by Laura Legend
Then the crowd erupted.
And Cass, too, was on her feet, frightened and elated all at once.
With the tournament prize on the line, Cass would face this demon in the final round.
Could she win?
The woman in the kabuki mask raised a hand to the audience, acknowledging their praise. She turned in a slow circle, addressing the whole arena, until the half of her face that was no longer masked was finally turned toward Cass.
As soon as she saw the face, Cass realized what part of her had known all along—the demon was Miranda.
31
The demon both was and wasn’t Miranda.
She was recognizable, but changed. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t alive either.
Cass felt like she was looking at someone who, rather than being her aunt, happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to her aunt. A doppelgänger. A clone. A shell.
This was the first good look at Miranda that Cass had had since her transformation. The hints of ferality in Miranda’s face, edging in from the margins, drove an icy spike through Cass’s heart.
She wasn’t prepared for this.
She wasn’t ready to see it. And she certainly wasn’t ready to be pitched against it, head to head, tomorrow night.
No wonder she’d kept the truth hidden from herself.
The expression on Miranda’s face, her height, her teeth, her pale skin, her posture—they all repeated one refrain over and over to Cass: You failed me. I trusted you and look what has become of me. I’m a blood-hungry fragment of a human being.
A wave of black guilt crashed into Cass and she stumbled backward in the box, tripping over her chair. She went down hard, bruising her hip.
It was all her fault.
Cass bolted from the box, looking for an exterior door, desperate for some fresh air. Her hands were shaking and her face was hot. Hoping to avoid being seen, she pulled up her hood and shrunk inside of it, hands jammed deep into her pockets. She burst out a side door and into an alley behind the arena. She leaned against the wall, trying to catch her breath. The wind was even stronger now and, channeled by the narrow alley, it howled and battered against her. The icy gusts cut right through her cotton sweatshirt. Cass shivered, every inch of skin on her body puckering into gooseflesh.
She bumped her way down the alley, brushing against the brick walls. The street at the end was unfamiliar.
She wasn’t sure where she wanted to go—mostly just “away”—and so she let the wind decide. Instead of fighting it, she put the wind at her back. She couldn’t imagine returning to the apartment and sitting there alone, waiting for someone to show up. Awash in guilt about Miranda, Cass had no particular desire to be seen by anyone.
She just wanted someplace to hide.
Cass had only gone two blocks when she was greeted by a flashing neon sign for a bar. It had clearly once spelled BOOBS, but now with one “O” darkened, it just spelled BO-B’s. The sign mirrored the bar where Cass and Zach had met Amare and traded a relic for information about Miranda.
There seemed to be some poetic justice in Cass’s coming here again, this time alone.
Cass fought the wind to open the door. She slipped inside and it banged closed behind her. This bar was smaller than the other, long and narrow with booths and stools.
What were the odds, Cass wondered, of two different BOOBS bars in two different Underside hubs burning out the same “O” to become BO-B’S? Was she patronizing some kind of parasitic franchise that was dismantling BOOBS across the Underside, colonizing the host body with some alien brand?
She couldn’t worry about that now.
Cass took a seat at the far end of the bar. For now, she just needed a drink. She ordered a shot of vodka and the bartender obliged. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely get it to her mouth. The vodka burned its way down her throat, momentarily stilling her spinning head and numbing her guilt. The fire, though, quickly died out.
“Another,” Cass said, raising her glass.
The bartender smiled a creepy smile and obliged.
Cass’s hands were steadier this time and, squeezing her eyes shut, she sent another flaming shot of anesthetic down her gullet. This time, the fire turned ice cold in her stomach and leeched out into her limbs, back up her spine, and into her head.
With her eyes shut, though, all Cass could see was the image of that kabuki mask, now broken in half, as if Miranda herself were split between who she’d been and who she now was. Cass pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to squeeze the image out of her head. Instead the image doubled, separating into an image of Miranda’s face in the monastery library, rigid with the pain of transformation, her teeth flashing, superimposed on the image of Miranda smiling and laughing as she took Cass dancing on her twenty-first birthday.
The dissonance of the images was overwhelming. Trying to hold them together, Cass felt like she might split herself in two. The liquor in her stomach threatened to come back up.
I’m the Seer, dammit, Cass cried in her mind. I’m supposed to help people. To save people. To see the truth and bring them together. Why am I failing? What aren’t I seeing? Why can’t I even see the truth about myself?
Cass put down her glass and buried her head in her arms on the bar, fighting to keep the vodka down. She held her head very still and kept her breath very shallow.
She stayed this way for a couple of minutes, grateful for the soft darkness of her hoodie’s cotton sleeves, until a finger poked her in the shoulder.
She lifted her head and peeked out with her good eye.
The man from a couple of stools down—some kind of Underside businessman with a dark suit and loose tie—had scooted next to her.
“Hey, can I buy you a drink?” the man asked, his slurred voice marking the fact that he’d already had a few drinks himself. “We don’t get many of you young, beautiful types in here.”
He shot a glance at the bartender, as if looking for confirmation. The bartender smiled weakly and shrugged his shoulders, granting agreement while polishing a shot glass.
Cass picked her head up and looked at the fellow with both eyes.
“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t buy me a drink.”
The man looked offended. And, too, he looked weirded out by the sudden revelation of her wandering eye. In response, his own eyes grew narrow and calculating as they registered recognition.
“I know you,” he said coldly. “I’ve seen you in the ring. You’re the ‘Seer.’”
Cass put cash on the bar and stood up to leave, her head still spinning.
“You don’t look so tough in person,” he added, also standing. “You’re barely five feet, all skin and bones.”
He had at least a foot and a hundred pounds on her.
Cass couldn’t deal with this right now.
She tried to leave, but the man blocked her path. She tried to brush past, but he pushed her into the corner.
The bartender turned away, busying himself with cleaning the bar.
“I’m talking to you,” the man said, reaching out and taking Cass by the shoulder. “I’m buying you a drink to celebrate your big win. This may be your last chance to celebrate for a long time, because tomorrow that demon lady is going to tear you apart.”
At the mention of Miranda and tomorrow’s fight, something inside of Cass snapped.
“Hands to yourself, asshole,” Cass said, as she pulled his hand from her shoulder, twisted his pinky finger, and snapped it like a twig.
The man cried out in pain and dropped to his knees. Cass held on tight to that dangling finger and, with her other hand, drew back to level a punch across the bridge of his nose. Tears streamed down the man’s face and he begged her to stop. But Cass could tell that no last-second rush of pity was going to stop her from clocking him now.
She was going to level him.
Her arm trembled, cocked and ready, suspended in the air.
Then, just as she was about to strike, the bartender dropp
ed a glass.
With a bright crack that Cass could feel in the soles of her feet, the glass shattered on the tile floor and time itself fractured in two.
32
This instance was different than before.
As her perception of time broke in two, Cass could immediately sense that this fork was not going to present her with a choice between two possible futures. Rather, it was going to show her two different versions of her past.
As before, she felt herself step sideways, out of the normal flow of time, and into an adjacent space. Here, though, there was no sense that she was witnessing two rows of dominoes that she could choose between, setting one in motion, but not the other. This time, instead of facing toward the future, she was facing backwards, tracing in reverse order the events that had led her to this moment. She could identify the very point in the past where her life’s path had forked decisively. And she could see the series of events that would have led her to an entirely different present.
First, she was drawn to the fork that belonged to her own timeline.
She saw, in a flash, the whole of her life unfold. She saw herself swaddled in her father’s arms as a baby. She saw the day her mother took her for ice cream and taught her how to guess the astrological signs of passing strangers: Leo, Cancer, Gemini. She saw her family in Japan with Kumiko at the cherry blossom festival, and she saw herself get lost among the trees, then be found by her mother. She saw the day her mother had given her the amulet that had contained the anointed fragment of the One True Cross. She saw the day of her mother’s funeral—the pale, stricken look on her father’s distant face at the cemetery. She saw her first underground MMA fight as a teenager and the surprised look on her swarthy opponent’s face when she’d sent him to the mat and forced him to tap out. She saw that day in her sophomore medieval history class at Rice when she’d fallen in love with the field and felt, for the first time in years, like she knew what to do with her life. She saw the day that her dissertation committee had refused to accept her work on Christian relics and left her stranded, without a doctoral degree, working as a barista. She saw the moment when Judas, overwhelmed by the powers he’d unleashed, had pulled down a castle on their heads. She saw the rubble crush what she’d thought was Richard’s lifeless body as she, Zach, and Miranda barely escaped. She saw that night in the monastery library when she’d failed to save Miranda from the Heretic and instead lost her to the darkness. And she saw herself now, alone and guilty in a seedy dive bar in the Underside.
This was her life as it had happened.
Then her attention shifted to time’s other line, the past that she might have had. The decisive moment, the moment when her life had forked down two fundamentally different paths, was right at the beginning. Kumiko was right. Something had happened at the time of her birth that had changed everything for Cass and her family.
She saw it vividly and plainly: Cass had been a twin. And her brother had died at birth.
Except in the timeline she was witnessing now, he hadn’t died.
She saw the day her parents brought the two of them home. She felt how the sadness that had hung heavy on her parents’ hearts all through her childhood in her timeline was replaced by a simple, present joy in their shared lives. She saw how she and her brother would have been; two sides of the same coin. Her strong passions and emotions were balanced and tempered by the cool clarity of his strong mind, and—working together—they easily saw the truth of things.
In a final punch to her already plummeting gut, she realized the root of her problems: she wasn’t supposed to be alone because alone she was only half a Seer.
She saw the two little raven-haired, toddling twins safe with their parents, taught from early childhood who and what they were—trained and mentored to handle their powers. She saw the day when she’d rescued her brother from a bully on the playground. She saw how she’d stepped up to help him ask a girl to the prom. She saw herself as a bridesmaid at his wedding. And then she saw herself holding her newborn niece in a hospital room as her brother squeezed her arm and looked over her shoulder into his baby’s eyes.
But none of this had happened.
Her brother had died and Cass had been maimed from the day of her birth. Without ever realizing it, she’d carried that life-sized wound with her for almost thirty years. She’d been an unbalanced top spinning, wild and wobbly, from the start. It was plain now: to protect her—afraid of how her unstable emotions threatened to overwhelm her without her missing half—her parents had withheld the truth from her and, perhaps, from themselves.
All of this struck Cass in a flash as she came to the disintegrating end of that unrealized timeline. As she did, the separate forks collapsed into each other and Cass could clearly see how the past she hadn’t enjoyed had shaped the present she had been given.
As the forks imploded into one other, superimposing the truth of one life onto the other, Cass saw a final, fleeting image. In this memory, from the time just before her mother had died, Cass was sitting in her mother’s lap. Her mother was apologizing, encouraging Cass to be brave and promising that, though this might hurt, it would help keep her safe. Then Rose reached out, her finger flashing green, and she gently touched the edge of little Cass’s eye. It instantly swam with a milky white fog, clouding it. And, as Cass could see so clearly now, locking away Cass’s emotions, forever hobbling her powers as a Seer.
“I’m sorry, Cass,” her mother had said, “but I’ll come back for you. And we’ll fix this together.”
And then the vision collapsed entirely and Cass found herself alone, on her knees in a bar, weeping for everything she’d lost and everything she’d never had.
33
The man with the broken finger was gone. The bar was mostly empty. Cass wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She was still on her knees on the bar floor—the floor was filthy and sticky and she refused to think about when it had last been mopped.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to gather herself. She’d barely gotten a handle on herself, though, when she was racked by another of wave of tectonic sobs. The sobs originated someplace so deep inside of her that they felt geological.
Cass felt like her grief was pulling her apart at the seams, until a pair of small but strong hands gripped her by the shoulders from behind.
“There, now. Let it out. It’s alright child,” Kumiko whispered, kneeling down beside Cass, pulling her close.
Cass leaned into Kumiko and Kumiko squeezed Cass’s shoulders, holding her together, giving her space to release the pressure that had been building inside for decades. The tears streamed down Cass’s face. At first, she tried to wipe her running nose, but she soon gave up any pretense of propriety and let it all soak into the silk shoulder of Kumiko’s kimono. Tiny, silent Kumiko absorbed everything Cass had to give: grief, guilt, and all.
However, when a couple of hard-looking men in leather entered the bar, their time was up.
“It’s time go now, dear,” Kumiko said, keeping an eye on the men as they glanced around the room. Kumiko pulled Cass to her feet and, staying low, they slipped out the back door before they were spotted.
The wind was still blowing, but it didn’t have the same kind of icy fight in it that it had had before. With her arm around Cass, Kumiko led them both down the street into a small park crowded with chestnut trees. The branches waved in the wind, inviting them in. The leaves rustled. Kumiko guided Cass to a wooden bench that was tucked to the side of the path, sheltered by shadows. Her knees still weak, Cass was glad to sit down. The tremors that had rocked her subsided to trembling hands and moist eyes. She pulled her hands inside of her sleeves and wiped her face.
Without meeting her eyes, Cass asked Kumiko, “Did you know?”
Kumiko cocked her head, reading between the lines of Cass’s question, and guessed at what she meant.
“Rose and I used to be very close. Then, when I returned after your birth, something was different. Something had changed. We were
still friends, but some door between us had closed. And as the years passed, the distance between us grew.”
Kumiko paused. They both listened to the trees.
“Tell me what you saw,” Kumiko prompted gently.
Cass took a deep breath, searching for words to describe what she’d seen and how she’d seen it. She traced the outline of both paths for Kumiko—both the path her life had taken and the path it hadn’t—and wept again, quietly, when she described the brother whose absence she could now name.
“His name,” Cass choked out, “was Nathan.”
Saying it out loud for the first time made him feel real.
Cass had a brother. His name had been Nathan. She’d seen their life together and, even without that life, she loved him; she felt entangled with him.
“I didn’t know,” Kumiko responded, sighing. “But it explains quite a lot.”
The wind picked up again and the trees bent in response, bowing to the wind’s strength and, thus, demonstrating their own.
“Seers,” Kumiko continued, taking Cass’s trembling hand in her own tiny one, “are meant to see the whole truth, not just part of it. They are meant to see the truths of both the heart and the mind. Every so often, though, Seers are born in pairs, as twins. When this happens, they each embody half of the truth. One of them embodies the truths of the heart—of the passions and emotions—and the other embodies the truths of the mind—of clarity and reason.”
Kumiko turned toward Cass and gingerly took her other hand. Holding both of Cass’s hands, Kumiko placed them palm to palm with her own, as if in a prayer that joined two separate halves.
“To be a Seer and see the whole truth, each of the pair needs to be balanced by the other. But, when doubled and joined, this rare kind of Seer can be especially powerful at effecting unity where there is division, at crossing the gaps that divide people, and at healing the wounds that leave the world cracked and broken.”
With their hands joined palm to palm, Cass felt a kind of circuit complete itself, and light began to flow through her. Her cloudy eye cleared and focused, strength returned to her legs, time opened like a flower, and a smoky white light emanated from the whole of her.