Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  The accusation cut like a whip. It was so patently untrue. Nothing made sense. Was this the disease? “I don’t even—”

  “That was fine. I let you think that was okay. That’s on me. And it’s true, you were the one on track, to get your degree, to find your way in life. Not me. I’ve always been a fuckup, but that didn’t stop me from taking care of you.” Mariana’s lower lip trembled, and that—just that—was enough to make Nora want to fling herself off the cliff from which she was currently hanging.

  And then Mariana delivered the killing blow, the one Nora never saw coming, the one she would never recover from.

  Her keys still jingling, Mariana said, “You think you can’t die because it would destroy me, but what’s actually true is that it destroys you to think about doing this alone. You’ve never had to struggle through anything by yourself. I have. Back then? Starting with Bill trapping me in that room at the party? That’s when I knew the truth—that I would have to take care of myself. I knew I could. I’m strong. But you’ve never seen that. You’ve been seeing me as a disaster area for so long that you forgot to look at me. And it’s just going to get worse. I’ll be with you when you die, taking care of you, but I’ll be alone again afterward. As usual. And someday I’ll do what you won’t have to: die alone.” A crystal-shattering pause. “I have to admit, it might be nice not to be judged all the time.”

  Then her sister was gone.

  Her sister was all the fucking way gone, leaving nothing behind in the foyer but two Glass women both shaking like they were taking their last breaths, the very last breaths left in the whole world.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS

  Christmas

  When Ellie was little, she loved for me to tell her stories. Her favorites, of course, were about her or a little girl very much like her, a girl who was brave and fought great battles on horseback or found hidden castles. Her next favorite were stories about me and her father. She liked to think about what Paul was like before she came along. Before he left. She loved our getting-lost-in-the-desert story, and the one about how we once mistook a baby skunk for a kitten in the dark. But the story she asked for most was the one about how we met.

  The story always changed. I never told her the real story, which was too prosaic and boring. It was no good for a little girl’s bedtime, a little girl who wanted something exciting. So I would make up a story, always changing the elements.

  “We met when I was a pirate.”

  “He was a pirate?”

  “No,” I would growl, covering my eye with my hand and stomping in a peg-legged circle. “I was a pirate. My ship was the Sea Siren, and I plundered the oceans, filling the hold with jewels I took from around queens’ necks.”

  She would giggle and fall backward on her bed. “Did you have both your hands?”

  I pulled my arm up in my shirt. “Of course not! This was just a hook back then.”

  “How did they fix it?”

  “I was rich. You can buy new arms that work if you’re rich.”

  “Where was Papa?”

  “On a kayak.”

  Ellie gasped. “In the middle of the ocean?”

  “Do you think that’s very safe? For a tiny kayak to be all the way out there in the big waves?”

  Solemnly, she shook her head.

  “Me, neither. So I pulled my sailing ship alongside. ‘Prepare to be boarded,’ I yelled down at him. He looked up, surprised. He’d been napping, you see.”

  “You woke him up?”

  “I did. He was very grumpy about it. Your dad never liked to be woken from a sound sleep.”

  “Like me!”

  “Like you, chipmunk. So he said, ‘Don’t even think about it!’ That made me, as a pirate, very upset. You can imagine.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “I reached over with my very long arms and put the point of my hook right behind his collar. I hauled him on board and turned him upside down, shaking him to see if any doubloons fell out of his pockets.”

  “Did some?” Ellie scrambled excitedly to sitting.

  I pushed her gently back into her pillows. Story time was about going to sleep, after all. “No money. But lots of jewels.”

  “What kind?”

  “Diameralds. And rupizluli. Do you know what colors those are?”

  Her green eyes wide, she shook her head.

  “Diameralds are rainbow colored and they come out of rain clouds, and rupizlulis look like sequins but they’re actually tiny crystals that fairies dig out of riverbanks after lightning storms.”

  “Oh . . . ,” she breathed.

  “So I collected all of them, because they were rolling around the deck of my ship, and you know how I hate dirty floors. And usually, when I turn prisoners upside down and shake them, they start crying. It’s to be expected. It’s not a very pleasant feeling, as you can imagine. But your dad, he was different.”

  “How? He didn’t cry?”

  “Just the opposite. He yelled at me.”

  “He did?”

  I nodded. “Well, I deserved it. I was a thief, after all. He said I’d better give him back all his jewels. I said, ‘Or what?’ And then he said, ‘Or I’ll sic my pet alligator on you.’”

  “Pet alligator?”

  “Sure enough, I looked back down in the water, and there was an alligator thrashing his tail so hard he sent water up into the sky for a mile. Maybe a mile and a half.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Alastair.”

  “That’s a funny name for a crocodile.”

  “It’s a funny name for a crocodile, yes. But this was an alligator, and it’s a pretty common name among that species.”

  “Then what?”

  “I gave up, obviously. I didn’t want to get bitten by Alastair, because he looked like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in twenty years.”

  Ellie touched her freshly clean top teeth. “Then what?”

  “Then he said he loved me and that he wanted to marry me.”

  “Alastair did?”

  “Your dad did.”

  “That’s silly. Why would a pirate marry a man in a kayak with an alligator?”

  Because of his eyes, your eyes. “Because he made me laugh.”

  “I make you laugh, too.”

  “All the time.” I kissed her and told her to sleep. The next night, the story would be different. I tried to never tell the same one twice.

  The actual story was dull. I was twenty-three years old, just a baby. I’d landed my dream job at the Sentinel, and I wasn’t fully aware yet that really what I’d landed was a glorified gofer position. It was Christmas Day, and there were only ten people in the whole office, all of us rookies. The only place open for lunch was Pho King, but that was okay. I ordered my pho with extra jalapeños and green onions, light on the chicken. The man behind me in line laughed. “I’ve never heard anyone order it exactly the way I do.”

  I said without looking around, “Well. We should probably get married.”

  He laughed again, and I liked the sound of it, round and sweet. “I’m in. How do you feel about roofing materials?”

  “Nothing better,” I said. Then my eyes met his. I had a piece of beach glass in my pocket at that very moment that exact shade of green.

  We fell in love. He gave me my heart, my Ellie. For that—divorce and failure and alimony and resentment and anger and regret aside—for that, he will always be the best Christmas present I ever got. He gave me my strong, clear Glass girl with his own beautiful matching eyes and my long nose and, of course, a strength that is all her own.

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Ellie sighed and pressed ctrl-G to holster the knife. Addi jogged behind Dyl.

  In-game, Dyl was all ma
n, wide at the shoulder and thigh. He didn’t bounce on his toes like he did in real life—the computerized Dyl strode with authority. Ellie watched him jump two creeks in three bounds, his sword flashing at his hip. A thorny Velocirat attacked from under an Islan tree, and in less than a second, before Addi could even unsheathe her knife, he’d cut off its head with an exultant war cry.

  If only they could go somewhere and fight things in real life together, instead of hanging out in Oakland bars, talking with his friends about stupid amps and their next unpaid gig.

  Over there, she typed. That’s where the smoke came from. I have this idea . . .

  Like a big, manly puppy, Dyl bounded over a ripple of flame that shot out of a hole in the ground. He stopped and swayed back and forth, waiting for Addi to tell him what to do next.

  The week before, she’d asked him to meet her at Mills College. The acceptance letter had come and thank god she’d been the one to intercept the mail that day because she still hadn’t told her mother that she’d chosen to put in for early decision there and not at Smith. She’d used her own debit card for the application payment, and Mom hadn’t even noticed.

  She was going to be pissed, which, given the fact that she and Aunt Mariana still weren’t talking, wasn’t good.

  But Ellie thought she might have a way around it. She was going to tell her mom about her acceptance as her Christmas present to her. No matter what, her mom couldn’t get mad about it if it were a gift, right? Hey, Mom, I’m staying home. No, not to take care of you. Not at all.

  Mills College was gorgeous, something she hadn’t expected it to be. She’d just assumed the brochure had lied. Dylan met her at the front of Mills Hall. “I can’t believe this is in the same city I live in,” he said.

  She felt the same way. Because it was located in a rougher neighborhood in Oakland, she’d expected Mills to be two or three industrial-looking buildings surrounded by razor wire, the students protected by armed guards. Instead, after her two-hour public-transit commute, she’d walked onto campus with no more than a wave to the cheery guard in the shack.

  The campus itself was huge, way bigger than she’d thought. Trees were everywhere, so many of them. Wide pathways wound through grass still lush even though it was cold now, and small groups of women weaved their way between Mills Hall and the building her map told her was the tea shop.

  “Dude,” said Dylan. “This is awesome. You’re going to go here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. It was the first time she’d said it out loud. “I am.”

  He took her hand, and she felt somehow embarrassed. This was a school full of feminists. Would they look at her and know she was in high school? That she was looking at the campus with her boyfriend, like she was too much of a baby do it herself? She pointed at a fat squirrel, using the opportunity to take her hand back.

  Mills Hall was three stories, with a fourth, smaller, cupola-like story on top. She’d read in the brochure that it had once been the only building on campus, back when this was still out in the country, and that in the late 1800s, the hall was where the students lived. Now, a century and a half later, it held classrooms and office space for professors, but looking up at the narrow windows, Ellie could imagine girls running up and down the halls in their long dresses, calling out to one another the same way they were doing all around her.

  “My brother said only lesbians go here.”

  Ellie’s mouth dropped open. “Excuse me?”

  Dylan grinned. “No, that’s not a bad thing. You know, the four-year-plan. Isn’t that what happens here? No guys, right?”

  Two men walked by as he said this, and the taller one gave an exaggerated eye roll.

  Ellie hissed, “The international and graduate programs allow men.”

  “Still,” he said, leaning back and looking up at the windows sparkling in the sun, “you should go for it if you get the chance.”

  “Seriously?” Ellie wished she’d asked her mother to come with her instead of him. Mom would have loved the long expanses of rich, verdant lawn and the way the light blue sky looked almost fake against the dark green of the trees.

  Dylan had gotten a little better while they followed a campus guide on the tour, keeping his comments to himself, texting his bandmates as they walked. They’d had lunch at the tea shop. He’d looked over the course brochures with something very close to excitement.

  And all Ellie could think was, What if I was wrong about him? How could she trust herself if she’d gotten something so essential wrong?

  Now, at home, she sat on the couch with her laptop on her knees while her mother banged reassuringly around in the kitchen. Ellie watched Dyl thump a clod of dirt with his battle-ax. This was where you saw the smoke? Coming out of the ground?

  Yeah. Addi used an earthen spell to move the dirt much more efficiently than Dyl’s ax could. Just give me a sec.

  A reddish glare rose out of the hole she was making, startling her into leaning forward. Two brilliant puffs of gold smoke followed by smaller puffs of purple started belching out of the ground.

  What? This couldn’t be . . .

  Ellie hit the keyboard harder. Could it . . . ? Holy shit.

  This was it. Excitement stung the back of Ellie’s eyes and her breath came faster. Sparkles flew upward into the green-black sky.

  This was it. This was where Ulra had hidden her cache of eggs. More than a hundred thousand players worldwide, and no one had found this but them. But her.

  We did it! he typed.

  No.

  She’d done it.

  Carefully, she tugged a spider’s web off a troche bush and made it into a net that she lowered into the hole. Ctrl-K to drop it in, ctrl-J to pull it up, and Addi held a perfect dragon’s egg in her hands. Ellie could practically feel its warmth.

  Can I get the next one?

  Go, she said. Away.

  What?

  I need you to leave.

  Ha.

  I’m not kidding.

  Ellie?

  If you touch one of these eggs, I will kill you.

  Dyl took a step backward, and then another one. His sword remained at his side, but Addi kept her left hand on her knife, just in case.

  What’s going on? Ellie?

  She waited.

  Ellie, what’s the problem? Can I help?

  She didn’t have a problem. She had a solution.

  Ulra was sick. Only a Healer could fix her, a great healer. If she raised these broodlings herself out here on the edge of the game, if she kept them safe and learned their secrets, she would be—by default—the greatest Healer in Queendom. Then she could save Ulra. Ellie had no idea how she hadn’t thought of it before, but it was as plain as day before her now.

  Pain twisted in Ellie’s chest, stabbed behind her eyes. Tears ran down her face, and they weren’t about sending Dyl the Incurser away.

  Dyl the Incurser was done. And she was, sadly, done with Dylan the man.

  Only Ulra mattered. How had she not seen that before?

  Ellie could almost hear the incredulity in Dylan’s typed words. You know I’m a fighter. You shouldn’t threaten me like that, even if you’re kidding.

  It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise. If he came between her and the cure for the Queen, he would die, and when he rerolled, she wouldn’t accept his offer of Friending. She wasn’t a great fighter, but she was better than she used to be. She knew both his moves and his weaknesses.

  And now she knew what she was fighting for. It was more—so much more—than a story she’d helped write. Somehow, she was fighting for herself, suddenly, and it fucking mattered. She mattered the most. And she was a Glass, goddamn it. She was strong.

  Addi cradled the egg more carefully and watched Dyl trudge away. He threw fireballs into the sky, his in-game invention. If you threw them high enough, they exploded above and hung there,
drifting down so slowly they looked like a boat’s flare. He was doing it on purpose, drawing attention to their hidden world’s edge.

  It was okay.

  She would fight everyone. And she would win.

  “Do you think we should have steak for dinner? Have we had that recently?” her mother called from the kitchen. She stuck her head through the arch that led into the living room. “Are you . . . baby, are you crying?”

  Instead of closing the computer, instead of lying, instead of making sure her mother didn’t see her screen, didn’t see what had made her cry, Ellie felt the sobs come harder. Her stomach hurt like she had the flu, and she hoped she wasn’t going to throw up.

  Mom sat on the couch next to her, folding the afghan around them carefully. She wrapped her arms tight around Ellie. “Is it Dylan?”

  “No,” Ellie choked. “But I’m going to break up with him.” The words made her cry harder, and she hiccuped violently, something she usually did while laughing her ass off, not crying like a baby.

  “Why?”

  “Because.” Because I got it so wrong. I didn’t see what was important.

  “So you’re breaking up with him, but that’s not why you’re crying?” Her mother sounded confused, and Ellie didn’t blame her.

  “No . . .”

  “Is it Smith? Did you hear back?”

  Ellie shook her head, feeling tears roll down her cheeks. She gestured toward her laptop.

  “Want to show me?”

  She did, but she didn’t know how to explain it. It was too big, too important. It wasn’t just a game.

  “It’s the game . . . The game.”

  Her mother waited.

  “I found the eggs. The Queen’s eggs. I think they’re the key to . . .”

  Her mother sat next to her, her arm still around Ellie. So warm.

  “I think they’re the key to healing her.”

  There was a long pause. “The Queen is sick?”

  Ellie buried her face in her hands. It wasn’t fair, to cry like this in front of Mom. She’d done so well at not doing that, and now she was blowing all of it. Mom needed to be perked up, not brought down by a sobbing daughter who was upset about a dumb game.