Deathglass
by Lee Killough
This story copyright 1999 by Lee Killough. This copy was created
for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for
honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company,
www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
Since our father's death, my siblings and I
have looked out for one another with fierce protectiveness, but the bonds are
more than blood and our common love of glass. There is also shared terror. The
public remembers Joshua Benet as a name synonymous with fine glass, like
Tiffany, Gallé, and Lalique, but it is his death I cannot forget, ten years of
descent into raving madness, lurching and twitching and screaming paranoid
accusations until nothing remained of the father Claudia, Garrett, and I had
worshiped. Nothing but the legacy of his genius in our hands, and cold-sweat
dread of the time bomb in our genes.
So it was no
surprise to have Claudia calling me during the day at Johns Hopkins, where I
blew glass apparatus for research projects. "Dane, someone has to talk to
Garrett. He's taken up another of those religious cults, a pagan one this time,
I think."
Hardly a reason for so much concern that I
could see. Garrett had been religion-hopping since he left home for college.
"He's a grown man, Claudia."
I could see her at the
other end of the line, calling from her studio filled with stained glass, and
leading, and the largest privately-owned inventory of vitamins and health foods
in the hemisphere. We each had our defense against Fate. I could not see that
Garrett's was any more ridiculous than Claudia's.
"Why not let him live the way he wants?"
Her breath hissed over the wire. "In the first
place, this time the high priestess or whatever has actually moved in with
him-- Aletheia, she calls herself, no last name, just
Aletheia-- and... she's not content with just taking his money.
Obviously you haven't been to his new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art."
"I haven't even talked to him for a month."
"There's an article in Newsweek. You'd better read
it."
I remembered a copy of the magazine in the
lounge. I ran down the hall after it, then pawed through to the Arts page.
"Benet à la Bosch," the headline read. I have no
idea what the writer thought about the exhibit; I never saw the text. Color
photographs of three pieces in the exhibit illustrated the article, and for me,
nothing else existed on the page. Garrett had made his reputation on glass
portraits and sculptures that seemed to defy gravity, crystal thread spun into
dreams of moonbeams and starfire. But the pieces in these pictures... A chunk of
lead crystal like a fragment of glacier trapped some creature frozen in a moment
of desperate struggle. A fairy palace light and frothy as cloud cast a twisted,
demonic shadow. The third photo showed two views of the same vase. Seen from the
front it seemed no different than his usual work, but the fresh young girl's
face within the glass became that of a toothless hag when the light shone
through it.
I stared at the photographs. Could a
cult really have influenced Garrett to start producing pieces like these?
Perhaps he had just gone commercial. The Beautiful People lost in the ennui of
sunning and gambling in their villas in Saint-Tropez and Monte Carlo would love
these. The novelty, the duality of ugliness in beauty, would bring them flocking
from the galleries of now commonplace sonic and tropic sculptures, from the
holosymphony performances and the boutiques of chamelemode clothing and
silicivitae jewelry.
But I could not help
remembering something else, something Claudia had either overlooked or chosen to
ignore, that Father, too, had changed his style as deterioration swallowed him.
* * *
Twenty-four hours later I stepped off the
plane in Gateside and caught the cabletrain for Aventine.
Artists built the mountain retreat. The rich and
famous have discovered its isolated peace and filled the shores of the Lunamere
and Heliomere with their villas, but the center still belongs to the artists.
Shops and studios with balconied living quarters above them lined Terpsichore
Road and the other muse-named streets I walked on the way to Garrett's studio.
Sonic sculpture sang at me in passing. A kinetropic piece recognized movement
near it and rattled a greeting with wooden rings. Garrett's studio had no sign,
no streetside sample, only a window etched into a delicate floral fantasy
surrounding large letters, �BENET�, and under them, smaller and simply, �Glass�.
I pushed open the front door.
The smells inside were
those of my life... acid and hot glass and the warm-metal scent of an annealing
oven. Past three straight wooden chairs and a single glass showcase holding a
half dozen or so finished pieces, the studio spread beneath fluorescent lamps:
tables scattered with pieces of cut glass and works-in-progress; bins of glass
rods and irregular chunks; an asbestos-and-stone-topped workbench with holders,
spreaders, gas jets, blowpipes; another workbench under a strong light, backed
by a rack of enamel and acid bottles. A gangly form sat at that workbench with
his back to the door.
"I'll be with you in a
minute," Garrett said.
I trotted across the studio
to his shoulder. "Is that any way to greet your kid brother?"
For the first time in my life, he did not grin and
hurl himself at me. Instead, Garrett's fingers whitened on his paintbrush. "Did
Claudia send you?"
"I saw the Newsweek article on
your exhibit and thought as long as I was on vacation, I'd drop in." It was half
the truth at least. "An interesting change in style."
"Is that what you think."
His voice shut me out, remote as the peaks above
Aventine. Remembering my father's black moods, my gut knotted.
"Garrett-- " I began hoarsely.
Overhead, the ceiling creaked. Garrett looked up for
a moment, then turned toward me. "It's begun, Dane."
The knots tightened. "Have you been to a doctor?"
He frowned irritably. "I don't need a doctor. We all
know the signs... depression, inexplicable and uncontrollable anger,
incoordination, twitches. There've been times when my hands shook so much I
couldn't work, and I'm thirty-six, the same age when Father-- "
I cut him off. "An anxiety reaction. You're giving
yourself the signs just by worrying-- "
"Dane, stop it!" His arm raised, and for a moment I
thought he might smash his work, an antique-looking, footed bowl of streaky
amber glass, what the Victorians called a coupe, to the floor. But he stopped,
and after a moment, resumed work on it... painting the silhouette of an antique
car, I saw now. "You think that by refusing to admit something exists, it can't.
That's no answer, any more than Claudia's vitamins and brewer's yeast."
The ceiling creaked again. This time I recognized
the cause, someone walking. The soft footsteps crossed overhead toward the
staircase at the end of the room. A pair of bare feet appeared on the stairs.
"But there is an answer," Garrett said. "Dane, may I
present Aletheia."
The woman came down the stairs,
all long, smooth limbs, brief neo-grecian playsuit, and ebony hair pulled up
into a casual topknot, but the thought that crossed my mind was
Pygmalion, not priestess. For under the studio lights her hair had
a shifting purple sheen, as though it were not black at all but deep iridescent
violet, and her skin glowed with the pearly inner light of glass reaching the
melting point. In a moment of caught breath, reaching out for a slender hand
that felt hot, too, I wondered if Garrett's genius could have created her of
opalescent glass, giving her the classic face of a Greek statue and setting her
eyes with amethysts, then used the knowledge from his arcane religions to breath
life into her.
"In a manner of speaking, perhaps he
did." Her amethyst eyes smiled into mine, then while I was still realizing that
I had not spoken my thought aloud, shifted past me to an askance focus on
Otherness that sent a chill up my spine. Madness, the eyes said. "I'll
check the oven, Garrett. The bowl for the Kimbrough wedding should be ready."
The voice was like crystal, clear and smooth, but
somehow... transparent. When it stopped, I could remember the words but never
the sound of the voice.
Aletheia padded
gracefully across the room to the annealing oven. The light there made a purple
nimbus of her hair, but her skin glowed on its own, a white heat shimmering
hypnotically against the darkness of the paneling behind her.
It took an effort to look away from her to Garrett.
"I didn't know you were living with anyone," I lied. "How long have you been
together? Where did you meet her?"
"It isn't what
you think. She walked into the Gallery Cafe a couple of weeks ago, looking for a
job and a place to stay. I have more room than I need and I had been wanting
someone for housekeeping and odd jobs in the studio, so..." He shrugged. But he
avoided my eyes. "She has a real gift with glass. I've begun to let her do all
the annealing."
I glanced toward her. Aletheia swung
back the lid of the annealing oven. Reaching in, she lifted out a thick crystal
bowl, which had been put in for reheating and a slow cooling that would relieve
the stresses the process of fabrication put in it. So Aletheia could not be
responsible for the pieces in the exhibit, I reflected, and maybe there was no
new cult after all. Still...
I glanced sideways at
my brother. Garrett watched her with an intensity, a fervor, that sent a chill
down my spine. I lowered my voice so Aletheia could not hear. "Come on, Garrett,
no woman that beautiful has to keep house and pick up around an artist's studio
for a living. What's she really doing here?"
He
hesitated, then said, "Her name means 'the healer.'"
My gut wrenched. Oh, god. "Don't tell me you were
fooling around with something and because she showed up you think you summoned
her?"
He looked away. "She says she can cure me."
I sighed. "With what, magical incantations?"
"She can cure me, Dane." Faith burned in his eyes.
"When she touches me, the moods end. My hands quit shaking."
I glanced toward Aletheia. She appeared to have
heard nothing. Setting the bowl on a worktable and kneeling down to turn it in
slow examination totally engrossed her.
Watching
her, it occurred to me that if Garrett's symptoms were merely the result of
anxiety and she reassured him out of them, what was the harm in her for now? I
could stay on a while to make sure she demanded nothing extravagant for her
"services."
Staring into the lead crystal, Aletheia
sighed.
The sound touched a reflex bred into both
us. We ran for the bowl.
"Did it crack?"
Apprehension edged Garrett's voice.
"No." The
amethyst eyes looked up at him, past us both, focused on Otherness. "There will
be no wedding."
My relief over the bowl changed to
amusement. "No wedding." I tried to smile, but something in that mad, askance
gaze and flat pronouncement paralyzed the muscles. "What makes you think so?"
"The glass." She caressed the rim of the bowl
absently. "The images don't join."
I squatted down
beside Garrett at the worktable. The bowl was laminate work, layer upon layer
etched with delicate floral designs and two portraits, presumably of the bride
and groom. As usual with Garrett, the detail was exquisite. The two beautiful
young heads in their gossamer bower looked three-dimensional, like holographs.
Logically, then, at some point in seeing the portraits through the glass they
should have superimposed over each other. They did not. No matter how we turned
the bowl, the two images never crossed. They lay on one side of each other until
they almost touched, then abruptly jumped to the other side.
I tried again and again to superimpose the images,
turning the bowl repeatedly. "It's some trick of diffraction, isn't it, Garrett?
How did you do it?"
"I don't know." He caught his
lip between his teeth.
"No trick," Aletheia said.
"It is what is." She padded away up the stairs.
I
followed, leaving Garrett staring into the bowl in fascination.
Aletheia must have headed straight for the balcony.
I found her there leaning against the rail, looking up at the snow-capped peaks.
Afternoon light played purple and blue over her hair and soaked into her skin,
intensifying the glow until she looked almost incandescent. Around us curled a
cool breeze filled with the scent of mountain pine, the laughing voices of the
tourists window-shopping along the street below, and the mixed chorus of a dozen
sonic sculptures in the studio opposite.
"I do
nothing to the glass," Aletheia said, without looking at me.
I started. "You only prophesy and read minds."
She stroked the railing. "I don't prophesy. What is,
is."
"That's how you plan to heal Garrett?"
Now she looked around, though she barely glanced at
me before her focus slipped. "I never said I could heal him. Help him, though,
yes."
"He thinks you have a cure. He says your name
means 'the healer.'"
It came out more accusingly
than I intended. Her gaze focused, and the intensity made her eyes glitter more
jewel-like than ever. Light shimmered gold and pink around her skin. "He
believes what he wishes to believe. He doesn't think clearly." She sighed. "He
doesn't ask the right questions."
The light from her
was beginning to give me a headache. I frowned irritably. "What questions? What
do questions have to do with helping him?"
"I cannot
seek. I must be sought. I am Aletheia."
I am
Aletheia. She said it like a title. Names. Something jogged in my head, but
of course when I tried to identify it, it slipped out of reach.
I stared into the amethyst eyes for a minute,
groping in vain for the elusive thought, then left the balcony and went back
downstairs. Garrett had returned to painting the coupe.
"Part of my luggage is still at the cabletrain
station," I told him. "I'm going after it."
He
nodded without looking up.
But I went to the
library, not the station.
* *
*
Aletheia had
supper ready by the time I returned to the studio. It was a brief, quiet affair.
Garrett bolted his food so he could go back to work, and Aletheia stared at and
through him into whatever other dimension she saw. I ate in silence, too,
wondering what to do with the information I had learned. Saying anything could
destroy the relief Garrett thought Aletheia brought. Silence, on the other hand,
would only sharpen his despair when the "cure" failed.
And on the other, third hand, I could not stay
forever, and what might happen to him when I finally left him with this mad-eyed
woman?
Afterward, I followed Garrett downstairs and
sat watching while he fused another layer of glass on the coupe.
"A commission?" I asked.
He looked up from the coupe and gas torch, eyes
purple behind the didymium lenses of his goggles. "The winner's cup for the
Diana Mountain Road Race next week. It's their seventy-fifth year and they
wanted something nostalgic and appropriately commemorative."
"A coupe is certainly appropriate for a road race."
Admittedly, the humor was feeble, but I expected him
to at least smile. He did not.
I bit my lip, then
taking a deep breath, asked, "Who told you Aletheia's name means 'the healer'?"
Garrett did not answer immediately. The flame of his
torch flared from blue to blinding orange against the glass. Through the
goggles, though, I knew it would look only pink. After a minute, he said, "It's
something I remember from when Mother was pregnant with you, a discussion about
names and what they mean. Why?"
"Because I looked it
up. Althea means 'the healer.'"
The orange
blaze washed across the bowl of the coupe. "So? Her name is a variation."
I was tempted to leave the matter at that. The truth
might well do him more harm than good. Then I thought again of the strange woman
upstairs with her opalescent skin and eyes focused on Otherness. "No.
Aletheia means 'the truth.'" I took a breath. "Garrett, you haven't
called up some healing spirit. Whoever Aletheia is and wherever she comes from,
she's mad. I think she believes that she is her name, that she is the
personification of Truth. However she did that trick with the wedding bowl, she
did it to support her fantasy."
"Fantasy." He looked
up then. Lifted from the bowl, the torch flame dimmed to blue again. "I forgot
to tell you. After you left for the station I called the Kimbroughs to tell them
the bowl was ready. The wedding's off. The bride eloped this afternoon with
another man."
He had gone back to the coupe and the
goosebumps had subsided on my spine before it occurred to me to point that
prophesies did not make a healer. By that time it was too late, though; Garrett
had soundproofed himself with concentration.
* *
*
I might have
brought up the subject again later as the three of us sat out on the balcony
sometime after midnight, watching the blaze of stars overhead and listening to
the chorus of sonic sculptures across the way fade into silence. The opalescent
paleness of Aletheia's skin shone misty in the darkness, turning her to a
phantom curled cross-legged in a basket chair.
She
tilted back her head and breathed deeply. "It's good here. Artists ask deep
questions, and honestly desire answers. In too much of the world I have been
twisted and raped by people who consider Truth something to be tailored to
order."
I wanted to poke Garrett. See? Listen to
the voice of unreason. But I did not. That wedding had been canceled, and
Aletheia understood Garrett. He believed what he wanted to. As long as he
thought this strange woman gave him a weapon to fight fate, I could tell him
nothing.
Up the street, a whoop of group laughter
broke the quiet. A sonic sculpture whined in response, setting off others, a
ripple of sleepy sharps and flats spreading down the street ahead of the
merrymakers like a bow wave. As they neared us, I recognized several as
Garrett's neighbors I had met on previous visits, including Caroline
Edmund-Leigh, the holosymphony composer, and poet Tony Jubal.
They halted below us and Tony called up, "Did you
know you're a modern oracle?"
Garrett blinked.
"What?"
"Darius Miller's new play, The Man In the
Concrete Glider, opened tonight at the Blue Orion Theatre in Gateside with Kelsi
Ferris in the leading role."
"A role the gossip
columns say Maya Chaplain moved heaven and earth to land," Caroline added in the
tone of one savoring something delicious. "Didn't I see Maya in your studio a
couple of weeks ago buying a crystal egg?"
"Yes,"
Garrett replied slowly.
"Well," Tony drawled, "after
the opening we attended the cast party, and Kelsi told us that 'someone' sent
her a crystal egg just before the show opened, with an unsigned card in it
reading 'A wish for you and all the cast.' Only a strange thing happened. Kelsi
picked up the egg and was holding it, and she swears it looked perfect, not a
crack anywhere in it, when it suddenly fell into a dozen pieces in her hands."
"And the play didn't lay an egg," another of the
women said. "The word from inside sources is that the critics started raving as
they left the theater."
My breath stuck in my chest.
Aletheia laughed, a ringing sound as clear as tapped
crystal. "Glass is wonderful, so responsive. They should have thought of it at
Delphi and Dodona."
"Delphi glass," Tony said. "I
like the sound of that. I think I'll use it in my next poem."
The group trooped on. Garrett stared after them
until they turned the corner out of sight, then turned to Aletheia. "You knew.
When Miss Chaplain picked up the egg, you said 'It won't do her any good.'" He
smiled thinly. "Do you still think she's mad, Dane?"
Not mad, no, but... "I don't know what she is."
Darkness turned Aletheia's eyes to obsidian, but
they still glittered, reflecting the light from below. "I am Aletheia."
Garrett's smile vanished, uncertainty suddenly in
his eyes as he watched Aletheia. Was he remembering what I told him her name
meant? My gut knotted in sympathy and self-recrimination. Why had I said
anything? At least he had had hope before.
This
is better for him, though.
The words sounded so
clearly in my head that I thought Aletheia spoke aloud, but when I glanced
toward her, her lips never moved. I stared, then frowned angrily. Better! How
could this be better?
Aletheia smiled. In my head
her voice said, Watch.
* *
*
I watched. Over
the next few days I watched Garrett throwing himself into his work with grim
haste. I watched Aletheia. And I watched the glass, examining each piece before
and after annealing. Sometimes they changed. When Aletheia put them in the oven,
pieces came out with designs that had not been present before.
Like the vase a woman commissioned as a gift for her
very wealthy fiancé. Garrett etched her portrait into the crystal, and from the
front her stunning beauty showed to perfection. At any other angle, however, the
face twisted, revealing vanity, selfishness, and avarice.
And like the Road Race coupe.
Aletheia's soft intake of breath brought both
Garrett and me running to bend anxiously over the coupe.
At first I wondered what she had seen. The original
design appeared intact. The shapes of antique race cars drifted all through the
streaked glass, some visible on the outside surface, some from inside the bowl,
others as phantoms below the surface, like memories half-forgotten, or
competitors obscured by dust. Turning the coupe produced neither new shapes in
the glass nor altered the ones already there. Then I noticed the light. Coming
through the bowl it looked not golden but pulsing, flickering scarlet, and where
it danced around the cars, the silhouettes sank into twisted frames stained a
bloody red.
My gut knotted. Another addition to the
Delphi collection?
"What kind of disaster are you
wishing on us this time?" Garrett said softly.
Aletheia regarded him solemnly. "I don't make the
future. What is, is."
Garrett traced the rim of the
coupe, following the bead with his finger... around and around and around.
*
* *
The day of the race, we watched it on
television, but not like most viewers, I am sure. We sat in silence, Garrett's
and my eyes fixed intently on the screen. Apprehension chased along my spine.
Aletheia-- I wish I knew what Aletheia felt or saw. She curled
cross-legged in a dark armchair that intensified her glowing pallor, face
expressionless, hands relaxed in her lap, jewel eyes focused past the television
on... whatever.
For three-quarters of its distance,
the race went well. A car spun out here and there. A French car scraped the
barrier at the edge of the drop-off on the outside of a sharp switchback. One
American's tire blew out. A billowing cloud of white smoke announced the demise
of an Italian engine. None of it serious, except perhaps in the viewpoint of the
Italian, who stormed around his car with waving arms, shouting a diatribe as
histrionic and rhythmic as an operatic aria.
Then
the lead cars reached Scorpion Turn.
The front tires
on Victor Dietrich's Porsche dissolved simultaneously in flying shreds of
rubber. Seconds later the car was spinning across the road and into the inner
wall, rebounding from that in a leaping roll that brought it down on two
following cars. An orange fireball enveloped the three. A passing car trying to
avoid the pileup skidded sideways, through the guardrail and into emptiness.
Everything behind the fire vanished from the TV
camera's sight, but in the end, the statistics came to four drivers dead, three
others hospitalized.
Garrett slammed his fist down
on the arm of the couch. "I should have said something. I should have warned
them!"
"You can't change the future, either,"
Aletheia said distantly.
He came to his feet,
whirling on her. "Then what are you doing here! Who and what are you?"
She sighed. "If you refuse to know, how can I ever
help you?"
Garrett exploded, as suddenly and lividly
as the racing cars. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he jerked Aletheia out of the
chair and to her feet. "What the hell can Truth do for me!" he shouted. "Will
you prophesy my end, tell me the measure of my productive days? Is that supposed
to help me!"
She looked up at him with
compassion. "The right questions will help you."
"Questions." Face contorted in rage and
dispair, Garrett shook her. "Damn your questions!"
Aletheia's head snapped back and forth. Galvanized
by the memory of our father's murderous rages, I leaped at Garrett. "Stop it!
Let her go before you kill her!"
We went down on the
floor in a tangle. Somehow, though, Aletheia peeled clear. From the corner of my
eye I saw her retreating across the room to watch us with glittering eyes.
Garrett thrashed under me, kicking and swinging, but he managed only one good
connection that left my head ringing before I pinned both his arms. He might be
the older, the smarter, the more gifted, but I was always faster and stronger.
He struggled a minute more, then went limp. "Dane.
Oh, god, Dane."
The cry of anguish stabbed through
my gut. I hugged him fiercely, searching for something comforting and reassuring
to say... something that would reassure me, too. "It's all right. You've got
Claudia and me. No matter what comes, however unthinkable, we'll face it
together."
His shudders stopped. "Face?" Suddenly he
sat up and pulled away to where he could look at me. "Face. That's it." He
twisted to look at Aletheia. "The question?"
She
smiled faintly.
He rolled to his feet and headed for
the stairs.
I started to follow, but a fever-hot
hand caught my arm. "Please don't. Let him work."
I
looked around into the amethyst eyes. They focused on me and remained there,
intense, earnest... fiercely happy. I stared at her. "What question?"
Regret dimmed her eyes only a little. "A private
one."
I fought a desire to shake her, too. "Is it
the right one? Do you promise this will really help him?"
The heat of her hand seared my arm. "I promise."
* * *
I gave him his privacy. That did not stop me
from speculating on what he could be making, though. My best guess was a
self-portrait in glass, to see exactly what he faced and how soon.
Garrett worked the rest of the day and through the
night. The several times I woke, I heard voices and movement below. But in the
morning I found him in the kitchen clear-eyed and singing while he made toast
and coffee.
Astonishment and relief washed through
me. I wanted to hug Aletheia. She had been right. "You must have liked the
answer. What was the question?"
He only smiled and
left the toaster long enough to put a shoe box on the top shelf of a cupboard.
Then it dawned on me that he was cooking.
"Where's Aletheia?"
"Gone." He turned to smile at me
again. "And you should be going, too. You have your work. So do I."
Could he really be the anguished brother of
yesterday? "What did you see in the glass?"
He
hesitated only a moment. "Freedom. Come on, finish up. I'll help you pack and
walk you to the cabletrain station."
We walked,
joking and laughing with an ease we had not enjoyed for years. It was a
beautiful morning, I remember, cool and golden. I left him on the platform,
luminous with contentment.
* *
*
A month later Claudia called again to tell me
Garrett had died of a self-administered barbiturate overdose.
He willed me the studio "...in the hope you'll stop
squandering your talent on the sterility of laboratory glass and produce
something more worthy of your blood."
I turned in my
resignation and took possession of the studio.
And
even before unpacking the suitcases, I headed for the kitchen. The shoe box no
longer sat on the shelf where I had seen Garrett put it, however. I swore. Now I
would have to search the entire house and studio.
"That isn't necessary," a voice said behind me. "I
took it to keep the police from finding it."
I had
not heard her come in, but it did not surprise me to find Aletheia there. I
turned to look into amethyst eyes. "You must not have gone far."
"I am never very far away." She handed over the shoe
box.
My hands shook a bit as I laid it on the
counter and opened it. Tissue wrapped the object inside. I stripped it off...
and caught my breath.
Garrett had spent that night
making a goblet, blown in the same streaky amber glass as the Road Race coupe,
and he had put a face on it, but not his. The empty eye sockets and lipless
mouth of a sculpted death's-head leered at me from the glass.
I looked up from it to Aletheia. She smiled past me,
radiating light, eyes askance as ever... but somehow no longer looking mad.
Slowly, I looked down at the goblet again and turned
it to the position the shape of the rim would force a drinker to use. That put
the death's-head on the opposite side, where the skull cast a shadow through the
glass. Tilting the goblet, though, the skull softened into a face, sexless
but... attractive, friendly... compassionate. What did you see in the
glass? I whispered in memory. Freedom, Garrett's voice replied.
Perhaps he should have said victory. Tipping the goblet farther, the face
vanished, replaced by an almost blinding--
A hand took the goblet away. "You don't need that
truth yet," Aletheia said.
I drew in a breath. "Will
I?"
She looked up at me, into me, smiling faintly.
"You don't really want to know." Her hand touched mine as she handed back the
goblet. "For the time you may, however."
I rewrapped
it and put the box up in the cupboard. When I turned back around to thank her,
Aletheia had vanished.
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