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THE LIGHT

“ W e can’t just leave it like this,” Black growled. “Don’t you fucking get it? We can’t leave an open, active portal in the middle of a heavily-populated area like this. Are you insane?”

“Are we insane?” Angel spat back. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Quentin? Are you really a sociopath, like Nick always said? Why else would you be like this?

Black’s jaw visibly hardened, but his voice remained level.

“While I feel like I might be physically sick just saying the words… Brick was right. He was fucking right, okay? We can’t just leave an open inter-dimensional portal inside what’s essentially a tourist attraction in a populated European city…”

Angel’s face contorted again, a mixture of rage and disbelief.

“Nick went in there,” she burst out, anger winning out. “And Jem!”

“I’m aware of that,” Black growled back.

“Then what part of ‘that’ are you not understanding, Quentin?” she snapped.

“Me? I understand just fine.” Black raised his voice a few notches. “I think maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand, Ange––”

Angel cut him off.

“You understand. Right.” Angel nodded, tears welling in her eyes. “Right. You understand. Yet you’re seriously proposing that we blow up the mountain, even when this might be Nick and Jem’s only way back?” She bit her full lower lip. “Why? Just to keep out some hypothetical seers or vampires? What the fuck is wrong with you, Quentin?”

“What makes you think they’d come back through here?” Black snapped back.

“What makes you think they wouldn’t?”

“Because these damned portals don’t work that way, Ange!”

I stood a little ways back, with Cowboy and Kiko.

I didn’t try to step between them.

I didn’t try to add anything.

I didn’t want to be in the argument at all.

Kiko had an arm around my waist, and Cowboy had his arm over my shoulders. I think they could tell I wasn’t doing well with any of this. I didn’t even know which of them, Black or Angel, I agreed with the most. They were both right.

Both of them were also dead wrong.

It was too late. We were too fucking late, and at base, they were arguing about nothing.

Nick was gone.

In all likelihood, he and Jem and my sister were gone forever.

I felt that same, sick, sucker-punch to the solar plexus I’d felt when Nick came up missing from the Thai island of Koh Mangaan. I could feel it, that same finality I’d felt them. I recognized this. I recognized the part of me that knew we were separated by more than just a few minutes, days, weeks, or even years. That feeling was so familiar I already couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I could feel it with Jem this time, too. I could feel it with my sister.

They were gone.

They were really fucking gone.

My stomach heaved.

I threw up on the cave floor, unable to stop myself.

Black and Angel looked over while Kiko and Cowboy rubbed my back.

I saw the anger fade from Black’s face.

He and Angel exchanged looks, then seemed to come to a silent understanding.

Black walked over to me. Cowboy and Kiko stepped out of the way as he wrapped his arm around me, rubbing his hand with the one not holding me up.

“We can figure this out tomorrow,” Black murmured. “We’ll stay here tonight, in Nice. I’ll get us a hotel. We don’t have to do this today…”

No one answered.

I stood there, hunched over, fighting to breathe. I slowly began to bring my heart and lungs under control. God, I didn’t know if I wanted to scream or burst into tears.

Nick. Jem. Zoe.

“Ace.” Black glanced over his shoulder at the tall soldier. He nodded towards the rock wall and the metal bridge above. “Can you get up there on your own?”

Ace stood next to his girlfriend, Mika.

The small seer gripped one of Ace’s large hands in both of hers. Mika was crying quietly, and I suspected it was for Jem. I forgot sometimes that most of the Old Earth seers had known Jem long before they even got here. They’d fought a different, much longer, and far more catastrophic war with Jem on that other world.

For all I knew, Mika had known Jem longer than I’d known Nick.

Given seers’ long lives, it wasn’t even that difficult to imagine.

The Texan glanced up the rock face and nodded, once.

He bent down, kissed Mika on the mouth, then extracted his hand.

He walked over to the wall, measuring it with his eyes as he went. He found his first hand-holds and hauled himself up the rock. He placed his booted feet next, then began to climb steadily. I watched as he made his way up to the metal bridge, moving like some kind of insect with his long limbs and deliberate but steady hand-holds.

He got to the level of the bridge a few minutes later.

A few of the humans and seers around us let out low gasps when he looked over his shoulder––then leapt for the metal platform. He managed to catch hold of the railing with both hands. Tendons strained in his neck, arms, hands, and shoulders as he climbed up and threw a leg over the top. Only then did the rest of us take a breath.

He was all the way up there now, and I looked away as he knelt down to unknot the rope from the balcony so he could pull people up faster. Once he had it untied, he wrapped a few lengths back around the balcony and called down.

“Whoever’s coming first, I’m ready,” he shouted.

His voice echoed strangely in the damp, suddenly very, very large-feeling cave.

Black nudged me. “You should go,” he murmured.

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

Black looked like he might want to argue.

In the end, he seemed to think better of it.

“Kiks,” Black said, his voice abrupt. “Go on, then.”

Kiko hesitated, too. I saw her glance at the swirl of mist and light on the cave wall. Her mouth and cheek twitched. Then she turned her back on it and walked over to where the rope and harness hung down from the walkway above.

A handful of seconds later, I heard her call up to Ace.

“Ready,” she said.

She began to rise up in the air, slowly and steadily.

Mika went up after her.

Then the three of them hauled up A.J.

Then Jax.

I stood at the bottom of the cave still, my arms wrapped around my torso, my cold hands rubbing ineffectually at my biceps.

I hadn’t fully realized until then that every one of our group had come down either via the cave wall or the ropes. Manny. Yarli. The seers and humans they’d brought with them. Everyone we’d brought with us from San Francisco. Javier. Angel.

Angel was just walking over to take her turn on the rope and harness, when Yarli yelled out. “HEY! Look! Look!”

All of us turned.

All of us froze, staring at the rift in the wall.

Angel, who’d just picked up the harness, stared into the rift, too. She seemed paralyzed for a few seconds, her brown eyes reflecting the light from the rift as she looked where Yarli pointed. Then she dropped the harness and walked back over to where the remaining seers and humans stood at the bottom of the cave.

We all huddled there, together, in a tight, nearly straight line.

Angel gripped my hand on one side, as soon as she stood near me. Black half-crushed my fingers on the other side of where I stood. After Yarli’s first, panicked words, none of us made a sound. We just stared, holding our breaths.

The fissure in the cave was brightening again.

It was brightening, and the mist that writhed around it swirled increasingly faster.

The blue and green light was washing out.

It left a sharp, near-blinding white in its wake.

That crystalline, sun-like light grew brighter and brighter and brighter as we watched.

The portal was opening.

I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing at first.

Shadows poured through the light and mist, far more of them than I could make sense of.

More than I ever would have expected.

I counted three… four… five… six…

My mind fuzzed out about then, unable to focus on their number as I found myself staring at them instead, at what they looked like, who they were.

They wore strange clothes.

I stared around at their different ages and faces, at how beat-up they looked, how exhausted and bruised and bloodied… but somehow, it was the odd clothing and weapons that bewildered me the most. I saw what looked like armor on some of them, strangely cut shirts and pants, guns that looked completely bizarre, like something out of a science fiction movie, even compared to the most advanced seer tech I’d ever seen. Their boots were strange. They wore odd headsets and wristbands, and even jewelry that looked strange.

Then I saw Nick’s face and I let out a shriek.

I couldn’t help it.

I didn’t wait. I ran towards him. I leapt at him, and wrapped my arms around him, and for those first few seconds I didn’t notice anything else.

He hugged me back, but stiffly, like he’d done it more in reflex and confusion than because he was happy to see me the way I was him.

When I released him, I didn’t see relief on his face.

I saw shock.

He stared at me like he was looking at a ghost, like he couldn’t believe I was there at all, or that I was real, if I was.

The light in the portal was fading now.

It grew less bright, then less… then more blue and green.

The colors swirled more slowly as it died down.

In the end, the doorway looked how it had before it reopened, with only bare wisps of misty, coiling air swirling in the vicinity of the tear.

All of us stood briefly in silence.

Someone ignited two more yisso torches, and suddenly, the area on the cave floor grew bright with green-tinted light. It washed over the group of people who’d just come through the portal door, illuminating them and dying them a sickly green and yellow, making them look both more and less real.

Nick stood in front of the group that had walked through, wearing what could only be called a uniform: a black, perfectly-tailored but official-looking jacket with some kind of insignia on the arm and shoulder, and a half-moon symbol on his chest. One of those futuristic guns sat in a holster low on his thigh, making him look like some kind of futuristic space cowboy.

Another gun handle poked out of the jacket, probably stuck in some kind of shoulder harness. One of those high-tech looking headsets wrapped around his ear. He had a thick bracelet around his wrist made of a metal I didn’t recognize.

I decided he didn’t look like a cowboy.

He looked like a futuristic soldier, or cop.

It hit me then that he stood in front of the others, as if protecting them.

They all looked beat up, like they’d just come from a fight, but Nick struck me as very much in charge of his rag-tag group.

He also had dirt smudged on his face, and a cut by his scalp.

The woman with him… and she was definitely with him, I realized, as I saw the way she clutched his arm from behind… had bruises on her face and more cuts on her arms and hands. She also wore a dark coat, similar to Nick’s, and long, sleek, black hair peered out of her hood. Pieces of it had been dyed a bright, peacock green, and also gold.

I stared at the woman.

Then I blinked, and realized I recognized her eyes.

“Aura?” I gasped.

She was older.

Hell, she was my age.

She was seer, so the age thing might have been blurred a bit, but she was definitely no longer a child. The woman in front of me was a full-fledged adult, and had an adult’s sharp, angular face. The round face I remembered was now very distinctly heart-shaped, with a sharp chin and a well-defined but delicate jaw.

The way she held onto Nick made me doubt they were only friends.

She held onto Nick like her life depended on it.

She stared at me in utter confusion. She didn’t react to her name at all.

I saw what might have been recognition there, but of me, not the name I used. Mostly, she looked wary of me, possibly even afraid of me. She definitely didn’t look at me like someone who remembered me with any fondness.

I looked back at Nick, totally at a loss.

“Where’s Jem?” I asked.

Nick noticeably paled. He tightened his grip on the woman with him and stared at me like he couldn’t comprehend my words.

Maybe he couldn’t.

I glanced at the woman with him… Aura, I reminded myself, although maybe that’s not her name now… and saw that her blue-green eyes had hardened at my mention of Jem. A scowl pulled at her full, very adult-looking lips, even as she slid closer to Nick’s side.

I was still staring at her face, unable to comprehend how she was so different yet so much the same… when a much younger voice broke out in a disbelieving, shocked cry.

I turned, just in time to see a small body running towards me.

A child, younger than Aura had been when I’d last seen her, but roughly the same age, ran towards me at full speed. I only managed to get a bare glimpse of her appearance before she launched herself into my arms. I caught her like Nick had with me, more in reflex and confusion than affection, at least in those initial moments.

Then I just stood there, holding her in my arms.

She had shoulder-length black hair, dyed silver at the tips. When she looked up at me, her eyes were a bright, ice-blue, almost the same color as her hair.

She looked at me with so much love and adoration, tears threatened.

More than that, I could feel something on her, in her light, something that felt like a punch to the chest. I stared at that beautiful, small face, and I could only clutch at her.

“Mom!” She said the word with so much, my throat closed, I couldn’t breathe. My mind shorted out. “Mom! You’re alive! You’re alive!”

I froze, still gripping her in my arms.

I looked over to Black, who stared at me with the girl, his eyes wide and panicked, his jaw clenched. He turned then, as another person walked up towards us much more cautiously, a tall, lean seer with long black hair and two different colored eyes. He stared at Black, then at me, then back at Black, then back at me. His eyes held nothing but stunned shock, right before they filled with tears.

Then the young man walked up to Black and wrapped his arms around him.

He hugged Black so hard, tears came to Black’s eyes, too.

“Dad,” the young man said.

So much relief filled his voice, I choked on it.

Relief filled his voice, his light, everything about him, making him sound and feel far younger than whatever his years must be. He also choked on the words, and then he was crying, sobbing against Black’s chest.

I stared at the young man, who looked to be roughly in his early twenties in human years. Like the girl in my arms, he was unmistakably seer, though, which meant that couldn’t be his age. I could feel their lights swirling around both of us, clouds of intense structure and brightness––so bright, it made my throat clench even more.

I looked at Black and he looked at me.

Neither of us could manage to speak.

When I looked at Nick, he looked as shocked as we were.

He stared at the two people in me and Black’s arms, and from the look on his face, he obviously knew them both, and knew them well.

Then the woman who’d gripped his arm in both of her hands released him.

I watched her, followed the direction of her stare, and saw her staring at Manny and Yarli. She stepped away from Nick, walking towards them gradually, almost fearfully.

She walked until she stood right in front of them.

She looked at Yarli, taking in her face and eyes and hair.

Then she looked at Manny, and he smiled at her.

“Are you… are you my parents?” the woman who had been Aura asked.

Her voice was so hollow, so filled with disbelief, it sounded like shock.

Unlike the girl in my arms, she didn’t sound relieved so much as like she might pass out. I was still staring at the three of them standing there, bewildered looks on all of their faces, when the woman with the blue-green eyes burst into tears.

Nick got to her so quickly, I didn’t even see him move.

I felt the movement of the air, and then he had his arms around her.

The girl in my arms squeezed me, and I hugged her back, stroking her hair.

I realized there were other people with them, too.

I looked at another girl in her twenties, who might have actually been human. She was staring between me and Black in shock.

I have no idea how long we all stood there, half of us crying, the other half standing there, numb, paralyzed.

Black and I found one another’s eyes again, and I saw him lean down, and kiss the young man on the head, even as he lovingly stroked his black hair. It struck me that both me and Black had opened our lights to them, that their hearts were open to us in turn, both of them. I could feel the boy’s light and heart open to mine, almost like he belonged there.

The boy was shaking now, but he held onto Black with that utter, profound confidence and safety you only feel with a trusted parent. A parent you love, who never hurt you, who never did anything but try to protect you, who listened to your problems and let you crawl into bed with them when you were scared. A parent you could trust with your tears, with your pain, with your love, with your open heart.

A parent you thought was…

They’d thought we were dead, I realized in shock.

Both of them had thought we were dead.

I stared down at the girl’s dark head, then over at the boy, then at Black.

Why had they thought we were dead?

Black returned my gaze.

Slowly, meaningfully, he quirked an eyebrow.

He must have heard my question.

He didn’t try to answer me.