The Veil by Cory Putman Oakes

shoreline, okay?”
    “All right,” I agreed, slightly puzzled at the sudden note of stress in his voice. I took a deep breath and repeated the exercise he’d taught me the night before.
    When I opened my eyes, the sun was even brighter, althoughit somehow hurt my eyes less. There were silver streaks running through the water and small silver waves crashing onto shore. Half a dozen fish leapt out of the water and caught the sun, their scales reflecting the golden rays. Or perhaps the fish were gold to begin with. I was too far away to tell. Regardless, I found myself smiling at the tranquil scene.
    But my enjoyment was not to last long. My first solid inkling that something bad was about to happen came from Lucas’s next words; his voice was gruff and heavy, and he spoke slowly, as though he was already regretting what he had to say.
    “Now look at the island.”
    I raised my eyes to the middle of the lake.
    The island was still there, but it was nothing like the rocky outcrop, sprinkled with sparse patches of grass, that I’d seen a moment ago. The island in this world, the
Annorasi
world, was frightening.
    To this day, I still have trouble describing exactly what I saw that morning. Part of the problem is the difficulty of conveying accurately what Annorasi buildings look like to those who have never actually seen one. I’m always tempted to say, as I did while describing the fortress at Ghirardelli Square, that they’re made of light. But that’s not precisely true. They’re actually made of metal. The woven silver and gold make up the physical “bones” of Annorasi buildings. But it’s the light reflecting off of the metal that creates their actual
structure
, like mortar holding together bricks. Without the light, Annorasi buildings would crumble.
    And that was what had happened to the building on the island. It looked like someone had sucked the light right out of it, so suddenly and so violently it left behind only twisted clumps of dark, lifeless metal. The shards reached jaggedly upward, frozen in a desperate attempt to hold onto the light.
    It was dark around the ruin, but the darkness didn’t bother me nearly as much as the
absence
of the light. The only bits of brightness that remained were small trickles of the same eerie yellow-green I’dseen in the rally bonfire. But this type of light seemed only to add to the dark, rather than illuminate it.
    And the building, whatever it had been, was not the only thing that had been destroyed here. On the far edge of the ruin, just beyond where the dark water lapped onto shore, were row upon row of small, square, metal markers that could only be graves.
    Up until then, most of my glimpses of the Annorasi world had been beautiful. Some, like the cougar and the light-fortress in Ghirardelli Square, had been startling. But it had not been the visions themselves that had scared me, more the fact that they had appeared in front of me without explanation. But the island in the lake . . . this was more like the people burning in the bonfire. The threads of yellow-green flames matched the flames in the bonfire exactly, and the whole scene made me feel exactly like the bonfire had: scared and powerless, like I was alone in the dark.
    I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Lucas’s voice (back to normal now and smooth as silk) was in my ear.
    “Let the veil back down. Cover it up, and look away.”
    In my head I pictured a shimmering cloth lowering itself over the front of the frightening scene, like a curtain closing at the end of a performance. The island disappeared, and soon the warm rays of the sun were all around me once again.
    But the icy, grim feeling of the island was not gone.
    My hands shook. I clenched them together to stop them and looked over at Lucas. “Why did you show me that?” I demanded. My voice shook also.
    He took his hand off of my shoulder and looked down at the ground. His expression was hard to decipher, but it looked something like remorse;