Between us : The In-Between

Between us : The In-Between

by Rehan Azam

Note: this short story continues directly from Part One, the same train, the same morning, only moments later. It follows Kai and Elara through the night that reveals why he was ever the boy worth staring at.

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The lights flickered a second time, and then went out entirely.

Not dimmed, gone, replaced by a dark that had weight to it, a low hum crawling through the walls and into the base of every spine in the car. Whispers turned to something sharper. Outside the windows, Tokyo was gone. In its place: red clouds moving like they were breathing, islands of stone hanging in nothing, a river running straight up into the sky.

Elara's laugh died in her throat. "Kai, what's happening?"

Something unfolded at the far end of the carriage. Not a person. A shape built out of shadow that moved like liquid, tendrils uncoiling, eyes the color of a bruise.

"Elara, stay close." He was already standing, already between her and it, gold light gathering at his palms, petals of it spinning into a slow storm around him.

The creature's tendrils lashed toward her and struck his light instead, and shattered against it like glass against stone. This one, it hissed, not with a mouth but with something worse. The flame he carries. He is not ordinary.

"I won't let you hurt her," Kai said. "Not her. Not anyone."

It came again, faster, and his aura came back brighter, gold cutting the dark into ribbons. Elara's hand found his sleeve without her deciding to reach for it, holding on with a trust that had no evidence behind it yet, only instinct. He raised both hands and let everything he had collect into a single point of light, and drove it forward. The thing shrieked, came apart, and was gone, not killed so much as unmade, a hiss fading into nothing.

The lights steadied. Passengers who'd been folded under seats began to lift their heads, faces caught between terror and disbelief. Elara stared at him like she was seeing him for the first time, though of course she was.

"You're... incredible," she said.

He was breathing hard, the gold dimming out of him slowly, like a coal cooling. "I told you. I won't let anyone get hurt."

She leaned into him without thinking about it. "I trust you. Completely."

"Good," he said. "That's all I need."

The other passengers wouldn't meet his eyes for long. An old woman stood, unsteady, and whispered a thank-you. A man in a business suit backed toward the far door instead, demanding to know what he was, what that had been. Kai didn't answer him. He only looked at Elara.

"We should go somewhere more private," he said, and led her into the next car, empty, the strange world still sliding past the windows: floating stone, a river of stars running the wrong way.

"Kai," she said, and her voice wasn't steady anymore. "Where are we?"

He turned to face her. The light was gone from him now; he looked ordinary again, except for the weight sitting behind his eyes.

"Not our world. Somewhere pulled alongside it, an echo. I call it the In-Between."

"And that thing?"

"Lives here. They're drawn to feeling, fear mostly. My power works like a lantern for them. It's why it found us." He pushed back his sleeve, showed her a plain leather band with a black stone set into it.

She remembered, suddenly, the creature's voice inside her own skull. The bracelet.

"Is that the curse you mentioned?"

He looked startled. "You heard that?"

"I felt it. Like it was thinking inside my head."

"That's the curse. Or the gift, depends on the day." He exhaled. "It's my job to stop them before they reach our side. Usually no one even notices. This time it was strong enough to take the whole train with us."

She understood, then, all at once, the strange gravity under his jokes, the sense that he'd lived a lot more than his face suggested. She stepped closer and touched the bracelet lightly. "Does it hurt? Living like this?"

For a moment he wasn't a hero at all. Just tired. "Sometimes," he said.

The train lurched, hard enough to throw them both against the wall. A groan rose from somewhere beneath the floor, worse than anything before it.

Kai was at the window instantly. "That's bad."

They were drifting toward a crumbling black island, and something was climbing out of the dust of it, vast, built of stone and shadow, two purple lights for eyes, fixed on the train like it had already decided what it wanted.

"That first one was the warm-up," he said grimly, stepping in front of her again. "Stay behind me. Don't move."

The new arrival wasn't like the first. It was beautiful in the way that some dangerous things are, a body of liquid silver and drifting smoke, eyes a deep, patient violet that seemed to look past skin into whatever was underneath it. When it spoke, the voice didn't come from any mouth. It came from inside everyone's head at once, soft as a held hand.

Sleep, it said. Come, and live the life you've always wanted.

Elara gasped. Warmth spread through her chest, unearned and total, every worry she'd been carrying since the alarm hadn't gone off that morning simply lifted away. And there, suddenly, in the space where the creature's voice had been: her parents. Standing exactly as she remembered them. Her mother's laugh. Her father's low, steady voice.

Elara. Come to us.

Tears ran freely before she noticed she was crying. She forgot the train, forgot Kai, forgot everything except the impossible, aching fact of them standing in front of her. She lifted her hand to touch her mother's face.

Kai saw it happen in real time, the petals around him spinning faster, gold flaring against whatever was pulling at her.

No, he thought, and meant it like a wall going up. You will not take her.

The creature's attention turned, slow and curious, onto him.

And you, the one who carries the flame, it whispered. You have dreams too. Face what you've lost, or fall into them and be lost forever.

He knew exactly what it was reaching for. He let it come anyway, one memory, offered up on his own terms before it could be stolen.

Wren.

The name arrived with both warmth and a blade in it. A girl with sun caught in her hair, laughing in a garden behind a school he barely remembered otherwise. The particular weight of her hand in his. He let himself feel it, just for a second, a happiness he'd folded away so carefully he'd almost convinced himself it didn't hurt anymore.

Then the creature twisted it. Shadow fell across the garden. Her laugh became a scream. The memory he'd guarded for years turned, in an instant, into the worst thing he owned.

He forced his eyes open against it. He was on a train. Elara was beside him, lost somewhere he couldn't follow her without permission. The silver thing was trying to eat them both from the inside.

The pain became fuel. The petals around him rose into a storm.

I won't let this thing take anyone's heart, he promised himself. Not again.

The dark parted, and another memory rose to meet him, Rowan, his oldest friend, arms crossed, wearing the small, needling smile he always wore right before he said something true and unkind at the same time.

"You're too powerful, Kai," Rowan's voice said, somewhere between teasing and serious. "That's just who you are. Nothing stands in your way." The smile faded a little. "Maybe that's not always a good thing. But it's you."

Kai's hands closed into fists. He remembered the fight that had ended things between them, words neither of them had taken back, pride standing exactly where an apology should have gone. A crack that had never closed.

"I never wanted to hurt you," he said, though there was no wind in this place to carry it anywhere.

Rowan's voice came back once more, almost fond now, a ghost of easier days. "Too strong for your own good. Too unstoppable. Maybe that's too heavy for one person to carry, but it's your burden. Don't forget it."

The storm around him answered instead. Shadow-arms lashed toward him, trying to find a crack to slip fear and doubt through. Not one of them landed. Gold light burst outward, thousands of petals, spinning into a shield the dark couldn't cross.

He stepped forward into it. He let every memory move through him at once, love, guilt, grief, the stubborn need to protect people who hadn't asked him to, and turned all of it into strength.

I am not just my past, he thought. I am not just my mistakes. I am what I do now.

The fight paused, or he did. He found himself sitting on a bench made of shadow, chest heaving, and out of the mist came the old teacher who'd first shown him what the bracelet meant.

"Why didn't you stop him sooner?" the teacher asked gently, a hand settling on his shoulder.

Kai shook his head, hair falling into his eyes. "I can't control it. I'm too much."

"Yes," the teacher agreed, without judgment. "Your power is very great. It must be carried with care, but it is yours. It always has been."

"I just want to keep them safe."

"And you will," the teacher said, already dissolving back into shadow. "That is why you were chosen."

His light reached out across the dream and found Elara, still caught in the illusion of her parents. The image trembled, thinned, went the way of a reflection when the water is disturbed. The warmth of the real world was calling her back, and this time she heard it.

The silver creature shrieked, furious that it couldn't reach him. Sleep. Forever, it hissed, each word like a blade drawn slowly across his mind.

He almost smiled. "No. Not while I'm here."

He lifted both hands and let go of everything he had, every memory, every ache, every reason he'd ever had to keep going, and it came out of him as light. Gold tore through the dream like fire through paper. The creature twisted, screamed, and came apart.

Around the train, passengers who'd been drowning in their own private illusions began to blink awake.

Elara gasped, her hand still locked around his. "You're incredible," she whispered, crying with relief now instead of grief.

He softened, reached out, and brushed a stray petal from her hair. "I told you. I won't let anyone get hurt. Not now. Not ever."

"I trust you," she said.

"I trust you too," he answered. "Completely."

But the danger wasn't finished with them. The train shuddered violently, not the aftershock of a fight but something new, something arriving. Outside, the dream-world was tearing itself apart: islands crumbling to dust, rivers of light bending in ways nothing should bend.

"The meteor," Kai said, already on his feet, voice pitched to carry through the whole car. "It's too big to stop. I have to move it."

A smaller shard of shadow shot through a broken window before he'd finished speaking, lunging for a family huddled in their seats. His light caught it mid-strike and threw it back like it weighed nothing.

"Stay in your seats! Stay calm!"

Elara stared at him, fear and wonder tangled together. "How are you doing this?"

"I focus on one thing," he said, voice fraying at the edges with effort. "I protect people. That's all that matters."

He closed his eyes and let every memory carry him one more time, Wren's laugh in the garden, Rowan's voice daring him to be better, Elara's hand steady in his. The gold around him grew until it pressed back against the dream itself, and for a moment the whole broken world seemed to hold its breath with him.

The meteor kept coming anyway, a second sun falling toward them, and the train screamed against the pull of it. I can't let it hit the city, he thought. Not again.

He drove both hands toward the window and tore the loveliest, most violent hole he'd ever made, a doorway of light straight into the collapsing dream. The meteor hesitated, as if it could feel the pull, and then the whole sky seemed to rip as it was wrenched sideways and swallowed whole by the doorway he'd opened. The dream-world took the blow instead of them, and came apart in silence and fire, entirely somewhere else.

Inside the train: nobody hurt. Only trembling hands, and disbelief, and Elara leaning her whole weight into his side.

"You saved everyone," she whispered.

"I promised," he said. "No one gets hurt. Not now. Not ever."

The last of the shadows dissolved, unable to survive what he'd become for that one, endless minute. Outside, the wreckage of the dream burned itself out over a place that wasn't theirs. Their world stayed whole.

"I trust you," Elara said again, tears bright in her eyes. "Completely."

"Good," he whispered back, and meant it more than he'd meant anything in a long time. "That's all I need."

The train came into the station on ordinary wheels, under ordinary light, and it took everything in both of them not to laugh at how normal it all suddenly felt. Passengers filed out murmuring, some of them glancing back at Kai with a gratitude they didn't have words for. Elara walked close beside him, her hand brushing his without either of them quite deciding it should.

"Thank you isn't enough," she said.

"It's what I do," he said, and managed a tired smile. "I made a promise."

For a moment, standing at the edge of a city that had no idea how close it had come to ending, there was something almost like peace.

Then his phone rang. And rang again.

He looked at the name on the screen and felt something in his chest go very still. He answered anyway.

"Yes?"

A voice came through, cold and cracked, like metal dragged across stone. "Kai. Or should I say, Soren? Stronger than I expected. But this is far from over."

His hand tightened hard enough to threaten the phone's casing. "Who is this?"

Elara touched his arm, worry plain on her face. "Kai, what's wrong?"

He put the phone away slowly. When he looked at her again, something in his expression had gentled, even as the rest of him had gone hard. "Someone who knew me a long time ago. Someone who remembers who I used to be."

He looked out at the crowd moving past them, none of them aware how close their morning had come to disaster. "That fight on the train was nothing, Elara. This is only the beginning."

Her hand found his again, steady this time, no hesitation in it at all. "Then we face it together."

He looked at her, and something in him settled, just slightly. "Together."

They walked out into the sunlight, and the peace was already gone, replaced by the quiet certainty that somewhere, in the dark, something was still watching them. Whatever came next wouldn't wait long to arrive.

THE END.

© Rehan Azam,'Between us : The In-Between' An Short story by Rehan Azam , All Rights Reserved.

For any Query email to: rehanazamauthor.gmail.com