The Hidden Truth
966 Words
POV: Zara Lay
He didn't let go of my wrist.
I noticed that first, that he held it carefully, the way you held something you were afraid of dropping rather than something you were afraid of.
He turned my arm toward the light again, and the symbols shifted with the angle, brightening slightly, as if they were aware of being looked at.
"Explain," I said.
He lowered my arm but didn't step back.
Close enough that I could see his expression clearly, and what I saw wasn't the controlled distance of the past two days.
He was working through something ordering information, deciding how much of it to hand over.
I waited.
"When you remembered me," he began, "you didn't simply break the Veil's effect.
You made contact with it.
Direct contact."
He looked at my wrist.
"The Veil marked you."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you are connected to it now.
Every disruption it suffers, you will feel.
Every weakening, every seal that breaks, every memory it fails to erase, passes through you first."
I looked at the marks.
They pulsed once, slowly, like a second heartbeat that hadn't asked my permission.
"And the Hunter tonight?"
"Was sent because the Veil reported a breach."
He paused.
"You are the breach."
I absorbed that.
I have a habit, in moments of significant information, of going very still while my mind sorts through implications.
My mother calls it my thinking silence.
My teachers call it unnerving.
I stood in it now and sorted: I had seen a boy, I had remembered him, and as a result I had become an antenna for a supernatural force and a target for creatures made of wrong darkness.
Because I had looked at someone and not forgotten.
"Can it be removed?" I asked.
"The mark."
The pause before his answer was answer enough.
"No," he said.
"Once marked"
"There is no turning back."
Plain. No softening, no apology.
Just the fact, because I'd asked for it and he understood I deserved to have it.
I recognised that.
Filed it.
"I am sorry," he added, after a moment.
"You did nothing to cause this."
"I know," I said.
"I looked at you.
That's all."
Something moved in his expression.
I couldn't name it.
I walked to my desk and sat down, mostly because my legs had quietly decided that standing was no longer their responsibility.
I looked at the sketch in my notebook, his face in pencil, the eyes I'd gotten slightly wrong.
I thought about the eleven-year-old version of me describing a grey-coated man to a kind doctor who'd called it imagination.
I thought about every stranger I'd deliberately taught myself to stop talking about.
Overactive imagination.
"How long have you been watching me?" I asked.
He'd moved to the wall beside the broken window.
He didn't look up.
"Long enough to know this was likely."
"That I'd remember you?"
"That eventually one of them would break through."
He glanced at me.
"You have always been able to see us.
Since you were very young.
Most people with partial immunity, and there have been very few, eventually forget on their own.
Time, distance, repetition."
A pause.
"You didn't."
I had always thought it was something wrong with me.
I didn't say that.
"What happens now?" I asked instead.
"You need to understand what you're connected to."
He turned from the window and looked at me steadily.
"The Veil is not simply a spell or a barrier.
It is ancient.
Sentient, in the way that forces become sentient when they've existed long enough.
It has rules.
Laws."
He paused.
"And it has enemies who have been waiting for exactly what happened yesterday."
"A human who remembers."
"A human who can break it."
He held my gaze.
"The Council of the Unrevealed believes you are a weapon.
The rebel faction believes you are a key.
Neither of them intends to let you simply walk away from this."
I thought about the shadows against the front wall.
The thing in my doorway with no face.
The temperature dropping so fast I could see my own breath.
"And what do you believe?" I asked.
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer.
The broken curtain shifted in the cold air from the empty window frame.
Somewhere outside, a night bird called once and went silent.
"I believe," he said finally, "that you are someone who looked at something everyone else has been trained to forget, and you simply didn't."
He picked up the darkened feather from the carpet and set it on my desk beside the notebook.
"What you are is still to be determined."
He moved toward the door.
"I'll have the window repaired before morning," he said.
"Lock your door."
"It was locked."
"Lock it anyway."
He was already gone down the hallway when I heard it, a breath, or the suggestion of one.
I crossed to the empty window frame and looked out over the street below.
Nothing moved.
I looked up.
On the rooftop of the building across the road.
A face.
A girl I recognised.
Elegant posture.
Dark hair.
The kind of composed expression that looked, from a distance, like complete calm.
Stephanie Lee.
Student council president.
Third-year.
We'd spoken maybe twice.
She stood completely still and watched my window with an expression that wasn't surprise, wasn't concern, wasn't the face of someone who had stumbled onto something unexpected.
It was the face of someone confirming a result.
Then she turned and walked away into the dark.
I stood at the broken window with the cold feather in my hand, watching the empty rooftop.
Understanding without knowing yet why I understood, that whatever had just ended was not the most dangerous part of my night.
- Writer
