Chapter 9 Cursed #3
“Where are you going?” Ella asked as they neared him, and he nodded to a white steeple visible above the trees in the far distance.
It was the only visible sign of civilization and Ella understood his logic.
She wondered if the ROSE actually knew where they were, but either way he didn’t seem interested in asking them anything.
He scanned them as if doing a quick assessment of their usefulness.
“Jackson. That’s my name,” he said back to them.
“Ella,” she replied, nodding back to Kay, “and this is Kay.”
The ROSE didn’t reply, and Ella left it as is, following farther behind with Kay as they continued to keep their distance.
Ella could only imagine the furious dialogue burning through Kay’s mind, but her eyes remained focused on the ROSE’s mask strapped across his back.
It was an anchor point as their walk turned into a hike through the jungle shrubbery.
She felt the effects of her blood loss, with an onset of fatigue and labored breathing.
She hadn’t given her wound a thorough examination, stubbornly plowing forward with a single-minded determination until they broke past the last veil of leaves and vines to an overlook of The Quiet.
Ella and Kay both stared as they looked out over the world. It was a vast, colorful landscape, with the evening sun spanning beyond a sequence of mountains, oceans and geographical formations. Strange buildings of all shapes and sizes marked points on the horizon.
“The Spirits,” Kay breathed, and proceeded to point them out.
One large castle looking structure that seemed to be made of blue stone was apparently where the spirit of Hope resided.
Another bright green mountain was apparently where one could find the spirit of Courage.
His countenance lifted as he captured the landscape, removing a pen and notepad tactfully protected in a waterproof bag.
He began sketching it, the ROSE apparently content to spend a minute here as he inspected the view.
Kay pointed to the tower they were traveling toward, “I think that’s the spirit of Life,” he explained.
No one seemed intent on talking after that, and Ella hardly minded, because she couldn’t help but stare at this new world, resisting the urge to sit. The colors bounced across a blended mixture of snowy tundra, red desert, and vast valleys of green land.
It made no logical sense, free from the laws of geology and every other scientific study, and though she knew Madness had distorted its laws, it was still beautiful.
Jackson searched through his things, opening and exploring the bag he’d brought with him as it hung over his shoulder. Kay remained several feet away, sketching studiously while glancing periodically at the ROSE in an alert and suspicious way.
Jackson drew out a cigarette, one toppling off the side of the bag and landing in the grass beside him. Ella thought little of it, and despite the state of herself, she didn’t hesitate to bend down and pick it up, offering it back to him.
His eyes remained trained on hers in a focused and intentional way as he drew the cigarette out of her fingers.
Just as he’d risen from the water, he performed this act so slowly that it seemed to slow the rest of the world down.
She felt the cigarette move through her hand, noticing the textures of it, textures she would not have noticed had he just taken it outright.
She noticed other things too, tattoos, through a window of his shirt, seeing a row of broken arrows marked along his collarbone. There were enough, maybe seven, to start a second row.
Ella’s mind paused on this, as if their meaning were on the tip of her tongue, some figment of retained knowledge from his memories, perhaps. There had been a kind of transference she couldn’t explain, but now she felt like she knew things about him, things she didn’t know how to vocalize.
Scents of the water and woods permeated the air between them, along with the lingering residue of gunpowder and smoke.
Her mind jolted as if gasping for air–gasping for some sense of time again.
Realizing she’d been staring, her eyes flickered back up to his and time started anew.
In any normal interaction, people would shrug off the discomfort of such a moment, urging time onward as if it were unnatural to sit and pause like she had.
She was surprised to see he’d been watching her gaze, and she wondered how long she’d been staring.
“Thanks,” he said, and it were as if his eyes were asking her to come closer while his tone made it sound as if he wanted to push her offthe cliff.
He turned and walked off.
Ella looked over at Kay who seemed to have watched the entire interaction, a scientist studiously observing an experiment.
“What was that?” he asked with an edge of suspicion.
Ella lowered her hand, having no words to explain the mixture of uncomfortable feelings. She wasn’t sure how to name all of them.
What was that?
"I don’t know,” she said, still somewhat dazed.
She was sure it was a mixture of blood loss and lingering effects of the memories.
She’d felt things in the past week she could never explain.
Something had urged her to pursue Crow with an uncontrollable passion.
She’d navigated Jackson’s curse and freed him from it almost on impulse.
Her brain still hadn’t sorted through the events of the embolism.
Why had she reached for Jackson in the first place? Why hadn’t she let him go?
Every decision she made seemed to entrench them deeper into an impossible situation.
“I do,” Kay said back, folding up his notebook with a clap as if she’d offended him.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, feeling both puzzled and flustered by Kay’s nested accusation.
“Nothing,” he replied as the implications of his statement hit her in a mixture of shock and hurt.
“What are you saying?” she pushed, urging her tired body in pursuit.
“Nothing, forget I said anything,” Kay retreated as they started following after Jackson, his shoulders visibly tight as he pushed through the foliage ahead.
Luckily, Kay seemed to notice the subtle differences in her ensuing silence, glancing back several times when she didn’t keep questioning him.
Eventually, he mused aloud about other things.
He mused aloud about the world, and showed her a drawing as if nervously trying to engage her again.
Ella passively nodded at his remarks as she fought nausea until at last they reached a small clearing a short ways from a freshwater river.
The ROSE walked off to clean in the river, as Ella and Kay both stayed at the campsite nearby.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” Kay apologized as he rifled through his bags for a change of clothes.
“What were you implying?” she asked coolly, leaning against a nearby tree.
“I just don’t understand how you’re comfortable being around someone so dangerous.
You even said he’d try to drug us with Amnesia.
Those memories did something to you. You aren’t thinking right,” Kay continued, but kept his eyes on his bag, refusing to look at her.
“You looked like you were hypnotized. I’ve never seen you drift off in front of someone like that. ”
“Because I picked up a cigarette? I picked it up. He took it. That’s it,” she shot back. “I have plenty of reasons for not being myself, Kay.”
Kay didn’t respond and she knew it wasn’t for lack of a better word. That was never the case. Kay was a quick study of most things, so quick sometimes that he sounded paranoid or hysterical until everyone else finally caught up to the more obvious signs of what he’d noticed days before.
Her teammate and his lover, Jade, had accused him of being a Listener on several occasions. As a powerful Listener herself, she’d meant such things in jest, but Kay’s powerful sense of observation did sometimes seem uncanny.
He was still wrong every now and again. Ella reminded herself of that before turning and leaning against a nearby tree with an overlook of The Quiet beyond the campsite.
She wanted to sit and fall asleep, but didn’t want to encourage any questions from Kay about her health.
He was already looking for reasons to doubt what they were doing.
Her head rested against the bark, relieved she was facing away so that she could close her eyes. “The ROSE live and die for their mission. It’s only dangerous if you get in the way.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That kind of black and white thinking just can’t be reasoned with.
Come to think of it, Ella, you’re in danger of it too these days,” he said, “and you’re talking about them like you know them when just yesterday you barely knew who they were.
I think you absorbed something from his memories. ”
Ella sighed, already regretting telling Kay about her experiences with Jackson’s curse. She’d considered that possibility, but hadn’t wanted to think about it. It was too unusual, too foreign a concept to her, and she didn’t have time to think about the implications.
Kay would spend all night thinking about just that, throwing her questions and challenges she’d have no words to reject.
The worst part is that every concern would be well thought out, and she would eventually have to admit that she didn’t care about the concerns.
If the last few hours had taught her anything, it was that logic was nowhere close to driving her actions.
Kay would catch on and then almost certainly try to take the reins from there.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so stubborn,” she said, hoping the apology would deter him from his earlier theory about Jackson’s memories. Even though she wanted it to be genuine, the apology felt empty coming out.