A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 1
Sung-ho swept Seo-yeon off to the master bedroom and Jill slept on the guest bed. Still tipsy and jittery with pre-run adrenaline, Zoe stayed awake, nursing a final scotch and half of a clove. Wandering toward Sung-ho’s den in hopes that old music and worn-cozy chairs might help her sleep, she heard the sound system already alive beyond the inch-open door, the Black Diamond Heavies bidin’ their time. A sigh whispered out in Omar’s voice. Zoe sipped her drink and took a deep, lung-filling breath. She’d wanted to say something to Omar but hadn’t. This seemed like the ‘now or never’ moment, the point at which the thing either happened or didn’t.
Switching her rocks glass to the same hand as her cigarette, Zoe knocked hard enough to push the door in farther. “Omar?”
“Hm?”
“You okay in there?”
“Uh, yeah, yeah.”
She stepped into the den to find Omar in Sung-ho’s chair. Sitting across from him, she set her drink on the edge of the desk. “I thought you didn’t like the blues.”
“I don’t like anything on infinite repeat.”
“Up late thinking?” she hazarded.
He nodded, gazing at his glass.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Mostly that I don’t really know how to defuse a bomb.”
“You have double degrees, one in computer science and the other in electrical engineering. You applied to MIT for graduate school but didn’t get in. You didn’t have a back-up plan for whatever reason and you’ve been doing IT and odd jobs since you graduated.”
“How do you know all that?” he asked.
“Me and Sung-ho talked to a friend of ours. Someone high up. We hashed out a deal so we can guarantee you Class-E clearance, probably Delta. They followed SOP, a deep background check, stuff like that…”
“You could’ve just asked.”
“I could’ve. The people actually making the decisions don’t know you from Adam.”
Omar leaned back, massaging his face, his eyes bloodshot. “How big is all of this, anyway?”
“Not that big but big enough.” She held out her half-a-clove. “There a matchbook over there?”
Omar massaged his face for a few more seconds before sitting forward with a groan. “Yeah.”
“If you do get Delta, which…if we pull this off, I think you will, you’ll have to think about whether or not you really want into all of this.” She took a beaten old matchbook he offered and snapped off a stick from inside. “Because if you’re as good at all this shit as I told everyone you were—and you are good—you’ll have to make a choice between civilian life and formal training pretty quickly.”
“How quick?”
She took a drag, the initial flavor stale from when she put it out the first time. “Six to nine months after you go through the initial swearing-in.”
“Did you tell ‘em I could start on Monday?” Omar grinned.
Zoe didn’t return the smile. “Really think about this, Omar. Being Delta in and of itself isn’t so demanding…but if you go through with training, probably you’ll get Charlie, and after that there’s no way back out again.”
“Back out of what?”
“All of this. The monsters and the magic, this whole world—”
“I’m already in it.” Omar sat forward, smile gone. “I’m already in the world with the monsters and the magic whether I like it or not. Proved that at the ski lodge.”
“This is different.”
“How? At least people like you know what’s coming.”
Zoe laughed.
Omar frowned, brow wrinkling. “So that’s a joke?”
Still chuckling, she shook her head. “No, it’s not. Except it is. Do you really think I know what’s coming?”
“I…” he sat back, slouching. “I don’t know. More than anyone else, I guess.”
She puffed, flicked the filter of the clove even though little ash had accumulated yet. “This life…it’s a maze of glass. Once you’re sure that magic exists, you can’t be sure of anything else ever. When is a car crash just a car crash, after all? And when is it the result of an accretion of hexes and curses, probability fields micro-adjusted until one of them became inevitable? Because once mundanity sets in, the end result looks the same. So we’re all locked in this little world together where reality itself is uncertain, where we can’t really tell the difference between the walls and the floor and the ceiling, where we can’t see a dead end straight ahead of us unless the light hits it just right. Sometimes people get cancer and sometimes cancer is incurably vicious, but the right magic can give someone incurable cancer. It’s a lot of work and really not worth it, but they could. Knowing that means that I always have to wonder. Realistically, I’ll rarely ever know. So I just keep my hands out and try not to get too far from the walls, in case I lose them, and I pray I never need to sprint because when something really chases you in the maze, if you really have to run, sooner or later you’ll hit a dead end, another pane of glass you couldn’t see because the light didn’t hit it the right way…and by the time you realize you’ve crashed face-first through a dead-end of slivered glass, the shards of your fuck-up will already have shred the skin from your bones.”
Omar picked up a drink she hadn’t noticed, rum and coke it looked like, and sipped. “Wow. You worked on that for a long time, huh?”
Zoe let herself chuckle. “I did, yeah. I went over it in my head about a thousand times.”
“Why?”
She watched smoke writhe around her cigarette. Her jaw tightened. Relaxed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess…nobody ever warned me.”
“I’ve been with you for a month and a half,” Omar said. “My job? It’s gone. And you keep telling me that you guys are somehow gonna set it up so all the evidence for these attacks points to your perp, but last I checked…I’m a person of interest, right?”
Zoe answered by not answering.
“This world existed the whole time I did and I never knew it was there until…until it came for me. Since then, you’ve been the only person watching out. And I appreciate that, but if you tell me there’s a chance I could get the skills I need to defend myself from all of this, maybe to defend someone else? If you tell me I can get paid for it? Why would I not?”
“Because once you sign onto this, you can’t get out again.”
“There is no ‘out,’” Omar said. He swirled his drink in its glass and finished the last of it. Zoe noticed the music had changed but she didn’t recognize the song. Omar chewed his thoughts for a few seconds. Sighed. “I think maybe since you grew up in this weird secret society shit, you think the secret society shit is the thing that matters. But the thing that matters is that, sooner or later, someone gets killed by a monster, and probably they never saw that coming. Someone’s gotta be there, right? Does it matter what ‘team’ gets credit?”
Zoe went for her clove but it had died again. “Goddammit.”
Omar set down his drink and tossed the matchbook back to her side of the table. “Here.”
“Thanks…”
“That make sense to you, though?”
She took a long drag. “Yeah. Probably more than most.”
Turn Back
...coming soon...
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