---Jason---

  # Chapter 1: Darkness Into Darkness

  The GO Train station thrums with movement around me. People rushing, voices blending into a chaotic symphony that my ears have learned to decode over years of relying on sound to map my world. I shift on the hard bench, pstic edge digging into my thighs. My white cane rests against my knee while my fingers trace the same raised dots on my braille novel for the twentieth time without absorbing a single word.

  There is no darkness in my world—no light either. People always assume I see bck, but that's not it. There's simply nothing. No visual processing whatsoever. Just a complete absence where others have sight. It's like trying to see out of your elbow—the input simply doesn't exist.

  The station smells of coffee from the nearby kiosk, someone's overpowering cologne mixing with the metallic tang of train tracks and the faint mustiness of the heating system struggling against January's biting cold. A janitor's mop leaves behind trails of chemical pine that catch in my throat.

  "You're sure there's nothing else they can try?" My own voice echoes in my memory, the phone call that changed everything just hours ago. The desperation in my tone disgusts me even now.

  Mom's silence stretched across the line before she finally spoke. "I'm sorry, honey. The specialist was clear. Your father's condition is terminal. Three months, maybe four."

  My duffel bag sits between my feet, containing everything I've managed to accumute in twenty-seven years of existence. Not much to show for nearly three decades alive. I'm returning to Toronto, the city I fled five years ago, where everyone knows me as "the blind Stone boy" rather than just Jason.

  The memory surfaces without warning—Dad teaching me to swim when I was eight. His hands steady beneath me in the community pool, voice firm but patient. "Float first, Jason. Trust the water. Trust yourself."

  "But what if I sink?" I'd asked, terror making my voice small.

  "Then I'll catch you," he'd replied simply, as if it were the most obvious truth in the world. "I'll always catch you."

  His hands had stayed there, unfailing, until I learned to trust the strange sensation of buoyancy. The man who never gave up, spending hours teaching me to navigate the world without sight. How many nights had he stayed up building tactile maps of our neighborhood? How many weekends spent teaching me to use tools, insisting I could build things just like anyone else?

  The anger stirs, a living thing beneath my skin. He doesn't deserve this. A man who built accessible pysets for the neighborhood kids in his spare time. Who volunteered at the community center teaching woodworking to troubled teens. Who never once treated my blindness as a tragedy, only a different way of experiencing the world.

  A child shrieks nearby, the high-pitched sound slicing through my thoughts. My hands clench involuntarily, nails digging half-moons into my palms. The pain helps—a controlled hurt to distract from the rger fury building inside me.

  "Watch where you're going, asshole!" someone shouts, followed by mumbled apologies.

  I almost ugh. *Watch*. What a concept.

  I remember Mom—Bearee, as Dad always calls her—reading to me before bed every night until I was twelve. Not children's books, but real literature. Dickens, Austen, Tolkien. Her voice would shift for each character, painting pictures with words that I could see more vividly than sighted people ever could. Her background in developmental psychology meant she understood exactly how to help me build mental frameworks for concepts most children learn visually.

  "Your mind is extraordinary, Jason," she'd told me once. "You process information differently, but that's not a limitation—it's a gift."

  The station speakers crackle to life, jolting me back to the present. "GO Train service to Toronto Union Station now boarding on Ptform 2."

  I gather my belongings, the anger simmering hotter now. Why him? Why the man who taught me to throw a baseball by sound alone? Who spent weeks creating a tactile chess set when I expressed interest in the game? Who never once, in twenty-seven years, made me feel like a burden?

  The station grows louder as passengers move toward the ptforms. Someone brushes against me, hard enough to make me stumble. My cane nearly ctters to the ground.

  "Sorry, man," a young voice says, already moving away.

  The rage fres white-hot. My free hand forms a fist automatically, the fantasy vivid in my mind—grabbing him, my fingers closing around his throat, teaching him what it costs when people are careless around me. The satisfaction of feeling his pulse flutter beneath my grip.

  I force my fingers to uncurl. *Control it. Not here. Not now.* The man probably doesn't deserve a rabid blind man attacking him, but mostly it's the first reason.

  The memory of Mom's face when I was expelled from high school fshes through my mind. I couldn't see her expression, of course, but I could hear the tears in her voice, feel the slight tremble in her hand when she touched my shoulder. I'd put a kid in the hospital for repeatedly moving my things, setting me up to stumble, ughing with his friends. They called it an "overreaction." I called it justice.

  "Ticket?" a voice asks, pulling me back to the present.

  I hold out my phone. "It's on here. Under Stone."

  "Ptform 2, fourth car. Train leaves in five minutes."

  I navigate through the station with practiced efficiency, counting steps, noting the subtle change in floor texture as I reach the ptform. The train waits, a behemoth I can sense rather than see—the vibration of its idling engine, the smell of metal and electricity, the way sounds bounce differently in its presence.

  Finding my seat requires concentration—trailing my hand along the tops of seats, feeling for the empty one, settling in beside the window that offers me nothing but different temperatures against my skin.

  "Heading to Toronto?" The voice beside me is female, older, with a slight rasp. She smells of peppermint and something medicinal.

  "Yes," I reply, not particurly interested in conversation. Human interaction requires too much energy, too much restraint.

  "Visiting or going home?"

  I hesitate. "Neither. Both. My father is dying."

  The words hang in the air between us. For once, I'm grateful for my blindness. I can't see the pity that inevitably crosses people's faces. Pity is worse than fear, worse than disgust. Pity makes the anger burn hotter, brighter. Pity makes me want to do things that would get me locked up, and Mom, Bearee, and my brothers Worthy and Tyran don't deserve that. They have enough shit already without their eldest killing some random person on a train for pitying him.

  "I'm sorry to hear that, young man," she says finally. No ptitudes about better pces or God's pns. Just simple acknowledgment. I appreciate that.

  The memory of Dad teaching me to ice skate surfaces unexpectedly. I was ten, terrified of the endless void stretching before me, unable to sense the boundaries of the frozen ke. But Dad was there, his voice a constant anchor. "I've got you, Jason. Five more glides, then we turn. Trust me."

  And I did. Always. Because Magnen Stone never broke a promise to his children.

  The train lurches forward, and I lean my head against the window, feeling the vibration through my skull. What am I even going back for? To sit by my father's bedside and listen to him struggle for breath? To comfort my mother, who has devoted her life to raising a blind son and now will lose her husband too? What comfort can I possibly offer when I can barely keep myself from exploding into violence at the slightest provocation?

  A memory blindsides me—my seventh birthday. Dad had built me a treehouse. Not a normal treehouse, but one designed specifically for me, with textured pathways, knotted ropes to guide my hands, and a pulley system I could operate myself. "Everyone needs a pce that's just theirs," he'd said as he guided my hands over each feature. "A sanctuary."

  He'd spent months on it, working te into the night after his regur job. Mom had compined good-naturedly about the sawdust he tracked into the house, about the blueprint discussions that dominated dinner. But her voice always held that warm note of love and pride when she spoke about "one of Magnen's projects."

  A child starts crying a few rows ahead, the sound like needles in my ears. The crying turns to screaming, high-pitched and grating. The mother's hushed, desperate attempts to quiet the child only seem to make it worse.

  I grip the armrests so tightly my knuckles must be white. My jaw aches from clenching. Inside my chest, the familiar pressure builds—a votile mixture of frustration, anger, and helplessness that threatens to detonate.

  *Breathe. Just breathe.*

  But the child keeps screaming, and now there's another sound—a man's voice, irritated, telling the mother to "shut that kid up." The mother's defensive response. The beginning of an argument.

  The pressure increases. My heart pounds. Sweat beads on my forehead.

  I am nothing. Have nothing. Will leave nothing behind when my time comes, except perhaps a few frightened memories in those unfortunate enough to have witnessed me.

  The train rocks gently, tracks clicking rhythmically beneath us. Outside, January's cold presses against the gss. Inside, the overheated car smells of wool coats, coffee, and the faint sour note of someone's takeout lunch.

  I think of Mom again, of how she'd sit with me during thunderstorms when I was small, describing the lightning in such vivid detail I could almost perceive it. "The sky just cracked open, Jason, like someone took a giant silver chisel to dark blue stone. The light branched like a river finding its way across the sky."

  She never pitied me, never treated my blindness as a tragedy. She simply found ways to transte the visual world into something I could understand. Her background in developmental psychology made her the perfect mother for a blind child, though I've often wondered if she regretted the career she put on hold to raise me.

  I need space. Air. Distance from these people before I say or do something I'll regret. Though it's probably "do something" at this rate, and that's always worse.

  Standing abruptly, I grab my cane. "Excuse me," I mutter to my seatmate. "Need to use the bathroom."

  I make my way down the narrow aisle, counting steps, using my cane sparingly in the confined space. The bathroom is occupied—I can tell by the "in use" light that doesn't matter to me but the locked door that certainly does.

  The train lurches, throwing me sideways. I catch myself against a seat, fingers digging into the upholstery. Someone asks if I'm okay. I nod tersely, not trusting my voice.

  The memory of Dad teaching me to use power tools rises unbidden. His hands guiding mine, showing me how to feel the resistance of the wood, how to sense when the drill bit catches. "Tools don't care if you can see or not," he'd said. "They only care if you respect them."

  I make my way back toward the space between cars, needing to escape the press of humanity, the overwhelming sensory input. The door slides open with a hiss, and cooler air washes over me. The space is quieter here, the sounds of the train more pronounced—metal on metal, the rhythm of the rails beneath us.

  I lean against the wall, trying to steady my breathing. Three months. Maybe four. That's all the time I have left with the man who taught me how to navigate a world that wasn't built for me. The man who never once treated me as less than capable, less than whole.

  The rage boils hotter, a living thing in my chest. The unfairness of it cws at me. Why him? Why not one of the countless assholes who make the world worse just by existing? Why not me?

  The train begins to slow, approaching another station. The announcer's voice crackles overhead, naming a stop I don't care about. People will get off. People will get on. The world continues its relentless forward motion while my father's time runs out.

  I should go back to my seat. Instead, I find myself stepping onto the ptform when the doors open, cane sweeping in familiar arcs before me. The cold hits like a physical blow after the overheated train car.

  I don't know this station. I don't know where I am. But suddenly I can't bear the thought of being trapped on that train for another moment.

  Twenty paces to the edge of the ptform. Step down. Another fifteen across what must be a pickup ne.

  Traffic sounds to my left—cars moving too fast for a parking lot. Must be the street. I turn right, parallel to the traffic, seeking some quiet pce to gather myself before continuing to Toronto.

  Something catches my cane—a crack, a hole, I'm not sure. I stumble, momentarily disoriented. Reorient. The traffic sounds are louder now. Am I still on the sidewalk?

  A horn bres suddenly, impossibly close. The sound of brakes squealing. Someone shouts.

  For a split second, a strange calm washes over me. The rage that's been my constant companion quiets, repced by an odd acceptance.

  *So this is how it ends.*

  Impact. Pain explodes through my body. I'm flying, then falling.

  Darkness swallows darkness. At least I won't be at risk of making my family's lives worse.