Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

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  “You will never be unopposed.”

  “Insignificant trifles.”

  “Not always so insignificant.”

  “It matters not. They will ever be outweighed by the apathetic, and those shall always fall as easy prey.”

  “You depend over much on that premise.”

  “Do I? When have I been proven wrong?”

  Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall

  It always came back to the fact, that for Karen, it never felt like they were actually doing much of anything. Despite her prodding, despite her pointed questions, despite the fact that on multiple occasions she had come right out and accused them of not actually even trying to do what they all claimed that they were doing, they just kept brushing her off and nothing ever changed. And heavens to Betsey did everything in their little universe come unglued if she so much as hinted at Lia Lawson’s name. Will even got a little squirrelly about anything that came near to broaching that topic.

  Karen figured it was probably because he felt like he had been played right along with the rest of them, but that was part of the problem. They never just came right out and admitted that they had been played. They all sort of stayed on the outside edges of any formal acknowledgement. They made comments about not taking unnecessary chances and tightening up information control, but they all tiptoed around the fact that they had had someone that they thought was firmly in their camp that had turned out not to be. It grated on her nerves, and she knew exactly why each of them did it -- Kyle.

  Kyle was still living in la la land. He still thought that everything was some sort of misunderstanding where they didn’t get what was going on because they didn’t have a full view of the bigger picture. (It was some sort of nonsense like that -- Karen mostly tried not to hear anything that the kid said because it just aggravated her more. She was trying to not have any major blow ups of her temper in her quest to play nice with all of them even if most days she couldn’t remember what it was that had prompted her to accede to Will’s request that she play nice in the first place.)

  Anna and Connor were humoring him (going out of their way to not pick that fight). Will was humoring Anna and Connor. She thought that the first two (Anna and Connor) were hurt, but there might have been something else there as well. It would all be much easier if everyone would just have the conversation that they were avoiding and get everything out in the open. They had trusted the wrong person. They had figured it out before it came back to bite them too hard. You live, you learn, and you move on. That was how Karen saw the situation (she wasn’t a fan of holding things in). Why the rest of them didn’t or couldn’t see it that way was beyond her.

  People made things far more difficult than they had to be in general, and this particular little group that she was in the middle of seemed to turn that into some sort of an art form. Why make the nefarious duos nefarious deeds public when you could stress yourself out trying to counter their machinations from the shadows? Why let all the preset organizations for the maintenance of law and order do their job when you could turn your life upside down to make it your personal burden to bear? And if you were going to do all of that why take some sort of significant, large scale action to shut your opponent down when you could spend your days endlessly harping on tiny little insignificant ways that you could continually poke at them instead?

  And what in the world, Karen wondered, had happened to her vocabulary? That was the last time she read anything off of Will’s personal list of novels everyone should read. It did bad things to her thought processes. It was making her thoughts come out all wordy and grandiose. She preferred simple. They were all being stupid. There. That was a nice, simple, and straight forward explanation for what was going on with each of them (including, at this point, Will). If they were going to fight, then they should be fighting. If they weren’t going to bother, then they should pack it up and go home. (She meant figuratively speaking, of course, since technically they were running their base of operations out of Anna’s home. That was another one of those things that Karen questioned that no one ever bothered to answer. Why Anna’s apartment? It certainly wasn’t because of the spacious interior.)

  Put up or shut up, fish or cut bait, and all of those other things that her grandfather used to say that had always made her roll her eyes behind his back as a teenager that she now found herself echoing because they oh so accurately summarized the situation as she saw it. This wishy-washy, bide our time, try not to attract too much attention, and keep everything under wraps business had been annoying at best in the beginning. It was infuriating now. Why couldn’t they just go public with things? Why couldn’t they directly challenge Meredyth (who, as Karen had gathered, was the real person to be reckoned with on the other side)? Why couldn’t they just have one nice, big blow up and be done with it already?

  She never got a satisfactory answer to that -- not even from Will. It was always some variation on the theme of it not being that simple. Why wasn’t it that simple? It should be that simple. If it wasn’t that simple, then it was because they were making it not be that simple. If they were going to be the winning side, then why not get on with it? If they thought they were going to lose, then why drag it out? Wouldn’t it be better to know where they stood? Wouldn’t it be better to know that it was over instead of suffering through this slow drain that they were all going through?

  She was sick of watching Will watching her like someone was going to come swooping in and snatch her away while he watched (frozen and doing nothing to stop it most likely if the way he was currently behaving was any sort of an indication). She was sick of watching Connor wind himself tenser and tenser. She was sick of watching Anna throwing herself into every bit of anything that might even be loosely defined as work in order to pretend that she wasn’t watching Connor wind himself tenser and tenser or her brother becoming more and more withdrawn. (She was really sick of watching Connor and Anna trying not to watch each other, but that was a different type of tension altogether. She didn’t have the time or the energy to try to do anything about that at the moment.) She was even sick of watching Kyle (who with Anna had had the best sibling relationship that she had ever encountered in her life) sink further and further into a resentful silence whenever he wasn’t directly needed to help with whatever they were doing at the moment.

  She was sick to death of the never ending up in the airness over a girl that she had never even met. They needed to pick a side. Either they trusted the Lawson girl and let the chips fall where they may, or they didn’t trust her and had their marching orders (and followed them) accordingly. She didn’t even care at this point which it was. They just needed to pick a side and stick with it. This always playing to the middle ground was going to make her snap. It was infuriating. They were all infuriating.

  Karen chose to do what she always did best. She told them what she thought they should do, and she stepped back and let the reactions fly. “If you want to know what’s up with the kid, then why don’t you just run her through Glimpse?”