Excerpt: The Other Side of Sanity

“They’re blind,” concludes Gwynne, sitting on the decrepit porch of the Sighted headquarters. She sees James tense beside her, and remembers that the boy sitting two weak floorboards away is, literally so, blind. He turns his head in the direction of her voice, looking without purpose at her with large hazel eyes. Gwynne tries not to cringe; even a week after her induction into the cult, she finds it hard to get used to the son of the watcher. The child has no pupils, and as a result his irises appear twice the standard size. Flecks of green freckle light brown fibers; she notes that his eyes would be nice if he weren’t so eerily sightless. It’s ironic, Gwynne thinks, that the boy born to the leader of the Sighted, those who rely so heavily on the ability to observe Enceintra and its countercity, is blind.
“Sorry,” she says under her breath, quickly glancing into the Brink for the sole purpose of avoiding his gaze, though she knows that he can’t really be looking at her. The sun hangs midway in the sky, casting beams of light that illuminate the sand in the air that still hasn’t settled after the sandstorm a few hours before. “I forgot about your...” She trails off into nervous silence. James shifts beside her, running his fingers along the floorboards absently. Apprehensive, Gwynne wonders if he’s angry at her. This, as a relative newcomer to the cult, is not something she wants to happen.
He speaks suddenly, though his voice remains soft and somehow older than his mere twelve years. At any rate, he expresses no anger. “My father says I have the Sight, beneath the blindness.” His fingers betray stronger emotions than the ones denoted in his tone; his nails dig slightly into the wood softened by years of wear. “He’s wrong. I know that I believe in the countercity, but I can’t see it to confirm its existence.”
Gwynne waits before answering, carefully trying to sidestep his frustration, as if he might deflect it to her. “The Sight is important, yes,” she admits, and notices his subtle despair. He tenses his hands so that they lay flat on the porch, and his small frame becomes a little more hunched. She continues hastily, “But it’s not as important as the belief in what it reveals.”
In the reflection from a window of one of the eclectic Brink shops, she sees a glimpse of the other world. She feels like she’s betraying James in doing so, the boy cheated of his right to see it as well. What would it be like, she asks herself, to live in the darkness like he does?
James rises fluidly, having grown up on these steps, and he jumps down from the top one to the third, which is buried almost completely in sand to form a small and natural ramp. The territory of the Sighted, secluded from the rest of Enceintra simply by low brick walls, is the only place where no one would suspect him of being disabled. He’s rarely outside its boundaries, the watcher said to Gwynne before she met the child, for fear of disorientation amid the disheveled streets of the Brink and for fear of standing out amid the perfection of Central. Children like him are lucky, the watcher told her, to be born into social isolation. Watching the confidence with which James moved, she can understand where that idea came from. The loneliness and the lack of excitement he carries about with him, however, make her think that he’s wrong.