Blood, Ink & Fire

by Ashley Mansour

  *

  The footsteps are soft and short. Along the wooden floor, a pair of feet come into view. They’re purple, with dots of dark brown paint unevenly spread over the toes. Not paint, I realize. Blood. John’s blood.

  With a flash, I remember how it grew across the floor of the RV, then in slow motion how he fell after the voltage shot through his body. I bolt upright before the room spins and I collapse back onto the small bed. “I saw him! Help him, please!”

  I check my surroundings. The low beams and crooked plaster walls tell me I can only be in one place: the Winnow. This must be the Potts’s house. John’s home. I try to remember how I got here, but can’t. Everything went dark after Grandpa passed out, after I saw John appear before me like a dream.

  Someone slips a hand beneath my head, helping me sit up. “It’s okay. You’re safe. You made it safely back.”

  I recognize her voice. “Miriam? You’re alive!”

  “It takes more than a little chemical backdraft to take down this old bird,” she says.

  I throw my arms around her. “Miriam, I saw him!” I grab her hand. “I saw John. He’s alive.”

  “Shhh, calm now,” she whispers. “You need to rest. You have a slight concussion.”

  “I know what I saw,” I tell her, feeling unsure.

  “Of course. Only I don’t want you to think of that now.”

  “What about my grandfather? Please tell me he’s okay.”

  “He’s been badly hurt.” Her voice croaks. “His leg was broken in two places. I have set it, but he needs an operation.”

  “I need to see him.” I try to spin my feet to the floor, but Miriam stops me.

  “Not so fast. You are severely dehydrated, dear. The sun is too strong for you. You had heatstroke when you got here.”

  “Grandpa . . .”

  “He’ll be okay. He’s resting now. You must do the same.”

  “Miriam, please tell me. Is it true? Is John alive?”

  Her eyes look frightened. “Yes, and it is a mystery.”

  “So he’s okay?”

  “It would appear so. He managed to bring you and your grandfather back to us. He saved the book. You had it hidden inside your clothes.”

  My eyes blink rapidly, struggling to understand. “How is it possible? No one could have survived the chemi-taser.”

  “Sometimes the impossible is possible.”

  Her response triggers something inside me. I’m not crazy. I know what I saw. I was there. My parents are dead because I was there.

  “Listen,” I say, adamant. “You were with me, Miriam. You saw what those men did to him.”

  “Fell assassins, yes.”

  I lean forward and take her hands. “John died last night. Right here in the Winnow. You know this to be true.”

  “Yes,” Miriam says. “I do.”

  “So then tell me, please, how can he be alive now? Was it you? Did you save him with your . . . your herbs?”

  “Oh no, dear. The herbs have power but not that kind of power.”

  “But he’s here now,” I repeat.

  “Don’t be mistaken,” Miriam says casually. “That isn’t John. Not anymore.” She moves into the half-light of the window. The sky outside is hazy with clouds. “John is dead. What you see is just his body.”

  “Miriam,” I say slowly. “You’re frightening me.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she says, dropping her voice. “But the fact is, you should be frightened. There are secrets Fell doesn’t want us to keep. But our survival depends on it, I’m afraid.”

  “What secrets?”

  “It’s time for the Rising’s return. At last.”

  My head starts spinning again. I struggle to hold Miriam in my gaze. What is the Rising, and what does it have to do with my best friend? “Please,” I manage. “Just tell me if John is okay. That’s all I care about.”

  Miriam makes one long, exasperated sigh, then slams a fist on the edge of the side table. “I told you. John is gone now.”

  She takes me closer, pulling me into her fragmented world, where truth and stories overlap. Tears fill her eyes. I see the grandmotherly grief I’d been expecting. “Our John was murdered. He’s dead and never coming back.”

  I shut my eyes, trying to grasp what she is saying. “If John is dead,” I manage. “Then who is that?”

  Miriam nods. “Now you’re asking the right question.”

  A scream from the next room makes us both jump. The bedroom door swings open. A man surveys the room, his eyes beet red beneath starkly rimmed glasses, a gun tucked at his side. I’ve never seen him before, but I can guess who he is. He’s John’s father, Hale. They have the same eyes. “We need to get him into the lab,” he says. “Ginny just got home and found him. She’s a mess.”

  “Poor dear,” Miriam says.

  Hale glances at me. “You’re awake already.” He strides toward me and offers his hand, a standard Winnower introduction. “I’m Hale. John’s father.”

  “Noelle,” I say, taking his hand.

  He nods once and looks at my wrist-plate.

  “It’s disabled?” he asks Miriam, who nods once in reply.

  Hale sighs, then guides my arm to the bed frame, where he bashes it hard against the surface. I yank my arm back as my wrist-plate shatters.

  “We have a firewall, but we can’t be too careful,” he says. “Especially now.”

  I rub my arm as the remains of my wrist-plate fall away, leaving my reddened skin bare. “You could have warned me.”

  “Miriam,” Hale says, looking past me, “you disabled William’s?”

  “Of course. Noelle should come with us.” Miriam helps me up. I have the shakes, and she insists I keep a blanket around my shoulders to prevent my body temperature from dropping. Miriam stops me at the bedroom door. “Whatever you see, whatever happens, you must not be fooled, my dear. Not for a moment. He isn’t one of us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The one in John’s body. Virginia and Hale will find this very difficult to understand. But you and I will know the truth much sooner.”

  “What truth?”

  “The truth of Prospero’s dream. The reason he is here. The reason you are both here.”

  I feel myself grow faint. My hands grip the door frame as the walls bend and sway.

  “You must be strong,” Miriam says. “Strong to meet your purpose.”

  I follow her downstairs, into the kitchen. Page bounds up to me, a limp in her gait. I notice her leg has been bandaged, but she seems otherwise okay. I drop to the floor and open my arms to her. “Poor baby,” I say, stroking her. “They hurt you, too.” Page stays at my side and points her nose at the round table where John is sitting, his hands tied behind him. He sits silently, his body still, his head tilted slightly, watching us. When I approach him, Page starts growling.

  “Shhh, enough, Page!” John’s mother, Ginny, kneels in front of him, stroking his face. Her eyes are bare and flushed red like the color of her hair. She’s sobbing uncontrollably. John appears calm, collected.

  Hale turns to us, his eyes showing his fatigue, and fear. “Ginny went to the market to trade some things for his funeral clothes. When she got back, he was here,” he says softly. “I can’t seem to calm her.”

  Hale helps Ginny stand. He holds her close. “I don’t know how it’s possible that he survived, but I don’t care,” she says. “He’s not going back there, Hale. Never again.”

  John lifts his eyes past his mother. He looks at me in a way that makes my senses prickle, my breath halt in my chest. His face betrays no emotion, but his eyes cut right through me. “I’m sorry about the boy,” he says. “I know he meant something to you.”

  Ginny steps back from him, wearing an expression of horror. She shakes her head in disbelief, grasping for Hale behind her. “What have they done to him?” She breaks down in Hale’s arms, her face between her hands. “I warned you,” she says, lifting her eyes. “I warned you this
would happen if you sent him to that place. That shell of a world!”

  “Please, honey, calm down. We don’t know what’s wrong with him yet,” Hale says.

  “Yes you do! You do know!” Ginny yells. “You let them change him. You let them change my son!”

  Hale falls silent, a look of dread encasing him.

  “You believe he’s been compromised?” Miriam asks.

  Hale releases the gun and combs his hand through his hair. “Fell injected him with their Fellmaceutical through the chemi-taser. His body was missing for hours after he . . . he . . . expired.” He pauses, collecting himself. “We need to run the tests to be sure, but yes, that seems to be the only logical explanation for this.”

  “We don’t need any tests,” Ginny snaps. “I can tell you right now. That is not my son! I can feel it.” She bursts into tears. “What did they do to you, John? What did Fell do? Can’t you just tell me?”

  “I don’t believe he’s here to hurt us,” Miriam says. She clocks my confused expression and whispers, “They think his brain has been tampered with. By Fell.”

  “What?” I say stunned. “How?”

  Ginny turns and locks eyes with me. “The same way they tamper with all you Valers. Toxic light. Neuron-altering light. For all we know, you’ve been compromised, too.”

  “No,” Miriam says sharply. “She hasn’t.”

  “What evidence do you have of that?” Hale asks.

  “Noelle never made it to immersion,” Miriam says. “So therefore she has not been changed.”

  “You think immersion did this to him?” I ask, baffled.

  “It could explain the memory defects and alteration to his personality,” Hale says. “Though immersion is usually too sophisticated for such extreme . . . side effects.”

  “Does it explain how he survived?” I ask. “Or how he can see?”

  Hale looks uncertain. “We need a test, pure and simple. Data is all we can rely on.”

  Ginny laughs. “I have all the data I need. I know my child, Hale. I can feel him.” She begins sobbing, triggering John to stand and free himself from the chair as though he’d never been tied in the first place.

  “I’m sorry this is difficult,” he whispers. “But you need to understand, your son’s life has been taken.” He looks at Ginny with a strange intensity. “John is dead,” he says. Ginny’s face drains of color. John lifts his arm, offering his hand. “It will be okay.”

  Ginny grabs Hale’s gun and thrusts it into John’s face. “Listen to me! Tell me right now what you did with my son. Tell me or I will destroy you, the same way you destroyed him!”

  “Ginny, no!” Miriam cries.

  Hale’s eyes grow large and frightened. “Please, Virginia, you have to calm down.”

  Page starts barking as John steps forward. “Get back,” Ginny yells. She shakes her head as if to convince herself. “You are not John! Heaven help me, but I will shoot you.”

  “Listen to me!” Miriam shouts. “You can’t do this! It’s just as Prospero said. We’ve waited a lifetime for this. You have to trust me!”

  “Mom, stop! You’re not helping,” Hale yells. He reaches for Ginny. “Honey, please, if you just trust me, I will do a scan. We’ll find out what they did to him, okay? Just, put down the gun. Please, Virginia. Please.”

  Ginny steadies. Her breathing softens. “He’s not my son. Not my son . . . my son.”

  “Think of us, our family.” Hale slowly reaches around her, placing one hand lightly on her abdomen. “Think of the baby.”

  Ginny freezes as though she’s remembered something. His hand strokes her belly. “Just one test,” she says.

  *

  Hale leads us into his basement lab. He makes John enter first and directs him to a chair facing several displays. They look like they should be broadcasting Verity, but all of them seem to be blank. Hale arranges himself on a wheeled stool in front of a long wooden workbench covered with machine innards. Six or seven modified wrist-plates in various states of disrepair are strewn across the surface. One of them sits on a stand. Hale picks it up and begins navigating. “Don’t worry,” he says without turning around. “They’ve all been reprogrammed. No Verity here.”

  John sits silently, his gaze concentrated on the floor. There are no other chairs, so Miriam, Ginny, and I stand against the wall, watching.

  Hale rolls up to John. “Right,” he says, attempting to sound poised. He sets the wrist-plate on the desk to the right and leans toward it. “Subject is John Potts, my son.” He clears his throat. “Age eighteen and six months, approximately. Last night, at twenty-three thirty hours, subject received what would appear to be a fatal dose of Parasulin, injected by a Fell-operated chemi-taser. Subject has survived, though his whereabouts from oh-two-hundred to approximately oh-six-hundred hours this morning are unknown. He currently exhibits signs of memory loss, personality changes—”

  “Dramatic personality changes,” Ginny blurts out.

  “Very well. Dramatic personality changes. Also acute amnesiac tendencies consistent with a poorly executed immersion. It’s possible this was intentional. And also”—Hale stops to collect himself—“it appears the subject has regained his sight. Subject is no longer blind.”

  Hale turns to us, extending his official bedside manner. “I’m going to run a neural imaging program. It will detect whether anything in John’s brain has been altered.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “The brain’s activity after immersion forms a discernable pattern,” he says simply. “There are certain markers Fell leaves behind, certain signs, if you like, that indicate a person has been through immersion.”

  “What kind of signs?”

  Hale sighs. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. They’d have me destroyed.”

  “They’ll never find out, I promise. I’m never going back there.” Hale looks unsure.

  “Please. I need to know. I need to understand what happens to us.”

  Hale turns back to the display. “Fine. But the best way is to show you.” He navigates toward an image of what looks to be a human skull. We zoom inside, past the skull and a liquid substance to the lumpy mass of the brain.

  “Imagine this is you,” Hale says in a matter-of-fact manner. “This is your brain. You’ve spent the last seventeen years of your life having it mapped. Every lobe, every neuron. Every connection you’ve ever made has been recorded. By Fell.”

  “The stream,” I hear myself utter. “They see everything.”

  “Correct,” Hale says. “Fell has been gathering information on your internal wiring. And you’ve been helping them.”

  “Helping them? That’s the last thing I’d ever want to do.”

  “Maybe so, but you were unaware it was happening. In fact, it turns out you’ve been teaching Fell exactly how to read your brain all along.”

  “Verity,” I say. I feel myself breaking the surface of the ocean, plunging into the deep unknown. “The Learning.”

  “That’s right,” Hale says. “The so-called Learning is not for you. It’s for Fell. So they can get to know exactly how you work. So they can map your brain and prepare to rewire it. So they can alter you from the inside. Permanently.”

  “So all this time, I’ve been helping them prepare to change me?”

  “Precisely. The more data they have on you, the more accurate that change will be.”

  “And if they don’t have the data? If we fail the Learning?”

  “You mean what happens if you don’t give them the best possible map of your brain?” I nod.

  Hale blinks rapidly. “What you must understand is the brain is a highly sophisticated computer. The slightest error in programming could have irreversible effects. If Fell can’t map you in Learning, they can’t reprogram you in immersion. And if they can’t do that, well . . .”

  “Well what?” I ask.

  “You’re useless to them.”

  “That’s enough, Hale,” Ginny says. “She doesn’t need to know thi
s.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say to her. “I’ve spent my life being lied to. I want the truth.”

  “The truth is, in simplest terms, Fell has found a way to engineer what has happened to humanity quite naturally,” Hale says. “Namely, the dissolution of literacy.”

  “That doesn’t sound simple,” I say.

  Hale brings up the image of the brain on the screen. “Look with me.” The map of the brain lights up in the left hemisphere. “For over two thousand years, human beings have had language. And for just a fraction of that, we’ve had widespread literacy.”

  “The ability to read and write,” Miriam says. “The thing you can do, Noelle, makes you literate.”

  “We have found over time that the brain has a center for language, for literacy,” Hale continues. “Human beings are wired for it.”

  “What are you saying?” I ask him.

  “In short, the material we require to be able to read is inside us, just like the lungs we need to breathe, or the optic nerve, which allows us to see. We were all born to be readers, Noelle.”

  “And Fell has found a way to change that.”

  “Correct,” Hale says. “Right here.” He points to the left side of the brain, then zooms in focusing on a small area. “Within the angular gyrus, the place where reading happens. With a careful, targeted insult to the brain.” Hale stops to adjust his glasses. I notice his brow is dotted with moisture. “They have, rather bafflingly, managed to artificially create a thing called ‘alexia sine agraphia.’”

  “Word blindness,” Ginny says. “Every Valer has it or will have it by the time they’re through with immersion.”

  “So you’re saying I would have been blind, too, had I gone into immersion?”

  “Yes,” Hale says. “Blind to words. Blind to text. The ability to recognize the written word would have been erased from you as if you’d never had it to begin with.”

  “So, someone who is word-blind cannot see words?” I ask.

  “More precisely, they can see the word, but there is no recognition, no ability to grasp meaning from it. It would be like trying to recognize a familiar shape in a current of water. It’s constantly shifting, providing new information all the time instead of something permanent, recognizable. Anyone encountering the printed word will experience only confusion,” Hale says. “One who is immersed will never be able to learn to read, and if they were a reader before, it will be wiped from them as cleanly as a blemish of dirt.”