A Circus of Ink

by Lauren Palphreyman

  ‘Like it?’ says Mary. Two of the walls are lined with shelves cluttered with papers, books, and parchment. But Elle and the Darlings are clustered around something on the far wall. ‘I painted it myself.’

  ‘I . . . I’d almost forgotten what he looked like.’ Elle sounds as if she’s in pain. I don’t like it.

  ‘You knew him?’ says Mary.

  I push through the group to stand beside her.

  ‘He is . . . he was my father,’ she says softly.

  My heart stops. Waves of darkness crash over me. Something heavy pushes down on my chest, and I can’t fucking breathe.

  There’s a painting of one of the Creators on the wall. The Fallen Creator.

  Her father.

  His greying hair, sharp chin, and brown eyes blur as the room swims around me.

  There’s a watery film over Elle’s eyes when she meets mine. I can’t do anything. I can’t say anything. She coughs, blinks, and then turns back to the painting. She’s talking to Mary, but their voices fade to nothing. I can’t focus on them. I need to get the fuck out of this room. I can’t fucking breathe.

  I step back. No one seems to notice as I leave. The books and shelves blur together, and I find myself back in the room we started in. I put my hands on the table and take deep breaths.

  Get a grip on yourself, Jay.

  I close my eyes and try to process it.

  Elle’s father was a Creator. Of course he was. It all makes sense. The story about the clockmaker and the grey world and the dandelion. The story about the man who first spread the seeds of the Circus. The way Sylvia referred to him as a crackpot. The reason Elle knows so much about the Final City. Her naïvety. The way she knows how to tell stories too.

  ‘You knew Elle’s father, didn’t you, Blotter?’

  The door clicks shut behind me. I stand upright. Slowly, I turn to face Sylvia. Her lips are pursed in a hard line.

  ‘Everyone knows him. He was a Creator. The Fallen Creator. The First Twist.’

  ‘Yes. But you knew him. Didn’t you?’

  I hold her gaze. Then I incline my head.

  ‘How?’

  I moisten my lips. ‘I met him twice. Once—’ I exhale. ‘Once when he gave me this scar.’ I touch my eyebrow. Then I look at the chequered floor between my boots and rub the back of my neck.

  ‘And the second time?’ she asks.

  She already knows what I’m going to say. I know she does.

  I meet her eye. ‘The second time when I killed him.’

  She stares at me, and her lips harden. Then she nods. ‘Elle can never know,’ she says.

  She turns on her heel and strides out of the room.

  Chapter Forty

  Elle

  My fingertips skim over the dusty tomes lining the shelves. When I close my eyes, I smell him in the air: old parchment and cigars and peppermint. Something aches inside of me. It’s relentless and consuming.

  I miss him.

  I miss him so much.

  ‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’

  I open my eyes and turn. The others have gone. Jay too. I don’t know when that happened. But Mary sits casually in a chair by the painting of my father. I can’t look at it. In this room full of his things, his absence feels like a tangible thing; a hungry mouth waiting to swallow me.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m looking for a Book of Truth. One that’s not in circulation anymore. I think he wrote a story in it. One that got him killed.’

  She leans forwards, resting her forearms on her black trousers for a moment. Then she nods and gets to her feet. ‘There’s nothing like that in here. But we have a collection of them. Maybe the one you’re looking for is amongst them.’

  She walks past me, stirring the stale air. I momentarily lock eyes with my father. Then I tear myself away and follow Mary back into the main room of the library.

  ‘How do you have all these books?’ I ask as I fall into step beside her.

  ‘Well, I was born here. As was my mother. And my grandmother. And my grandmother’s mother.’ Our way is lit by glowing table lamps, and our boots leave footprints in the dust as we navigate the narrow paths. ‘My family has been based her for decades—centuries maybe. We record people’s stories and rescue books from fires.’

  ‘Stories will always grow,’ I say.

  ‘Stories will always grow,’ she repeats.

  ‘Jay says this place reminds him of the Citadel.’ I glance up at the domed ceiling and the gold railing that circles the gallery up there. ‘The Creators lived here once, didn’t they? That’s why some of my father’s stories are here. They ban books for the rest of us. They have libraries of their own.’

  Mary nods. ‘I’m not sure how many generations back it was, but one of my ancestors worked in the Citadel. She made a record of it. We think the Citadel she spoke of was this building. Only, it wasn’t considered Draft Four back then; it was the Final City. But then the Creators moved on and built something better. They hid this place under the earth to be forgotten.’

  I think about the underground railway we were heading towards and Jay’s insistence it didn’t exist. Did the Creators hide that too?

  ‘But it wasn’t forgotten,’ I say.

  ‘By most, it was. History belongs to those who write it after all.’ She smiles. ‘But not by all.’

  ‘There are cracks in everything.’

  ‘Yes.’ We walk through a small doorway, and Mary flicks on a light. ‘Ah. Here we are.’

  We’re in a hexagonal room filled with books. The Sacred Stylus is embossed on many of them in glinting gold or bronze or silver. The Book of Truth. Thousands of them. All of them filled with the One True Story, the words of my enemy.

  ‘Tom wanted to burn them.’ Mary leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms. ‘But I don’t like the idea of burning books. Even these. Need any help?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

  She grins, flashing white teeth. ‘I’m so glad you said that. I don’t much fancy going through this lot. Tom’s going to head out to see if he can intercept the rest of your Circus friends. I’ll go prepare us some food so we can all eat together when they get here. You know where you’re going to start?’

  ‘If it’s here, my father will have left me a sign. I’ll know it when I see it.’

  She smiles and heads back into the library.

  It must be about an hour of pacing the room and pulling tomes from the shelves before I see the dandelion seed scribbled onto the spine of one of the books. My pulse quickens as I slide it off the shelf and crumple, cross-legged, onto the floor.

  There is a symbol on the first page: thirteen concentric circles with thirteen black lines cutting through from a blot in the centre to the edges. It looks a little like the tattoo on Jay’s arm. The one he said was a map.

  I frown, running a finger along it. Then, hand shaking, I flick through the pages, catching glimpses of the One True Story. There’s the story about how the Creators made the world out of ink and words, a parable about a greedy smuggler who was killed in the river, the promise that if we follow the One True Story our souls will be saved when the Ending is upon us.

  Then I turn the page on a dried dandelion. My heart jolts.

  Something burns behind my eyes. This has to be it. I place the small, withered flower onto the chequered floor. Heart beating fast, I read the words my father left for me to find.

  ‘Once, there was a world, and the world was grey.

  ‘But before that, there was a different world. A world that was full of colour.

  ‘Dandelion seeds were carried by the breeze, and wherever they landed, a dandelion would grow.

  ‘In this world, there were some who wondered what else could be grown amongst the fields of flowers. Their creations started small: a bee, a door, a storm, a Circus. But like their creations, their ambitions grew too. And before long, there was War between those who were starting to understand their power, and those who were trying to cling ont
o it.

  ‘The War lasted for many years, and as it raged across the land, flowers were culled to make way for instruments of destruction. In the darkness that remained, the men who clung onto power planted something else. A new story.

  ‘They told the world dandelions were weeds, not flowers, to be uprooted and destroyed. And gradually—so gradually no one even seemed to notice—they rid the world of colour altogether until all was grey, and only their story remained, carried instead of dandelion seeds by the breeze.

  ‘As time went by, they grew and revised and amended their story. They made themselves gods. They reinforced their story with Ink to give it power. And then they hid the Ink so no one else could use it.

  ‘Because they knew a truth many had forgotten.

  ‘Whoever controls the Ink controls the Story.

  ‘Whoever controls the Story controls the world.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  Elle

  Jay is lying on the bed when I make it back to the room, hands clasped behind his head as he stares vacantly at the ceiling. He’s fully clothed, and his muddy boots have left marks on the cream bedspread. He doesn’t look up when I close the door behind me, but he tenses, his breathing stopping momentarily.

  I hurry over and kneel on the mattress beside him, placing the book down on the sheets. A smile spreads across my face. ‘I found the story I was looking for.’

  He swallows hard then glances at me. His eyes are cold. He turns his attention back to the ceiling. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘I don’t know, Elle. Do I?’ He exhales a long, weary breath and sits upright. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and puts his head in his hands.

  ‘Jay?’ I shuffle closer and place a hand tentatively on his shoulder, feeling the knots in his muscles. ‘You’re upset.’

  When he doesn’t reply, I sigh. I think I know what this is about. Most records of my father are gone. His stories were deleted from the Book of Truth, the buildings with his face on them were destroyed, and any devout followers of his were Cut from the One True Story. My father exists only as a footnote in the Creators’ story now. They call him the First Twist and say he existed only to tempt people into straying from the true path.

  Most forgot his name and his face when the new version of the One True Story washed over them.

  But Jay is a Blotter.

  ‘You recognised the painting, didn’t you?’ I drag my teeth over my bottom lip. ‘Only a few people know he’s my father, Jay. It was drilled into me since I was born to never tell. I needed to survive. But I wish you hadn’t found out that way. I guess it was surprising.’

  ‘Yeah, it was pretty fucking surprising.’ Tension radiates from his hunched-up body.

  I run my thumb along his shoulder. ‘You were going to find out at some point. And . . . well . . . I . . .’ The words catch in my throat, and I’m unsure whether I can say it. Then I breathe out softly. ‘I trust you, Jay. I should have told you.’

  And it is true. I do trust him. I have always looked out for myself; I’ve never really let anyone get close to me before. And yet somehow, even though this man was sent to kill me, I trust him.

  ‘Yeah, you should have. It would have saved a lot of trouble.’ He stands up abruptly, and I’m stung.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  When his eyes hit mine, there’s pain behind them—hot, malleable pain I can’t understand. He looks away. Runs a hand across his mouth. Then he paces in front of me.

  My father told me a story about a wolf with a thorn stuck in his paw once. The wolf lashed out because it was in pain until someone pulled it out. But I do not know what is hurting Jay. I do not know how to make it better.

  I do not understand.

  I push myself up and stand on the bed so my eyes are level with his. ‘Jay? What’s wrong?’

  He looks away from me then nods. ‘I got you to your stupid library.’

  My insides freeze. All the warmth I felt after reading my father’s story drains from my body. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. I’m going. I’m out. I should never have come in the first place.’

  ‘You mean you should have killed me?’

  His eyes blaze. ‘No. That’s not what I mean, and you know it.’

  ‘Well, what then?’

  He steps back, taking away the heat from his body.

  ‘No, Jay. You’re not leaving.’

  He smiles, but his lips are hard, and there is no warmth in his ink-blotched eyes. ‘Right. and you’re going to stop me, are you, little Twist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how the fuck are you going to do that? Create a hurricane to trap me here? A tornado? An impossible cage to lock me in? No. Because you can’t do that out here, can you, little Twist?’

  ‘Stop being a dick.’

  ‘Don’t you get it, little Twist? I am a dick. I’ve always been a dick. Stop trying to fucking fix me.’

  ‘I’m not trying to fix you.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘Do you think you’re the only one who has problems? Who feels pain? Do you think you’re special because you’re a Blotter and things didn’t work out the way you planned? Do you think things worked out for any of us either, Jay? The only person I loved was killed. Sylvia lost her child. Raven’s girlfriend was murdered. We’re all broken here.’

  I’m breathing hard, and so is he. He rubs his face with both hands.

  ‘FUCK.’

  ‘My father being a Creator changes nothing.’

  He drops his arms to his sides. His face is red, and there’s a watery film over his eyes. ‘It changes everything.’

  ‘Why?’ I grab his hand and move it to my waist, then I take his face in my hands. He doesn’t pull away when I rest my forehead against his. His skin is hot, and his short breaths mingle with mine.

  ‘Jay, what’s wrong? Why are you being like this?’

  He meets my eye, and there’s something painfully vulnerable in those hard pools of blue. ‘I’m going,’ he says. It’s not the hard, impenetrable voice of the Blotter I met in my bedsit, but I hear the finality in it all the same.

  I try to swallow the panic rising in my chest.

  No. I don’t need him. I’m fine. It’s fine.

  ‘But I don’t want you to.’ My voice comes out as a whisper.

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘No.’ I step closer so our noses touch. ‘Jay . . .’ I brush my lips against his. He doesn’t kiss me back. ‘Jay, what’s the matter? Talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t belong here, Elle.’

  I kiss him again, and a low, hollow sound vibrates against my mouth. ‘Yes. You do,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve done terrible things.’

  ‘That’s what this is about? I know.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘You’ve done good things too. You didn’t do what was written. You saved my life. You helped Raven. You saved all the kids at the Circus. And now you’re feeling guilty about the bad stuff. And that’s good, Jay. It shows you’re human.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m a fucking monster.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ Holding his face, I brush my lips against his again, and this time, his mouth part slightly. His grip tightens around my waist.

  ‘You can’t change your past, Jay. It’s done. But you can change your future.’ I nip his bottom lip with my teeth.

  He makes a low sound, and his other hand moves to my waist. Some of the tension in his chest eases as if he’s giving in. But then he inhales sharply through his nose. ‘Elle. I can’t.’

  ‘Yes. You can.’ I move my thumb against the side of his face.

  He closes his eyes. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I know you don’t think you belong here. But you do. And it’s dangerous for you out there now, because you are one of us. You can’t leave. They’ll kill you. Please. Stay with
me.’ I brush my lips against his again. ‘Stay with me. Please.’

  Finally, he kisses me back. He groans as his mouth moves against mine. One of his big hands slides up my back, and he pulls me into him.

  ‘Stay with me,’ I say as his kisses deepen and his mouth moves urgently against mine. His grip on me tightens until it’s almost painful, and I don’t care.

  ‘Stay with me.’ I hear the panic in my voice, and I hate it. I don’t need anybody. I don’t. I can do this alone. I can. ‘Please stay with me.’

  I know he can hear that I’m panicking too. I hate that he hears it. But something dissolves in his chest. He lifts me off the bed and holds me in his strong arms.

  ‘I’m here,’ he says.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jay

  I taste her. I taste every fucking inch of her.

  Head between her legs, I devour her until she throws her head back against the mattress and cries out my name.

  Then I make her do it again with my fingers.

  And then I take her with her legs over my shoulders and her hands balled up in the sheets.

  And with every thrust, I try to forget. I try to get it out.

  That bad.

  Fucking.

  Feeling.

  Building.

  In my.

  Chest.

  Fuck.

  And when I release a low, guttural cry that comes from somewhere deep inside and scrapes hard against my throat, it comes out with it. That bad feeling. Just for a few seconds.

  No thoughts. No emotions.

  Just relief. Lightness. Bliss.

  But when I crash down on top of her, sinking my head into her neck and feeling her heartbeat pounding against my chest, it starts to build up again. Hollow and heavy at the same time. A shadow. Growing. Spreading. Dark like the ink I can’t get out of me.

  ‘Jay.’ Her fingertips move against the back of my neck, and I groan into her skin. I inhale her scent of sweat and sex and soap. I taste her on my tongue. I let her take over my senses as my heart pounds and my breathing steadies.

  And I force the bad feeling to the pit of my stomach so it won’t destroy everything. It settles, cold and hard, and feels too heavy. But I have to hold it there. What else am I supposed to do?