A Glint of Light

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Balidor himself, after spending months getting to know his way around her light and mind, was no longer so certain that had been the case.

  She was exponentially smarter than she pretended to be.

  She dumbed down her language, her demeanor, even the things she pretended to be interested in and her hand gestures somehow conspired to make her seem less intelligent than she was. She pretended not to notice things she definitely noticed, pretended not to draw conclusions she definitely drew, pretended not to care about things she definitely cared about.

  She almost reminded Balidor of Dehgoies the Sword in this, too.

  Perhaps less Dehgoies as he was now, but definitely the darker versions of Dehgoies Balidor had met over the years––including the one they’d chained in a cell not unlike this one.

  Both Dehgoies and Cassandra had a tendency to wield their emotions and their sexuality more as diversionary tools than as sincere expressions of desire or feeling.

  That was exponentially more true when they found themselves behind enemy lines.

  In any case, Balidor was learning not to underestimate her.

  He had learned that the hard way, especially in the beginning.

  He could tell himself her intelligence made this game between them more dire, in that at some point, they would be faced with the question of what to do with her.

  They couldn’t keep her locked up in here forever.

  If they didn’t kill her, eventually she would get out.

  When that happened, there was a good chance Dehgoies would hunt her down and kill her anyway.

  His wife, Alyson, would likely help him in that.

  Which brought Balidor back to the truth of things, of why he came here, day after day, without telling anyone, knowing full well they’d mock him as a fool if they knew.

  If he didn’t come, no one would.

  He knew that.

  Cassandra knew it, too.

  If he didn’t come here, no one would come, and eventually she’d either escape, be executed, or be lobotomized by inducement wires or seers within the Council.

  For the same reason, he looked at her now, and told himself he had no choice.

  If not me, who?

  If not now, when?

  Indeed.

  No one else would come in here.

  Certainly no one would come with any real desire to help her.

  Not even Alyson would––and from what Balidor could sense, Alyson still loved her friend, although she might hate her in equal amounts.

  Maybe one day Alyson would make the effort, but for now, the betrayal was too fresh. Even if Alyson could forgive what Cassandra had done to her, meaning Alyson herself, Cassandra kidnapped her daughter––then attacked Allie’s mate. Worse, Cassandra gave Allie and Revik’s daughter to Menlim, possibly damaging her light and mind permanently.

  Moreover, Alyson had other things to worry about at the moment––like an ongoing apocalypse for one, and trying to get her daughter, Lily, the help she needed. As the leader of their small resistance army, Alyson had too much on her plate to prioritize helping out someone who showed no indication of wanting that help.

  As for Revik, meaning Dehgoies the Sword, the thought was laughable.

  There was no doubt in Balidor’s mind that Revik would have killed Cassandra by now, if his wife hadn’t already stood in the way of his attempts.

  No, there was no one else.

  Balidor was it.

  Moreover, it was his job.

  Balidor was head of the Adhipan, the oldest guardians of the light within this current historical wave. As such, he was responsible for the Adhipan’s charge, at least what of it remained, at least to the extent that he served those beings whose light shone greater than his.

  Like it or not, that included War Cassandra. Evil or not, betrayer or not, murderer or not… she was War, the Fourth of the Four, and one of his beloved intermediaries.

  He would not abandon her.

  He would not, not until he was forced to do so.

  Almost like she heard him, Cassandra met his gaze from where she knelt on the organic floor, her wrists shackled with semi-organic chains…

  …and burst out in a full-throated laugh.

  Two

  War Cassandra Of Menlim

  “Hey boss-man,” the prisoner intoned lazily.

  She watched him intently, waiting for him to answer.

  Holding her gaze, he answered, his voice neutral.

  “Hello Cassandra,” he said.

  “What’s on the menu today?” she said sweetly, smiling up at him. “Here to fuck with my brain some more, brother Balidor?”

  She did her best to sound excruciatingly bored, and openly contemptuous of him.

  Truthfully, she did a good job of sounding both.

  Balidor found it ironic she would use the affectionate seer-to-seer term of “brother” with him, given everything. He supposed she meant it sarcastically.

  Or perhaps not; she had been raised human after all.

  Being a seer likely remained a novelty for her still.

  He’d wondered about that, in idle moments.

  He’d wondered how that must be, to go from one race to another, to think of oneself as one thing, only to find out you are something else.

  Her seer abilities had been hidden from her all those years, of course.

  Unlike with Allie, that had not happened via intervention by other seers. Allie had been hidden deliberately among humans, to protect her. Alyson had been ID’d prior to her birth by her prescient mother, who announced her birth and asked for help to keep her daughter alive and safe from those who would harm her.

  Cass, on the other hand, had been truly unknown.

  Her birth parents, by all accounts, had been human.

  Moreover, they had hardly been the most enlightened examples of humanity Balidor had ever come across.

  They had been, her entire family had been––aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, parents––pretty fucking godawfully terrible, all things considered.

  She’d had one aunt who’d been semi-decent, on her mother’s side.

  Her mother’s parents had been alcoholics, which likely explained how her mother had come to marry one.

  Really, that an intermediary would end up in such a place was difficult to comprehend. He could tell himself it was karma, some kind of test, a cosmic mistake, but it still bewildered him, whenever he was alone and contemplating what he’d learned about her so far.

  The only thing that remotely made sense to him was Allie.

  Allie was the First of the Four.

  That made her their leader, and presumably their lodestar.

  Perhaps Cassandra had incarnated where she had simply because Allie was there.

  Allie and Cassandra’s human mothers were friends.

  They lived more or less down the street from one another, and had even worked at the post office at the same time, after attending high school and then community college together. They’d been to one another’s weddings.

  They would have been even closer if Cassandra’s human father hadn’t despised Allie’s human mother and father and refused to associate with them.

  Balidor knew there was some kind of history there, too, but since Cassandra didn’t know precisely what that history was, Balidor didn’t, either.

  In any case, it was the only connection that made sense.

  The fact that Cassandra was conceived less than a year after Alyson, and ended up birthed to a human family down the street from Alyson’s own human family, could not possibly be a coincidence, no matter how far-fetched. The strangeness of that alone more or less confirmed Balidor’s theory, at least in his own mind.

  Cassandra’s soul found Allie’s soul.

  Or perhaps, Cassandra was simply drawn to where Allie would be, like the second in a pair of magnets. In the process, Cassandra’s light apparently took the first opportunity available––or created that opportunity, perhaps––to inhabit
a vessel that would suit that base purpose.

  As a result, the two of them had more or less grown up together.

  Neither of them had known who or what they were.

  They’d both thought themselves human.

  They’d both had no access to the higher parts of their light.

  Still, unlike Alyson, who had been watched over, guarded, protected, monitored, cherished by her seer brethren, if only from afar––Cass had stumbled through her life in complete anonymity, with no safeguards whatsoever.

  Even after Alyson herself had been awakened, Cass still had no idea who she was, and for several years played human sidekick to the most famous seer in existence.

  All the while, Cassandra could not consciously feel her own light––her very light, her aleimi, that thing which defined most everything for seers. Light was how seers felt, touched, tasted, experienced the world. Light was how they shared feelings, from one to the other.

  Light was how they knew one another.

  Light was how they knew themselves.

  Moreover, looking at one another’s light was how they understood one another, how they categorized one another, how they recognized one another, even more than their physical bodies.

  Light was everything to a seer.

  It was the sixth sense that dwarfed all the rest.

  Cass would have known none of that about herself.

  She had been denied access to the most basic component of who and what she was. She’d been denied access to the Barrier, that space from which all seer abilities came.

  Sex pain––

  She wouldn’t have known about sex pain.

  Even if she had experienced the aleimic and physical pain seers suffered when they went too long without contact––light-to-light, body-to-body––Cass could not possibly have known what that pain was. She would not have known what the pain meant, even if she’d been instinctively driven to have sex to relieve it.

  Balidor wondered if she had noticed it.

  He wondered if she’d acted on it, without being able to explain it.

  Pushing the question from his mind with a light frown, he refocused on her face.

  When he did, he wondered again just how effective that collar was in keeping his thoughts from her. Something about the new nuance he felt in her expression and light made him wonder if she’d picked up some glimmer of his thoughts, their flavor at least.

  She heard too much.

  Given the high-tech sight-restraint collar she wore, she heard way too much.

  As he thought it, she leaned against the wall, exhaling another plume of contempt. Opening her legs in the dark pants she wore, her bare feet pressed to the green metal floor, she winked at him, her lips lifting in a half-smile.

  “I can think of much more interesting parts of me to fuck, ‘Dori,” she said innocently. “Or are your holy vows not so into that?”

  “Not so much,” Balidor said, sighing a bit in spite of himself. “No.”

  “Yet somehow, you managed to get it up for Allie. Funny how that works.”

  Still staring up at him, Cass paused, her jaw hardening perceptibly.

  It was there and gone, but Balidor noted it, even as it melted away.

  “…I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” she went on conversationally. “How was she? As good as Revik seems to think? Or is she a one-seer kind of girl?”

  Balidor ignored that, too.

  He could feel her trying to worm her way into him, even now.

  Even collared, she had an uncanny ability to get under his defenses, to find ways to jab at him that actually hurt. She was better at it than Allie’s husband had been, with Balidor himself, at least. She was better at it than Yarli, and all of the other ex-girlfriends and partners Balidor could remember.

  Even as he thought it, it struck him as a strange comparison to make.

  Shoving the thought and his reaction to it from his mind, he focused back on her.

  Understanding the effect she had on him was all that mattered.

  He could admit that effect to himself and still not want to look at the reasons why. He would likely need to look at those reasons eventually, but not today.

  He knew Yarli had theories.

  Yarli had been extremely generous in sharing her theories.

  She’d also grown increasingly vocal about them of late.

  Just the day before, she’d paraded a number of those theories in front of Balidor once they were alone together in their quarters, keeping him up for more than half of his sleep-shift while she questioned him about where he’d been the night before, and exactly what he’d been doing.

  Him detailing his session in here with Cassandra hadn’t exactly calmed her.

  If anything, it only infuriated her more, the more he tried to be transparent with her.

  They’d fought about his unwillingness to break off his work in here, with Cassandra, for most of the afternoon, which partly accounted for Balidor’s tiredness now.

  It wasn’t the first time Yarli and he had gotten into it about Cass.

  Moreover, increasingly ugly things were being said during some of those fights, things that were growing increasingly difficult to come back from.

  This time, she’d threatened outright to go to Wreg.

  Later in the fight, she’d further threatened to tell the Sword himself what Balidor had been up to in here, and behind the Sword’s back.

  In a different fight she’d already threatened to go to the Bridge about his sessions in here, if Balidor didn’t agree to stop them at once, and to promise to never again so much as cross the threshold of this cell, or spend time alone with Cassandra without other seers present.

  Clearly, Yarli hadn’t made good on her threats, or there was a good chance Balidor would now be in a cell of his own, or at the very least, confined to quarters.

  Just as clearly, Balidor hadn’t made Yarli the promises she’d asked for, either, or he wouldn’t be standing in Cassandra’s cell again right now.

  Cass seemed to hear some part of that, too.

  “How’s the girlfriend?” she said, smirking at him.

  He couldn’t help but notice she spread her legs slightly further apart as she said it.

  Wincing, Balidor broke eye contact, exhaling as he looked around.

  As he did, he realized he still stood closer to the door to Cass’s cell than he did to Cass herself.

  If only to give himself time to think, he forced himself to move––to walk.

  He crossed the floor of the high-ceilinged room, a room big enough for four or five cells and a few dozen prisoners.

  He did not stop until he reached the edge of her chains’ range.

  Without waiting, he lowered his weight to a cross-legged position on the floor, sitting just outside a circle that he himself had painted on the organic metal. The circle was meant to denote the minimum safe distance to Cass’s physical person.

  Cass herself was shackled to the wall.

  He’d had her ankle restraints removed, once he’d decided they weren’t necessary, but the wrist cuffs remained, giving her enough walking range that she could reach a bathroom stall to her right, and a cot that stood across from that.

  Usually, she sat on the floor.

  Unlike some of the prisoners they’d held in these cells, Balidor knew he could overpower her physically. She’d had little training as a fighter before she came to live among seers and probably weighed a third of him.

  On the other hand, she was telekinetic.

  It paid to exercise caution with telekinetics, even those shackled to walls and wearing sight-restraint collars calibrated to block the telekinesis.

  That being said, ankle cuffs wouldn’t help him, not if she ever did find some way to access the telekinesis in here, so he had them removed. He didn’t believe in restraining any prisoner beyond what was practical or necessary, no matter what they had done.

  “Well?” Cass flipped her silky black hair over one shoulder, her
eyes impatient.

  Balidor’s eyes followed the motion, but he didn’t speak.

  “Are you going to tell me? About Yarli?”

  “We are not doing well,” Balidor said, blunt. “If things continue on their current trajectory, without some kind of intervention by one or both of us, it is likely the relationship will end soon. Assuming I did not manage to end it already last night.”

  He wondered why he would tell her such a thing.

  He wondered, even as he said it.

  He had confided no such thing to any of his friends.

  Yet strangely, it did not stop him from saying it to her.

  Nor did it stop him from knowing, in the deepest part of his light, that every word he had just spoken was true. He and Yarli were definitely headed down a bad path. They were spiraling at this point, in a near freefall, and had been for months. Although he wasn’t yet ready to admit it, it was possible this thing with Yarli was already finished.

  It was possible the two of them were simply riding the corpse of it now, both of them unwilling to let go, both of them knowing it was dead but in denial of that fact.

  The thought surprised him… but also not.

  Cass looked surprised, too.

  Then she smiled at him, eyes knowing.

  “Ah,” Cass said. “Is that the real reason you’re down here so much? Distracting yourself from yet another failed relationship? From the lonely drudgery that is your life, Adhipan Balidor? It must be hard to be such a pious, long-suffering, morally-superior, stick-up-the-ass know-it-all, but we both know that is your inescapable fate––”

  “Aren’t you bored of this, Cassandra?” he cut in, his own voice weary.

  There was another pause, then she smiled.

  “Not really, no.”

  Balidor went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “Doesn’t this tire you?” he said. “You are an intelligent person. You had…”

  He hesitated, then shifted the direction of his words.

  “…Things you cared about once. Before, I mean. When I first knew you.”

  Seeing the frown lines start to harden around her mouth, Balidor went on before she could intervene.

  “You cannot possibly be lying to yourself to the extent that you don’t know I’m here to help you,” he said, exasperated. “Why do you spend this time with me like this?”