THE WAY THROUGH — A Sycaphlegm Series Short Story by Nicol S. Blue
THE WAY THROUGH
A Sycaphlegm Series Short Story — by Nicol S. Blue
Written for The Ink Well Prompt #43: "Believe"
Mira was cutting wick-fiber when the rumor reached her stall, and her hands kept moving even after her ears stopped working right.
"Somebody got through," the runner said, the way the hatch line always says things — flat, secondhand, already frayed from four burrows of retelling. "The Barrier. Somebody walked in and it didn't touch them."
She set the fiber down before she cut herself. Around her, the lamp market did what it always did with hatch line rumors: shrugged, half-laughed, moved on. Somebody always says that. It's just a story people tell so the Barrier feels less like a wall. Old Kessa, three stalls down, didn't even look up from her mending. "Fifteen men tried that, girl. Ask Mira. Her brother was one."
Mira had been asked about Tomas so many times she could recite the official version without feeling it: he went up with fourteen others, they tried to force their way through the Electrostatic Barrier, and the Barrier did what it does to anyone who tries to force it. No ceremony. No bodies to bring down. Just a name added to a list the Paymasters kept for exactly this purpose — a warning, not a memorial.
What the official version left out, because nobody who repeats it was there, was the last thing Tomas said to her before he went up. He hadn't sounded like a man about to die stupid. He'd sounded like a man with a plan.
"It won't let anything through that's afraid of it," he'd told her, three nights before he climbed. "So you don't fight it. You go in like you already belong there."
She'd told him that was nonsense — bravado dressed up as strategy, the kind of thing men said to each other before doing something reckless together. He'd smiled like she'd missed the point entirely, and she had spent six years since telling herself she'd been right to think so, because he'd died the same as the other fourteen, hadn't he. Vaporized at the edge, same as everyone who'd ever tried.
Except the rumor reaching her stall today didn't say tried to force it. It said walked in. Calm. Like fog. Like someone who already belonged there.
"You're not going to believe that," said her stallmate, watching her face. Not a question.
Mira didn't answer right away, because the honest answer was complicated in a way the burrow didn't have patience for. Believing it wouldn't bring Tomas back. Believing it wouldn't even mean he'd been right about himself — fifteen men had gone up together, forced their way in together, and the Barrier had ended all fifteen the same. Whatever this new person had done, Tomas hadn't done it. He'd died with the other fourteen, exactly as the list said.
But there was a version of this that mattered anyway, and it took her the rest of the afternoon, wick-fiber forgotten in her lap, to find the shape of it.
Tomas hadn't been wrong about what the Barrier was. He'd understood something true — that it answered fear with force answered — and he simply hadn't lived long enough to learn how to act on what he knew. He'd had the idea and none of the years it must have taken someone else to actually trust it with their body, to walk instead of climb, to arrive calm instead of ready for a fight he'd already decided was coming. He hadn't failed because the idea was foolish. He'd failed because six years wasn't enough time to unlearn being afraid, and whoever walked through today had apparently had more.
That was a different kind of grief than the one she'd been carrying. The old one said: my brother believed something stupid and it killed him. This one said: my brother believed something true and ran out of time to learn how to hold it.
She didn't know which version was more accurate. Nobody in the Basin would ever know, probably — the hatch line would keep fraying this story four more burrows down until it was unrecognizable, the same as it did with everything. That wasn't the part she got to choose.
What she got to choose was which grief she carried home tonight. And when Old Kessa asked her, not unkindly, whether she really believed some stranger had walked through a wall that had killed her own brother, Mira picked the wick-fiber back up, resumed the cut she hadn't finished, and said the only honest thing she had.
"I believe he was right about the door. I just think somebody else got there first."
THE WAY THROUGH is a short story from the Sycaphlegm Series, the ongoing afro-futurist epic by Nicol S. Blue, written for The Ink Well's weekly writing prompt. The first full story, PROTOTYPICAL, is available now. [PATREON_LINK]