The Wrong Kind of Dark

The lights went out while they were still on the stairs.

Not a flicker. A slam. One second the stairwell was buzzing yellow, and the next it was nothing, a black so complete that Maya put her hand out and could not find the wall she knew was there.

"Storm took the grid," Soren said somewhere below her. His voice sounded closer than it should have, the way voices do when your eyes stop helping.

"Don't move," Maya said. "I can't see anything."

"Me neither."

They stood. The dark pressed on Maya's face like a warm cloth. She had left her phone charging upstairs in the robotics room, and Soren never brought his, and the only sound was the rain hammering the little window at the top of the stairwell, a window that let in exactly no light at all.

Maya reached for the handrail and missed. Reached again and found it, cold under her fingers.

"This is the wrong kind of dark," she said.

"There's a right kind?"

"You know what I mean. Like there's a difference between the dark when you turn off the lamp and the dark inside a closet." She stopped. Something in that was true and she wanted to hold still and look at it. "The closet stays dark. The lamp dark goes away."

"Goes away how? There's no light."

"That's the thing." She turned her head toward where his voice was. She still could not see him. But. "Soren. Can you see the window yet?"

A pause. She heard him breathing, heard him turn.

"No," he said. Then, slower, "Wait."

Maya looked up the stairs to where the window should be. For a long time it was nothing, the same black as everything. And then it was not quite nothing. It was a rectangle that was less black than the black around it, a gray so faint she wasn't sure she was inventing it.

"I see it," she said. "The window. It's gray now."

"It wasn't gray a minute ago."

"The window didn't change." She said it fast, before she understood it, the way things sometimes came to her. "We changed. Our eyes changed."

Soren went quiet. Then his hand touched her shoulder, found it in the dark on the first try, which meant he was seeing something too.

"Test it," he said. "Close your eyes. Count to thirty. Don't cheat."

Maya shut her eyes. She counted, the rain filling in the numbers, and when she opened them the window was brighter. Not bright. But more. The gray had crept down onto the top step, and she could see the edge of it, a line where step became air.

"It keeps going," she whispered. "Every minute it's a little more."

"Cones and rods," Soren said, and she could hear him building it in his head, piece by piece, the way he did. "In the light you use one kind. The color kind. They quit fast in the dark. Then the other kind wakes up. The gray kind. But they're slow."

"How slow?"

"I don't know. Minutes. My mom's optometrist made her sit in a dark room once and it took forever." His hand left her shoulder. "Maya. There's more than one thing happening. That's what's weird."

"What do you mean."

"The first bit was fast. The window showing up. That was quick, right? A few seconds and there was gray." He was moving now, careful, she could hear his sneakers testing each step. "But it's still getting better. Slow. Like there's a fast thing and then a slow thing underneath it."

Maya looked down at her own hand. A minute ago it had not existed. Now she could see it, a pale five-fingered shape floating in front of her, and if she looked slightly to the side of it, it got clearer, which made no sense and she filed it away with the other things that did not make sense yet.

"Look to the side of things," she said. "Not straight at them."

She heard Soren turn his head. "That's better. Why is that better?"

"The gray kind must not be in the middle. The middle's for color." She was piecing it too now, both of them laying stones across the same dark water. "So at night the middle of where you look is the worst part."

"That's backwards from how it feels."

"Everything about this is backwards."

They sat down on the top step together, shoulders touching, and did nothing but let their eyes work. And that was the part Maya could not get over. She was not doing anything. She was sitting in the dark being useless and her eyes were quietly, without asking her, cranking themselves open wider and wider, switching over machinery she had never once felt switch, reaching down into a dark that had seemed like a solid wall and finding that it was not a wall at all, that it was full of things.

The stairs came back first. Then the handrail, a curve of gray. Then the door at the bottom, and the poster taped to it, and she could not read the poster but she knew it was there, she could see the pale square of it.

"It's the same amount of light," she said. "The whole time. The rain, the window, whatever's leaking in. It never got brighter out there."

"No."

"So we're pulling more out of the same nothing. We're just, we're squeezing it." She laughed, once, surprised. "How far down does it go? If we sat here an hour?"

"Starlight," Soren said. "People can see by starlight. Just stars. No moon." His voice did the thing it did when something was too big for him and he had to put it somewhere. "Noon on a beach and one single star. Your eyes do both. The same eyes."

Maya tried to hold the two ends of it in her head at once, the white blaze of the beach and the one far star, and the fact that the wet gray thing sitting in her own skull could stretch all the way from one to the other, was stretching right now, in the dark, on a staircase, while she just sat.

Somewhere above them a breaker thunked and the stairwell light flared back on, white and total and blinding, and both of them threw their hands up over their faces at the exact same time, flinching from the brightness they had been begging for a minute ago.