“I love you,” she said. Her face was damp with tears and the
misery made her look ugly and old. She was young and pretty; at least she had
been an hour back. When she had believed that I loved her back.
I looked across the café at the barista. She was decorating
a cream topped beverage with bright pink sprinkles. The moment warped and grew sparkly
as everything became razor sharp but tinged blue, like a great TV screen going
bad. I could see the sprinkles reflected in the barista’s eyes.
I turned back to her to see if it changed the way she
looked. Her face grimaced with misery as she saw my dead eyes. She could see
the effects of the warp, but she couldn’t understand it. No one could.
I looked down at my hands. They were bathed in blue, streaky
fire. Little sparks jumped from one finger to another and bounced between my
hands. I raised my hands and looked at her. She looked miserable and confused. She
was just reacting to my vague gesture. It wasn’t
oh-my-god-your-hands-are-on-fire confusion. She couldn’t see it.
“I have to go,” I told her. She let out a sob that quickly
plummeted into a wail. My hands flared, covering my arms and then my entire
field of vision in a flickering blue hellish haze. It was out of control.
“You can’t leave,” she screamed. “I love you! I cannot live
without you! You have to tell me you love me! Say something, damn it!”
With each scream, the blue haze flickered more intensely. I was
vaguely aware of everyone in the café looking at us. I didn’t have to look
around to know that a portly man in an overly embroidered beige jacket was
demolishing the pink-sprinkled, heavily creamed beverage… behind me. I could
see the barista frowning at me and I could see her thoughts spilling out of her
mind in strange purple words… Jerk!
Cheat! Liar!
None of it was true, but it didn’t matter. It was too late
for all that.
“Say something,” she shrieked. I felt all the glass in the café
tremble a bit. So it really happened, given enough pitch. I raised my hands
again and saw that they were now an intense, tightly packed band of blue
energy. All it would take is one word. But this time I had waited for too long,
let it build too much. I had no idea what would happen. It was time to find
out.
“Boo,” I said.
“We should have got here earlier,” the strangely tall woman
said.
The man shook his head, stopping to tap his pipe out over a smoldering
trashcan. “He was too old for a cipher, too dangerous. We couldn’t have saved
him.”
“But we could have saved a city block full of norms,” she
said, looking at the still smoking pile of rubble and the desperate activity
around it.
“It’s alright,” he said, refilling his pipe. “They’re just
norms.”
