Chapter 24 | Part 4

He saw her.

The moment held. Frozen in the heat of that impossible cavern, suspended between the fading agony of whatever the presence had done to him and the shock of finding her wedged behind his own eyes. His pupils contracted. His breath stopped. And Maris felt, with a specificity that left no room for doubt, the instant he understood that someone was watching.

Not something. Someone.

His reaction wasn’t fear. After what she’d just felt him endure, perhaps there was no room left for fear. It was the reaction of a person who’d been alone for so long that the concept of another consciousness had become abstract, theoretical, a memory of a memory. His surprise was the surprise of a man hearing his own language spoken in a foreign country. Disbelief, then recognition, then a desperate, involuntary reaching toward the source.

She felt him reach. Not with his hands. With his mind, his attention, the same fierce focus he’d directed at the presence in the volcano. He turned that focus on her and it was like standing in a searchlight. Everything she was, everything she felt, exposed under the scrutiny of someone who had nothing left to hide.

He was trying to speak.

His mouth formed shapes. Syllables pressed against his teeth and Maris caught fragments of a language she didn’t recognize, guttural and musical at once, vowels that slid between registers like water over smooth stone. Then he stopped. Reconsidered. Tried again in something older, simpler, a pattern of sounds that carried meaning below the level of grammar.

Who are you?

Not the words. The intent. Transmitted through whatever connection bound them, arriving in her awareness the way his pain had arrived: raw, unfiltered, stripped of artifice. He wanted to know who she was. The question vibrated with everything behind it. Where are you? How are you here? Am I alone? Have I been alone this whole time?

She tried to answer.

Her own mind formed the response automatically, the way a hand reaches for a falling cup. I’m Maris. I can see you. You’re not alone. Simple thoughts, simple words, but when she pushed them toward the connection she felt them hit something solid. A wall. Not the thinning membrane she’d felt from her side but a vast, structural barrier that existed between wherever she was and wherever he was. The connection that let her see through his eyes, feel through his skin, was a crack in that barrier. A fissure. Enough for light to leak through but not enough for words.

She pushed harder. The barrier didn’t yield. It was immense, ancient, built from materials she couldn’t identify, and it went on in every direction, up and down and sideways into dimensions she didn’t have names for. The crack was a miracle of improbability, a fault line in something that was never meant to fault.

The Beacon’s counterpart pulsed inside his chest. She felt it answer the artifact in Dulint’s pack across whatever distance separated them. Two fragments of the same broken thing, calling to each other through a wall that was supposed to be impenetrable. The frequency was identical. The resonance was perfect. And the wall between them groaned.

He was far away.

Not miles. Not countries. The distance was categorical, the kind of separation that couldn’t be measured in units she understood. He existed somewhere else in a way that redefined elsewhere. The barrier between them wasn’t geography. It was ontology. Two places that shouldn’t be able to touch, connected by an artifact that had been split and scattered and was now, against all probability, trying to reassemble itself.

She understood then, in the wordless way the vision granted understanding, that finding him would not be a matter of walking north until they arrived. The Beacon wasn’t pointing toward a location. It was pointing toward a seam. A place where the barrier might be thin enough to breach.

His eyes held hers. Or rather, his attention held hers, because they were sharing the same pair of eyes and the intimacy of that was almost unbearable. She knew the rhythm of his breathing. She knew the specific ache in his left knee where he’d landed on the stone ledge. She knew the way his stomach clenched when the presence shifted in the depths below, still watching, still waiting. She knew him the way she knew her own heartbeat, from inside, without the luxury of distance.

He was alone. Profoundly, structurally alone in a way that went beyond the absence of people and into the absence of possibility. Wherever he was, there was no rescue coming. No allies approaching. No plan unfolding. There was only him and the choices in front of him and the thing inside his chest that called north, always north, toward a counterpart he didn’t know existed.

She tried again to speak. Gathered everything she had and threw it at the crack in the barrier.

I can see you. I’m coming.

Something got through. Not the words. A ghost of them, an impression, a warmth where there had been cold. His expression shifted. His eyes widened. The reaching intensified, his mind pressing against the barrier from the other side, and for one fractured instant the crack widened and she felt the full weight of the distance between them, the sheer staggering impossibility of the gap, and she understood why the barrier existed. It wasn’t a wall. It was a boundary. The edge of one world pressed against the edge of another, and the crack they communicated through was not a door.

It was a wound.

The barrier objected.

The crack snapped shut with a violence that felt physical. She was wrenched away from his eyes, his body, his fear. The connection tore like ligaments separating from bone. She screamed. He screamed. Two voices in two different worlds making the same sound for the same reason: the pain of being ripped from the only other person who understood.

The vision collapsed around her. The cavern, the heat, the volcanic light, all of it compressed into a single bright point and then expanded outward into nothing. She was falling. Not through space but through consciousness, tumbling through layers of perception as her mind tried to find its way back to the body it had been pulled from.

She hit the bottom.

Cold ground. Pine needles against her cheek. The smell of frost and blood.

She was screaming. She could hear herself and couldn’t stop. The sound tore out of her throat with a force that scraped her vocal cords raw, a single sustained note of loss and pain and the particular grief of knowing exactly how far away help was and knowing it was too far.

Next: The Clear Sight: The Aftermath