Chapter Sixteen
Declan
Avena was late.
The rain had stopped but water still clung to the porch rail and darkened the logs beneath the eaves.
The snow beyond the steps had hardened again.
The frozen lake reflected a pale sky that hadn’t changed since Avena disappeared.
I checked it twice for movement. Nothing crossed the ice.
No birds settled in the cedars. The scenery had gone back to waiting with me.
I tried to keep busy.
The fire needed wood until it didn’t. The chessboard needed straightening until every piece looked ready for inspection. Grandpa’s legal pad still held our safeguards and my two additions beneath them.
Touch. Avena disappeared. Clock advanced.
Sustained contact. No adverse response. Clock unchanged.
I added rain appeared after waking experience, stared at the line, and crossed out waking. Her waking experience. The distinction mattered more than it used to.
After that, I ran out of useful lies to tell myself.
If she came back.
Doing the right thing sucked.
I stepped onto the porch. Cold air pressed damp clothes against my arms even though I couldn’t remember getting wet.
Avena had laughed here. Really laughed, not the quiet sound she released like it had escaped without authorization.
She had leaned against me and held my hand while the rain moved across the lake.
Now there was no rain and no Avena.
“You’d tell me if something happened to her, right?” I asked the clock through the open door.
It didn’t answer, showing me a lack of character.
Going back into the cabin, I was feeding another unnecessary piece of wood to the fire when the air near the far wall brightened before the log caught. She’d made it back. I crossed three steps toward her before I stopped.
Avena stood near the fireplace with her hands closed into fists at her sides. Her silver-white hair had been pulled away from her face so tightly that not one strand had escaped. The soft silver clothes she usually wore in the cabin had darkened to gray, every line straight and severe.
She looked like she had dressed to be sentenced.
Her gaze found my bare feet first, then moved slowly upward over my knees, my chest, my right hand, and my face—but stopped at my mouth. She never reached my eyes.
“The fish is ceramic,” I said.
A second passed. Then another.
“That is what he wants you to think.”
The words were correct but flat. Everything was wrong.
“You made it.”
“Yes.” Simple and completely unsatisfactory.
“Were you trying not to?” I asked.
Her fingers tightened. A line of blue-white appeared beneath one wrist and vanished under her sleeve.
“My rest cycle was delayed.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It is the available answer.”
Her voice held its usual precision, but each word sounded placed rather than spoken. I moved closer. Her attention dropped immediately to my feet again, tracing me upward until it stopped at my hand.
I stopped, too.
“Did something happen after you left?”
“There was another inspection.”
“Of you?”
“Of the synchronization system.”
“Did they change it?”
“No recalibration was required.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“No.”
That one sounded true.
“Did they threaten you?”
“Not directly.”
“That’s a lousy qualifier.”
“It is accurate.”
“Tinkerbell.”
A wince crossed her expression at the name but she only looked at the mantel clock.
“Look at me,” I said.
Her chin lifted. Her gaze reached the collar of my shirt and stopped.
“I am looking at you.”
“You’ve looked at everything except my eyes.”
The blue-white light returned beneath both wrists and flared at her temples. “That distinction has no practical significance.”
“It does to me.”
Silence opened into a chasm between us.
I didn’t cross it. Every instinct I had wanted to close the distance, put my hands on her shoulders, and make sure she was solid. Wanting to touch her didn’t make touching her mine to decide.
“Did you learn something?” I asked.
Her breathing changed. The movement was small enough that I might have missed it a few nights ago. One breath stopped too high in her chest. The next arrived carefully, as if she had selected it.
“No.”
She answered still without looking at me. The lie hurt more than I expected. Because it was a lie. Avena had avoided questions, narrowed definitions, and built fences from precise language, but she had never flat out lied to me.
I looked at her hands, closed so tightly I was sure her palms were scored with tiny moons from her short nails. “Try again.”
Her head turned sharply, her neck and temples flashing gold, though her eyes still landed somewhere near my shoulder. “You do not have the authority to require an answer.”
“I think I do.”
The anger gathering in her posture lost its direction.
“You don’t owe me the truth before you’re ready to tell it,” I said. “But don’t stand there and tell me there’s nothing. Lying to me.”
“The distinction may not matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“You have insufficient information to determine that.”
“Then give me enough to decide for myself.”
Her throat moved. Light climbed beneath her collar, blue-white threaded with a color too pale to name. For one second, I thought she might finally look at me but then she turned toward the window instead.
The disappointment came hot and immediate. I let myself feel it while telling myself not to use it as a weapon. Part of me wanted to. I wanted to fling words at her and make her tell me what had happened. Instead, I chewed the inside of my jaw before I said, “Okay.”
She went still. “Okay?”
“You’re not ready to tell me yet.”
“You accept that?”
“Yes, but I hate it.”
Her head turned slightly.
“But I can hate it without forcing you,” I continued. “Grandpa said being angry didn’t make a man right. It mostly made him loud.”
“You are not loud.”
“I’m trying something new.”
“Your patience may be misplaced,” she said.
“Probably, but I’ll keep trying.”
That reached her. I saw it in the sudden brightness beneath her skin and the way her fingers opened before closing again.
“Did you contact the person with the questions?” I asked.
This answer sounded different. Regret instead of deception.
“Are you going to?”
“I do not know.”
“That one I believe.”
She accepted the observation without correcting me, but her stillness had an edge to it.
Only this time, I knew the real Avena was in there.
“Is this about what happened when I remembered the white room?” I asked.
Her shoulders locked. There were answers that didn’t need words and she’d just proved it.
“I already knew my body might be somewhere else,” I said. “You don’t have to protect me from the idea.”
“An idea is not the same as—”
She stopped.
“As what?”
“Confirmed evidence.” The words dragged like broken glass from her throat, but the careful description arrived too late to hide the sentence she had almost spoken.
“You confirmed something.”
“I did not say that.”
“Basically, you did.”
Her hands closed into fists again. “The distinction between an inference and an observation is significant.”
“There’s that word.”
“Which word?”
“Observation.”
“Did you see something?” I asked.
She turned farther toward the window.
“Avena.”
“I cannot answer that.”
It was the first honest thing she had said about the secret.
My anger didn’t disappear, but it changed shape. “Can’t, or won’t?”
“Both.”
“Because someone might find out?”
“Yes.”
“Or because you think the answer will hurt me?”
She said nothing long enough that the answer became clear anyway.
“You don’t get to decide what truth I can survive,” I said.
The words came out harsher than I intended but Avena absorbed them without defense.
“I know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. The quiet agreement took most of the heat out of me.
“Then when you can tell me, tell me.”
“You may not want me to.”
“That decision’s mine, too.”
Her chin lowered. She still wouldn’t look at me, but a flicker of blue-white moved beneath her throat.
I crossed to the table and leaned against its edge, giving her more room instead of less. The ugly fish and white cup stood together beside me. Avena’s gaze moved to them, then to Grandpa’s legal pad, then back to my right hand.
There it was again.
I held the appendage in front of my face and studied it. “What’s wrong with my hand?”
Her fingers flexed at her side.
“Nothing.”
“That word’s having a rough night.”
“Do you remember touching me?” I asked.
Her eyes opened, but they remained fixed on my palm. “Yes.”
“Did it hurt after you woke up?”
“No.”
“Did something happen to your hand?”
“No.”
“Then what are you seeing?”
Her lips parted. No answer followed. I could have kept asking. She was tired, frightened, and bad enough at lying that persistence might have broken something loose.
But I didn’t want the truth that way. Instead, I stepped away from the table and held out my hand.
Avena stared at it.
“This isn’t a test,” I said.
Blue-white light gathered beneath her fingers.
“You don’t have to take it.”
She swallowed.
“And you don’t have to stand over there alone, either.”
Her attention stayed on my open palm. She did not look at my face. The silence went on long enough for my shoulder to ache, but I kept my hand where it was.
Finally, Avena moved. One step. Then another.
She stopped close enough that I could feel the cooler air around her. Her right hand lifted and hovered above mine. Light traced every finger in thin blue-white lines.
“Either of us may end the contact,” she said.
“Any time.”
“We stop at pain, disorientation, involuntary memory, waking sensory intrusion, or structural instability.”
“I remember.”
Her hand came down into mine.
The contact felt different immediately. Her palm was as cool and solid as before, but her fingers closed around me with enough force to press our bones together. This wasn’t the careful hold from the rain. It felt like she was trying to keep me from being taken somewhere.
“Easy,” I said.
The cabin dropped away. Cold curved material pressed against my palm.
Not the wooden table behind me. Not the window that stuck when it was wet. Something smooth stood between my hand and another hand I couldn’t feel. A measured pulse traveled through my spine. Six seconds.
Pressure gathered behind my ribs. Air entered my lungs without permission. I tried to pull away and discovered I had no arm to move. White light burned through my closed eyelids.
“Declan.”
“I’m here.” I forced air into lungs that belonged to me again. “Was that what you saw?”
Her face changed. Not surprise. Not confusion but recognition.
She released one of my hands as if the contact had burned her. The other remained locked around mine.
“Avena, what did you see?”
The fire stretched sideways. The walls blurred. A crack moved across the window without breaking the glass.
“End the contact,” she said.
“You’re the one holding on.”
She looked down at our linked hands where her glowing fingers gripped mine like a lifeline. For a second, she seemed not to recognize her own fingers around mine. Then she tried to release me.
Avena made a sound I had never heard from her. Not a word. Something torn out of her before language could contain it.
The clock began ticking too fast, too loud.
“Avena, stay with me.”
She kept staring at our hands as if she could see something beneath them that I couldn’t. The floor shifted under my feet. Books fell from the shelves and vanished before they struck the boards. Snow drove sideways beyond the windows beneath a sky still pale with daylight.
“Avena!”
Her outline began breaking apart.
I tightened my fingers around hers because she was slipping away and some part of me believed I could hold her here through force alone.
She looked up. For the first time all night, she met my eyes. Every careful answer and every defense she had carried into the cabin was gone. All I saw was naked grief.
“Declan.”
The cabin took her before I could ask why she was grieving a man who was still standing in front of her.