by Laura Legend
An orange tabby cat padded out of the darkness framed by the door. Filled with a deep sense of gratitude and relief, Cass wept as Atlantis jumped into her lap.
She wasn’t alone.
“Meow,” Atlantis said again as Cass squeezed him tight.
Though her legs were weak and shaking from the force of what she’d experienced, Cass willed herself to stand up and take a couple of uncertain steps toward the open door. With Atlantis still tucked in the crook of one arm, she leaned against the doorframe for support, staring into the ink-black darkness on the far side.
She didn’t like what she saw. The darkness seemed alive. It seemed to breathe. Cass stretched out her hand and extended it into the darkness. It felt hot and liquid and primal. She withdrew her hand, expecting to find the darkness still clinging stickily to it, but saw only her own hand.
A wave of vertigo crashed over Cass. Instinctively, she dropped Atlantis and grabbed the doorjamb with both hands, hanging on tight as the room wobbled around her. Cass squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. When the rocking stopped, she opened her eyes again. The room was still.
But the very act of opening her eyes—as if she had been asleep—prompted an unwelcome thought: was she dreaming? Were Atlantis and the door and the darkness just a dream?
Cass touched the darkness again, this time with just the tip of her finger, and it reacted to her touch. Concentric circles rippled outward from the point of contact. This was weird, no doubt, but it didn’t feel like a dream.
It felt real.
Still, though she didn’t think she was dreaming, “dream” wasn’t a bad shorthand for part of what was happening. With a start, Cass realized what the darkness really did feel like: it felt like mind.
Atlantis curled between her legs, purring reassuringly, and then, like he was responding to a call, dashed through the door and into the darkness, leaving Cass behind.
The Underside, Zach had said, was allied with mind.
Right, Cass thought, let’s take a trip, led by my super-weird cat, into the underside of my mind. Why not? I don’t have anything else planned for today.
Cass swallowed hard and stepped into the inky darkness.
On the far side of the darkness, Cass found a narrow set of stairs that funneled into a bland hallway with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She walked the full length of the hallway. It came to a dead end.
Where the hell did my cat go? Cass wondered for the thousandth time in her life, staring at the blank wall in front of her and running her hands through hair.
She turned back and retraced her steps, taking a more careful look. Before long she found a side door that she must have missed the first time—or maybe it hadn’t been there the first time? It was hard to believe that she would have walked right past it. The door looked just like the other she’d seen: flush with the wall, missing a handle, and fitted with a lock that was ice cold to the touch.
Cass wasn’t sure what to do next. She knew she wasn’t going back to that dungeon. But she definitely didn’t have a key—she barely had any clothes. Shoeless, her bare feet felt like blocks of blue ice. She rubbed her arms, trying to dismiss some of the goosebumps, and knocked loudly on the door.
She waited and listened.
Nothing.
She knocked again, this time pounding long and hard with her fist.
Nothing.
A flush of anger crept up the back of her neck and, raw and immediate as the anger finally felt, it felt good. It felt very good. It felt powerful. Cass didn’t try to fight it. Instead, she gave it free reign and, channeling months of confusion and frustration, she pounded again, hard enough to leave a dent, and shouted at the door: “I am the goddam Seer and I need to see what’s behind this door!”
In response, as if she’d just said the magic words, the door popped free of its lock, loose on its well-oiled hinges.
Cass couldn’t believe that had worked. She offered a verbal “Thanks” just in case someone was listening and pulled the door the rest of the way open. It opened onto a dark room. Instinctively, Cass leaned through and felt for a light switch. She found one, flipped it on, and the space was flooded with warm light. The room, with its modern furniture, shelves of books, and stainless steel appliances, was characterized by a tasteful but almost monastic sense of décor.
Surprised, Cass realized where she was. She was in Zach’s apartment.
“What. The. Actual. Hell.” Cass whispered to herself, trailing her fingers along the granite countertop.
“Zach?” she called out, hoping against hope that he would answer from the bedroom. But no one replied. Just to be sure, Cass poked her head into the bedroom. It was almost empty except for a low, neatly made bed. She had to gave her head a hard shake to stop herself from picturing what it would have been like to spend the night there. To be sure she was alone, she looked in his closet and in the bathroom. Nothing. The apartment was empty.
Cass sat down on the couch in the living room, facing the wall of built-in bookshelves. Though no one was here, she also couldn’t quite shake the feeling that, nonetheless, she wasn’t entirely alone.
Cass leaned forward on the couch and massaged her temples with her thumbs. As she did, she noticed that a single book had been left out on the coffee table. It was a fat, tattered paperback with a painting of a desert scene on the cover: Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic, Dune. She picked it up and leafed through it and, as she did, she flashed on an extremely vivid image of Zach. He was lying in bed as a ten year-old, reading this book by flashlight long after he was supposed to be asleep.
Cass was so surprised by the memory that she dropped the book with a thud back onto the coffee table. After a moment’s hesitation, she picked it up again and flashed on the same image—except, this time, she wasn’t just an observer. She could feel what ten-year-old Zach was feeling. She could feel his rapt attention and sense of anticipation as he turned the pages. She could feel them as if they were her own feelings.
For Cass, this sensation was extraordinary—usually, even her own feelings didn’t feel as if they were her own.
Cass set the book down, left the couch, and took a closer look at the overstuffed bookshelf. The range of books was enormous and eclectic but, slotted between a book on evolutionary biology and a thin volume of Walt Whitman poems, she found a high school yearbook. She flipped through the pages, smiling at the inscriptions and the occasional photo of a goofy, teenage Zach, until she came to a flower, pressed and dried between the pages.
When she touched it, she flashed on another memory. Zach was in high school. He and a girl had snuck out on a sunny spring afternoon. She twirled a wild flower between her fingers and slipped it playfully behind his ear. He looked like some kind of wood sprite. She tucked her hands inside the back pockets of Zach’s jeans and pulled him close and kissed him. Surprised again, Cass could feel the girl’s kiss, wet and full. Cass could taste her as if Zach’s lips were her own. Zach slipped his hand under her shirt, soft against the flat of her stomach, and she laughed, pushed him away, and ran back into the building.
Cass snapped the yearbook shut and cleared her throat as if she, embarrassed, had just walked in on something. But even once she’d reshelved the book, she could still taste that kiss and feel the sun in her hair.
Cass left the bookshelf and wandered through the rest of room. She sat down at a worn wooden desk in the opposite corner. The top of the desk was clear and its simple design included only one flat drawer in the center. Cass hesitated for a moment and then pulled the drawer open. The only thing inside was a photograph. The image was facedown.
Cass stared at the back of the photo for a long time until, without thinking, she picked it up and flipped it over. It was a picture of her. She was the only thing in Zach’s desk.
This object also came with a memory attached. She and Zach were sitting at a table in the coffeeshop after a late shift, preparing to close up for the night. They were the only ones there. Zach told a co
rny joke, smiled his goofy smile, and, despite herself, Cass laughed until she cried. She rested her head on the cool table top, trying to catch her breath. Zach parted the curtain of hair covering her face, looked her in the weak eye, and winked.
At this point, the memory turned itself inside out. Zach’s memory bled into her own and she felt the whole thing from his perspective. She saw herself through his eyes. She felt what he was feeling sitting there with her, their friendship still new and uncertain. Zach was filled, from head to toe, with hope. He glowed with it, with the hope that he could charm her, with the hope that he could make her laugh, with the hope that he could look her in the eye and she wouldn’t look away, with the hope that they might connect and that their connection might last.
Infused with Zach’s sense of hope, Cass felt her own emotions, her own despair and hopelessness, recede within the normal bounds of human experience. She could still feel, directly and immediately, the complex cocktail of emotions swirling inside of her, but they no longer owned her. They no longer overwhelmed her. With a toehold in Zach’s mind, she had some measure of control over her own.
When Zach leaned close and blew in her ear, Cass snapped back into the apartment and dropped the photograph on the desktop. She reached for the photo again, her hand hovering just above it, then touched it to slide it back into its place in the drawer.
But as soon as she touched it, the whole room started to grow brighter and brighter until the light engulfed her, saturating her, and the whole scene dissolved in a blinding flash of light.
Chapter Thirty-Four
When the light dimmed, Cass found herself laid out on the stone cold floor of her cell. Her bands were still broken but the unmarked door was shut.
Cass wasn’t sure what time it was, but her cell seemed to be lighter now than it had been before. Some faint light still slanted in from the hall through the window in the door, but not enough to make a difference. She checked the opposite wall to see if light was coming through the window only to be reminded that, just as before, her cell didn’t have a window.
Where, then, was the light coming from?
Though the floor was cold, Cass herself felt warm and strong and flexible. More, her head felt clear and her emotions, though immediate, felt channeled.
Effortlessly, she jumped to her feet from a sitting position and, in the process, noticed something unusual about her hand. She held her hand out in front of her, flexing the fingers. Her hand was radiating light, trailing wisps of white smoke as waved it in the air.
“Huh,” Cass said out loud. “I’ll take it.”
Cass felt along the edges of the handleless door, dug her fingers into the crack between the door and the jamb, and pulled. The door resisted but gave a few inches. Cass readjusted her grip for a better hold and pulled again. The heavy door groaned open, raising a cloud of dust, its hinges grinding like they hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.
Cass stepped back and took a look at it.
“Huh,” she said, echoing her earlier reaction to the light in her hand.
Cass shrugged and bolted down the narrow staircase into a hallway with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. This time, instead of dead-ending, the hallway branched and then branched again. Each time, Cass choose the right. The third hallway funneled her into ascending a set of spiraling stone stairs that, through another dusty, groaning door, emptied into a room on the opposite end of the monastery’s basement level.
It was a storage room of some kind. It wasn’t lit, but Cass found that, by herself, she gave off enough light to make out what it contained. Taking inventory of the room’s complement of lockers, racks, and tables, she found an array of weapons and uniforms, most of which looked like they were meant for someone the size of Dogen. But, on the table next to the door, she found exactly what she needed: her own jacket, shoes, and sword.
Cass slipped into her jacket and shoes, then unsheathed her sword and sliced through the air with a couple of strokes. In her hand, the sword glowed white hot, trailing wisps of smoke just as her fingers had. She was tempted to write her name in the air with the light, like a kid with a sparkler on the Fourth of July, but she refrained. Instead, she held the sword at arms length and watched it glow and smoke. The longer she stood still and focused her attention on it, the more calm and centered she felt.
“Huh,” Cass said yet again, after a few minutes.
She sheathed her sword and slung it over her shoulder. It was time to go. It was time to confront Kumiko and find Miranda.
Cass slid through the door to the storage room and out into the hall. She could feel, in the soles of her feet, the whole building gently thrumming, like somewhere up above bass drums were being played and a mass of people had assembled.
Follow your feet, Jones, she thought to herself. Follow the beat.
Keeping to the inside of the wall, Cass silently made her way down the hallway toward the stairs leading to the upper levels. She had almost turned the final corner, when she heard a pair of loud footsteps coming her way. She doubled back a few yards and hid herself in a shadowy doorway. The guard turned the corner and immediately looked right at her.
Damn, thought Cass, I forgot I was glowing like Christmas.
Cass waved shyly at the guard and gave him a winning, apologetic smile.
He looked flattered and almost waved back before he remembered who she was. A look of panic replaced his aborted smile as he set about trying to wrestle his sword from the scabbard at his waist.
Before he knew what had happened, Cass drew her own sword in a blaze of light, took two running steps along the span of wall between them, and cartwheeled a crushing blow to the back his head with the hilt of her sword. She landed on her feet like a cat. He crumpled to the floor, a ghostly wisp of smoke rising from the bruised spot on his head where the hilt of her sword had made contact.
Cass was going to have to use speed rather than stealth.
She flew up the stairs, drawn to the thrum, hoping to avoid anyone else. Fortunately, the halls were mostly empty. The beat grew stronger as she got closer. It drew her toward a large, ancient assembly hall at the center of the monastery’s ground floor. Cass skirted the main entrance to the hall and doubled back to a flight of stairs that took her to an open deck with a railing that overlooked the assembly from the second story.
Cass sheathed her sword, crouched low, and—basically holding her breath—tried to pull the light in tight around her. She’d just have to hope that no one stumbled along or looked up this way.
From what she could see, she didn’t think she’d have to worry.
All eyes faced forward. The assembly’s attention was riveted on Kumiko as she stood, silenced the beating drums, and commanded the room with a glance. To Kumiko’s right, a panel of Shield elders, men and women, stood convened. To Kumiko’s left, Dogen had charge of Miranda, bound but unbowed. A fox lay at Kumiko’s feet.
“The Shield is assembled,” Kumiko intoned. A hush fell over the crowd. “And a panel of elders is convened in judgment.”
Her small voice filled the room. Cass shifted uneasily in her crouch. Miranda stood with her eyes closed and back straight.
Kumiko continued. “The charge is simple but serious. Miranda Byrne stands accused of high treason. She has flagrantly and repeatedly violated her oath of loyalty to the Shield and disregarded her sacred responsibility to defend the world as we’ve received it from the monsters that would destroy it and remake it in their own image.”
Kumiko paused, then appended a personal observation. “She has betrayed us. And given what she’s been entrusted with, she is extraordinarily dangerous.”
A mixed rumble of concern and approval passed through the crowd. The council of elders uniformly shook their heads in a gesture of censure and disappointment.
Seizing the moment, Miranda stepped forward, raised her head, and opened her eyes. She fixed the whole of the audience in her gaze and stole Kumiko’s thunder. She was incandescent with anger and
defiance, despite her powerlessness. Cass almost stood up in solidarity, but checked herself and hunkered deeper into her crouch.