The Edge

Luca: Part Five

Luca closed his eyes and tried to picture his glitter jar. He tried to imagine swirling the mixture inside, watching the glitter swirl around the glass, the pieces catching and reflecting the light. He tried to imagine them slowly slowing down, sinking, settling at the bottom, forming a thick carpet like heavy silver snow.

It wasn't working. The mental image kept being chased away by a new worried thought. He was trapped. What if the others weren't coming for him? What if they had gotten hurt? What if the whole building was going to collapse on him?

Damn it.

Luca opened his eyes and looked around. Was there another way out? There had to be another way out. The slope wasn't going to get him anywhere. Maybe he should try looking around. But Alan said to stay put. That's what Mom and Dad always said, too. Don't wander off, you'll just get more lost.

Then again, if he stayed here too long, Luca was sure he'd lose his mind. And potentially die in a cave-in, but only potentially. The ground hadn't shaken again recently...or, at least, he didn't think he had. What if it was over?

Or what if it's about to get worse?

All these what-ifs and maybes. They'd always been the bane of his existence. He had to deal with enough of them without being in a situation like this. All the brand-new possibilities were seriously taking their toll.

I'm going to throw up.

He really thought he would for far too long, but he didn't, Luca was somehow able to breathe threw him. That was something, at least. Throwing up might've been an understandable stress response, even one he'd just let happen under other circumstances, but it'd really screw him over down here. He'd get dehydrated. He'd lose calories. He didn't know how long he was going to be trapped down here. He might not be able to afford to lose either.

Nope, nope, not thinking about that. If I do, I might throw up for real.

There had to be something he could do to take his mind off things. He didn't have his guitar, obviously, and he wasn't sure he wanted to use his phone unless he absolutely had to. He probably didn't have a signal down here, anyway. That just left...

Cassandra's journal!

His relief at having something to occupy his time only overrode his guilt for a few seconds. He tried to combat the returning guilt by reminding himself that this could give them some real, solid answers. Yes, it felt shitty, but...what if they found her and she didn't want to come back? What if they wouldn't be able to convince her because they didn't know what was really wrong? Doing the invasive thing could actually be the right call, no matter how shitty it felt.

Still. "Sorry, Cass," Luca whispered as he opened the journal.

It was almost comforting, seeing her handwriting. She had a distinctive way of angling her e's when she wrote in print. He also recognized the swoosh of the C in her signature on the journal's front cover.

If found, just burn this. I'm not that attached. If you read anything, keep it to yourself.

Gosh, he could almost hear her saying it. Luca had always been impressed by Cassandra's ability to just not care. He was unable to do anything but care, deeply and terrifyingly about every little thing in his life. Her chill seemed like more of a superpower than her bilocation, even if it got her in trouble a few times.

A quick glance at the entry confirmed this was her most recent journal. She'd only gotten about two-thirds of the way through it before stopping. As with all her journals, it was a combination planner and journal, with the keeping track of things spreads mapped out amongst the journal entries. The guilt over invading her privacy was still nibbling at him a little, so Luca decided to ease himself in by checking the habit trackers.

Cassandra had taught him how to journal like she did. There were a lot of differences (she liked adding more flourishes to hers while his was mostly plain), but the trackers were a commonality. He knew these parts served as a pretty good mood indicator for him. If he looked back and saw fewer things getting done, mood trackers weren't being filled in at all, and he had to put question marks around dates because he couldn't remember what had happened that day, it probably hadn't been a good week. Maybe it was the same for Cassandra. Even if she did keep things up no matter how bad her mental junk, there would probably still be some other pattern there.

Things started off normal, or what he guessed was normal for her: items were checked off, the little trackers were filled in, everything looked fine. She had a bilocation tracker; whatever the marked off squares indicated, it only happened once or twice every few weeks at first. But as he kept flipping through, things degraded. Fewer items were checked off; some trackers were left blank for stretches of days. To-do lists were replaced with things like Did nothing, fuck it. The bilocation tracker, meanwhile, was filled in more and more.

"Where were you going?" Luca muttered. She'd involuntarily bilocated before. It usually happened when she wasn't fully in control of her faculties: when she was half-asleep, tipsy, or accidentally took too much cold medicine. But that was sporadic, with a clear cause. He didn't think it had ever happened this frequently before. He'd have heard her complaining about it long ago if it did.

Luca carefully rested his fingertips over one of the charts and closed his eyes. It always took a bit of extra effort to do this on purpose, and the pain from his busted ankle wasn't helping. But if he pushed past the mental block, the pain, the physical feeling of the paper, and reached out for the little spark that was his sister...

Frustration. Feeling like she as losing her mind. A queasy lack of understanding as to what the hell was going on. She kept filling in square seven though each one felt like taking a step off a cliff. She didn't know why this was happening, but she had to find answers before she really lost it.

He lifted his fingers off the page, and the feeling faded away.

So, whatever it was definitely had something to do with her bilocating. And if she was bilocating all the way to the ship from the Edge, then perhaps it had been the reverse before. He hadn't known she was capable of something like that...at least, not without frying her brain. A lot of powers had a cutoff, and the common assumption was that it was for that exact reason.

If I was miraculously being transported out to the Edge in defiance of everything we knew about my skill set, I'd want answers too. But he also would've gone to the others for help first, which Cassandra hadn't done. That was the next potential mystery: why she hadn't reached out to any of them.

Luca swallowed nervously and flipped back to the start of the journal. He still felt shitty about this, but he'd come this far, and he didn't have anything else to do. Might as well see if he could get to the bottom of this.

Something moved in the corner of his eye. Luca looked up. He thought he saw Cassandra's braids flowing behind her as she darted around a corner.

He shuddered, fixed his eyes back on the journal, and started reading.