The blue box part 6: The eye that sees

 The blue box part 6: The eye that sees. VIDEO

The silence weighs like a stone. Obsidius holds the purple eye between his thumb and forefinger. The temperature of the object has risen to the point of burning, but it does not release it. In front of him, Lila waits with her empty socket turned towards her face, the patch of black silk like a tiny abyss. Behind him, Kym breathes raggedly from the doorway, her gun trembling but steady. “Give it to me,” says Lila. His voice doesn't plead. Order. "Don't pay attention to him," Kym says at the same time. "Obsidius, listen to me. If that eye returns to its place, she is complete. And you... you fall apart. As if you had never existed." Obsidius looks at the eye in his hand. The purple iris seems to look back at him. The pupil dilates and contracts with a rhythm that is not its own. And then remember Lila's words in the mirror room: When the time comes, you will have to look through it. And what you see will change you forever. He doesn't return it. He doesn't give it to Kym. He raises it to his own eye. -What are you doing? —Kym's voice breaks. Obsidius brings the purple eye closer to his left eye—the one with the membrane—and the world tears apart. There is no pain, like someone has folded the space between his eyelids and stretched it into a tunnel. Above a sea of lavender clouds. The sky is not sky: it is a dome of purple light crossed by two twin suns, one large and white, the other smaller and reddish, like an eye that never blinks upward, closing the world in itself like the inside of a sphere. There are structures growing from the ground like quartz crystals, illuminated from within by a pulsating light reminiscent of the pulse of the purple eye. figures, with skin the same violet tone as the sky, with large, dark eyes that have no white. 

They communicate through waves of light that erupt from their throats and coil in the air before dissolving. Not the Lila of the patch and the empty socket. This Lila has both eyes, and the left one shines with the same purple light as the quartz structures. says. His voice doesn't come out of his mouth. It resonates inside Obsidius's head, like the membrane when he spoke from the other side. But now it is clearer, closer. As if he had always been there, waiting for the moment to speak without masks. chest and is lost in the curved horizon. "As real as you," Lila answers. She walks among the violet figures without anyone looking at her. Pass through one of the quartz structures as if it were smoke. "This was my world," says Lila. Before the bridge broke, she stops in front of a structure larger than the others. It is shaped like an eye, supported by threads of light that descend from the sky like upside down. dimensions. My people built it a thousand years ago, when we discovered that we were not alone in the multiverse. We learned to travel between realities. But every trip has a price. Something is left behind. One eye. In memory. A name. Sometimes, a lifetime. Lila extends her hand toward the sphere. His fingers pass through the surface as if it were water. 

The images inside shake violently. "We traveled for centuries," she continues. We knew a hundred worlds, a thousand civilizations. Some welcomed us with open arms. Others closed their doors to us. And others... others saw us as a threat. Because traveling between dimensions leaves traces. And the footprints can be followed. —By whom? —Because it lives in the spaces between worlds. It has no name in your language. In mine, we call it Hunger. It is not a being. It is a void with its own will. And the further we traveled, the closer it got. Until one day, the bridge broke. Not by accident. We broke it on purpose, to close the passage. But I was on the other side when they did it. Obsidius looks at the sphere. On its surface, he sees images swirling like liquid dreams: a dark-haired girl singing in a hallway with faded rose wallpaper. A faceless boy sitting on a metal bed. To blue box. A tooth. "That girl," he says. Is it Sarah? "Sarah, it's you," says Lila. Sarah is the part of you that I created so that you could harden who you are. —And what am I? Lila turns to him. Her eyes—both complete—look at him with a sorrow so ancient that Obsidius feels like he's suffocating. “You are my anchor,” she says. 

When I crossed from this world to yours, the bridge could not support my full weight. Something had to be left behind. But something also had to cross with me. I couldn't travel empty. I needed a container to keep the connection open. A being from your world that I could cling to. "Me," says Obsidius. It's not a question. -You. The membrane in your eye is not just a conduit so I could talk to you. It's the cord that keeps you tied to me. Without it, the part of you that I brought from this world—because a part of you is also from here—would fade away. Like a dream when you wake up. Obsidius backs away. Or try to back away. The landscape refuses to move. "You mean I'm not real?" "You're real," says Lila. But you are not only from your world. When I chose you as a vessel, I did not take an empty body. I took a child who was about to die. A seven-year-old boy, in a hallway with rose wallpaper, with a tooth in his hand and a mouth full of blood. I offered him a way out: he could continue living if he let me in. I have accepted. "That's not true," Obsidius whispers. “You know it deep down,” Lila says. The membrane has been opening memories, right? You have seen the child. You have seen the blood. You have seen the tooth. How do you think it got into the blue box? The sphere pulses. 

The images speed up: a blow, a scream, a small body falling to the ground. A hand that picks up the tooth. The hand of a child—Obsidius, seven years old—offering it to a tall, dark figure with the promise that everything would end. "You lie," he says. "I've never lied to you," says Lila. I put a mask on you called Sarah so you could live without remembering. I gave you a fake childhood, a fake identity, a fake life. But the membrane was always there, waiting. And now that you have looked through my eye, you can no longer unlearn what you have seen. Obsidius tries to scream. He doesn't have a throat. “Kym knows,” Lila continues. Kym has her own anchor, her own cord. The Scorpion under its skin is not a symbol. It is the mark of another vessel, another journey. That's why Kym is afraid. Not from me. Of what you are. Because if you can fade away, so can she. And if I can complete myself, her own anchor—whoever brought her into this world—can claim her too. The vision begins to fray. The edges of the landscape turn white, like burning paper. "The next time you look at me," Lila says, her voice receding like an echo in an infinite tunnel, "you'll have to choose." Giving back the eye is giving me back. But it's also letting you go. And I don't know if you're ready to know who you were before I found you. Obsidius opens his eye—the one with the membrane—and is back in the room. Kym's gun is still pointed. Lila is still waiting. The purple eye is in his hand, hot, pulsing. But now he knows. And knowing is worse than not knowing. 

Kym looks into his eyes and understands that he has seen. “Oh no,” Kym whispers. You looked, right? You looked through him. Obsidius doesn't respond. You can't. “Listen to me carefully,” Kym says, and her voice shakes no longer. The gun in his hand has stopped swinging. Now he points directly at Lila's heart with a precision that only gives certainty. Now you know the truth. But there is a part that Lila hasn't told you. The part about what happened to the boy in the blue box. The part about why Sarah wasn't just a mask. And that part, Obsidius, is the one that really matters. Obsidius looks at Kym. There's something in his eyes I haven't seen before: it's not fear. It's guilt. A guilt so old and so deep that it has become the foundation on which Kym built her life. —Do you have an anchor too? —Obsidius asks. His voice sounds far away, as if he were still in the world of two suns. Kym doesn't respond. But his free hand instinctively goes to his right forearm, where under the sleeve, under the skin, the incandescent Scorpion beats with a pulse that is not his own. "It's not the same," Kym says at the end. Mine didn't come from another world. Mine came from another time. Of a life that I lived and that I do not remember. But the mechanism is the same. Something that anchors you to an existence that doesn't entirely belong to you. And when that anchor breaks... Kym swallows. The gun shakes one last time before hardening again. —...you disappear. You don't die. You disappear. As if you had never existed. And everything you did, everything you touched, everything you were, comes undone with you. Because you were never completely real. Lila smiles. It's not a kind smile. —Are you going to tell him, Kym? -ask-. Or do you prefer that I do it? "Don't tell him anything," Kym says. Not yet. First you have to remember for yourself. The boy in the blue box. 

The night he lost his teeth. What he saw before I arrived. Obsidius blinks. The membrane in his eye throbs. —Were you there? -ask. Kym closes her eyes. When he opens them, there are tears that do not fall. "I was," he says. You don't recognize me because I didn't recognize myself either. He had another name. Another face. Hereafter. But it was there. And I saw what happened. And I spent the rest of my existence trying to forget it. The purple eye in Obsidius's hand pulses harder. The light it emits dyes the entire room an impossible color. —What did you see? —Obsidius whispers. Kym opens her mouth. Lila interrupts her. “If you tell him now,” Lila says, her voice having lost all warmth, “you'll break the bridge before it's time.” And then yes, it will disappear. Not for me. For you. Because there are truths that cannot be told. They have to be remembered. Silence falls again. Heavy as a slab. But now there are three people in that room who know the truth. And no one is willing to tell it first. Obsidius closes his fist around the purple eye. Feel its heat, its pulse, its presence. He knows he can pay it back. He knows he can keep it. He knows he can look through it again. But next time, Lila warned him, he will have to choose. And he still doesn't know what he wants to choose.