The Broken Circle (The Book of Sight 2)

by Deborah Dunlevy

  He had to get his eyes fixed before he could figure anything out. Candace had promised him that she would do that.

  “Remember when we tried to have a surprise party for your birthday? You knew the second you saw me, but you pretended to be surprised anyway. We should have known better.”

  Logan did remember. He saw Adam’s face in his mind, obviously hiding something, full of suppressed excitement. Logan had never had a surprise party before. He pictured all his friends, laughing as they realized that they didn’t really fool him. That was a good day.

  “Remember the time that I fell out of the tree?” Alex was somewhere way off to the left. “You wouldn’t believe me when I told you I was okay, and it was a good thing. I had that stupid boot on for two months.”

  Logan remembered Alex’s look of pain. He remembered half carrying her out of the Gylf forest and the gratitude in her eyes while the doctor set the bones.

  Without realizing it, he stopped walking. Memories were flooding him now, his friends’ faces parading through his head. Dominic’s hurt the day he first told Logan about his mother’s letters. Alex’s confidence as he reached a hand to help her cross a log bridge. Eve’s shining eyes when he bandaged up the leg of a wounded creature she had found. Image after image of laughter and fear, of trust and friendship.

  A sense of calm came over Logan. He didn’t feel sure of anything, but the panic was receding, replaced by an idea. He might not be able to see his friends’ faces now, but he could remember them clearly. Adam was right about Logan’s ability. He saw things people kept hidden, and he had not seen anything from them but friendship. There was no way they would have been able to fake that.

  He had to be sure, though. He might just be remembering what he wanted to remember. He tried to call to mind exactly what those whispers had said, but all he could think was that before tonight, his friends had never given him any reason to doubt them. Well, Adam had hidden the map to this place. Though, now that Logan thought of it, Adam had said he didn’t know about the map.

  “We need to go now. Don’t listen to these liars.” Candace’s hand was on his shoulder again. Logan tried to see her face in his mind. He could picture her on the day she had moved in but for some reason, that was the last time he could remember seeing her eyes. Why did she never look in his eyes?

  Logan shook off her hand.

  “How did you find me here if you didn’t know about the map before?” he called out to his friends.

  Eve gave an indistinct cry, but Adam’s voice came back solidly. “Darcy gave us the map. She took it out of your bag. She was worried about you.”

  That was believable. Darcy pawed through his stuff every chance that she got, and it would explain why the map wasn’t in his bag anymore.

  “I heard you earlier. You were whispering, but I heard you.”

  Alex’s voice was very close now. “When did you hear us, Logan?”

  “Just now. We were in that big grassy place. You were talking about…stuff.”

  “In the meadow? With the flowers?” Adam was only a few steps away.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But you were resting, and…whispering.”

  Dominic was standing right in front of him. “That wasn’t us. Those flowers whisper things. They whispered things to us, too.”

  Now Adam was there, too. “We didn’t do any whispering in that field. It was all shouting, believe me. Seriously. Look at my face. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”

  Logan’s throat closed up. He was still trying to force an answer through it when someone crashed into him, nearly knocking him to the ground. He felt arms around his neck and heard Eve’s voice in his ear. “We found you. You’re okay. We found you. Don’t ever do that again.” She kept repeating it over and over.

  Alex was laughing. “Let him breath, Eve.”

  Eve let go, but she didn’t stop talking. “I can’t believe we found you. Are you really okay? How did you make it up here by yourself? Why did you leave us? What did that foul woman tell you? Oh, Logan, your face! There’s blood everywhere. What did that woman do to you?”

  “Nothing,” Logan mumbled. “She didn’t do anything.”

  “That doesn’t look like nothing, that looks like…”

  Logan spoke over her. “It wasn’t her. It was me. I smashed into something. I couldn’t… It was just me.”

  He didn’t want to think about it. The truth was sinking in, and he didn’t think he could stand it. He had done this. It was all him. There was no one else to blame.

  “You know it was that Candace woman, right?” Eve went on. “Of course you do, you were with her. Where is she anyway?”

  There was a sound of shuffling as everyone looked around.

  “She’ll be long gone by now,” said a voice Logan didn’t recognize. Logan’s back stiffened. Who was with them? “Breakers don’t stick around when their plans go south.”

  “Logan, this is Ben. Do you recognize him?”

  Again, Logan tried to say something, but his voice wouldn’t come. The unknown man answered for him. “You can’t see me, can you?”

  Everyone went still. Logan couldn’t see them, but he could feel their eyes studying him. He shook his head.

  “No,” whispered Eve. Her hand was on his arm again, gripping tight. “You can’t see? What did that woman do to you? Don’t you dare say it was nothing.”

  Logan forced the words out, but they were a croak. “She didn’t… It wasn’t…”

  “Let’s find a place to sit down,” said Alex. “We found you now, we can take our time. Breathe for a minute. You can tell us when you’re ready.”

  “Is it safe to stay here?” Adam asked.

  “I think so, for a little,” said the man named Ben. “The Breaker is gone. The circle seems to be…shorted out or something. For now at least.”

  “Come on,” said Eve. “You can sit over here.”

  Logan jerked back. “Not in that stone chair! I’m not sitting there.”

  “Okay,” said Alex soothingly. “We’ll just sit here on the ground.”

  Eve’s hand tugged him down and steadied him as he sat. Logan could hear the others settling in around him, then silence. He knew they were waiting for him to tell his story, but the tightness was back in his throat. Where should he even start? How could he tell them the stuff he had thought about them? The pause stretched on.

  Finally Alex said gently, “Why don’t you tell us what happened to your eyes?”

  Logan nodded. “I don’t know what happened.” His voice cracked at first, but slowly it got stronger as he tried to explain. “I was going through this tunnel. It was really dark, but I was following this sort of trail of rock that was on the ground. My flashlight was dying, but as long as I kept touching the rock trail, I could keep going. Then I came out of the tunnel and…it was still dark. I couldn’t see anything. Somewhere in there…”

  “You went blind just by walking through the tunnel?” said Eve. “How could that have happened? We went through there. Nothing happened to us.”

  “You were touching the ridge of rock?” asked Ben. “Using it to guide yourself through?”

  Logan nodded.

  “We stayed away from it,” said Adam. “It freaked us out, so we didn’t touch it.”

  “That may have made all the difference,” Ben said.

  “What would the rock have to do with it?”

  “Only the Book of Sight has the power to make you see, but many things were made to take sight away.”

  “You think just touching those rocks blinded Logan?” Eve asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Ben. “I don’t know anything for sure. But that ridge…I came across it while I was looking for you…those are the same kind of rocks as this circle.”

  “So how do we make him better?” Eve demanded.

  “I’m not sure.”

  A dark silence settled over the group.

  “Candace said she was going to make me see again,” Logan forced himself t
o say. All his doubts were coming back. He tried to hang on to the images of his friends faces, but panic at his own blindness was overtaking him. He could feel himself tremble.

  “Here.” Alex slipped something into his hand. It was a rock, about the size of an egg and roughly rounded like one. He gripped it tightly, trying to calm himself. “Hang on,” she said quietly. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  “If he got this way by touching those rocks, we need to get out of here,” said Eve. From the sound of her voice, she had already stood up. “They’re all around us. Anyway, I hate this place.”

  Logan agreed, though he was pretty sure no one was going to ask his opinion. Not that he blamed them. The longer he listened to his friends, the more he realized what an idiot, no, what a jerk he had been. Even now they were carefully helping him to his feet, leading him along. No one was talking much, no one was asking all the awful questions that Logan knew they must be thinking. They were being kind. How could he have thought they were out to get him?

  Then he remembered those whispers. They were so real. He knew he hadn’t imagined that. Could it really have been flowers doing that? He had recognized his friends’ voices.

  “What did you mean that the flowers whispered?” he asked.

  It was a moment before Eve said, “It was awful.”

  “We thought someone was getting ready to attack us,” said Adam.

  “Attack you?”

  “They were whispering about you and about…” Alex’s voice trailed off.

  “If we’re going to give him the whole story, we should find a place to sit down. Once we’re out of the circle, we should be safe for a while,” said Dominic.

  They walked on in silence for a minute, and then several hands helped ease Logan down to where he leaned against something hard. “Is that more rock? I don’t want to --”

  “It’s a different kind of rock,” said Alex. “It’s one of the guardian stones, like the one in your hand. It won’t hurt you. They helped us get through to you.”

  “The rocks helped you?”

  “Hey, that’s the end of the story,” said Adam. “We should start at the beginning.”

  They did. Beginning with their following of the stone Medusa yesterday morning, they told it all, right up to the moment they finally heard his voice through the mist.

  Logan believed every word. After all, he had followed most of that same trail. Listening to them, Logan couldn’t stop thinking that they had been through all that just because of him. He gripped the rock in his hand tighter and tighter, feeling worse and worse, and swearing to himself that he would find a way to make it up to them.

  “And then we finally got close enough to see you,” finished Adam.

  “And I lost my head and nearly tackled you to the ground,” added Eve.

  There was a long pause. Logan was working up the nerve to tell his own story. No one asked anything. No one said anything.

  Finally he knew he just had to do it. “I guess I’ll start at the beginning, too.”

  Eve said, “Logan you don’t have to…”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He started with the night he had found the map in the book. He didn’t tell how angry he had been. That was too embarrassing in light of the actual truth. He just said that he thought Adam knew about it and was keeping it a secret. He explained that he had decided to bring it up to the group the next day. Then he told how he had changed his mind while they were talking, skipping over all the horrible things he thought about them all, just saying that he convinced himself that only one person was supposed to go, so he should just do it and bring the information back.

  “I know it was stupid,” he said miserably. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was definitely stupid not to tell us everything,” said Eve. “The next time you do something that idiotic, I will totally kick your butt. Lucky for you, I’m happy to see you, so you get a pass this one time.”

  “And you’re not the only one to ever do anything dumb,” said Adam.

  People calling him stupid had never felt better to Logan. Somehow, it was easier to go on with the story after that.

  Without pausing, he told everything right up until waking up in the meadow. When he started to tell what he had heard the voices whispering, his words trailed off. It was embarrassing to admit that his biggest fear was his friends not liking him. It was embarrassing to admit that he had believed it so easily. Then he shook himself. He deserved to be embarrassed. He tried to make his voice as normal as possible as he told everything he had heard.

  “No wonder you didn’t answer us when we found you,” said Alex. “I would never have spoken to us again.”

  “It wasn’t you,” said Logan. “I should have known that.”

  “We’ve already been over how you should have trusted us,” said Eve. “But those whispers…they’re crazy real. You aren’t going to get any judging from people who ran all over the meadow thinking they were about to be killed by imaginary monsters.”

  “Not me,” said Adam. “I thought I was going to be killed by real monsters.”

  “If Eve didn’t have a constant need to shout out everything she’s thinking, we would probably still be there huddled up and crying,” said Alex. “We get it about the voices.”

  “They aren’t just voices,” Ben spoke up for the first time. “I’ve seen flowers like what you’re describing before. They have no scent, but they give off a mild hallucinogen. Not strong enough to make you see things. Just enough to stimulate your fear reaction, to make the whispers believable.”

  Logan shuddered, but knowing there was a reason for his stupidity helped a little, too.

  “How did you finally get out of there?” asked Dominic.

  Logan told them the rest. He finished recounting his conversation with Candace (Eve making hissing sounds at everything Candace said), the flash of light, his confusion when he heard them yelling, Candace trying to lead him away.

  When he was done, he felt exhausted, but relieved. He had told them all of it. Maybe later he would regret that they knew exactly how stupid and selfish he had been, but right now it felt good not to be hiding any more.

  Someone grabbed his hand, and Eve said, “It was that horrible woman. I can’t believe she told you we attacked you. Aach. She was trying to turn you against us from the beginning. All that ‘I understand the different levels of friendship’ crap. She wanted you to think we didn’t really like you. All just so she could get you up here and…” She trailed off, squeezing his hand.

  “Obviously she was the one who hit you,” said Alex. “But why? You were already on your way.”

  “I don’t think Logan’s blindness was in her plan,” Ben said. “She couldn’t have known that he would keep contact with the rocks so long. One evil got in the way of the other. She must have figured he would never make it up the stairs with no sight.”

  “That’s just twisted,” said Eve. “She is the…” She cut herself off with a little growl.

  “What was she trying to do anyway?” asked Adam.

  “Get rid of you,” Ben answered without hesitation. “She is a Breaker, which means her ultimate goal is to destroy your circle. Taking Logan out of the picture would do that.”

  “Our circle?” said Logan, ignoring that last part.

  “Us,” Alex said. “We’re a circle. The five of us. Like the brothers who protected the jewel.”

  Logan thought of the first story they had read in the Book of Sight. The small group of brothers had saved their kingdom from an evil sorcerer by standing hand in hand around the jewel he had stolen. He had made them doubt each other. He had reminded them of all their childhood fights, but they had stayed together, slowly turning into a circle of trees that kept the jewel and the kingdom safe forever.

  “Yes,” said Ben. “You are a circle. What the Council fears and hates above everything is an unbroken Circle of Seers. So they send out their Breakers. And their Breakers are very effective.”

  Logan
shivered at how close he had come to following Candace.

  “What’s the Council?” asked Adam.

  “They…We shouldn’t talk about them here. Not where anyone could hear. Not so close to that place. They are the enemy. That is enough to know for now.”

  “You think someone is still around?”

  “It’s the rocks,” said Dominic. “We touched them. We saw things. But they were seeing us, too.”

  “The rocks are watching us?”

  “Would that be so strange?” said Ben. “I don’t know how it works. But I do know the Council has eyes and ears everywhere. That’s why I don’t stay anywhere long.”

  “You’re a Traveler,” said Dominic.

  “A Traveler? Where did you hear that word?”

  Dominic told him about his dream and how he had found the hidden room. Before he could repeat the message, Ben interrupted him.

  “It was all exactly the way you dreamed?”

  “Yeah, and then…”

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “No, but…”

  “How about clouds? Have you seen messages in the clouds?”

  “Yeah. How did you know…”

  “You’re a Dreamer. That’s…rare.”

  “What do you mean ‘a dreamer’?”

  Eve laughed. “I think it means you dream things and then they come true, Dom.”

  “Yes,” said Ben. “And no. Dreamers don’t dream things that will be true; they dream things that are true. It’s not the future you see. It’s now. That is how dreamers receive messages.”

  “Messages like the one we found?” asked Adam.

  Ben was silent for so long that Logan wondered if something was happening that he couldn’t see. Finally Alex said, “Ben?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is a surprise. It…changes things. I’m sorry. You found a message. Yes. But that was not what I meant. For a dreamer the dream is the message.”

  “So he’ll keep having more dreams like that one?” asked Alex.

  “Almost for certain.” There was another pause. “I’m sorry,” Ben went on at last. “I am not doing this well. I should start at the beginning. You have all read the Book of Sight, so you know that it changes you. You can now see things that others can’t. You see the world as it really is, not the blurred reflection that most people take for reality. That is the main gift of the Book of Sight, of course. But there are others. Once you have read the Book of Sight, you are never the same again. You find that you can do things. Some find they can communicate with animals…ordinary animals that don’t speak. Some develop the ability to sense good and evil by feel alone. There are many gifts. Dreaming is one of them, probably the rarest of all.”