Quibble, 49. Revelation

Quibble takes a steep risk, and Asuja reveals himself.

49. Revelation @Quibble

Anxiety was having its way with me. All was darkness, and I almost fainted. But, for once, I kept control. Still, through the numbness in my fingertips, I felt the amber in my cloak pocket. I focused on its smallness, its smooth surface, its oval shape.

Spitfire! Don’t faint! You won’t faint!

I sought a mirror in the glass. The image of my face floated hazily before me in the dark. Bit by bit, the image sharpened, and I studied my face. Willowy, white as plaster, it was a strange setting for the disparate colors of my eyes.

I lingered on my face for what seemed an eternity. When sight returned to me, first in the center of my vision and then creeping outwards to the periphery, I found myself still standing and leaning against the tree. A goo of sap and flecks of bark had formed in the crook of my left hand.

Nihal stood beside me. Her right arm was thrown across my back. She was doing her best to hold me up. “Quibble,” she said, whispering my name again and again, her voice husky with effort and apprehension.

“I’m all right,” I told her. I took deep, even breaths. “I’m here. I’m with you.”

“Thank kindness!” she said, then unburdened herself of me and stepped away. “What happened? What was that?”

“Anxiety. It happens when I can’t handle something.”

I focused on my breathing and the electric tingling in my nerves as feeling came back to them. After a couple of minutes, I stood upright, let go of the tree, and turned to face Nihal.

She looked anxious herself. “What will you do?” she asked. “Go to Egg 17?”

“I can’t. Not with utter control after me.”

“You want proof, don’t you? Working together, I’m sure we can learn the way there.”

“There’s another way to get proof.”

“Another way?” Nihal said, now dubious.

“Rectification.”

Nihal gasped and blinked now in surprise, not assent. “Quibble, are you out of your mind?” she said, gaping.

“Maybe!” I answered with a laugh. “Relax, Nihal! I don’t mean to get myself rectified. Do you know how Meissa’s rectifying orb burst?”

“I’ve heard a story,” the protégé said, frowning, “but I don’t know what stock to put by it. One was being rectified, and you broke the orb.”

“It wasn’t as simple as ‘I broke the orb.’ It tried to rectify me, and I had to find a way out of the dream.”

“How?”

“Pain, touch, a thing.”

That was an unwise admission! Kaus interjected.

Do you now trust Nihal? Meissa said. Be sparing with what you admit!

“In the dream, I saw all the Ones the orb rectified, at least as far back as Meissa. If Aladfar rectified Quiddity, then it stands to reason she was in that dream, too.”

“If he used the same orb to rectify her,” Nihal pointed out.

“And I think he would have. Baiting me Without with Quiddity’s disappearance was Vega’s doing, and testing my excellence with the same orb has the hallmark of that plot. But what’s more, I think I do know Aladfar, and he would have used the kind red.”

“But—” Nihal paused to consider. “Then you can just review the dream in your amber? Simple as that?”

“Not quite. I didn’t have my amber then. It doesn’t have the memory. Only I do. There were many faces in the dream, but Quiddity can’t have been far back in the orb’s memory. There’s only one problem with my idea.”

When Nihal gave me a blank look, I waved at my white hair.

“One, remember? I’ve never seen my mother’s face, at least not all at once. I’ve seen it one small part at a time. She showed me at a tarry-not, once. And of course I know it to touch it. I’ve just got to hope that’s enough. So, what do you think?”

Nihal thought a long moment about what I was proposing. “Even if you could recognize Quiddity,” she said slowly, “there’s a risk you aren’t taking account of.”

“What?”

“The dream, Quibble. It was a rectifying dream.”

She was right. Alnasl had refused to share his amber and let me recall the dream for him for the very reason that, as he said, reliving a dream was tantamount to having it again. I sighed, feeling frustrated, and turned to walk a little way off from Nihal.

There must be some way around this problem, I thought.

There is, my amber intoned, but I’m quite skeptical of it.

She’s my mother. I have to know.

If only Vega had told me, we could’ve avoided this mess! Meissa said. All right, Quibble. Think about how you excel. Pain, touch, and a thing are your lifelines. You’re right to beware of this dream. We don’t know those lifelines will work again. They didn’t work the first time Alnasl controlled you, and rectification is more powerful than his control. You only escaped it because you asserted your desire to live, putting the orb in paradox. But now the orb has no part in it, so you need better lifelines. Well, you have them. First, there’s your mirror—

I appreciate your help out of the anxiety attack, Meissa, and it’s not that I doubt you, but remember the nightmare on the mountain. I couldn’t find my mirror then.

I know. That brings me to the part I’m skeptical of. Nihal. She can be your second lifeline. Her existence, her there-ness, can root you Without.

How?

If the two of you share me and mirror each other, you’ll have strong second sight.

Like I had with Vega when she gave you to me?

You see why I’m skeptical, don’t you?

Yes! I don’t like it. What about trying it with Index instead?

He’s not a Zero. Even if he were, what of his blindness? Could he even mirror with you? No, I think either you’ve got to do this with Nihal or wait to do it with a Zero you trust.

I can’t wait.

Closing my hand on the amber, I turned back to the protégé. She was floating in the air again, now with her back to me. “Nihal,” I called.

She spun quickly around. “What’s up?”

“You are! I have a proposition. Feel free to refuse. My amber suggests we share it and mirror with each other. Second sight will protect us from the dream.”

Nihal gave it a moment’s reflection, then floated lightly to the ground before me. “I thought you didn’t trust me,” she said. Sighing, I gave her assent, and she responded with not a blink but a snort of mirth. “So that’s how it is!” she cried. “You assent when you need me!”

“I guess I do trust you, now that we’ve touched.”

Instead of reciprocating my assent, Nihal winked, but then she pursed her lips and shook her head slightly. “Mirroring with me like this, Quibble, you’re trusting me to the ends of the earth. You know that, right?”

I nodded, withdrew my right hand from my cloak, and opened it to reveal the amber. She took my hand. Hers was large, her skin rougher than I expected. I felt a tiny cavity in the flesh of her forefinger, just below the first knuckle. Looking down, I held aside my thumb to see a cut not quite healed. “What’s this?” I asked.

Grimacing again, she said, “When you whittle wood, don’t whittle too fast!”

I set the amber softly aglow and intoned, Mirror!

A translucent mirror sprang into being between us. My face overlaid Nihal’s, our features blurred together, and all around her appeared a brilliant halo of amber light.

I took a few breaths, gathering my self-control, and tried to think of the rectifying dream. What came first? The orb itself, of course. I pictured it leaving Aladfar’s hand to be caressed by air under the Arc of Summary. It gleamed crimson, but no dream began. Perhaps I needed to imagine what I first saw in the dream.

The starved girl. She asked if she was real.

It was difficult to form any picture of the starved girl with both Nihal’s face and my own hovering in the air before me. But if I closed my eyes, I’d lose second sight. So I gripped the protégé’s hand tighter, hoping to distract myself by focusing on touch. My fingertips brushed a ragged ridge of skin at the base of Nihal’s palm.

Glancing down, I twisted my arm to turn hers wrist-up. A white scar lay along her wrist, disappearing under her cloak sleeve. The sight of it filled me with a sense of déjà vu. I pulled her cloak sleeve back with my free hand to bare her forearm. Running halfway up to the elbow was a crisscrossing mess of scars. Recognizing those scars at once, I looked up at Nihal.

But Nihal wasn’t there. The face on the other side of the mirror had changed, and now, refracted as if in ice, through the mirror burst a dream’s crimson light.

Light the kindness! Meissa shrieked.

I couldn’t move. I could only stare into the mirror, through my own face at the other, familiar face inexplicably there. Wind gusted at my back. Two arms wrapped me and yanked me backwards in a tight hug. But the person holding my hand – the protégé of kindness calling herself Nihal, the adept of utter control who went by Asuja, the One sent Without who was now Quotation the Adroit – didn’t let me go. My amber burned like a sun between our clasped hands.

Quote’s face broke into a winning smile, and away we popped.

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rem

Though it’s short — maybe because it’s short — this chapter gave me a lot of trouble. I felt the narration wasn’t very compelling, and since we’re witnessing Asuja’s endgame, I tried rewriting it from his point of view. But that didn’t work: there was too much to keep track of, and the chapter just became a muddle. So finally I reverted to Quibble’s point of view and stripped out all the irrelevancies I could. I hope making the chapter lean has helped make it compelling.

For personal reasons — you can read about them at the end of “The Dystopia Is Here,” linked below — I dropped nearly all publication at Singular Dream for a few weeks. I’m back now. I’m here. I’m with you. Regular publication is resuming. This Sunday, you’ll get part 2 of “Social Media Made Me an Asshole.” If you haven’t yet read part 1, which is free to all subscribers, I’ve linked that below, too.

rem