Blood, Ink & Fire

by Ashley Mansour

  There is the word again, asking, pleading, hoping. I know when I hear it that there’s only one thing he wants.

  The wind echoes my name.

  LEDGER

  FORTY-FOUR

  Before he could correct himself, before he could change the course of that moment, she was on top of him. She stared right into his eyes, transfixing him with a determination he’d never seen. Not like this. Up close. The weight of her pressing into him, the heavenly feeling of being so close to another human sent him reeling. Her hands jetted up into his hair and found the sides of his face. Ledger held his breath tightly, trying to constrict the sudden excess of emotions he felt for this one single human. It was too much to touch her, but he could touch her, if he’d let himself. The thought of it alone made him ache all over. He could pull her close, wrap his arms around her small waist, make her part of him. But Ledger couldn’t move.

  The bond held him firmly to the earth, as if the elements were asking him if he could ever live again as just a spirit without a vessel after this. After knowing her. The thought of it frightened him beyond belief. And that’s when he knew he couldn’t be the one to bind her to him.

  “It has to be you, Elle,” he heard himself say, like a disembodied voice, a warning he had to echo.

  “It can be me,” she said, boldly.

  And it was.

  In moments, she was a hair’s breadth from him. The scent of her washed over him like a waterfall. Her lips melted into him, so soft and encouraging. Above them, the bright constellations encircled them, two hands caressed the skies, beckoning them to draw closer.

  “Please,” he begged her, though he’d meant to do it silently. The eons crushed together, suddenly forming a single instant he could no longer deny. It has to be now. It has to be, or I will surely die right here and return to the ether.

  Then her skin became his, and he felt the wondrous melding of their worlds. He pulled her to him and caressed her hair as his mouth lingered over her lips, her cheek, her temples.

  You’re so beautiful, he wanted to tell her. So unimaginable. So perfect. But he was afraid he’d frighten her if he found the right words. So he pulled away to meet her eyes. But when he did, she was gazing at him, blinking a slow and soft hunger that he felt, too. Deep in the pit of his stomach, the ache gnawed at him greatly and grew. He knew what she wanted: the moment Rose and Hamlet had shared.

  In this body, maybe he could give that to her. And maybe it would be right. Maybe it would be okay because the Earth and sky and time itself had granted them this moment. Maybe it was supposed to happen this way.

  But maybe it wasn’t.

  Ledger felt the magnetism of the moment pull him to her, but there was something else pulling him away from it. She soon would fall into the vision, the final vision of the story he had waiting for her. It will change everything. It will change her, this girl I love.

  And so Ledger did a thing he’d never done before. He followed her into the vision. Like a shadow, he went by her side so she would not be alone. So she could see why he had saved this part of the story until the very end.

  “Elle,” he whispered softly so the wind would take the word away. “Elle, I’ll follow you.”

  NOELLE

  FORTY-FIVE

  I don’t know how I know it, but I know he is with me this time.

  “Ledger? Why is it dark here?”

  “Shhh,” he says. “Just listen.”

  The high-pitched beep of an amplifier followed by the low hum of static invades the silence. A midrange voice, distinguishable as neither man nor woman, begins to speak.

  “Good evening, Risers. Tonight’s simulcast will be our last. As you know, tomorrow we will face the eye in the sky, the towering despot overshadowing us in our plight. Fell. For those of you who don’t already know my voice, this is Prospero, and I’m coming to you live from within the walls of the Archive.

  “Risers, I have been in darkness for over sixty days, protecting the location of this sacred place, the place for which our foremothers and forefathers died to keep secret. The place they buried in the printed words. The place that holds the secret to our future. Our future beyond Fell. Because, Risers, there is more beyond the controlling power of Fell we have come to fear, that we have allowed to rule us. There is another way, another world we can create for ourselves. I myself have seen it.

  “Risers, tomorrow we launch the largest strike against Fell in the history of the Sovereigns. Fell has promised to eradicate every book, every page, and every one of us. It is their will that we should be stripped of the narratives I have given you, that the stories you’ve come to love be gouged out and burnt with your hearts. Risers, forgive me, but this is our final stand against that fate. Regardless of where you’re from or what you know, now is the moment when we must cast our differences aside, when we must unite against our common enemy, when we must put out the fire with the outpouring of our blood. Because make no mistake, we are all Risers, every last one of us. We are rememberers of words, print, and page. We are fighters for the written word. We are soldiers of story and the truths inside the so-called lies of the books. And we will not back down.

  “Come together, all of you tomorrow, at the break of dawn. Join me here, and let us hold this enemy accountable for what they’ve done. Let us show them we will not go gentle into that good night, that we will rage eternally against the dying of our light. The books will live on, as will we through them. And the future generations will know that we once fought for this story’s happy ending. The end of our burden. The end of our sacrifice. The end of Fell. And in that very ending we will find the beginning of a new human era. An era of freedom. Of change. Of imagination and possibility. Because, Risers, if we succeed, if we save this Archive from oblivion, we won’t be merely human. With blood, ink, and fire running through our veins, we will be eternal!”

  When it seems to be over, the hum of the amplifier returns until it, too, dissipates back into the silence. I reach for Ledger in the dead quiet, startled that I can still feel his warmth inside the vision. “I’m here,” he says.

  “What’s happening?”

  Before he can answer, the amplifier squeaks loudly. A door opens, revealing a single thread of blue light from another room. “That was great, Prospero, really great.”

  The thread of light hits where Prospero is sitting, illuminating the back of her head, her long hair appearing purple in its glow. “It needs to be better than great,” she says. “It needs to be enough to move them to action.”

  “It was enough,” the voice says. “They will follow you.”

  “I hope so.”

  Then she turns, her face catching the edge of the blue light. And it’s just enough for me to see that it’s not the face I expect. Her eyes meet mine like a mirror, forcing me through the tunnels of time itself. This is not the past I’m seeing, not the original Prospero, my great-aunt Rose here in the vision.

  It’s the future.

  My future.

  It’s me!

  I’m older. I’m tired. My life has etched lines in my face. My hair is unrecognizable. But none of that matters, because it’s the look in my eyes that frightens me. The look that tells me I have become someone I never expected to be.

  I am the leader of a war against Fell. I am guarding the Archive. I am . . . I am . . . fainting.

  “Get me out of here!” I reach for Ledger in the dark and find the warmth of his hand. “Why did you show me this?”

  He grabs me and pulls me toward him, holding me the way he did just before the vision began. “Because I need you to understand. I need you to know who you are!”

  “That’s not me!” I cry. “I’m not another Prospero. I’m just a girl.”

  “Maybe now, but don’t you see what you will become? What you were born to be? Fell has upset the balance of your world. We need to fix it. We need to put it right again.”

  “Is this why you’ve come here, to make me into something else? Some sort of rebel?”<
br />
  “Your grandfather’s dying wish was for you to survive,” Ledger says. “This is proof that you can! This is what you could become, if you don’t give in to them! If you don’t surrender!”

  But I don’t even let him finish. “I don’t want to become this, Ledger. I don’t want this future!”

  “This is your story, Noelle, this is what you are. This is why the words were always with you. Because you were destined to have them. At dawn, a hundred thousand men and women from the Sovereigns will come to you because of your words. They will fight alongside you. So great is the power that you will command.”

  “But I don’t want to command!” I say. “I just want to live!”

  “You have to see your potential, your greatness. You have to know what’s been set out for you—before you throw it all away and give yourself to Fell!”

  “Why do you care so much what I do, anyway?”

  “Because I won’t be around to stop you!” I hear Ledger’s sigh, so resigned in the endless night of this vision. He holds me close to him without fear, without hesitation. Because here inside the vision nothing can happen to us. We can be together freely. And we both know it.

  I find Ledger’s fingertips in the darkness and pull them to my mouth, kissing each one with a new tenderness. “Let’s stay here, for as long as we can.”

  A low moan escapes his lips, and I stifle it with a desperate kiss. At first Ledger doesn’t move, doesn’t kiss me. He’s still, his breathing heavy as I plant kisses along his jawline, his cheeks, and again upon his soft lips.

  “Wait.” He pulls back from me. “I want to see you.”

  The vision emits a soft light, casting a twilight halo over us. “That’s better,” he whispers. When he pulls me to him, I’m lost in the depth of his eyes, their expression telling me that nothing else in the world matters except us. Except this.

  Ledger wraps me into his strong arms and holds me. The world tilts and spins. His hands find my bare skin, his lips meet my torso, my chest. Then Ledger stops and buries his head in my stomach. He’s trembling.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I just can’t believe it. All this time, and this is what it’s like.”

  “You’re disappointed?”

  He lifts his eyes to mine, his gaze longing. “Never. You want to know what it’s like to be in some other place?” he says. “Well, this is it. This is that some other place.”

  “If this is it, I want to be here forever.”

  Ledger nods and pulls in his lip, hesitating. Forever is a dangerous word. But I pretend not to know. I pretend this moment is forever and that it will linger as long as we have air left to breathe. “Ledger,” I ask him. “Be with me.”

  When our bodies find each other in the twilight, there’s a rush of energy, followed by the strangest quiet of surrender. There’s nothing left between us now, nothing keeping us apart. His skin becomes my own; his body is my vessel. His breath feeds my lungs with a life force I’ve never known. When he moves with me, we are as one, and I’m afraid of nothing and no one. And when it is over, I find his mouth and pull his face to mine, but he slips his lips to my ear to whisper, “My world.” And I know he means me.

  When I open my eyes, Ledger and I are back on Mount Memoria, lying beside the dwindling fire. I wake, as if the time we shared were just a dream. “Ledger?” Nothing. “Ledger!” I take his hands in mine, searching for a pulse under his jaw. His heart is still beating, and there’s a faint breath from him. “Denmark!” I shout. “Denmark, help me!”

  In moments, she’s by my side. “What is it?”

  “We need to get help! Now! He won’t wake up!”

  Denmark listens to his chest. “His pulse is dropping; his breathing is shallow. He needs a doctor.”

  “We need to get him to the Winnow,” I say. “Miriam knows. She can help him.”

  Denmark looks at me doubtfully. “Noelle, the Winnow is hundreds of miles away.”

  “Then, we’d better start driving.”

  *

  Sleep never finds us on the way to the Winnow. The days merge into their nights, each one feeling longer than the last. I pass the time at Ledger’s side, checking his breathing, monitoring his vitals. I try not to think about the fact that this was what I was doing before my grandfather passed.

  Each time he stirs, I hope it’s because he’s waking, but he never does. On the third day, his face takes on an ashen color like aged paper. This look that’s finding him, this terrible cloak of sickness is one I recognize. I try to fight it off, to will him to come back to me as though my voice, my touch, my words can reverse the inevitable. I pace out the hours with his heartbeat, marking the signs of life around me like omens foretelling the future. Live or die? Stay or leave? In this body or some other, where will Ledger be? Or, like the fleeting nature of those stories, will he find himself trapped in some in-between world, half-asleep or half-awake, never quite knowing who he is or where he belongs? Will he be lost on the other side of time, trapped and waiting beneath the ceaseless rolling waves, waiting for me to come and save him? Can I save him? Am I able? I seem to remember that not so long ago I no longer cared about my future. Then Ledger showed me what it could be like to be in some other place, outside of time, and I remembered. I remembered my story lacked an ending.

  Now the pages are turning fast, day into night, night into day, and so forth and so on, until I cannot count how or where we came to the Winnow but that we got here without sleep, without stopping, without resting to notice the time or the weather or any such thing humans notice. And Denmark was there. That was clear. As though she had always had that truck and been waiting to take us far away, to the little house near the alley in the Winnow, where the roads are mountains, and the hills and valleys devour footsteps. Where new memories hang precariously on the possibility of our return.

  NOELLE

  FORTY-SIX

  Everything feels smaller. The houses are miniature. The streets small, crooked veins of an old woman’s leg. Without John, without Ledger, the Winnow feels as empty as a vacant grave.

  “Your grandfather?” Miriam asks me when I first see her. Her eyes search me for some explanation, but there’s only one word I can give her. “Fell . . .”

  I know she understands when she doesn’t ask more. I throw my arms around her, grateful to be back in a place where words don’t have to be spoken, where a quiet understanding is all that’s needed.

  “We didn’t think you would come back,” she says at last. Denmark carries Ledger inside.

  “Oh! The poor boy!” cries Miriam and rushes to his side. “Ginny! I need your help!”

  In moments, Ginny is with him, too, crouching low to examine him where he lies on their living room couch. “How long has he been this way?”

  “Since we left Mount Memoria,” I say. But the details are fuzzy. I look to Denmark for more.

  “Four days,” she says. “He’s been this way for four days.”

  Miriam examines him before lifting her head solemnly. “He’s in a coma. Noelle, what happened?”

  “I-I hardly remember. We were together; everything was fine. And then when I woke up, Ledger was, he was . . . ,” I stammer. “He was gone.”

  Miriam and Ginny call Hale from the shop. When he arrives, I find myself sinking into the background, their movements and voices becoming just a picture, one I’m outside of. I linger on the fringes while they move him to another room, while they infuse and inject and cut and stitch to make him better. Only Denmark seems to sense I’m fading away, drifting from all of this, that my emptiness is taking over.

  She catches me in the kitchen, where I’m sitting watching the water from the sky coat the windowpane, listening to the desperate noises of loss and sadness. But I can’t feel them. I can’t feel anything. “Where are you?” she asks me. “Where have you gone?”

  “I don’t know.” I hear my voice reply. I move to the door, something pushing me into the folds of the night. “I can’t stay much longer
. I can’t watch Ledger die, Denmark.”

  “Where will you go? It’s freezing outside, and there isn’t another Sovereign for miles.”

  “Don’t worry. I just need to get some air. I’ll be back by nightfall.”

  Denmark looks unconvinced, her eyes searching my expression for a hint of a lie. “You know I’m responsible for you now, right? If anything happens to you . . . I’ll have to come bring you home.”

  Home. The thought of it makes me feel that tidal wave of loss inside me. Denmark is as close to family as I have now that Grandpa is gone and Ledger is a fading shadow, but even she won’t understand who I am. What I must do.

  I wait until the house is quiet so that I won’t be seen. I don’t want anyone to see me this way. When I step out into the Winnow and find the alley where John and I met near his house, I realize something strange. Home isn’t a place. It isn’t somewhere you can go or be found. Home is people. Home is that feeling you get when it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as someone you love is with you. That’s home. That’s what I lost, what I will never have again.

  I make my way through the cobbled alley. The air turns colder, a swift breeze transforming the rain to sleet. Beyond the alley, I see the statue of Prospero rising tall in the distance, the steps slick and obsidian with the night’s moisture.

  I step carefully along the slippery stones, making my way to the face of the idol, the face that was my ancestor. The face that now is me. Gazing up at it, I wonder how I could have missed it all these years. John had been right. Prospero was more than a statue. It was a reminder. I hear his voice now as the words that once formed the inscription flood into me.

  The time is at hand. We must take our chance to execute one last rescue. At dawn, we rise and make the journey together.

  I smooth my hands over the cold stone. Recalling Prospero’s words as if they were destined for me and me alone.