The Glimpse
Chapter 16 · 4,071 words
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Not stall — plateau. Ninety-three percent. The number hasn't moved in four days. The last seven percent requires a variable you can't calculate from the desk: the real-time resonance response between your cells and MC's Aether Core under active portal conditions. Theory gets you to ninety-three. The rest requires doing.
You spend three days trying to work around it. Alternative equations, parallel models, mathematical substitutions that might close the gap without closing the gap. You fill pages. You cross them out. You fill more pages. You cross those out too. The steno absorbs dead end after dead end in spider-ink shorthand, and the shorthand gets less precise as the days pass — your handwriting deteriorating from controlled to cramped to something that looks like a person arguing with herself on paper.
Day one hundred and twenty-nine. You throw the notebook.
Not the steno — one of the working notebooks, the one with the resonance models that don't converge. You pick it up from the desk and throw it into the bin under the kitchen counter. Hard. The sound is louder than it should be — composite cover hitting metal, pages crumpling, the particular crash of weeks of failed work landing where it belongs.
MC looks up from the couch.
The apartment is quiet. The refrigerator hums. The city breathes outside the window.
"Bad calculation?" MC says.
You stare at the bin. At the notebook with its spine bent, pages folded against themselves. At the work that isn't enough because enough requires telling the truth to a woman who will say yes when you need her to say no.
You've been carrying this since day seventy-eight. Fifty-one days of knowing that her heart is the door and you are the key. Fifty-one days of calculations in a language she can't read. Twenty-eight days of scanning her heartbeat without her knowing. Eleven days of calibrating against her while she sat on that couch reading reports, trusting you, thinking you were working on theoretical research while your body was learning how to use her.
Fifty-one days. And the calculations are stuck at ninety-three percent because you can't do the last seven percent without her, and you can't ask for the last seven percent without telling her the first ninety-three.
"I need to talk to you," you say.
You sit at the kitchen counter. MC sits across from you. Two mugs of tea between you — hers made the way she always makes it, yours made the way she learned you like it. The domesticity of it makes this harder.
You don't ease into it. You don't build context or lay groundwork. You open the steno to the fourteen pages of portal calculations and you put them on the counter between the mugs and you say it:
"Your Aether Core is a dimensional anchor. It broadcasts a frequency across the barrier between this dimension and others. If I can match that frequency with my cells, I can build a resonance bridge. The bridge becomes a portal. The portal takes me home."
MC looks at the steno. She can't read it — the shorthand is yours, opaque to everyone in this city. But she can see the density of it. The pages filled edge to edge, line after line, the obsessive precision of someone who has been building something in secret for weeks.
"The cost," you say, "is you."
You tell her the rest. The extraction protocol — how your cells would interface with her Aether Core, draw energy from it, use her heart as the lock while your body turns the key. The stability calculations — probably survivable, probably not fatal, the word probably sitting in the mathematics like a crack in a foundation. The risk: destabilisation. Her heart stuttering again. The memories you unlocked fragmenting back into fog.
You tell her about the scanner. The passive array hidden in the casing, calibrated to her frequency range. The two weeks of recording her heartbeat while she slept, while she cooked, while she read on the couch. The eleven days of live calibration — sitting six metres away, your cells learning her frequency while she talked about her day at the Association.
"I mapped your heart without telling you," you say. "For twenty-eight days. I had the data before I had your permission."
The words sit on the counter between the mugs. You wait.
MC is quiet for a long time. Her hands are around her tea. Her face carries something you haven't catalogued before — not surprise, not anger. Something slower. Something that looks like a woman absorbing information she already half-knew, fitting the shape of it against the shape of the suspicion she's been carrying since the night you pinned a frequency chart to the wall and took it down the next morning.
"You could have kept going," she says. "You could have finished the calculations and used the frequency and I would never have known until it was over."
"Yes."
"But you stopped."
"The calculations are stuck at ninety-three percent. I can't finish without—"
"That's not why you stopped."
You look at her. She looks back. Steady. The heartbeat you mapped for twenty-eight days, beating with the rhythm you gave it.
"No," you say. "That's not why I stopped."
MC picks up her tea. Drinks. Sets it down. Her hands are steady — steadier than yours.
"Go home," she says. "Find your fiancé. I'll be fine."
You stare at her.
She says it the way she says everything — steady, certain, the particular conviction of a woman who has already decided and is simply informing you of the outcome. Take what you need. Go home. I'll be fine. She means it. Completely, genuinely, without a single flinch.
And it's wrong. The ease of it is wrong. The speed of it is wrong. She should be angry. She should be demanding explanations, asking why you hid it, telling you to get out of her apartment. She should be protecting herself. Instead she's sitting across from you with her tea and her steady hands and her unguarded face, offering you her heart like it's a bus ticket.
"That's the issue, MC." Your voice comes out rougher than you intended. "I don't want it. Not like this."
She blinks. "Not like what?"
"Like it costs you nothing. Like your heart is something you can hand over between sips of tea." You press your palms flat on the counter. "I just told you I've been mapping your heartbeat for a month without your knowledge. I just told you using your Aether Core might break the thing I fixed. And you sit there and say I'll be fine like you're lending me a jacket."
"It's my heart. I get to decide what I do with it."
"And what about what it does to ME?" The words are out before you can stop them. Louder than anything you've said in this apartment. "You say yes and I carry that. Across a dimensional barrier, into a life that's supposed to be the thing I'm fighting for. I carry the fact that a woman who feeds me dinner said take my heart and go and I TOOK it. That's not—" You stop. Breathe. "I wanted you to say no."
MC is quiet. Her hands are still around her mug. Her eyes haven't left yours.
"I know," she says. Softer now. "But I'm not going to say no to save you from feeling guilty about something I'm choosing."
The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. The city breathes.
"You sat at that desk for fifty-one days carrying this alone," she says, "because you were afraid I'd say yes. You were right. I'm saying yes." She pauses. "Not because it costs me nothing. Because it costs me less than watching you live here like someone who's already gone."
You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again.
"That's..." You look at the counter. At the mugs. At your hands flat on the surface. "That's... fair. Yeah."
It's the least articulate thing you've said in one hundred and twenty-nine days. It's the most honest.
That night, you don't write the day number in the steno.
You've written it every night since you arrived. Every single night — the count, the tally, the running total of days spent in a place you don't belong. One hundred and twenty-nine marks in a notebook, each one a reminder that you're temporary, that this isn't real, that every morning is one morning closer to the morning you leave.
You sit at the desk with the pen in your hand and the page open and you don't write it.
You don't know what that means yet.
The calculations are complete within the week.
The last seven percent falls into place over four days of work that is different from every day before it. Not secretive. Not stolen. MC knows what you're doing now — knows the steno holds portal mathematics, knows the scanner is mapping her heart, knows that every evening on the couch is a calibration session. She doesn't change her routine. She sits where she always sits, reads what she always reads, makes tea the way she always makes it. She gives you her heart's frequency the way she gives you everything else: without hesitation, without condition, without making you feel the weight of it even though the weight is enormous.
You recognise what she's doing. That's the part that hurts.
You recognise it because you used to do it yourself. At home — your real home, the one with the cobblestones and the linden trees — you were this person. When your mother worked double shifts and came home with her eyes half-closed, you were the one who made her sit down, made her eat, turned off the lights and stood in the doorway until she slept. When your sister burned through another deadline and stopped eating properly, you were the one who showed up with food she didn't ask for and silence she didn't have to fill. When your partner hit the wall — the quiet kind, the kind that looks like functioning but isn't — you were the one who noticed before he did. And when something was off with your friend's cat — the way it sat too still, ate too little, watched the room with the wrong kind of patience — you were the one who said take her to the vet before anyone else saw it.
You know what healing looks like when it's given without being asked for. You know the rhythm of it — the steady presence, the refusal to make it about yourself, the particular discipline of caring for someone without needing them to acknowledge that you're doing it.
MC does it the way you used to do it. The same instinct, the same quiet architecture of kindness. And you're on the wrong side of it now. Not the healer — the healed. Not the one who carries — the one being carried. At home, you were your own version of MC. Here, you're just one of the many people she holds together with her steady hands and her jacket and her tea.
It hurts. Not the sharp hurt of the nosebleeds and the cellular burnout. The slow hurt of recognising yourself in someone else's generosity and knowing that right now, in this dimension, you are the opposite of what you used to be.
The resonance models converge. The interface protocol completes. Page twenty-eight, the last variable solved at four in the morning while MC sleeps — not secretly this time, just quietly, the way you always work at night.
One hundred percent.
You close the notebook. You still don't feel triumph.
The location takes two days to find.
Not the cold room — too small, too enclosed. A portal is a tear in dimensional fabric, and dimensional fabric doesn't tear quietly. You need space. You need isolation. You need somewhere that won't collapse on you if the physics goes wrong.
You find it on the eastern edge of the industrial district: an abandoned power substation, decommissioned three years ago. Concrete and steel, built to contain industrial-scale energy. The walls are thick. The floor is reinforced. The nearest occupied structure is four hundred metres away.
MC comes with you to check the location on day one hundred and thirty-four. She walks the interior in silence — twenty metres by thirty, open floor plan, concrete pillars at six-metre intervals, skylight panels half-covered in grime. She doesn't ask if this is safe. She's a Hunter. She can read a tactical environment faster than you can scan one. She checks the exits, the structural integrity, the sight lines. She nods once.
"When?" she says.
"Tomorrow night."
She nods again. No argument. No last-minute plea.
You eat. Three full meals from Kwon's leftovers, plus the calorie bars you've been stockpiling for weeks. Your body will burn through everything you give it. Better to start full.
Day one hundred and thirty-five. Just past midnight.
You stand in the centre of the substation. Concrete under your boots. Darkness above, broken by the grey wash of city light through the skylights. Your scanner is on your waistband, set to record. Your steno is in your jacket pocket.
MC stands fifteen metres behind you, near the wall. Far enough to be outside the predicted energy radius. Close enough to reach you if you fall. She's wearing her Hunter jacket — not the Association uniform, the personal one. The one she wrapped around you the first time. Her arms are crossed. Her face is controlled. Her heart beats — steady, stable, the rhythm you gave her broadcasting the frequency you need.
You look at her over your shoulder.
"If something goes wrong—"
"I know," she says. "I'm staying."
You close your eyes.
The frequency is there — mapped into your cells over eleven days of proximity, given freely for four more after the conversation at the kitchen counter. It's not a recording anymore. It's muscle memory. Cellular memory. The particular resonance of an Aether Core broadcasting its signal across dimensions, and your body knows it the way your lungs know breathing. And this time the signal isn't recorded — it's live, fifteen metres behind you, beating in the chest of a woman who is watching you try to leave her.
You begin.
The pulling starts in your chest. Not the gentle tug of a surface shift — not the skin-deep change you used in the metro, or the electromagnetic camouflage on the intersection. This is deeper. Fundamental. Your cells reaching for a frequency that exists below the level of matter, below energy, below the fabric of the dimension you're standing in. A frequency that says here is a fixed point and your body answering I am the road.
The structural cold hits at minute two. Not the cold of temperature — the cold of your cells rewriting themselves at a level you've never pushed to before. Your bones ache. Your vision blurs. Your nose bleeds — both nostrils, fast, the warm copper taste hitting the back of your throat before you can wipe it.
You don't stop.
The resonance builds. You feel it — the standing wave forming between your cells and the frequency you carry, the bridge extending from your body toward a destination you can't see. The mathematics said this would work. The mathematics said your cells could become a living dimensional engine, capable of tearing a hole in the barrier between here and there.
The mathematics didn't mention how much it would hurt.
Minute four. Your hands are shaking. Your knees are shaking. The pulling in your chest becomes a tearing — not metaphorical, not symbolic. You can feel the dimensional barrier resisting, the fabric of reality pushing back against the thing your body is trying to do. You are a key turning in a lock that doesn't want to open, and the lock is fighting you, and the key is your skeleton and your blood and every cell in your body screaming in a frequency that shouldn't exist in this world.
Behind you, MC's hand moves to her chest. She doesn't make a sound. But you feel it through the resonance bridge — a flutter in the live signal, a momentary stutter in the heartbeat you're drawing from. The Aether Core responding to the pull.
Minute five.
The portal opens.
It doesn't look like a door.
It looks like a wound. A vertical tear in the air three metres in front of you, two metres tall, edges rippling with energy that your scanner would classify as undefined because nothing in this dimension's physics has a category for what this is. The edges glow — not light, not heat. Something between. The colour of the space between stars, the colour of the inside of your eyelids when you press your palms against your eyes.
And through the wound: home.
You see it in fragments. Not a clear window — the portal shimmers, distorts, tears and re-forms. But the fragments are enough. More than enough. Each one is a knife.
Your street. The cobblestones you walked every morning for six years, the particular unevenness of the third block from the corner where the city never fixed the drainage. The lamppost on the corner — the one with the dent where a delivery truck backed into it the year you moved in. The bakery across the road with the green awning.
The light. Not Linkon City's blue-white LED wash. Your light. The warm sodium glow of streetlamps that haven't been replaced because the neighbourhood committee voted against it, because the warm light is part of the character, because some things are worth keeping even when they're inefficient.
The smell. The portal carries it — or your body remembers it so completely that the bridge fills in what's missing. Rain on warm stone. Linden trees in late summer. The particular scent of a city that runs on different fuel, breathes different air, exists in a dimension where the sky has the right number of stars.
Behind you, MC is silent. But you know she can see it. She's seeing another world through the wound you tore in hers.
You take a step forward. The portal shimmers. The image solidifies for three seconds — long enough to see the building. Your building. Fourth floor, second window from the left. The curtains are different. Someone changed the curtains.
The curtains are different and the light is on and someone is living in your apartment and the cobblestones are the same and the lamppost is the same and the bakery is the same and the world kept going without you.
One hundred and thirty-five days. Your world kept going for one hundred and thirty-five days without you and someone changed the curtains.
Your vision blurs. Not from the nosebleed — from something worse. Something that has nothing to do with your cells and everything to do with the fact that home is three metres away and you can smell it and you can't touch it because the portal is already shaking.
The instability starts at the edges.
You feel it before you see it — a vibration in the standing wave, a dissonance in the frequency your body is maintaining. The resonance isn't holding. The bridge is cracking, not at the destination end but at yours. Your cells are burning. The dimensional engine that your body became is consuming itself — fuel and machine and operator all made of the same material, all destroying each other at the same rate.
The portal flickers. Home vanishes — returns — vanishes. Each flicker is a spike of pain that starts in your chest and radiates outward through your bones, your muscles, the spaces between your cells where the rewriting is eating through your reserves like fire through paper.
Behind you, MC makes a sound. Small. Involuntary. Her hand presses harder against her chest. The resonance bridge is pulling — not just from the frequency you memorised, but from the live source fifteen metres away. The Aether Core is responding to the portal's instability, trying to compensate, and MC is feeling it in the organ you fixed on day one.
Your scanner screams. The high-pitched alarm that means energy output exceeds survivable parameters. You set that alarm yourself. You calibrated it to your own cellular limits. You know what it means.
Approximately ninety seconds before your body burns through its last reserves and the dimensional engine collapses.
Ninety seconds. Home is three metres away. The cobblestones and the lamppost and the green awning and the window with the wrong curtains. Ninety seconds to step through — to feel the cobblestones under your boots, to breathe the right air, to walk up four flights of stairs and knock on a door that might not be yours anymore.
Behind you, MC breathes through the pain in her chest and doesn't tell you to stop.
Ninety seconds.
You don't move.
Not because you're afraid. Not because the pain is too much. You don't move because you can hear MC's breathing change — shorter, tighter, the particular rhythm of someone whose heart is being pulled by a force it was never meant to sustain. The mathematics is clear. Your cells aren't regulating the process. If you step through a failing portal, the collapse will send a shockwave back through the bridge to its anchor. MC's Aether Core. Her heart. She gave you permission. She's standing fifteen metres behind you, letting it happen.
She said yes. She is paying the price of her yes, right now, with her hand pressed against her chest and her breath catching, and she's not telling you to stop because she meant it when she said go home, find your fiancé, I'll be fine.
You can't do this to her.
Not probably. Not the calculations suggest. You can hear her breathing and you can't do this to her.
Sixty seconds.
You look at home. You look at the lamppost and the bakery and the window. You smell the rain on warm stone and the linden trees and you let yourself have three more seconds of it.
Three seconds.
Then you close it.
Closing the portal is worse than opening it.
Opening it was a tear — violent, sudden, your cells ripping a hole in reality. Closing it is a withdrawal. You have to pull your frequency back, cell by cell, dismantling the bridge from your end while the dimensional barrier rushes in to fill the gap. It's like pulling your hand out of a closing door — the door doesn't care about your hand. The barrier doesn't care about your cells. It snaps shut with a force that your body was never designed to absorb.
The implosion hits you at the sternum.
Not a sound — a pressure. The air in the substation compresses and releases in a single pulse that cracks the skylights above you and sends pigeons scattering into the night. The concrete under your feet fractures in a starburst pattern radiating outward from where you stand. Your scanner dies. Your nose bleeds from both nostrils, and then your ears bleed, and then something inside your chest makes a sound you've never heard before — a wet, structural sound, like a load-bearing wall giving way.
You hit the concrete. Knees first, then hands, then sideways onto your shoulder. The pain is everywhere and nowhere — too large to localise, too fundamental to process. Your cells have stopped. Not slowed, not weakened. Stopped. The engine that you built from your own body has burned through its fuel and now the machine is dark and cold and you can't feel the pulling in your chest because there's nothing left to pull.
The last thing you register before the dark takes you: footsteps. Running. The sound of boots on cracked concrete, fifteen metres closing to zero. Hands on your shoulders — careful, strong, the hands of a woman who knows how to handle a body that's been broken.
Something warm around your shoulders. A jacket. The same jacket.
MC's voice, close, steady, refusing to shake: "I'm here. Stay with me. I'm here."
The concrete is cold under your cheek. The jacket is warm on your back. Home is gone. The portal is gone. The smell of rain on warm stone is gone.
Your body is silent. Your cells are dark. The key is broken.
MC's heart beats against your shoulder where she holds you — steady, stable, the rhythm you gave her. Still beating. Still here.
You close your eyes.
You don't count the day.