Seeing Light (The Seraphina Parrish Trilogy) (8 page)

::13::
Seeing More

When we reach our apartment, I stride into Sam’s bedroom and she follows, locking the door behind us.

“I want you to teach me how to see the life path of a relic.” I plop down on the floor, legs crossed.

She regards me for a moment, pursing her lips as though considering if it’s plausible. “Okay. We’ll try.” She shrugs. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

She removes the archive key from the cord on her neck and places it on the ground in front of us, and then she settles on the floor facing me, folding her long, graceful legs to one side. This is her typical meditation stance: body poised, shoulders back, chest out, neck elongated, and chin lifted. She closes her eyes and speaks. “First, find your most comfortable position. It should be the spot that you could sit in for hours without readjusting.”

I think about it for a moment and instead of sitting, I lie down, flat on my back, arms relaxed at my side. “Okay.”

“Now, do everything that I say, starting with clearing your mind of any chatter.” She pauses.

“You must relax every muscle in your body, and as I say each body part, release the tension that resides there.” She pauses between each item on the list, pronouncing each one in a slow, soothing manner. “Jaw—shoulders—chest—arms—stomach—knees—feet. Allow all the weight of your body to sink into the floor. Sinking, sinking, heavier and heavier. Press all that tense energy through your body and out through your toes, squeezing every bit out until you’re completely relaxed.”

She pauses, then says, “Now, slow your breath, inhaling and exhaling quietly.”

I do as she asks.

“That’s right, softer and softer with so little movement that your shallow breath settles on the bridge of your nose.”

She allows me to work through her suggestions, and when my breath turns so shallow that my lungs barely move, an unexpected twinkling spark of warmth settles between my eyes.

“You’ve got it. Now, allow the heat to grow, pulsing larger until you can hold one focused image.”

With a flash, an image emerges from the haze of speckled fog. I push into the image, stretching it, searching to define the edges and lines, building it up from a sketch to a completed drawing. But as hard as I try, it remains fuzzy and indistinguishable.

“Focus on the warmth radiating from the vision, allowing it to gently glide toward you.”

My brow furrows as I try to focus, but instead of clarity, the image flattens, discolors, and slides out of my field of mental vision. I’ve lost it. It’s slipped away, and now I’m painfully aware that I’ve failed.

“I can’t, it’s gone.” I squeeze my eyes tighter, coaxing the image’s return.

“Relax and open your eyes.”

My eyelids flutter open and I gasp, a sharp breath hitching in the back of my throat. Above my face, midair, hovers the key to the Member Archives. As soon as I understand that I’m controlling it, the brilliant light illuminating the key fades, and the relic drops to my face with a
thunk
, slides over my cheek, and tumbles to the floor.

I turn to Sam with wide eyes.

“It’s true,” she whispers. “You really won’t need Bishop and me soon.”

“What do you mean?” I sit up and frown at her. “I’ll always need you.”

“It won’t be the same,” Sam says sadly. “I can feel it now. The connection, it’s not the same, not as strong.”

“It’s not certain. What I just did was nothing. I haven’t been anointed yet. This could be as far as I ever develop. We won’t know for sure until Saturday.”

“You may not know, but I already do.”

I grab her hand and glare at her fiercely. “You’ll always be my sister. Always.”

She forces a wan smile. We’ve been crying so much today, these last few weeks really, that I don’t think either of us could force another tear, but to my surprise, her eyes glass over and she sniffles.

“Your turn.” I snatch the key from the floor, returning it to her.

She reaches for a tissue, taking a moment to compose herself.

“Let’s try something a little different,” she says. “Sit here and face me, legs crossed.” I do as she requests as she lays the key on the floor between us.

“Not sure if this is gonna work.” She reaches her hands out to mine. Our fingers clasp, locking, forming a circle with our arms.

She relaxes into her graceful pose. I attempt to mimic her, but give up and settle in a hunched position.

“Now, let’s follow the same routine from before.”

“Okay.”

I recall Sam’s earlier instructions in my mind with my perfect Wandering memory and follow each step systematically. I relax at the same time Sam relaxes, and our arms hang limp. No motion, just focus. Though my body’s shutting down, there’s a strange sensation between us. Like it did before, energy and warmth blooms between my eyes, but this time the energy travels with a sense of mission, follows the curve of my cheek, slides down my neck, and oozes into my arms, rushing like hot lava to my fingers. It collides with Sam’s energy and a blast of light behind my closed eyes opens the door to the life path of the Member Archives key relic.

Images quickly flash, reeling by like the pictures presented by the relicutionist. In my mind, I sense that this is unusual and everything should be playing out quickly, yes, but at a reasonable pace so that I can make sense of it. One image that sticks in my mind is Terease stealing the key from the Academy office, only a day before she was arrested.

The flipping images grind to a halt and then play smoothly like a movie. To me, this view is real. Amazingly, I’m seeing like a Seer.

In this vision, the hand that reaches out to the door and inserts the key in the lock might as well be my own. Of course it’s not because I sense that this hand belongs to a man. The shirt cuff winds in ruffles around the arm, and I deduce that this arm belongs to Gabe Garcia, the Academy’s activities director.

When the lock clicks and the door creaks open, the point of view switches and I’m floating out of the body, looking down at Gabe with a bird’s-eye view. I remember the outfit he’s wearing from several weeks ago, and knowing Gabe, he would never be caught wearing the same outfit twice.

Gabe steps into the room, turns on a switch, and a buzz accompanies the illumination of the room. It’s the size of a square walk-in closet, lined with a metal coat of steel ribbons, rivets, and rusted mesh.

Gabe shuts the door behind him and turns his attention to a panel on the wall. It’s a typical Wandering apparatus, up-cycled with various metal machines from the early twentieth century.

He cranks several dials like a combination to a locker. At each click a number appears on the panel’s screen until the red digital combination reads 111896. Next to it, a second number appears: 30. This number immediately begins to count down. Something’s going to happen in thirty seconds, and honestly, even though I’m merely watching this like a warped movie, I’m scared at what that something might be.

::14::
The Vision

As the seconds count down, Gabe unfolds a seat mounted to the wall, sits, and drags a seatbelt around his lap, clicking it securely around his waist. But it seems that isn’t enough because he unwinds a harness for his chest and buckles himself into place. His hands reach down by his thighs, where handles protrude from either side of the seat, and he clutches them so tightly his knuckles turn white.

What is he bracing for?

Anxious, I quickly scan the room. If I had a body I might be screaming and banging on the walls, trying to escape.

The numbers on the digital countdown reach ten, and the caged room trembles and bounces. Fiery streaks of electricity race along the longitude and latitude of the steel ribbons, crisscrossing every wall.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The box free-falls like an amusement park ride and I disconnect from my sense of the floor, fly upward through the ceiling, catapulting away from the scene, losing my stomach. For a brief moment, I have an outside view of the box dropping through the air below me. Shimmering sparks zap and pop, circling around the outside of the compartment and dragging me along with its light-speed decent. Then, like a rubber band tethered to the key relic, I snap back inside the room and everything slams violently to the ground, coming to a halt.

Even with no body, in this vision my heart races, and I still have a sense of tension melting away from my muscles.

Gabe removes his harness and belt, flips the seat upright, and steps through the door. Unwillingly, I follow, leaving the elevator. Though I’m not sure if I can call it that, maybe a transporter?

The new space is dark. Dirt crunches beneath his shoes on wood planks. It’s cool here, smelling of cedar and earth. He walks through a passageway and enters a large room. A makeshift string of lanterns shines weak dots on the walls, revealing a cavern, high-reaching and twisted with dusky hollows and jagged columns of natural rock formations. We pass over a wooden bridge spanning a pond of peacock-blue-colored water.

Reading his actions and the ease with which he moves, I understand that he’s been here before, many times. We continue weaving around stalactites and stalagmites, and finally the environment changes to, of all things, brick.

This section is easier to label. It’s a very old train station. Exquisite brick patterns and barrel-vaulted ceilings whisper of another time period. Possibly Victorian. But it’s what’s beyond this room that is the most interesting part, and most likely the reason he is here—the Member Archives.

And though I’ve never questioned what they are, I instantly understand in seeing them, because I’ve seen something similar before, in the attic of the Academy last summer when I snuck out to visit Bishop in London. But this—this is nothing like that, in size at least. The attic of belongings I saw before is like a tiny cell of a much larger body. Perhaps a staging area before belongings move to their real home—here.

This area is open, possibly larger than the Relic Archives, which I estimate to be a football field in length. Iron fencing wraps in the largest labyrinth I have ever seen. Corridors and crossways disappear in right turns and curves. But it’s what lines this maze that interests me most. Storage pens, each labeled with a framed number.

Gabe doesn’t waste any time. He’s looking for something specific, and it takes him thirty minutes of navigating the field of belongings before he reaches his destination. When he arrives, the label on the door matches the number he set in the control panel of the transporter that we arrived in: 111896. That number looks familiar, so I stare at it, breaking it down into smaller parts. It’s my birthday, November 18, 1996, or 11-18-96.

Gabe unlocks the new door and when the gate swings open, he steps into the storage pen. Relics from my entire life line the walls in neat, tidy compartments. Clothes, everything from those for an infant to my current size, hang on another wall. My favorite long-lost toys, schoolbooks, childhood drawings, shoes, and personal knickknacks occupy every space.

Gabe walks to the wall of shelving and retrieves a purple suitcase. Stickers cover the surface, each representing one of the many places I lived with my dad, Ray. This is the bag I lost at the airport on the day I moved to Chicago, before I ever found out I was a Wanderer, before I moved to the Academy. Now I understand—the airline didn’t lose it like I originally thought. The Society stole it.

A pink stuffed rabbit sits nearby. I remember dragging “Bunny” at my side as a toddler, never sleeping without it. This and many of the other items here were supposedly burned in a house fire when I was very young. Images of my home emptied and burned to the ground immediately consume my thoughts. The Society burned my home and took everything from my dad and me.

The list of reasons to despise the Society just keeps growing, and my anger rises along with my temperature. Watching Gabe here sends my mind racing to piece everything together. Gabe appears to be in charge of this space. He’s in charge of making relics. He makes new relics for every student, every single year, by changing out their wardrobe. What I thought was just a bribe of lavish new clothes and an endless supply of material gifts is really much more sinister than that. The Society continually creates a safeguard of objects to watch and inspect our every single move—to keep us in line, to record and catalog our entire lives through relics.

Hate. It rumbles from my Seeing consciousness in heated swirls.

Gabe rolls the purple suitcase to a clear spot on the floor, drops it on its back, and kneels down. He unzips the top and flips it open. On top, just as I left it for easy access, sits my winter coat. Bishop’s photo, the one that Turner sent to me, is tucked inside the front pocket, along with my old cell phone.

But what worries me more is what happens next. Gabe shuffles through the clothes, looking for something in particular. When he finds the item, his eyes light up with the kind of happiness that makes me sick to my stomach.

::15::
A Hologram

From the suitcase, Gabe removes a framed photo of my mom and me at Easter when I was just a baby. He holds it up and smiles.

I want to reach for the photo and hide it away, so he can’t use it for whatever the Society is planning, but here in this state of Seeing consciousness and no body, that’s impossible.

In my mind someone whispers, “It’s time to go. Wake up.”

The voice pulls me, tugs at me, dragging me out of the vision even though I don’t want to leave, and the image of Gabe returning the suitcase to its original position slips away, fading to dark red. I’m looking at the inside of my eyelids, becoming aware of my true reality, that I was only seeing the life path of the Member Archives key. Everything that I watched happened several weeks ago.

“Sera.” Sam shakes my arm. “Open your eyes.”

When I do, she looks worried. It takes a moment to orient myself, to allow the life path of the key and all the new images to rush over me, settling into an understandable state.

“Did you see everything too?” I look to Sam with wide eyes.

“Yeah. Did you know about that place, what they kept there? I’m assuming that all those belongings are yours, right?”

“Yes, they’re mine.” I allow the memories to wash over me again and have to close my eyes for a second to push away the anger. Then I open them again and shake my head. “And no, not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that the Society tracked us like that.”

“Why do you think Gabe wanted the photo of you and your mom?” She plays with her braid, looking as concerned as I feel.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good.” I pause in thought. “Can we go back and see more?” I pick up the key, ready for round two.

“Yes, but we should wait.” She takes it from me and laces it back onto the cord as she talks. “We were under for a long time. It’s not safe to stay away from our bodies for extended periods for a relic. Especially for you, you’re too new, and we should go and find it for ourselves. We need to find your mom’s storage unit, that’s where her journal will be.” She loops the necklace around her neck. The key dangles at the end, settling on her chest.

“You’re right.” I lift myself from the floor and offer Sam my hand.

“And we should meet Bishop to see if he’s uncovered anything about the prophecy.” She reaches to clasp my grip, and I tug her from the floor.

“There’s one thing I have to do first.” I blow a flyaway strand of hair from my face and lock my hands on my hips. “I’ll meet you in an hour, okay?”

“Sounds good.” Sam nods.

•

The door to the training room slides open, but the lights don’t pop on. I walk to the center of the room and drop to the floor, draw my legs near my chest, and rest my chin on my knees. I’m exhausted from our Seer session, and glad Sam pulled me out of the meditation.

I promised to meet Turner here to spar, though I’m not sure if he will show. But as if he’s been waiting for me, it doesn’t take long before he speaks, appearing from within a twinkling haze of electricity.

“The last thing I remember is setting up Gabe’s party, the Underground attack, being in the hospital, and that night, here with you, when you told me to find someone else to love,” Hologram Turner says.

I look up and into the mirrors that line the walls, and his reflection sparks in blue hues as he paces. Dark locks of hair fall forward, hiding his chiseled face as he looks at the floor.

“You died after Gabe’s party. You didn’t sleep again that night, so your last dreamdrive memories are from the days before.” I watch for his reaction, then I sigh out loud. Since it happened, I’ve forced myself to only remember the good parts of our last day together—specifically finally understanding his motives, the way he held me, and the way we kissed.

Hologram Turner places a hand on my shoulder. I grab it and twine my fingers with his, pressing his skin against my cheek. Even though he’s a projected image, his hand is still warm, his skin thick and rough, exactly like the real Turner.

I give his arm a tug, and he relents and drops to the ground, settling close, too close. His slate-colored gaze cuts through me. “Has something changed between us?” He corrects himself. “Did something change—before?”

Of course he senses the shift in my feelings. How could he not with the way I’m acting? After his death, I promised myself that if I ever had the opportunity to look into his eyes again, I wouldn’t look away, pretending that there was nothing between us. But this is different; though my heart still yearns for him, I have to remind myself that he’s only a hologram, not truly real. I take a deep breath, unsure how to act or what to share. How do I tell him that I know about Bishop cheating him out of his role as my Protector, and about how we probably belonged together all this time? His months of torment, neglect, and hurt were for nothing.

My voice shakes before I decide how to answer but I panic. “No, everything’s the same,” I mumble, lying to protect him. To profess my love would only hurt him more. Besides, we’re a lost chance that can never be resolved. He’s only a hologram, and I’m a Wanderer.

His hopeful look diminishes. “Still lying to yourself, huh?” He pulls away and laughs.

I can’t help but smile. He knows me too well.

Turner leans in, moving close, speaking in low, raspy tones. “I don’t regret dying to save you because I would happily do it again.” He coils a strand of my hair around his finger, and then presses his lips near the sensitive skin of my ear as the heat of his breath teases. “But I do regret never kissing you.”

At his confession, my face turns hot and I know it must be red. The real Turner never slept the night of the gala before he died, never had a chance to download that day’s events into his dreamdrive for storage, so his hologram never experienced our kiss that night. If he only knew; if I could only show him, and tell him everything.

The thought of the steamy kiss causes my body to stiffen and I jump to my feet to keep our distance. Now that I’ve had time to absorb everything, I’ve been able to put this situation into perspective. I can’t let my heart be crushed again—and by a hologram, no less. There’s no future for us. He’s an illusion, merely a glimmer of the real thing.

I walk to the weapons rack and glide a finger over the head of an ax, tracing the shape. “Fight me?” I ask, wanting to return to what’s familiar and comfortable between us.

His hand covers mine faster than I can turn to him. The length of his body presses against my back. “I’d prefer not to.” He pulls my fingers away from the weapon, guiding me to the center of the dark room.

“Close your eyes.” He gently slides a palm over my face, covering my eyelids.

“Okay.” I squirm.

He leaves for several moments, and I hear him tinkering with something, though I don’t know what.

Turner walks back to me and warns, “Keep ’em closed.” I giggle out of nervousness. He grabs one of my hands and places it on his shoulder; the other he laces with one of his own. His free hand slides to my waist, pulling me close, causing a current of energy to run between us as we begin to sway.

“The thing is,” he starts, voice heavy, “I’m not sure if I ever had the opportunity to dance with you at the gala. So I thought we could do that now, instead of fighting, that is.”

When I open my eyes, we’re standing in the same exquisite ballroom he designed for Gabe’s gala. Hologram machines mounted around the room project the new holographic image, veiling the training room. Bright gold leaf carvings and paintings cover every surface. Rows and rows of columns and arcades run along a first and second floor. Red-and-white-striped curtains drape every wall, mimicking a circus tent. Beautiful holographic animals walk around: strutting peacocks, roaring lions, and graceful giraffes. In the corner sits a string quartet of women and men dressed as half human, half circus beast, performing the most romantic string music I’ve ever heard, so lovely it makes the small hairs on the back of my neck rise to attention.

Hologram Turner twirls me, and I realize that I too have been transformed. A creamy lace ball gown billows around me. The fabric flirts with his legs and ankles, wrapping around them as we dance. Even Rhett Butler would have a hard time competing with him in his black cutaway tuxedo and his hair slicked back into a low ponytail.

He smiles and it’s so devastatingly beautiful that I melt in his arms, but he holds me up, strong and firm, just the way a great dancing partner should as he spins me around for several songs. We laugh and smile in this fake beautiful world. If only it were real; if only he were real and my life were this lovely, this perfect. This is what I dream of.

“You never told me what you thought about my design work.” He looks around the projected ballroom and then back into my eyes, eager for my opinion.

“You know it’s amazing.”

“The hologram design, it was always for you.”

I drop my gaze. “Do you think you’ll ever stop flirting with me?” I look up from under my lashes.

In response, he quickly twirls me and pulls me to his chest, breaking our dancing form. “Apparently not even death can stop me.” He smirks, steps away, and bows at the end of the song. Leaning over briefly, he kisses my hand at the knuckles. His soft lips linger there, brushing back and forth against my bare skin, warming just that spot with electricity, with love.

He stands, lifting my hand to his cheek and drops another kiss on my palm before starting to dance again. And in this moment I understand, Turner will always find a way to me. He prepared for it by designing the strange little scorpion hologram machine, which scrabbles across the floor behind us to a new position. Dead or alive, there will be no keeping us apart. It’s impossible, and that makes me incredibly happy and sad all at once, because there can never truly be something between us.

Someone clears their throat nearby. I look over to see Bishop, eyes downcast as he kicks at the ground with one foot.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he says without meeting my eyes. But it’s easy to see from his expression that he’s not. Knowing that he’s witnessed this intimate and special connection between his brother and me—even though his brother is now only a hologram—I feel ashamed. And more than a little sad myself.