by Anthology
Then again, he understood his own feelings on the subject far better than he pretended.
Really, he understood a lot of things far better than he wished he did.
2
Reversal
Maybe it is from what he told her before they went under.
Maybe it is because Allie was already on Cass’s mind...even more than usual, or more intensely perhaps...or with more genuine emotion on the surface.
After all, Cass’s mind dictates the general direction of their jumps, not Balidor’s. He can guide, probe, look for openings, push her along tracks that look promising, things that Shadow might have used to break her mind...
But they are her memories.
It is her mind.
Ultimately, he cannot go anywhere she does not allow him to go.
The difficulty is in the allowing. The difficulty is in creating the need to see over the resistance to being seen.
And whatever the reason, Allie is on her mind tonight.
Not Alyson the Bridge...Allie Taylor, her friend.
Allie, who Cass has known since either of them could talk.
When Cass brings Balidor into her mind, into the dream world they share, he finds himself sitting on a faded yellow carpet. He sits on the floor, just as he does in her cell.
Only here he leans against the base of a flowered couch in a house he recognizes.
He sees pictures on the walls he knows, of a family with four people––a young Jon who is all elbows and bones and smiling teeth and bottle-thick glasses. A baby-faced Allie with giant eyes and a serious expression. A pretty woman heading into young middle age. An older man with thinning hair and workman’s hands and a smile not dissimilar to Jon’s.
He feels not only the house and Cass....he feels the difference in time period.
He feels the shift in the world, the difference in the energies.
Each time, the transition is easier.
Somehow more familiar.
Cass doesn’t fight him very much anymore, not openly. Instead he senses areas of her mind she avoids, skirting around the dark patches with a deftness that frustrates him, even drives him mad when he gets close enough for the barest taste...when he senses the charge behind those chasms, the deeper intensity of her light.
This room already contains the bare edges of that flavor.
She feels desperately sad.
He focuses on a Christmas tree in the corner near a long window. Next to it, the pretty, dark-haired woman from the photo on the mantle hums while she decorates the fir tree’s branches. The tree is already half-filled with lights and tinsel and sparkling ornaments. Some of those ornaments are exquisitely made...delicate baubles that glow with an inner light, small fairy castles and reindeer made of porcelain and crystal angels. Others are crude, painted by a child’s hands, with broken edges and smiley-face mouths and colors that clash.
When someone speaks up from above him on the couch, Balidor jumps, then turns, looking up.
Cass sits there. She is maybe eight years old.
Sometimes he is her in these dreams, so unable to see her.
Sometimes he is not.
This will clearly be the latter.
He cannot always see a pattern there, in terms of when he is and when he isn’t––but this time, the reasons for the distance are as obvious as her face, which has a black eye from an adult’s balled fist. He feels that pain in his chest worsen as he looks at the bruise.
“Mrs. Taylor?” she says, clearing her throat.
Her voice is tentative, but it is not a child’s shyness, not exactly. Already, he hears the faint flavor of that sharper, less child-like edge.
“Can I help?” she says, her voice holding an even fainter longing.
That longing seems to cut him.
“...When Allie gets here, can I help, too?” she asks.
The woman turns, smiling at her. She is pretty, maybe thirty-five years old. Maybe as much as forty. Maybe even forty-five. Balidor still struggles with human ages, despite how long he’s lived among their race. If she were seer she would be close to his age now, somewhere north of four hundred years old. Her dark, softly curly hair hangs past her shoulders. She wears a flowing dress that is dark green, a dress that hugs her narrow waist and curve of hip.
A Christmas dress.
“You can help me now, sweetie,” she says, beckoning her over.
Cass hesitates again.
Then, taking a breath, she slides off the edge of the sofa. Landing on her feet, that fake nonchalance already wafting off her light, she walks to the woman. Something about the caution he feels there, the fear, makes Balidor’s chest hurt all over again.
He sees something similar in the woman’s eyes as Cass approaches her.
Pity, yes, but more than that too. The woman is looking at the bruise on Cass’s face. Balidor sees a fierce anger there––an emotion he can recognize in himself.
It is one more reason to like Allie’s adoptive mother, Mia Taylor.
It is not this human woman who hurt her.
But Balidor already knew that.
He’s already seen enough of Cass’s childhood to know where that bruise likely originated.
“Pick whichever ones you like,” Mia Taylor says, motioning towards the messy box on the low glass coffee table and smiling again.
Balidor watches Cass’s face, the serious look in her eyes as she scans different ornaments in the box. Tissue paper keeps them marginally apart, but Mia Taylor is not a precise woman, unlike her adoptive daughter, Alyson. Mia is more a free-spirit, and her organizational and housekeeping skills reflect that, Balidor notices.
“I like having too many,” Mia confides, smiling at Cass as she blows a stray curl out of her face. She turns back to the tree, hanging up a glass dolphin on a higher branch. “I like to be able to choose my favorites...different favorites, you know? Different every year. If I have too many, I don’t have to put up everything. It’s why I buy new ones all the time, too...”
Unlike many children might have, Cass doesn’t dismiss Mia’s words.
Balidor sees the little girl with the bruised face thinking about them instead, stopping her perusal of the ornaments to frown at the tree as she did.
Looking back at the box, she stares until Balidor sees the exact moment her eyes light up. Once they do, she leans forward, pulling out a jagged design fashioned in metal...something that shines coppery in the afternoon sunlight slanting through the windows.
“I like this one,” she announces.
Mia glances down with a smile. Examining it, she nods in approval.
“One of my favorites,” she says.
“What is it?” Cass says, looking up.
“I don’t know,” Mia laughs. “Allie’s father found it in Asia.” She blows that pesky strand of hair out of her face once again. “It’s seer, I think...or maybe Tibetan? I don’t know.”
Cass holds it in both hands now. “I like it.”
Mia nods, her eyes shrewd as she looks at Cass’s downturned head. Smiling when Cass looks up, Mia says more gently, “Hang it on the tree, sweetie.”
She caresses the little girl’s dark, curtain-straight black hair.
She does it carefully, Balidor notices, conscious of the bruises on her face, aware there may be more where she can’t see them.
Balidor watches Cass as she hangs the metal shape, a copper-plated version of the old sword and sun symbol of the seers, on the highest branch she can reach.
That pain in his chest sharpens....
* * *
Something moves.
There is a shift. In the timeline...inside Balidor’s mind.
The break is sudden...it catches him off-guard, pulling him so quickly off-track it takes him a long stretch of silence to remember who he is, what he is doing. He usually feels something before she jerks him to a new part of her past, a different part of her mind...
This time, he sees no reason in it, no ending prior to the change.
He feels nothing from her. Not even an emotion.
He simply finds himself in a different room.
That energy of past and present collide...only it is intense this time, the differences so great they disorient him. He struggles to breathe. He knows this room...he recognizes every detail, from the carved wooden symbols on the wall to the cracked wooden altar and burning incense to the dark red curtains over the green-painted bureau that used to be his mother’s.
He knows this place.
...He knows it more closely than the room with the flowered couch and the faded yellow carpet. He knows this time...this history.
It is his.
It feels like his. In the good and bad ways.
The Earth is more alive in this time, quieter...more full. The silences are deeper, the air cleaner. He smells something cooking in the other room...
He has cooked it, he realizes in a kind of wonder.
He cooks here. He cooks and cleans and...
It is a wooden house.
A house from much longer ago.
His mind tilts as he looks around, focusing on the handwoven rug on the floor. He stares at its pantheon of watery creatures and different colored intermediaries and their gods. He looks at the crack on the hearth from when he dropped something...and then he sees the adult Cass, sitting on a wooden bench not far from that fire, as if warming her feet.
He feels small...impossibly small.
He knows that bench where she sits.
He has sat there many times himself. He remembers climbing on it when his mother sat there, too...watching as she wrote in her book, using an old quill pen and parchment.
He is still standing there, looking at Cass, trying to decide how he is here...
When something hits him, knocking him to the floor.
He does not see it coming...no more now than he did back then. He loses his balance, his knee crumpling under him and driving into the hard wood. He is already making himself smaller in reflex. The hand hits him again. Then a boot catches him in the gut, stealing his breath, making him gasp. He groans, unable to help it.
He is losing himself...losing the adult...
He finds himself back there, inside feelings...
A version of himself...
He scarcely recognizes it. Yet somehow, it is more real to him than who he is now.
He is kicked again. He whimpers as he looks up at the face of a man he hasn’t seen in over four hundred years.
The male seer’s scraggly beard is exactly how Balidor remembers it. His dark orange eyes, nearly opaque irises with gold and green flecks. They don’t look real to him...yet they are more real, more immediate than his own. He remembers a time he thought them riveting, more beautiful than any irises he had ever seen. They looked to him like the sacred glass jars used to store the oils used in high rituals in the temple down the road.
His father...
His father...
He has been drinking.
“Little fucking shit,” he slurs, lunging towards him again, his face twisted. “Why haven’t you cleaned this place up? I smell the fucking food burning too...what the fuck have you been doing, to leave it on the fire?” He grumbles and growls the words, barely coherent as he staggers deeper into the room.
Panic steals over Balidor’s light...even though he knows this. He knows it well enough that he should not care anymore about this. So many years have passed since this time...so many sessions where he’s looked at this with other seers. Sessions with senior seers during his training in the Adhipan. Sessions after, as an adult taking field missions.
His father is dead now. He has been dead for many years.
Yet somehow it bites deeper here, knowing she is watching.
Knowing she is seeing this.
He finds himself speaking in a pidgin bastardization of Mandarin and Prexci, the seer tongue. It is the same language most seers in the village speak.
“It is almost ready,” he says, knowing he’s said it before, that all he can do is act out his side of the play. “It is almost ready...” he gasps. “I came in here only to light the candles...”
“Lying fuck...”
His father’s side of the exchange is scripted too. The words never alter.
The past is the past. It is frozen. Immutable.
He knows this.
And yet, it feels different while it is happening. Here, it feels like anything can happen. Here, it feels like this might be the time his father finally kills him.
As the thought crosses his mind, the transformation becomes complete.
He is Bali again. Just Bali.
He is nothing. Dirt blood.
He is old enough to know what that means, but not much older.
His people come from the lower caste of seers, those given no clan names. He is enough himself, meaning Balidor, the Adhipan-trained seer, to remember that the tradition stretches very far back. Back to before the time of the Pamir. Back when seers stratified their ranks to keep from killing one another, to establish order in chaos after their own Displacement...
Whatever the origins of the caste, they all believe it now.
They believe his blood is less. They believe he is somehow less a seer than they.
The kids at school tell him so.
The village adults tell him too, if only with their eyes.
His human-like features only make that worse. The kids at school find his face funny. They make jokes that he is a half-breed––his blood so impure that his family can reproduce with humans. They call him pig-blood and worm. One day an older boy fills his cabinet in the one-room schoolhouse with pig shit and the rest of them laugh. The next day, one throws a human amulet at him, one scrounged from the trails of nomads in the flatlands below. They tell him that he will need it when he rejoins “his people” on the plains.
Balidor fights with himself, fights to remember that not all seers are like this.
He fights to remember where he is now...who he fought to become...
Who he is.
But here, he is only Bali.
Just Bali, only son of the town drunk...a dirt blood whose own mate had left him.
The voice grows louder, more bear-like.
“Don’t crawl away from me!” he growls. “Lazy, worthless...coward. What...” he slurs, his words incoherent. “...some rat who scuttles under floorboards to hide? You think whimpering will help you? You must toughen or die, Bali...if I have to kill you to teach you that, by the gods, I will break every gods-damned bone in you to teach it...”
The sound fades, even as he chokes, fighting not to yell at the old man with the sour breath whose pain and grief nearly black out Balidor’s mind.
He cannot feel anything but the dark clouds around his father, cannot see anything but the sadness of this man, a crushing weight in his heart and light, more than he can comprehend at that age much less find some way to lessen.
He loves him. He loves him.
He remembers a different version of him, too...
Laughing. A rumbling, deep laugh in his chest.
There is a field filled with flowers.
His mother is there...
But he cannot hold onto it.
He cannot stay there. He cannot stay.
Not even with her...
* * *
...He opened his eyes, fighting to breathe.
Lying on the green metal floor, unsure how he came to be lying down at all.
His vision blurred, tilting. Tears were running down his face. Raising a hand, he wiped them with his palm and fingers, uncomfortable with the shame that wanted to creep over him for having such a simple reaction to something so...
So worthy of it.
He didn’t usually feel shame for his emotions, like some child.
Fighting to shake off the memory of his father’s face, he sat up, seeking her with his eyes.
Cass leaned against the dark green metal wall, more or less where he’d left her. Her eyes looked diffe
rent though...her face. He couldn’t discern what the difference meant, not at first, but he could see it. He saw it, and reached for her with his light again, unthinking––
When a voice from the other side of the room nearly made him jump out of his skin.
“‘Dori!” it said.
The voice was harsh. Harsher than Balidor had ever heard from that particular person.
“‘Dori, man,” the other man said. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”
Balidor looked up, knowing his guilt probably showed on his face.
Before he could answer, Cass spoke up from where she leaned against the wall.
Balidor flinched when he heard the cold cynicism behind that voice, the hard wall that fell over her light and pulsed out of her.
“Hey, Jonny-Boy,” Cass drawled. “Don’t suppose you have anything to smoke?”
“No, Cass,” Jon said, his voice cold. He barely spared her a glance, but went back to glaring at Balidor, who still sat on the floor, fighting his equilibrium back. “I need to talk to you, brother Balidor,” Jon said, almost through gritted teeth. “I need to talk to you right now.”
“Jon...” Balidor began with a sigh.
“Now,” Jon said. “Or I’ll call Allie and Revik and we can have this conversation with the two of them...”
Balidor hesitated. He glanced at Cass. For the barest instant, he saw something there, what might have been that fissure he’d sensed when looking at her before.
Whatever it was, it was gone as soon as he glimpsed it.
Then she was looking at Jon again, that smirk toying at her full lips.
“I’m trying to talk ‘Dori here into fucking me, Jon,” she said. “Allie tells me he’s got a nice, thick cock. I’d like to take it for a test drive...but he won’t let me.” She made a mock pouty face, twining her cuffed hands together between her bent knees. “Why won’t he let me, Jon? Can you talk to him for me? A girl’s got needs...”
“Shut up, Cass,” Jon growled, still not looking at her.
“But Jonny...”
Jon winced, as if unable to listen to her voice.