· TRISTAN ·
Eternity stretched before him from the bend of reality that had once been the painted room hearth, and it looked like a lot of things. Like space. Like the night sky from his bedroom window. Like a twinkle half remembered in his mother’s eye. Like the shine of a diamond, the halting way he’d made and broken a promise. Like the dots of a message still typing, an answer yet to come.
Whatever Dalton was coaxing from the emptiness of space looked precisely like Nico’s diagram, too, which annoyed Tristan, ignited him, made him furious. The kind of fury that felt like elation. The kind of fury that made him suddenly ravenous. As if he’d waited his whole life to swallow it whole.
He saw stars and he saw planets. He saw emptiness, and it was full of space. He saw the many endless doors of his imaginings, he felt fear that tasted like sunrise, he understood what he was born for.
This. Exultant with it. He was born for this.
He reached and he was weightless, too heavy to fall, too lovely to burn. For the first time in his life Tristan Caine felt no hatred, no regrets. He understood something important, which was that he did not matter, and it was freeing because, in that moment, he was free. He didn’t matter! He didn’t have to matter! Nico was right, the whole world was an accordion of secrets, nobody mattered after all. Not Tristan, not his pain, not his pleasure. He would feel this moment of bliss and eventually it would pass. It would live and die and in the meantime, he would bear witness.
He saw it all, he was a witness, he existed, he was there!
. . .
Only for a moment did he falter. An error, something short-circuiting, a spark in a flurry of static while Tristan reached out to part the curtain of reality, to finally see behind the cosmic veil.
Amid all this glory, all this triumph, a split second of weakness. A hair’s breadth of shame.
What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes, and who will you betray to do it?
Tristan’s heart hammered in his chest. Dull thuds of consecration.
Libby’s voice. The same and different.
I don’t know, she said, and I don’t care.
. . .
As Tristan Caine’s fingers grazed the fabric of impossibility, past and present chased each other’s tails, catching up with him at last.
He saw it all because he was a witness.
He saw it all because he was there.
