A Glint of Light

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Briefly, he was lost there, feeling so much of her for those few seconds he couldn’t see past it. He felt that pit that Shadow found in her light. He felt it, and without thought, he opened his light more––as much as he could––gearing into that dark place in her aleimi.

  Gearing into her heart.

  Gearing into that fucking thing Shadow put in her heart.

  She let out a low cry, gasping a sob.

  Then she was gripping her head in her hands, crying as he wrapped himself around her. He ignored it that time when she tried to fight her way free. He gripped her arms, pulling her up against him, putting more of his light into hers.

  “No!” she cried out, shoving at his hands. “No! No! Leave me alone. Please. Please, goddamn it. Just fucking leave me alone, Balidor. Please…”

  She burst into tears, shocking him again.

  He didn’t release her.

  He gripped her tighter instead, his light still geared into that dark structure in her heart’s aleimi, that fissure Shadow used to break open her mind. In a matter of seconds he’d flipped almost completely into infiltrator mode, even though the shocks of emotion coming off her hurt him just as much as they might have if he hadn’t.

  He held her, and before he knew it…

  He was there again.

  He was with her, inside that other place.

  Thirteen

  Sold

  It is dark here.

  Dark… he barely glimpses the outline of a windowless room.

  Dank, musty smells.

  Sweat. Her fear, which is sour, suffocating.

  Physical light reaches him, giving him the room in jerking glimpses.

  He’s confused as to why at first. He tries to decide if it’s because of a swinging light or if something else cuts his vision in and out. He feels like he’s tilting, coiling into smaller and smaller shapes.

  More than anything, he feels like he is inside a nightmare.

  He feels her despair, her complete loss of hope.

  His body is being torn apart, manipulated.

  They yank at him, wrenching him to and fro even as he is pinned down, locked in place like cement envelopes him, holding him in place. He sinks into that dark place, and he is trapped there, unable to get out, unable to make it stop.

  He can’t make it stop.

  Gradually, sensation emerges.

  Gradually, he feels things.

  The numbness withdraws, just a little at first––then too much.

  He feels too much.

  His other senses kick in.

  Suddenly, the whole thing is real.

  It is real. This is really happening to him.

  He screams.

  It isn’t his scream. It is young, high-pitched, terrified.

  He smells alcohol, bad breath.

  He hears laughter.

  He hears her scream die out, choked out of her.

  He hears her whimper as it ends.

  The sound stabs at him.

  It guts him so that he can’t breathe, can’t think rationally.

  It hurts him. He can’t get past that hurt.

  His lungs are crushed inside his chest, and still he cannot move.

  But some part of him needs to see. He is too far in, and the confusion is worse than the not-knowing. She has brought him here. There is something here she wants him to see. There is something here she needs him to see, whether she acknowledges it consciously or not.

  He glimpses more in that slanting dark and light. It’s still not enough for a coherent narrative, still nothing close to that––but longer spans of time grow discernible around him. He sees more in those broken pieces of light and dark.

  He hears more.

  More whimpering.

  He hears more whimpering.

  Gaos. He can’t stand it. He can’t fucking stand it…

  The sound brings panic to his chest, even as he fights harder to hold onto that light. The sound brings up a beast in him, a desire to kill, to defend at all costs. There is something so animal in that sound, and the animal in him responds, wanting to help.

  He wants so desperately to get to her, to help.

  The film flickers. In his mind… in hers…

  But she is telling him now.

  Not the adult Cass. Not the Cassandra who brought him here.

  The little girl is telling him. She whispers it in his ear, telling him how she got here, what happened before this, what she understands and what she doesn’t. She tells him everything she can remember, wrapping into his light and whispering it to him, her grief gusting through his heart. When she feels him listening, she clutches at him, telling him more.

  She wants him to explain it to her.

  She wants him to help her understand.

  And he does understand now.

  Not only what she tells him.

  He understands a lot more than that, too.

  He understands how badly she needs a witness, for someone just to see it, to believe her. For that, it’s not enough to just tell him, or to even to show him. Instead she does both, telling him and showing him at once, keeping him with her for this.

  Part of her wants him to tell her it didn’t happen.

  Part of her wants him to tell her she imagined the whole thing, that it’s a lie, a bad dream, something she made up.

  It’s what everyone else wants her to believe, too.

  Her mother. Her father.

  Everyone.

  But she can’t accept that, not without him.

  She needs him to tell her it didn’t happen. She needs Balidor to tell her. If he does, she promises, she will believe it. She will believe it is all a bad dream.

  She will believe it’s all in her head.

  He feels the little girl there, and it breaks his heart.

  She so badly wants to show this to someone. She so badly wants someone to trust, someone she can show it to. She wants him here, not watching, but actually with her, inside her light, inside her body. She needs him there as a witness, but she also doesn’t want to do it alone, so they share the same mind in this nightmarish place.

  He promises to relive it with her, every piece of it.

  He promises her he won’t leave her.

  He promises her he won’t turn away.

  In this hell, they are one.

  He feels her understand.

  He feels her believe him.

  He feels her devastating relief that he believes her.

  Once he understands that, he pulls back his own reactions. He makes his own mind solid, calm, stable for her. He tries to make it safe, in any way he can possibly make it safe. He envelopes her in his light, holding her as carefully and safely and comfortingly as he can, given what is happening around both of them.

  He makes his light soft… so soft.

  As soft as feathers, as full of his heart’s light as he possibly can.

  He murmurs to her.

  It is over now. This is over. It can’t hurt you now.

  Is it real?

  A whisper so soft, he can barely hear it.

  Is it real? she sends, breathless. Is it a dream?

  He doesn’t hesitate.

  It’s real, my love. It’s not a dream. This happened.

  There is a silence there.

  Even softer, Are you sure?

  I’m very sure, my darling. I am… and I’m so sorry.

  The little girl thinks about his words.

  As she does, she doesn’t react how she expects she would react. She avoided this for years, decades… out of fear, out of a debilitating terror of what would happen to her, to her mind, if she ever let herself believe it.

  She expected this information to shatter her, to destroy what remained.

  She expects it to snuff out her soul.

  But she doesn’t feel more fear, more confusion, more terror.

  Those were already there.

  Instead she feels… relief.

  She is relieved.

  Br
iefly, it is stable. A slow-moving, linear progression.

  It is the beginning again.

  Before.

  She takes him with her, still wanting his verification, still wanting him to see it with her, through her… to help her understand. She wants to solve this crime. To do so, she must retrace the steps. She must retrace her own steps, and those of the criminal.

  She must watch the murder from beginning to end.

  Balidor hears a man talking.

  He looks down, through her eyes. He sees small, sun-kissed bare feet. The feet are so small. She just woke up. It is the middle of the night and she wears a flowered nightdress. She rubs her face with the back of one hand, blinking into the light.

  He struggles with human ages, trying to decide.

  It seems important to know.

  It seems important to know exactly how old she is.

  Money exchanges hands.

  Money, and suddenly Balidor understands for real.

  The girl doesn’t. She still doesn’t understand.

  Daddy is talking funny.

  She is wary, because he can be mean when he talks like that. She’s old enough now to know it means he’s drunk too much. He falls down when he’s like that. He can be funny. But he can also be mean. He can do all of those things in turn––one after the other, in a progression that defies logic, that can’t be predicted, or understood.

  The weekend before, he drank too much.

  He fell down and he and uncle laughed and laughed, then daddy yelled at uncle, then at mommy, then at her. He slammed cabinets and threatened to break her mouth, or maybe all three of their mouths and Cassie knew to be really, really quiet and try to hide.

  She knew to make herself invisible, as small as she can.

  Even so, she was up most of the night, lying in bed, listening to him shout. She heard things slam, loud noises, her mother’s soothing voice. She heard uncle’s laugh and then glass breaking.

  Tonight, uncle is there, too.

  They are all drunk, more drunk than she has seen him in a long time.

  They are all looking at her, and something in their eyes makes her scared.

  She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand how uncle is looking at her, or who the other men are, or why they’re in the basement… but Balidor does.

  Even here, inside of her, he understands.

  More images flicker behind his eyes.

  It is there.

  It is happening.

  He fights to hold on to that stability for her, that soft light, the structures in his heart fighting to be strong enough to hold hers, to keep her as safe as he can. He tries his damnedest not to react where she can feel it, to make her feel safe as she looks at this…

  It is interminable. It feels like it will never end.

  Somewhere, she blacks out.

  She goes away.

  She just… disappears.

  He watches her body separate out from her light.

  He watches her go away.

  He sees her running then.

  Running in the dark, crying.

  She is away from them.

  Away from the dark room.

  She is on the street.

  She doesn’t know how she got away.

  Time skipped while she was outside her body, from the swinging light to the dark street. She doesn’t know how much time, but it is cold. Her breath steams out in front of her as she runs and everything hurts, but she only runs faster.

  She doesn’t think about where she is going, but her feet don’t hesitate.

  There is only one place to go… only one place that will have her.

  She still wears the flowered nightdress. Everything hurts even more, making her gasp, bringing tears to her eyes as she climbs the tree to a higher window.

  She knocks on the glass of the window, and then… and then…

  A face appears, pale in the dark.

  It is Allie.

  Allie is there.

  Allie opens the window, smiling at her.

  She is clean. She also wears a nightgown but hers has a cartoon dog on it and she is clean and smiles at Cass and thinks it is all a big game.

  In those few seconds, Balidor wants to punch Allie in the face.

  He wants to grab her and shake her until her teeth rattle.

  He knows it is irrational. It is beyond irrational. It is cruel.

  He knows it makes no sense to feel this way.

  She is a child.

  To Balidor’s eyes, they are both babies.

  They are fucking babies.

  Rage fills him anyway.

  The growling animal returns from before. The part of him that wants to beat Cassandra’s human father to death with his bare hands––it rears up, snarling at Allie instead.

  It is not reasonable. His rage doesn’t care about reason. It hates everything about Allie’s cleanliness, her sweet, laughing smile, her cartoon dog nightgown.

  The sheer injustice of it. Her obliviousness.

  Her complete fucking cluelessness.

  Allie is a child, but she’s the goddamned Bridge.

  How does she not see it?

  Again, Balidor knows he is being completely unreasonable. He is thinking like a child himself, although he feels no anger on Cassandra. The child Cassie is used to this. She is used to this disparity between them, the reality of Allie versus the reality of herself.

  In some strange, incongruously-wise way, Cassie’s child-mind understands what Balidor’s cannot.

  It isn’t Allie’s fault that she is loved.

  It isn’t Allie’s fault that she is loved and Cass is not.

  Allie loves Cass. Allie loves her.

  Allie opens the window for her. Allie lets her in, even in the middle of the night. Allie wants Cass there. She is always happy to see her. Allie wants her as a sister, as a part of her family. Allie wants her there all the time. Allie wants Cass to live with her.

  That matters to Cass more.

  That is everything to Cass.

  Balidor feels that love, that gratitude in Cass, and a kind of awe mixes with helplessness as his adult mind tries to process this, even under his blinding rage.

  Allie is all Cass has.

  She is the only thing.

  Cassie whispers in the dark.

  She tells Allie they need to run away. She begs Allie to run away with her and Allie agrees at once, and says they will make sandwiches and get puppies and live on an island where they are surrounded by waves…

  …and Cass nods to all of it but her mind can only say go now we have to go now please we have to go now please hurry hurry hurry please hear me on this allie and hurry please hurry we have to go now right now…

  They whisper in the dark, Cass hanging from the branches of a tree, fighting not to cry as she pretends it’s all a game, too.

  Somehow Cass gets Allie to understand that she is serious, that they have to go, that they have to go right now, while it is dark, before too much time passes, before her father comes looking for her and inevitably finds her.

  Cass’s father knows she only has one place to go.

  Even when he drinks, he knows where Cass will go.

  He is looking for her, even now.

  He will start in the house.

  He’ll start by yelling at her mom.

  He’ll check the yard, the neighbor’s doghouse, where he found her once before.

  He’ll look on the street.

  Then he’ll come here.

  It won’t be long before he comes here, snarling at her to come down, telling her in Thai to stop talking to that little bitch, to stop sharing their family secrets with that little stuck up snob cunt who thinks her shit doesn’t smell like theirs.

  Allie beckons her to crawl through the window, seeing Cass shiver.

  Seconds later, they are putting on clothes and then they have shoes and they are downstairs in the kitchen and Allie is making them baloney sandwiches. Cass watches her do it, watches Allie
hum quietly while she works, a smile at her lips and all Cass can do is watch her while some part of her mind screams: HURRY HURRY HURRY even as she sits silently on a red-painted stool wearing Allie’s clothes and trying not to think about anything at all.

  Time jumps.

  Cassie is running again.

  He sees her running again, with Allie this time, and they are holding hands.

  But he already knows how this ends.

  He’s never seen this, not in the details, but he knows.

  She doesn’t escape. She doesn’t ever really get free.

  That only happens in stories.

  That only happens to princesses and people who are special.

  Cassie is neither.

  At the thought, he hears a scream in her mind and some part of him breaks apart into pieces with her, hating every second of this.

  More than anything, he hates that it has already happened, that this story is already written. This part of her timeline is frozen in place, immovable, permanent.

  There is nothing he can do.

  There is no way to stop it.

  Even as he thinks it, something in his chest explodes.

  It cracks like ice, ripping him apart.

  It feels like someone sunk a giant axe into his chest, snapping open his ribcage like kindling, killing him with a single blow, but in a way he feels all of it.

  He screams.

  He screams again, lost in unbearable pain.

  Lost in grief, in the realization it will never be fixed, never be okay.

  His father is dead.

  Cass’s father is dead.

  There is no redemption.

  There is no making it better.

  It is too late. It is too late to save either of them.

  It would be better if they hadn’t loved them. It would be better if neither of them had ever been loved. It would be easier if their fathers had been the monsters both of them saw them as in the end. But Balidor sees Cass’s father’s eyes, full of love. He sees him laughing, swinging her by the hand. He sees him blowing into her belly, hugging her.

  It makes it worse.

  It makes everything so much fucking worse.

  He sees his own father there, his father’s beautiful eyes, his booming laugh…

  He screams into the dark, and realizes she is screaming too.

  She is screaming, and he screams with her.

  They scream into the night, screaming their grief into the sky.