Refraction

by Naomi Hughes

  There’s a clattering, many objects hitting the floor all at once, and then I’m lain—gently this time—on a hard surface. Rough fingers yank up my sleeve, then stop. It’s my left hand. Injured hand. I have no idea how it looks by this point, but it must be even worse than before, because there’s a long pause full of … something. Then the fingers move to my other side and, more carefully, roll up that sleeve. Fingers rest on the inside of my wrist.

  “Marty,” he says, which is my name, I think. His voice sounds tight, helpless. “Your … your heart is beating too fast. Breathe. Try to breathe.”

  I inhale and choke on the dust that was kicked up by the cave-in. I cough and wheeze and finally manage a breath. Then another.

  “There,” he says, the tightness in his voice easing a little. “That’s better.”

  The pain is fading. It slinks back across my shoulder, sulks its way down my arm, and recedes to my palm, where it curls up and waits.

  I know what it’s waiting for. The next time it comes back—the next time that wave crashes down on me—it’ll kill me.

  My eyes are still squeezed shut. Stars blink in and out behind them, twinkling, falling. I know it’s just a symptom of the pain, but they make me remember the real stars, the ones I saw from Mirage’s floor. And the planet in the midst of them—its glowing golden veins, its beautiful aliveness.

  Ty is down there. I will get to him. I’m not dead yet.

  I sink back into myself. I test out my senses slowly, one at a time. Touch: I’m on a rough wooden surface, pocked and dented. Sight: A dim, flickering yellow bulb illuminates an earthen ceiling crisscrossed by support beams. To the side is a row of gaping open-air windows overlooking a larger pitch-black cavern. Sound: That never really went away, but at least now I can think clearly enough to name the person who’s been speaking. The one who dragged me out of the collapsing tunnel and carried me here.

  “Ackermann,” I cough, “I formally request a stay of execution. I’m in far too much pain for you to kill me right now.”

  The hands at my wrist tighten a little, then release me. “I’ll take that under advisement,” he says. There’s something incredibly tired about his voice. I wonder if it’s from my situation, or seeing his mother again, or both.

  I ease up onto my elbows, open my eyes, and find him. He’s standing at my right side. His clothing is soaked, his hair plastered to his face, his expression haunted. And that’s not even taking into account the dark blue bruise spreading over his cheekbone from our fight in the clearing. “You look like shit,” I note.

  He summons up something akin to a glare. “You try swimming through a flooded storm drain with half a dozen cops on your ass.”

  I wave him off. “I got you here, didn’t I?”

  Here is, of course, my loft. It’s hidden right beneath the city, its entrance tucked away behind an elevator shaft. The flickering light overhead is powered by a generator that I traded for in one of my deals. I’m lying atop my battered old desk. All of the things that used to be on its surface—a few sheets of precious, stolen paper, a covered hand mirror for emergency defense, and a picture of Ty and me in a haphazardly glued, homemade wooden frame—are scattered across the floor. My sleeping bag sits off by itself in a corner, rolled up to keep the spiders out.

  “Yes, you did,” Elliott answers, “and now you owe me an explanation.”

  His words cue up a flood of memory, and I jerk upright. “The transmitter,” I say urgently, looking down at my empty hands. “The transmitter, holy shit, tell me you saved it from the cave-in.”

  Elliott gestures to the side, at the stairs that lead down into the darkness of the empty cavern below. Sitting on the landing, looking a little banged up but with its red lights still glowing steadily, is the transmitter. I sag in relief.

  “You saved it, actually,” Elliott says, his voice unreadable as he watches my reaction. “Kept a death grip on it until we got in the door. I’m guessing this is why you needed me to distract everyone back at the bridge? So you could steal that?” He shakes his head, a sharp, jerky motion that betrays the frustration he refuses to show in his tone. “I know you’re up to something, Callahan. I know you know something about … whatever it is that happened, back there in the clearing. Tell me what’s going on.”

  So we’re back to Callahan now. I shake my head, holding off his questions for the moment while I slide to the ground and start toward the stairs. I want to double-check that the transmitter is okay—and maybe also stall just a little bit so I can figure out what version of the story to tell him so I can make sure he helps me. When I take a step forward, though, something crunches underfoot. The picture frame.

  I pause. I pick it up, brush it off. The left side of the frame has come unglued, and I carefully push it back into its spot. I’ve got some superglue somewhere that can fix it, I think. The picture inside has gotten crinkled. There’s no glass covering it—it was rumored that glass of all kinds might be put on the Reflectivity Index any day now, and while I’m happy to sell reflective materials to my customers, I don’t want to risk spawning a Being in the middle of my office. Carefully, I straighten the picture back out.

  I remember Elliott is watching me. I look up. His gaze is on the picture in my hands. Something flickers across his face—guilt.

  He feels guilty because he thinks my brother’s dead. Because he lied to me, and let his mother lie to everyone, about London being alive.

  I slide the picture out, fold it and tuck it into my pocket. I know it’s imaginary, but I still feel better with it on me.

  I drop the frame back to my desk. “Okay, Ackermann,” I say. “You might want to sit down for this.”

  And then I tell him everything.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WELL, ALMOST EVERYTHING. I HOLD BACK A FEW key bits of information and add a tweak or two.

  “Mirage forced us back into the dream,” I finish, without so much as a hitch in my voice, because damn it all, even if I’m good at nothing else, I’m a fantastic liar. “He said we have to wake everyone up, and then he’ll let us go.”

  Elliott stares at me for a long moment. I force myself to exhale instead of holding my breath while I wait for his response.

  At last, he says: “Okay.”

  I blink, caught off guard. “What?”

  “I said ‘okay.’”

  “Do you—you mean, okay you believe the story, or okay you’ll help me wake everyone up?”

  He narrows his eyes. “Now, that’s an interesting way to phrase that question.”

  I work hard to stay still. I’ve made a mistake somehow. He’s suspicious.

  I try to deflect. “A question that you haven’t yet answered,” I reply.

  He doesn’t move, his gaze still locked on me. “Yes, I believe you—because I woke up on that ship too, and your explanation makes more sense than any guess I’ve been able to come up with. And yes. I’ll help you wake everyone up.”

  Oh. That was the mistake.

  Smelling blood in the water, he moves closer. “What exactly is it that you’re getting out of this rescue attempt, Callahan? Why would you go to so much trouble for people you’ve been happily sacrificing to the Beings for over a year?”

  “I didn’t sacrifice anyone,” I snap, stung. “I ran a business, that’s all.”

  He presses harder. “I said I’ll help you and I mean it, but not until you tell me your motive. Because we both know you’re not usually big on saving people out of the goodness of your heart.”

  I pin my gaze to his and lift my left hand. “Do we? Is that a thing we both know?”

  Guilt flits across his face again, but he refuses to budge. “What,” he says again, measuring each word, “are you getting out of this? Because the more you evade the question, the more convinced I am that you’re keeping something from me.”

  I drop my hand. Last chance to give him some believable excuse. “When I’m not in the dream,” I say, keeping eye contact, because eye contact is the most i
mportant part of a successful lie, “the Being’s effects disappear. The sting disappears. What I get out of this is a chance to live.”

  He can know that I’m doing this to save my skin. He just can’t know I’m making him do this to save my skin. He can’t know he has a choice—that he could go through a mirror right now and jet down to Earth and leave me behind. That’s why I had to frame Mirage as the orchestrator of this little plan.

  I’m not sure why I chose to tell Elliott that the Beings’ effects disappear outside the dream instead of just saying that there’s a chance Mirage might be able to heal me if we succeed, though. I think it’s maybe because I don’t want to remember I might still be a dead man no matter what we do.

  Elliott is staring at me. His eyes have gone wide, and something like shock is plastered over his face. “The Beings’ effects disappear on the ship? Does that mean the people who die from Being attacks … what, maybe they just wake up there instead of their real bodies actually dying?”

  Everything in me sinks. I scramble to formulate a reply. I didn’t connect the dots, didn’t realize he might think Braedan could still be alive on Mirage. “I, uh, I don’t know, maybe,” I manage, the worst-delivered and most heartless lie of my life.

  It’s a good thing that he assumed Braedan might be alive. He’ll be much more motivated to make the plan work this way. I tell myself I’m glad for it, but all I can see is the look on his face when we found his brother’s body in the middle of the road.

  Elliott stares at me. Slowly, his eyes narrow again—in thought or in suspicion, I’m not sure. Then his expression clears, smooths out, goes blank. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and that makes me very, very nervous.

  But “What’s the plan, then?” is all he says when he finally speaks. “You want to use the transmitter to tell everyone the truth about the world?”

  Slowly, I exhale. He took the bait. “Not exactly,” I answer. “I want to use it to tell them all about the hundreds of mirrors I’ve planted in their shelters.”

  He stares at me. “You planted hundreds of mirrors … in the shelters.”

  I smile thinly. “Of course not. Even I don’t have access to that many mirrors at once. But I don’t need to actually plant the mirrors. I just need to make them think I’ve planted the mirrors.”

  Realization dawns. “And their collective belief that the mirrors are there will make mirrors actually appear.” The look in his eyes says he’s remembering that awful reflective forest, the way it appeared instantly when I imagined it.

  “Right,” I confirm. “We’ll also need to give everyone the quick and dirty version of the story I just told you, so they know they need to go through the mirrors I’ve ‘planted’ once they start stumbling onto them in their mad dash to escape.”

  He spots the flaw in my plan. “No one will trust you,” he says with a frown. “No one will go through the mirrors just because you say to.”

  “Of course not,” I agree easily.

  He lets his head fall back. “Which is why you need me,” he says to the ceiling.

  “Yep. A mirror dealer and the shadowseeker—how could they not believe us? The only way we’d ever agree on anything was if it was the truth.”

  He gives me a look. “What makes you think I’d lend you any credibility? I’m an exile now too.”

  “Don’t you remember the way that crowd looked at you the night we got sent to the mainland?” I ask, with a bitter smile and an edge to my words. “Those people might’ve rioted to free you right then and there if you’d just had the sense to ask them to. You were their hero. A shadowseeker, willing to do whatever it took to hunt down the last mirror dealer and keep his island safe.”

  You didn’t hunt any of us down because we put the island in danger. The words hang between us, unspoken.

  “I’m willing to bet you’re still their hero,” I continue after a moment. “I’m willing to bet people would trust you more than the mayor, and they’d sure as hell trust you more than me.”

  His expression shifts the tiniest bit, but he turns away before I can interpret it, looking at the transmitter and the cavern beyond. The miners used to use that cavern as a staging area, though there’s nothing down there now except ancient railcars and some broken tracks. Not that Elliott would be able to see any of that in the pitch-black.

  “Even so,” he says quietly, “not everyone would believe us. Not everyone would escape.”

  I drop my hands in my pockets, suddenly exhausted. “No,” I agree. “But if you’ve got a better plan, I’m all ears.”

  I curl my hands into fists, expecting to feel the comforting bite of my key in my fingers, but there’s nothing except the transmitter’s little remote. The key is missing. Elliott didn’t put it back after he used it to open the padlock.

  It’s not important. I don’t need it anymore, I remind myself harshly, even as a spike of anxiety bites into me at its loss.

  Elliott turns back around. He looks resigned. “What do you need me to do?” he asks.

  He’s in. It’s what I needed, but I can’t manage to dredge up any satisfaction. “Help write our speech,” I tell him, pulling a hand out of my pocket to wave at the papers on the floor. “It needs to be short and believable. And we’ll need to hurry—I ran into a cop right before that cave-in, and she saw the transmitter. If they figure out I plan to use it to address the city, they’ll remove the radios from the shelters before we can get our message out.”

  “Are you sure we can even transmit from down here?”

  “That thing is just a hunk of imaginary metal and wiring,” I remind him, motioning at the chest. “It works because we, and everyone else who’s seen it, expect it to. So expect it to transmit just fine from down here, and it will.”

  He scoops up a piece of paper from the ground. “I guess all we can do is try. Let’s get started, then.”

  I pause. The anxiety is still eating at me, and I have to take care of it, one way or the other. “Do you have my key?” I ask.

  He glances around, then bends over and scoops something else off the floor and tosses it to me. I catch it in my right hand: smooth silver surface, cool metallic teeth, tiny hole at the top. Familiar as breathing.

  I check the door to make sure the padlock is open. Then I step to the top of the stairs, crank my arm back, and hurl the key into the darkness. It arcs away, the gleam of silver tumbling end over end and then vanishing in a split second. After a moment I hear the distant clink of metal on stone.

  My hands are balled up so tightly they hurt. I instantly want to go down there and comb through the whole cavern until I find the key. Part of me—most of me—wishes I hadn’t thrown it, but I have to deal with my OCD and I have to do it right now. I can’t let it overtake me again. I can’t afford to put it off until our current crisis has blown over. I’ll do whatever it takes to prove to myself that I’m okay, that I’ve got my OCD under control. Throwing my key, which I won’t need after today anyway, seems like a good place to start.

  But even with it gone, I still have the urge to go check the padlock again. The ache to lock it—even though I know I wouldn’t be able to unlock it, now—is almost physically painful. I’ve thrown the key away, and it hasn’t helped at all, and I need it to help.

  Elliott’s voice startles me. “You’re a very all-or-nothing guy, aren’t you?” he asks.

  I glance over at him and try to loosen up my shoulders, which are hunched and tight. “What?”

  He’s got a careful, contemplative sort of look on his face. He nods at the cavern. “Why did you throw the key?”

  I hesitate—but he already knows about my OCD, and telling him might help get it off my chest. “Because I couldn’t stop worrying about it. I thought if I threw it, I could prove to myself that I really do still have all my compulsions under control,” I admit. “But now all I want is to go down there and find it.”

  He nods, more to himself than me, then searches through the desk’s drawers until he finds a pen. He scri
bbles a few lines on the paper. I should be helping him compose the speech, but my anxiety is too high now and I can’t think straight.

  “Why did you say I was all-or-nothing?” I ask at last, mainly because if I don’t distract myself I’m going to walk down those stairs and search for the key and we do not have time for that.

  The pen stops. He looks up. “It’s like you think you have to be either perfectly cured, if that’s even possible, or else completely in the grip of your OCD. There’s no in-between for you. So you throw yourself into proving that you’ve gotten it all under control—even at the expense of knowingly screwing up whatever life-threatening situation you’re facing at the moment.”

  I frown and start to snap out a reply but then pause, remembering the Being that attacked us in the garage yesterday. I’d tapped the door frame, and then, because I’d wanted so desperately to prove to myself that I was still stronger than my OCD, I’d turned around to walk through the door again without tapping even though I knew we didn’t have time for it. I’d meant to walk through it three times. Five times, if necessary.

  Three and five. My safe numbers. I blink, stunned. I’d tried to use my counting compulsion to prove I wasn’t under the control of my tapping compulsion … but both are my OCD. I’d gone deeper under its influence than I would have if I hadn’t turned around at all.

  And if I hadn’t turned around—if I hadn’t been so damned determined to prove I had my compulsions under control—I wouldn’t have seen the mirror. I wouldn’t have brought the Being.

  “And your brother,” Elliott continues, looking at the paper rather than me. “You wanted to find him, so what did you do? You started a black-market business. You risked getting other people killed and getting yourself exiled—then you actually got yourself exiled—all because you threw absolutely everything you had after your goal, even when you had to know it wasn’t a good idea.” He lifts the pen and looks at me. “You’re all, or you’re nothing.”