Page 144 of White Lights
“Who?”
“A drifter your brother met one night at the Badwater Saloon. Mo was going to steal your family’s money for a cheap high. But he was bringing a man who would have hurt you, like he’s hurt other women. So I sent Jet in his place.”
“Jet?”
“Of course, your brother couldn’t see Jet. Only a handful of mortals have ever been able to see us outside abarbelo.Yousaw Jet, but Mo thought his partner was wasted on the street somewhere, that he was left to do the job alone. Jet never interacted with your brother—not untilyouburned him and brought him to the precipice of death. Only then could he sense the angel holding him aloft.”
“But I took that guy’s eye out,” Dez says, staring at her hand as if the jellied eyeball is still there in it.
“Yes. You did. Jet had a hell of a time looking for it. Never found it though.”
He had an accident over break,Yael had told Dez.Before that, he was a Visionary.
Dez makes a gagging noise, piecing the horrible evening together. That feeling of wrenching out the eyeball. The sound it made. The warm wet of it in her hand.
The strange, old-fashioned gun he’d been holding. Was it a gun at all? And his eyes. One pale blue. One inky black.
One of them is a replacement.
Dez has the original in a pill bottle under her mattress. Jet looked for it but never found it, because it’s been with her all along.
At a school where eyes are used for security clearance, for access to the Vault and more.
And that’s why he was switched this year from Visionary to Scribe.
“Zeke got him a replacement from a frag,” Rafe explains, “but he’s never been quite the same.”
“Why did you do it?” she says to Rafe.
Rafe sighs. “You were already going to be so angry at Mo after he tried to rob the Dairy Barn. Which was very useful for me, having you estranged from your closest tie to home. But it wouldn’t be so useful if you got yourself killed that night, trying to fend off some deranged stoner. I kept you alive. Safe.”
“The gun Jet used—”
“A chronophotographic gun. Doesn’t fire bullets. Captures video. A fascinating invention, and we’ve got the whole night on film—”
“Then you just drove up on that motorcycle …” Dez whispers in a daze.
“And introduced myself,” he says, unashamed. “It was an opportune moment. You were gonna say yes to Acheron, no matter how absurd the offer was.”
“But Mo,” Dez whispers faintly, gripping a pine tree bough for support.
“Jet’s intervention was meant to be the Inciting Incident in this still-unfolding saga, the plot point that spun both our stories in a new direction. But there was a twist I hadn’t anticipated. Your will to protect your brother.”
Dez is apoplectic. She doesn’t even know where to start.
“There was never a committee who selected me,” she says. She cannotcatch her breath. “No one sawGlimpse. If they had, they wouldn’t have cared.”
“I was the committee,” Rafe says. “I sawGlimpse. I cared.”
She looks up to stare at him. She sees a stranger. “Not as much as you care about yourself.”
“That’s true,” he acknowledges. “But who really cares about anything more than they care about themselves?”
Dez swallows, choking back tears. “Icared about Mo. I loved him. And if you hadn’t ruined everything, he’d still be alive.”
“Yes. But you’d be dead. I saved you from a brief, meaningless life. And I made you a filmmaker, a storyteller, instead of merely a receiver of one tragic little story in a premature Life Review.”
“Shut up. Just stop talking for a minute.”
