REINTEGRATION

Day 100 of 100

He could not move, and so he looked.

It was the only thing left to him. His arms hung. His legs were stone. Halloran's hand lay on his breast, light as a leaf, and under it the whole of Rooke's body had gone as still as a held breath. But his eyes were his own, and behind his eyes the Sight, the thing he had cursed and starved and hidden under a Warden's gray for twelve years, was still awake.

Very well, he thought. Look.

He had never looked at Halloran. Not truly. One did not. The Director's soul had always been a polite blur, a pleasant silver haze at the edge of vision, and Rooke had told himself that was only age and dignity. Now he turned the Sight on the man full-face, and pushed.

It was like opening a door onto a furnace.

There was no haze. There was a crowd. A thousand small lights packed shoulder to shoulder inside the old man's frame, each one pinned like a moth to a card, each one crying out in a voice too thin to hear. They were bound to him with black wire, thousands of wires, and the wires ran out of his body in every direction: to the pillars, to the Mirror, down the thick cable at the platform's foot, away through the rock to the mountain. They ran to the Wardens, too. Thin gray threads, to every man in the ring. To Hartwell. To Okafor. To Josie, kneeling by the fallen boy.

To me.

A strand as thick as a bell-rope came out of Halloran's palm and entered Rooke's breast just under the hand. It was black, and it was old. He had worn it so long he had forgotten it was there.

And at the heart of it, small and gold and unmistakable, a light that he knew.

"Father," whispered Rooke.

…

Thaddeus Rooke had been a quiet man.

He remembered a heavy hand on his shoulder, a smell of pipe tobacco and wet wool, a voice reading The Pilgrim's Progress aloud by the stove, doing all the voices badly. In the winter of 1875 the hand had been taken away. Not stopped, not struck; simply lifted, as one lifts a coat from a peg, by a smiling man in the Bureau's gray who had said it was a requirement of the law. His father had lived twelve years more as a hollow in a chair. And all that time, the boy had never known where the rest of him had gone.

Here. He had gone here. Worked into the wire. Used as a leash.

"You see it," said Halloran softly. He had not lowered his hand. "How clever. Yes. Your father is the knot. I tied him to you myself when you were nineteen. It's how I knew where you stood, how I always knew." The mild eyes were kind. "He is the reason you cannot lift that revolver. I have only to pull."

Rooke could not speak. But the Sight is not speech. It is a looking, and a looking can be returned.

He looked at his father.

Papa, he thought.

The gold light did not stir.

Papa. It's Callum. I'm sorry. I'm sorry it took so long.

Nothing.

Behind him, behind the pillar, in the corner of his eye, the sky through the vault grating had gone almost black. A thin bright ring was closing on the sun. He felt the Sanctum draw itself in, as a room draws in before a storm. Mara hung in the air, silver, a shred. Vesper hung opposite, gold, a shred. The braid blazed above the Stone. There was less than a minute.

Papa, he thought, and put into the word everything he had: the stove, the voices, the Pilgrim's slough, the long ride home. You always said a man who carries a thing for someone else is not a tool. He is a friend.

A pause. A flicker.

Friend, thought Rooke. I'm asking you as a friend. Let go.

The gold light shivered.

It did not break the wire. It turned inside it, as a sleeper turns, and where it turned the black strand sagged, and slipped, and for the first time in twelve years went slack in Rooke's chest. He felt it. A loosening, as of a hand uncurling from his heart.

"No," said Halloran.

His smile had vanished.

"No, Thaddeus, you silly, sentimental—"

Rooke moved.

…

He did not draw the revolver. It lay at his feet; there was no time. He took one step, and then another, along the burning rim of the star, and reached the black cable at the Mirror's base. His hands closed on it. He felt the cold of it, the hum, the thousand lights screaming faintly in the metal.

And he pulled.

Not with his arms. With the Sight. He took every strand of black that came into his body and gathered them in his will, and set his teeth, and drew them backward through the cable, against the current, as a man hauls a drowned boat up a river. It burned. It was the worst thing he had ever done. Behind his eyes a white light was growing, bright and then unbearable, as though someone had set a lamp inside his skull and was turning the wick higher and higher.

"Stop," cried Halloran. The blade came up. "You will blind yourself, you fool!"

"Yes," said Rooke.

"You will never see again! Not a soul! Not a color! Not your own—"

"Yes!"

He gave it all. Twelve years of dread, twelve years of looking, every glimpse of every grief he had ever carried; he put it all into the wire and flung it at the Mirror like a stone. For an instant he saw everything. He saw every soul in the room: Okafor's, a square oaken blaze; Josie's, bright and quick; Hartwell's, mud-colored and ashamed; Pryce at the arch, a small brown flame, come in from the chapel at last, with a book clutched to his chest. He saw the two women, gold and silver, rising on their pillars. He saw Mara's face, lifted, wet, with her eyes shut.

Then the light in his head went out.

…

It was dark.

It was not dark. He could feel the stone under his knees. He could smell powder and lamp-oil and snow. But the Sight was gone, as a candle is gone; he looked, and nothing looked back. Only the plain world remained, flat, silent, without depth. The pillars burned white. The faces round the ring were faces.

And in the center of the cavern, with a sound like the world's largest sheet of ice splitting, the Mirror cracked from top to bottom.

…

"Now!" screamed Pryce.

His voice cracked, high and cracked as a boy's. He had come forward into the light of the star with the little black book held out before him like a lantern, and his thin face was ghastly. "Now! Totality! Ad lucem! Ad lucem!"

The sun went out.

Not slowly. It went out all at once, as a hand goes over a flame. From the grating above them, from the whole sky, the day fell away, and in its place hung a black disk ringed with thin white fire: the corona, silver-pearl, enormous, streaming out from the dead sun in long soft plumes. A cold wind poured through the vault. The pillars' flames guttered and blew out. In the dark the great star on the floor blazed alone, blue-white, brilliant, with two women at its points.

"Ninety seconds," Rooke heard Okafor mutter. "God help us. Ninety."

He could not see souls. He could not see anything but what any man could see. But he saw that.

The braid above the Stone had stopped drawing upward. It hung quivering in the air, a rope of red-gold and silver twisted together, and then, as he watched, it began to turn. Slowly. Then quicker. The two lights wound round each other in a spiral like the strands of a dancer's skirt. Down they came, toward the Stone, with a long low note as of a bell struck under water. Mara's feet touched the iron lines. Vesper's did. And they were no longer standing at the points of the star.

They were walking.

Toward each other. Along the burning rays, with their eyes open now and fixed on one another's face, as two women walk across a bridge. The lines under their feet turned from orange to white. The hum of the Sanctum rose to a single glass-clear tone. Halloran shouted something. His blade swept up. Rooke saw Calder, pale as chalk, lift her brass gauge and with a cry hurl it into the Mirror, where it burst into a spray of cogs; saw Okafor grab the Director's arm with both hands and hang on it like a dog on a bull.

"Hold him!" roared Okafor. "Hold him, boys, for the love of God!"

And Hartwell came, and Josie, and, after a moment, the gray-faced boy Tilden with his arm in a sling, and Greaves with a bloody nose: all of them, one by one, throwing their weight on the silver coat.

The women met at the Stone.

Rooke could not see what happened next. No one could have told it. There was a light, and the light was neither gold nor silver, nor any color he had a name for. It was the color of a thing made whole. It went up from the Stone in a single clean column to the roof of the Sanctum, through the vault, through the grating, and into the black sky, to touch the corona. It flung the shadows of the pillars out across the cavern in long, perfect rays.

And from the light, very faintly, he heard a voice.

Two voices, speaking as one.

Welcome home.

…

The Director screamed.

It was not a cry of defeat. It was a cry of loss, of pure animal loss. The cable at the Mirror's foot had gone white. The thousand wires streaming out of his body whipped and sang and parted; and down the length of the black rope, through the rock and the mountain and the frozen lake, there went out a vast rushing, a sound like geese rising from a marsh. It was the sound of a thousand souls going home.

The silver coat sagged.

Rooke saw it happen. There was no need of the Sight. The lines in the Director's face deepened, as ink spreads through water; his hair went from iron to snow; his hands, still clutching the blade, curled and spotted and shrank. The blade went out. The stick dropped from his fingers, plain black wood, and rolled across the iron. Under Okafor's hands Augustin Halloran, seventy-nine years old, bent like a reed and folded to his knees, an old man in a coat too large for him, with milky eyes and trembling lips.

"I was only," he whispered. "I was only going to—"

No one answered.

The light in the column sank. The corona spread. Then, from the far edge of the sun, a single bead of white fire broke through the darkness, dazzling, a diamond on the rim of the world: the first light after the dark.

The Sanctum was quiet.

On the iron floor, at the foot of the Stone, one woman lay on her back with her eyes closed.

…

He reached her first. He did not remember crossing the room. He was on his knees, on the warm lines of the star, with his coat off and under her head, and his hands were on her face.

"Mara."

She breathed.

"Mara, please."

Her lashes moved. Then her eyes opened, and they were gray, gray as the lake, but with a shot of something red-gold swimming deep in them, like a coal under ash. She looked up. She frowned. She said, in a hoarse, wondering voice, "Callum?"

Callum. Not Captain. Not Rooke. The name came out as it had on the dock, ten years before.

"Yes."

"We did it." She lifted her left hand slowly. Her wrist was bare. Across the inner skin, where a cracked gray snowflake had lain for a hundred days, a new mark glowed: whole, delicate, unbroken, its six arms outlined in a clear fine blue, and in the heart of each arm a thread of red. It was beautiful. It was like frost with a flame behind it.

"Look," she said. "Look at it."

He looked. He looked at her hand, and at the mark, and then, because he could not help it, he looked at her soul.

And saw nothing.

Her face. The firm brow, the freckle by the mouth. The tilt of the eyes. A woman of flesh in the light of a rising sun. That was all. The thing he had always seen behind it, the shimmering depth, the light, had gone. He was looking at a stranger's face, and it was the face he loved best in the world.

"Mara," he said. His voice was not steady. "I can't see it. I can't see your soul. I can't see anyone's. I—it's gone. I burned it out."

He bowed his head.

For a long moment she said nothing. He heard the wind in the grating. He heard, far off, Okafor shouting orders, and the clink of manacles.

Then a hand, warm and rough with ink, took his chin and lifted it.

"Then," said Mara, very gently, "this time look at me with your own eyes."