Chapter 21: I Will Neither Confirm Nor Deny That I Am Going Absolutely Batshit Crazy
August awoke the next morning to someone pounding on his door. “Silly?” he called out sleepily, getting up from bed and shuffling over to the door. “Just come in,” he murmured, trying to remember if Cecily had taken her house key with her when they’d started their journey to find Baby.
When he opened the door, though, it was Amy standing there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which in this world probably could be a literal description for some people. August hadn’t bothered changing out of his clothes before falling asleep, but now he wished he had, as he must look like an absolute mess. Amy, on the other hand, was wearing clean clothes, with her hair back in its usual ponytail and no sign of the exhaustion August was feeling.
“Goodness, August, you look awful,” she observed, looking him over. “When did you get home?”
“The middle of the night,” he yawned. “How did you even know I was home?”
“Bright told me,” Amy answered, letting herself into the house. August was about to ask how Bright had known that he was home, but Amy was already walking to the living room to sit down.
“This is insane, right?” she asked as August followed her in. “Glow being the Creator, I mean.”
“Yes,” August said cautiously. He was waking up enough to remember that this was a potentially dangerous person sitting on his couch, and he felt the locket that he’d stuck in his pocket and forgotten to take out.
“I was thinking we should go together to confront Puddle and Glow about it; you know, present a united front?”
August squinted at her. “What?” When have we ever been a united front?
“Well, because we’re all from Earth, so we all have equal cause to be upset with Glow for what she did to us!”
August did some quick weighing of his options. “I already talked to Puddle,” he finally said.
“When?”
“Last night, when I got back.” August shrugged. “In all honesty, I thought that’s what you were going to do.”
Amy let out a short laugh. “Yeah, that was my initial instinct, too, but Bright pointed out that it might not be the best call to go to the Creator and her Guardian’s house in the middle of the night. I guess he’s a little more level-headed than us Earthlings. I was going to go to Puddle this morning, but when Bright told me you’d gotten back, I decided to come here first.”
“Yes, and how exactly did Bright–”
“So, how did it go, anyway?” Amy interrupted. “What did Glow have to say for herself?”
August folded his arms, irritated at both the interruption and the implication. “Glow didn’t have anything to say, as she was an innocent child who was asleep at the time. But the long and short of it is that neither Glow nor Puddle knows how to send us home, so there’s no point in going after them over it.”
Amy stared at August with her mouth agape for a few seconds. “You’re still defending them? August, Glow ripped you and your sister from your home and stranded you in a nonsensical world of chaos! She isn’t an innocent child; she’s an immortal and all-powerful being that is responsible for this whole mess! If she doesn’t know how to fix what she’s done, she needs to figure it out.”
“But all her powers are activated subconsciously,” August argued. “She could only send us home on accident, and only if that’s what she really wanted deep down.” In hindsight, I guess it’s unfortunate that I spent so much time making up stories with her, August thought regretfully. It had been fun, but Glow was thoroughly attached to him now.
Amy appeared deep in thought for a few seconds, then she nodded. “Right, that makes sense. If we want to go back to Earth, we need to make her really wish we were gone.” She stood up and smiled optimistically. “I think I can pull that off.”
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“Amy.” August stood up, too, feeling a pit in his stomach. “Amy, what are you thinking about doing?”
She was already walking toward the door. “I’ll see you around, August. Feel free to stop by if you want to help, but if not, I think I can handle all the preparations myself.”
“What preparations?” August pushed his way in front of her to block the door. “Amy, you’re scaring me. You aren’t going to hurt Glow, are you?”
Amy looked shocked. “Of course not, August. At this point, I’m not even sure if I want to go back or if I want to keep working on fixing this place, but either way, Puddle and Glow are the key, and it’s going to take a big push to get what I need from them.” She gently squeezed around August and he let her go, realizing there would be no point in trying to trap her in his house. She glanced back before walking out the door. “Think it over and figure out what you want, too, whether it’s staying or leaving. I’ll do my best to make it happen.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” he called after her from the front door, then groaned as she walked away.
“Seems like that went well,” a voice whispered above him.
August jumped and looked up, seeing Bright sitting on the roof of his house. Bright jumped down, not even bothering to fly, and landed lightly next to August, surveying him with those electric blue eyes. August wished even more that he had taken the time to change his clothes as he braced himself for that morning’s insults.
Bright just looked around him inside the house. “Your sister isn’t back yet?”
“Um, no. I came ahead to try to beat you to Puddle.”
Bright scoffed. “You never had a chance at winning a race with me. Fortunately for you, though, some of us have the good sense not to wake a sleeping giant.”
August felt his mouth twitch in a smile. “That’s a saying on Earth: ‘wake a sleeping giant.’”
Bright raised his white eyebrows. “What a fascinating coincidence,” he said with obvious sarcasm.
“How did you get back so fast?” August asked. “Did you carry Amy all the way back?”
“Believe me, it wasn’t fun.”
“So you flew faster than a cat can run, while carrying a whole other person?”
Bright gave him a puzzled look. “I’m not sure why you are using cats as your metric for flying speed, but I doubt I’ll ever understand how your mind works, assuming–generously–that it does at all. Why?”
August shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just impressive.”
“Hm.” Bright’s lack of voice made his short hum little more than a sharp exhale. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to subject myself to your pointless chatter.” August waited for him to finish the thought, but Bright didn’t continue talking.
“So, why did you come here?” August finally prompted him.
Bright sighed, looking like he regretted every decision he’d ever made. “I wanted to know how you were taking the news about Glow,” he whispered particularly quietly.
“What? Really?”
“Yes,” Bright whispered slightly louder, looking almost murderous. “I wanted to make sure you and your sister aren’t going to do anything drastic now that you know who the Creator is.”
“You want to know if I’m okay?” August asked with an odd sense of triumph.
“Look,” Bright said, looking away, “it doesn’t affect my life at all to know that Glow is the Creator. I really don’t care. But the rest of you are a lot weirder about, well, everything, and what you do with that knowledge could absolutely affect my life, especially if you make the Creator do something that disrupts the entire world. I can keep an eye on Amy pretty easily, but I don’t know what you and your crazy sister are going to do, so I wanted to make sure you weren’t going any more insane than you already are.”
August grinned. “So, what I’m hearing is, you’re worried about my mental and emotional state after this big revelation.”
Bright turned his back on August. “This was a mistake,” he whispered.
“You came to check on me!” August cheered as Bright spread his wings and took off. He really could fly fast when he wanted to: in a flash of black, he had sped into the nearby trees and disappeared. August smiled again to himself. He probably shouldn’t have teased Bright so much, but it felt good to get under the boy’s skin when he clearly made such an effort to rile August up. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, Bright.
As he walked back inside, he glanced at the paper he’d tacked to the wall after his first week in this world. It still read “0 days without a Glow incident,” and August realized that if he was going for accuracy, that number would never be anything other than zero. Everything that ever happened was a Glow incident, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
When he actually gave some thought to what Bright had said, he had to admit that it was an important point he hadn’t considered before. Any action he took involving Glow could impact the entire world, especially if it was something that upset her. Bright may have been referring to Puddle when he’s mentioned waking the sleeping giant, but it applied on a much larger scale to Glow. They would all have to tread very lightly now; if they didn’t, they could quite possibly break the whole world.