Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter 13: The Prism

"There," Hawk said, and thumped their finished creation down in front of Alex. He was sitting in Emile's delightfully tacky living room, studying the expression of a bedazzled garden gnome, hoping for more answers. He'd explained his own work on who Studdard was, and was waiting for his wife to find her own piece of the puzzle: tests for the Prism.

"Okay," Dyson said, as Hawk backed away from a glass and rubber contraption. "So how the fuck are rubber gloves supposed to be any kind of protection?" he said.

Em held up a heavy duty plastic bag half full of yellow powder. It was the precise shade of the rubber gloves. "This is glass frit. I have two coats of it on the gloves. We used rubber cement. I can't be sure of the coverage, but--"

"It'll work," Dyson said, after a moment of thought. "We've got a similar set up at HQ. But how do you have that much neon yellow powdered...know what? I'm not asking."

"My mother went through a glass blowing phase," Hawk said, miserably.

Alex remembered the glass blowing phase. Mostly through burn ointment and ER trips. Hawk's choice to give the excess glass supplies to Em had been made of desperation and the scent of burnt hair. "Cool," he said, referencing the makeshift case, and sat back to organize his notes.

They'd prized apart the pieces of the Prism they had, using a pair of tiny tweezers and an Xacto-knife. Apparently it had fused slightly when it tore a hole in Elizabeth Cumming's backyard. Now, carefully, Hawk put the thing back together, her hands sheathed in glass fragments and rubber and the enzymes of her ants' honey. At least, they hoped that was the case.

"Okay." She said, as the last fragment slid into place beneath the teeny tiny tweezers. She slammed the glove-hole covers into place, two sheets of glass that latched across the arm holes. "Let's—"

The first flash was the same terrible blue-white flare that Alex remembered from Mrs. Cummings' backyard. It issued from beneath the Prism, and lasted only a handful of seconds. Then there was a hum. There'd been a hum before, something that wound into teeth and bone, overshadowed by Hawk's voice as she slammed the port covers shut. Then another flash, hot and bright and beautiful as starlight. Two seconds of it, and then darkness and the hum for a few more seconds. It reminded Alex of an engine working desperately at its own activation, but without half the necessary parts. Pistons working air and accomplishing nothing. That's what this was. Flash, and hum, flash again.

"Holy fuck," Dyson said. Then, even softer. "We never got this to work at the Project. Not ever."

Flash, hum, flash. The light was lingering in long, strange strands, reaching like the tendrils of a deep-ocean anemone. It was beautiful, in a way that evoked dying things. Numinous, Alex thought. That was the word for it. This shit was numinous.

"Maybe you just never tried the thing that worked?" Em said, eyes on the hum and flash, hum, flash.

"We haven't tried anything. We took it apart, put it back together, and put it in an aquarium. This is the kind of shit you give a twelve-year-old who isn't too bright. Like doing a diorama on monarch butterflies or some shit like that," Henry said.

"Y'all should have done this way before now," Alex said. It flashed. It hummed. "We gonna let that keep going or we gonna figure out what's building up in there?"

"The substance building up in there is something unknown to humanity and science in every sense of the word. It invokes a sense of awe and humility." Emile Yong said. "And awe and humility are the only things keeping me from poking it with a stick."

"Humility?" Hawk said.

"For all I know, that's what God's freaking tears look like. And now I'm willing to entertain the idea of God." This brought on several hasty nods from Emile as they examined their own words, measured against the back building ethereal substance within that glass. "Yeah," They swallowed, their hair a multi-colored cloud accenting every warble of chin, shiver of spine, and the rhythm of their hand's trembling. "I could see God with this." Her voice dripped with loathing and terror. Gods were not good things to Emile.