Chapter 53: All Things Revealed

The beast was silent as it trailed along, but for the occasional murmured instruction on which way to go. Violet asked no more questions, though she badly wanted to. Everything she’d already learned sat shimmering behind her eyes like an aurora, endlessly reverberating.

If the Glow itself was at the heart of the particles, then….

Violet shook her head and winced, feeling ill and slow, painfully reminded of just how worn down she was. Even hurrying along like this, barely at a trot, had already taken the wind out of her.

And even if it was the Glow….

Plenty of good things were also dangerous, Violet told herself. The same fire that warmed a house could also raze it if misused. Electrical wires ferried current that lit streetlights, yet they could also shock the life from a person if improperly handled.

All of that made sense to her, but there lurked the insistence that this was something else entirely. The beast had spoke of heat, and Violet had a dim supposition that the sensation of warmth felt emanating from the flames of a campfire was due to particles as well…though a different sort than what filled the air and made her machine crackle and shriek.

Violet’s eyes drifted to the beast and the dozens of tiny holes and tears that littered its fabric. Her friend hung in the air, crooked and gaunt, and Violet felt a brief chill of terror at the idea of that same condition being transposed to her, bit by tiny bit.

The holes were much too small to see, so the beast had said…but they were still there nonetheless.

“Will they go away?” Violet blurted, the question tugged free by a great sense of mortal worry.

The beast turned to look back from where it had moved ahead to point out the right choice between a pair of branching hallways. It seemed about to question her when the cat stirred.

“The holes,” it clarified. “…I expect the same thing is happening to me as well.”

The beast nodded very firmly, doing all it could to seem reassuring.

You will heal…but only if you get out of this place.

That still didn’t make any sense to Violet, but she didn’t bother asking questions. None of the beast’s explanations had done anything but make the situation murkier.

She’d see the Glow.

She’d see the Glow and then all would be clear.

Violet kept that thought in mind as she kept going, passing through a pair of steel fire doors only barely clinging to their hinges. Past them, the hallway let out into another atrium, this one smaller and without much in the way of marble or fine decorations. The whole room had a strange, buckled quality to it, cracks shocked into the walls which leaned slightly askew. A pair of doorways off to Violet’s right had been crushed entirely flat beneath a mass of debris, where the upper floors of the reactor building had folded into one another.

Straight ahead there was a wide entrance governed by a steel framed booth that reminded Violet of what she’d seen at the head of the bridge, the toll…whatever.

The inside of the booth was overgrown with great luminous fins of fungus that throbbed with gentle pulses of color. It seemed to be reacting to the Glow somehow, feeding from its energy. Again Violet felt a swell of confusion whirl within her but fought it down.

The answers would come.

Past the booth was another room, wide and paneled with white tiles, though many had been shattered by some ancient impact. The twisted effect was even worse now and Violet found that she didn’t like looking straight ahead of herself. Between the off kilter appearance of the room and the diffused fog of the Glow, it was becoming difficult to acknowledge perspective. For a half second this made her think about the refinery again, but she shook those thoughts free before they could begin to fester. This wasn’t even slightly similar, for the Glow was here.

And the particles of course.

Along the lefthand side of the room were glass fronted lockers and steel equipment cases. Half of the doors had been knocked open by whatever trauma had so wounded the building, and their contents were heavily mildewed. Still, Violet could make out rows of books and manuals, hard plastic cases and lines of heavy white fabric suits, hung up in preparation for…something.

She stepped closer and peered into the nearest locker. One of the plastic cases had fallen open where it had been knocked to the floor and within, half swallowed by an ecstatic burst of sulfur yellow roses, there lay the degraded remnants of a very familiar looking machine. Most of the buttons were gone, and the space behind the screen was clouded with moisture, but Violet knew that if it were in working order then it would be crackling endlessly away, just like hers.

Her eyes moved to the suits, which were coupled with lighter coats made of a similar material. It was curious stuff, white and stiff and slick like oilcloth, plasticky in a weirdly familiar way. It was only when Violet felt the beast’s gaze upon her that she realized what it was.

“It’s you.” She said, and stepped aside to give her friend a better view. The beast stood still, a curious recognition coming over its skeletal face. Its whole body, yards and yards of worn white fabric, twitched restlessly, as though blown by an intangible wind.

Then it slid silently forward and began rummaging amongst the fabric. Rusting metal hangers snapped and heavily packaged white suits crumpled to the ground amidst hazy bursts of spores, but the beast paid that no mind. Instead it seized upon one of the hanging pieces of fabric and tugged it impatiently free, sending more equipment cascading to the ground.

What it had fetched was not one of the full body suits, but rather what looked like an apron. The material hung heavily enough in the beast’s grip that its head was tugged low, and it moved very carefully so as not to lose grip on its burden.

“What is that?” Violet asked.

It’s lined with lead. ---- Said the beast. ---- It might help protect you.

In a strange way, the beast’s quiet uncertainty was almost reassuring. It was clearly falling back upon some old piece of knowledge, and Violet knew, even without knowing just how she knew, that in the old days the people in the reactor had worn this same equipment to block out the particles.

The cat looked from the apron to Violet, then straightened itself up.

“I think I can walk now.” It said.

Violet glanced down, surprised.

“Are you sure? What about your leg?”

“I told you, it’s only a cut,” the cat said, a touch more breezily than she suspected was genuine. “Truth be told, I was mostly catching a free ride.” With that it flickered out of her arms, leaving a peculiar sudden emptiness that made Violet want to clutch her arms closed and recoil at once. The cat stepped from a shadow halfway across the room, slightly favoring its injured leg.

Then the lead lined apron came down over her head and Violet had to shuffle her arms through a pair of requisite holes, the beast fussily adjusting the garment over her. It was clearly meant for a larger person and came down nearly to her knees, the back draped over her rucksack. Though Violet had known it would be heavy, the weight was still sudden and surprising. She took a staggery step sideways, catching herself against the nearest locker, where she could see a faint reflection in the scuffed glass. She looked small and bent over, like a tiny hunchback, and the sight was so bizarrely funny that she couldn’t help but laugh.

In an instant the cat had found its footing atop her rucksack, though from the way it shifted and dug in its claws, Violet could tell that the material of the apron wasn’t much good for standing on.

We’re almost there. ---- Said the beast, its gaze turning ahead to the twin doors on the other side of the room. Violet had a huge, nervous urge to ask what exactly that meant, but she bit the question down and gathered herself.

The nervousness was returning again, but when Violet tried to swallow she found that her mouth was too dry, the metallic taste in the back of her throat worse than ever.

But focusing on all of that would do her no good. She was too close to succumb to simple distractions, and with that in mind, Violet endeavored to clear her thoughts and make herself as calm and ready as possible.

They passed through a strange series of metal hoops, each perforated with tiny holes through which flowers had bloomed. The floor was riven with cracks and tiny ripples of color reverberated along them with each step Violet took. She could sense a peculiar energy to whatever lay down there, but it did not feel like plants or animals or anything at all. It knew on some level that she was looking at it, but could not differentiate that contact from the physicality of her footsteps and so Violet moved on.

The walls of the hallway beyond the metal rings shimmered with insects of all kinds. Glow dazzled moths milled about in a silent ecstasy, interlaced with lines of bulbous yellow ants that gave off such a sense of sweetness that Violet felt her teeth begin to ache just looking at them. They were feeding the other insects present, dosing them with droplets of an amber syrup that had no proper name but was imbued with all the stuff of life itself.

They didn’t seem to have any real motive for this, they were not farming the insects for food or even drugging them so they would not fly away, for the moths and the butterflies and everything else that layered the walls were still sharp and alert. It was that the only thing they cared to do was sit and bask in the wonder of the Glow.

Why they did not advance any further Violet could not guess. They were close enough to the center that the light itself had nearly displaced the air. A faint, distracted confusion settled upon her, but Violet managed to tear her attentions away. It wasn’t any of her business to question the doings of the moths. Perhaps they simply had no concept of the Glow’s center and were content enough anywhere that the light shone.

At the join where floor met wall were small heaps of dead bugs, all interlaced with grateful threads of cottony white fungus. It had grown feathery in places and the tendrils were beginning to acquire tiny petals and rippling fans of moist material as thin and delicate as paper. Ants and spiders combed through it, and Violet had to duck beneath a web that sang with a sensation of its own, for the silk was conscious in a way that she could not entirely quantify, and the idea of tearing it was anathema.

A great spindly legged spider sat at its center and it turned a slow clockwise circle as she passed, colorless ripples trembling across the architecture of its domain.

Ahead of her, the beast paused at the point where the hallway ended, next to a pair of enormous steel blast doors that had been twisted nearly in half, embedded so deeply into the concrete of the walls that the lefthand one was only barely visible. Wreaths of flowers and tiny, twisting trees nearly clogged the entrance, but the beast tore them aside with its teeth and cleared a path. The light shining through was so bright that for a moment Violet though that she would be dazzled, but it was only bright in the way that illumination after total darkness was, and her eyes opened to embrace it.

She felt stunned, in almost the same way the moths were, then the cat nudged her ankle and Violet shuffled forward.

Stepping through the blast doors, Violet’s first thought was that she had entered into a jungle, for the space before her was startlingly unlike the rest of the reactor and it took her a moment to fully put it all together.

She was standing in a room shaped like a cylinder, perhaps thirty meters across and paneled with white ceramic tile. There had once been a ceiling but some unfathomable cataclysm had long since snatched it away. Through the stupefied fog of her thoughts Violet realized that she was standing at the northern edge of the reactor, the blasted place she had taken notice of earlier. Were she to rise into the air then she would see a ruined slope of broken concrete rimming the outer walls of the building.

But all of that was secondary, for the floor was dominated by a circular pool of liquid flame, glowing such an intense azure that Violet nearly forgot to breathe. And up from the pool rose the very heart of the Glow’s aurora, piercing the heavens. Violet stared upwards, following the rise of its shimmering heights, and fancied that she could see a place where it spread like the impossible wings of a protecting angel.

The beast had settled off to one side, but the cat stood flatfooted next to her, eyes huge and round. It was slowly blinking but seemed lost for words.

Violet took a small step forward. The walls of the room were paneled with enormous flowers and wreaths of color. They sang.

Distantly, it occurred to Violet that this was the time to finally reach out and make her appeal to the Glow. Slowly, she settled to her knees upon a soft bed of moss and…were those violets? She reached down and stroked a pair of fingers along the curve of soft, purple petals. How perfectly fitting it all was.

In an instant her headache was gone, the metal taste in the back of her mouth, the weakness and pain and fear and awful stress of the whole journey melting away as she stared into the radiance of the reactor pool and let herself fade beyond the world, to see the heart of the Glow for what it truly was, to….

To….

She….

A tremor of unease ran through her, a wrongness, an impossibility.

She was reaching out now, as deep as she ever had, the world but a faintness past the edges of her comprehension, yet with every surface level thought that shivered across the whole of her mind, across countless sparking synapses…the whole of space before her was empty. The color and joy of plants and insects and rapturous animals formed a crescendo all around her, but at the center was a blank hole.

There was nothing in the pool.