The Shimmers in the Night by Lydia Millet Page A

eyebrows.
    â€œMy dear, listen closely: this is important. Where did you have this vision? And when?”
    â€œOn the T,” said Cara. “On my way here.”
    Then suddenly all the teachers were talking among themselves—or no: they were thinking at each other. It made her catch her breath: ripples like waves in the air, like the shimmer above a road in the desert heat. They were identical to the ones she’d seen flow between Jax and the leatherback sea turtle in the Aquarium back in August.
    All around her the air was moving, somehow—like a turbulence, a minor half-visible storm, twisting ribbons that distorted the view like a warped mirror or the patterned plastic of a shower door.
    She gazed up into it, amazed. Technically the silence around the table was wearing on, but at the same time the air was bristling with energy she could almost hear—a kind of liquid back-and-forth of pulses and lulls, so that the silence seemed less like the absence of sound and more like some kind of low-level white noise. It felt almost like the ocean, with currents and rhythm and deep pulls below…
    But it didn’t last. After what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, all of the teachers were standing. They seemed to be deserting their meals and their half-full, richly red glasses of wine. Some of them almost seemed to glide away, Cara thought, and remembered the wings.
    She felt at a loss until Mrs. O’s hand on her arm guided her up from the table, up and—with the crowd in front of them and behind them, too—out the door they’d come in through.
    â€œWas it what I said?” asked Cara, though it was half whisper and half thought.
    Partly , thought Mrs. O into Cara’s head.
    Her thought had the high, pure sound Jax’s had had—as though, in the space of Cara’s brain, completely different people’s voices got translated into the same kind of music. And yet, she knew it was Mrs. O. The idea “coincidence” came to her more as a feeling than as a word, a feeling or maybe a minor vision: in this case, a small mental picture of two parallel lines, which she instinctively knew meant coincidence .
    We sensed their presence then , sang the mind of Mrs. O into Cara’s. It sounded like a tuning fork, that resonating tone. She’d heard a tuning fork in music class one time last year. Not exactly relaxing. When the thoughts came from Jax, it wasn’t as jarring.
    â€œSensed it?” asked Cara.
    They’re coming.
    â€œBut I thought this was a sanctuary , where the bad guys couldn’t get in,” protested Cara.
    â€œIt is,” said Mrs. O out loud. “But all fortresses can be breached. The enemy is focusing a lot of energy, as we speak, on breaking down our wards—our defenses. And sooner or later they’ll succeed.”

    With Mrs. O and Mr. Trujillo alongside, Cara raced up stairways and through corridors to the bedroom where Jax lay sleeping—only now, when they pushed the door open, he was awake.
    He was sitting on the edge of his canopy bed.
    â€œJax!” said Cara, and ran up to him.
    He stayed slumped over, head bowed.
    â€œJax?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the mattress beside him. “Jax? Are you OK?”
    Still he didn’t say anything; slowly he raised his head and turned to look at her.
    His eyes , she thought. They’d changed again. Now the pupils were huge; the pupils were the whole iris. The blue of his eyes was completely gone. The irises were black—and not sharply black but a black that faded around the edges, fuzzed into the white of the eyes.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with him?” she asked urgently, turning to the teachers. “Why are his eyes like that?”
    They were at the bedside now, too, on the other side from Cara, their hands passing over Jax’s head in a strange fashion.
    â€œBecause the treatment failed,” said Mr. Trujillo.
    He