Chapter 17 The Lamb Speaks #2
“I came back for leverage,” he admitted.
“I meant it when I said I’d heal your arm for nothing.
I don’t like seeing you in pain. The transportation to Death and back, agreeing to do that, has already given me what I wanted, which is the conversation we’re having right now.
I ended up helping you a lot, you know. You don’t remember now, of course, because it hasn’t happened yet.
Unfortunately, these days, our negotiations have fallen through. ”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been avoiding me. I know you’re planning to leave.
This has gotten too dangerous for you, and I can tell you’re afraid to end up like one of the Strike slaves you watched growing up.
It isn’t a fear I can reason with. So, I came to set a precedent.
Anything else I do from now on will cost you. ”
“Cost me what?” she asked.
“I want your fear,” he said, “to you, it’s the most valuable thing that you own, and I can’t take it without breaking your trust, but I’ve reached an impasse with us.”
“So you want my free will, is what you’re saying?” She responded with an angry edge in her voice.
“Not at all. I’m giving you a choice right now. If I was really so controlling, I would have helped myself by now. I’ve been close. You’ve tried to tempt me with it out of anger multiple times during some of our more petty arguments,” he said.
“But instead, you go back to an earlier version of me, abuse your power, and take back the favors you once did for free. So, I’m right to be afraid? In the end, you abuse your power to control me.”
He smiled at this. “You aren’t without your own abuses, Ella, as subtle as they might be.
I see them, even when you don’t. We’ve been each other’s poisons for a while now, and I think if I retold our history, you’d see that neither of us really want it any other way.
You act so disgusted by it now, but in my time, you’ve willingly given me everything else.
In moderation, I assure you. We’ve had quite a pleasant relationship for years, but there’s more to it than that,” he added and paused.
“Your fear has always been what truly divided us, and now your fear is going to kill you.”
Ella exhaled slowly. “What do you mean?”
Lambspeak turned the cup again, “versions of myself cascade secrets from the future, telling previous versions of what lies ahead, existing both in every moment and yet segmented into all of them, much like people but with a deeper interconnectedness with ourselves. Ahead of it all is the one who discovered how to step back in time first. He tells us what portions of the past we can and cannot interfere with. Somewhere along the line, the message was passed on of your death.”
“Then why come back? Why not tell me?” Ella replied.
“We did. We have. We will. Several times.”
They watched each other in silence for a long time before Ella felt what Jackson must have felt all his life, the future closing in like a narrow path. As she looked this version of Jackson in the eyes, she could not help but give voice to the obvious and insurmountable barrier.
“You’re a Strike,” she whispered.
“And I owe you everything,” he replied, “I love you, Ella. Even now, the moment you’re waiting in, Jackson has not completely recognized it yet, but he loves you. He loves you for the same reasons that I still do now.”
“What is love if it makes two people so dependent on each other, so– so,” she struggled to capture the world, “trapped and enslaved by each other. Is that really love? To feed on each other, to–” she clenched her fists in her hands, “consume each other?”
“Love so often is as it’s expressed,” Lambspeak replied, calmly. “You cannot define what that looks like, only that it brings you closer to the truth. If you feel trapped, is it not love that traps you. Love is not a destination, but another avenue of travel.”
Ella’s eyes flickered down to the floor at the intrusion of a thought that brought her some relief. She stared at the ground, lacking confidence that she could hide the thought from him, and yet knowing that if she didn’t meet his eyes, he’d know for sure she had a plan.
Taking the risk, she emptied her mind and refocused her attention on the fear, the fear that so often buzzed in the back of her brain, the fear that a future with him stirred.
“Fine,” Ella whispered, and they both watched each other with a firmness that built a certain tension in the room.
His eyes narrowed in the slightest, and by the subtlest flicker in his expression, she knew he suspected something, but had the confidence that he couldn’t see it clearly beyond the fear, the fear that she now understood why he hated.
“I just have one question for you,” she said.
“Anything.”
“Have I changed in the future?” she replied, knowing he could lie if at all he wanted. She had no guarantee that all of this wasn’t a lie after all. “Have I changed so much?”
“No,” Lambspeak replied, with a smile that was surprisingly soft. “But I guess that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Ella opened her eyes before the flickering thoughts of her plan resurfaced and were exposed to him. Jackson and Paris had both taken seats near her in the present, waiting for her to return from her meditation into another point in time.
“Paris,” Ella asked, “could we get new supplies?”
Paris rose to her feet and sauntered from the room with a smile, “I’ll have it brought up.”
Ella waited until she heard Paris’s shoes completely fade from the hallway. She looked over at Jackson. “How hard is it to avoid him? To not think about the past and the future even?”
“Did you make a deal?” Jackson said.
“No,” Ella said, “he’s transporting us and healing my arm as a favor.”
“And for anything else?” Jackson asked.
“I can’t tell you anything, can I?”
Jackson hesitated, glancing away as if almost hurt by the suggestion. “I’m not sure,” he admitted and looked up at her, “but if there is anything I can do to help—”
“I can’t have him just appear like that,” Ella said. “I just need more control. I need to get to know you, everything I can know about you that can help me. Can you do that?”
“Alright,” he nodded, obviously resisting the urge to ask her what she was planning.
He was visibly bothered by the wall she’d just asserted between them.
“Ella,” he said, “don’t try and trick him.
I don’t know how old the version you met was, but there are worse risks.
There could be versions of him out there that are hundreds of years old.
He could have discovered how to communicate with the past a thousand years ago in his time and just communicated it to all past versions of himself.
Don’t you see? He’s only showing us the versions of himself he wants to.
We can never know what he’s really building. ”
“What can we know?” Ella said, shaking her head, her words capturing her frustration, awe, exhaustion and confusion from the past few days.
As she looked at him, she doubted her own words, because she still relied on one fact, one undeniable truth. The future was uncertain in so many ways, but still sitting in her room was that metal vial of Amnesia. Its effects were indisputable.
She had no doubt she’d need to rely on Lambspeak in the future. No doubt he knew that, though Ella wasn’t sure when the time would come. Ella would do right by that future version of herself and not make a deal against her.
If she could not keep Lambspeak at bay in the present, she’d always have Amnesia. With a drink of it, she could forget him, and even if it landed her right back where she’d started, she’d still be a version of herself that she recognized.
Ella was drawn from her thoughts as Jackson sat down with her.
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” he said, “but we shouldn’t rush into whatever this is.” He paused. “What?”
Ella found herself glaring on accident, unable to stifle the earlier upset and shoving all feelings of possible affection for him into a tightly sealed box.
“Keep going,” she replied evenly, and Jackson began to speak.
He spoke about his experiences in the ROSE, the Strike, all that he’d learned so far about Lambspeak, and everything he’d tried to do to avoid him at the detriment of his own life, never being able to pinpoint what it was that ultimately triggered his own transformation.
As he spoke, Ella struggled to keep her mind open to the facts, likening Lambspeak to a disease of memory, spreading like an infection through time.
She resisted the pangs of sympathy for Jackson.
She wouldn’t apologize for waking him up and yet now she found herself regretting it, sitting across from someone that had an illness he’d given to her.
Her strong disgust for their closeness filled her with a wash of guilt as she wrung her hands in her lap and listened.
So often the outcast, she’d always reached out to people that others had spurned.
It was so deeply ingrained in her nature that in feeling disgusted with anyone she felt so at odds with herself.
“Let’s go,” Ella interrupted at one point, propelled by that same unmistakable force that had been driving her forward since the embolism.
“Ella,” he warned against her urgency.
“We just go take a look. Let’s go now. We go. We come back. More answers. That’s what we need.”
Jackson seemed to notice the resoluteness in her expression and sighed as he leaned back.
Together they waited in silence for a few minutes and then Jackson started. “What was that earlier,” he said, “about me not being irresistible?”
Ella blinked, having forgotten in the chaos that she’d even said it. “Is that what I said?”
“Yes.”
“I think I meant something else,” she added.
He rubbed his chin questioningly but didn’t push.
Moments later, Paris came with guards in hand who supplied refreshed gear. They examined it thoroughly, Paris leaning up against the doorframe as Ella hoisted it into her arms and handed Jackson his share.
“When will you be going?” Paris asked.
“Ten minutes,” Ella announced as she left to change.
“Ella,” Jackson objected.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she replied stubbornly. Despite it all, when she returned to the study, he’d replaced his knives and any other lacking pieces, arms crossed in a tense silence between him and Paris.
Ella stood between them.
“Good luck,” Paris said, “we’ll be waiting here.”
“Be back soon,” Ella said, and looked over at Jackson. “It’s just to have a look,” he started to object again but she refocused her attention and looked at Lambspeak knowingly. He lifted his fingers to snap them.
The entire world eclipsed away in a second.
Her feet sunk into the mire of dark oil and ashes, extending on for what seemed like an eternity.
Stone chimneys, paths, and fireproof structures were all that remained.
Ella followed Jackson’s gaze as she turned in the mire to find them standing at the base of a scorched fortress that jutted high into the overcast sky.
Her jaw grew slack as she stared in a mixture of awe and horror at the sight before them.
There was no life or growth, only a residual dew of black oil, dressing the hollow fortress that looked haunted and empty.
“The Bleeding Grin,” she breathed its name like a phantom, looking down at the black oil and knowing what it now represented. She began to shake her head, “this is an illusion,” she said, and then looked at Jackson, “this is an illusion, right?”
“This is supposed to be vacant according to Paris. Something else made this,” Jackson said and scanned the earth around them, “but you’re seeing what I’m seeing.”
His words lingered in the silence, unable to dissolve in the thickness of the fog.
Ella lifted a foot and the mire tugged at her feet. She pushed toward the entrance, undeterred by the foreboding of such a malicious symbol.
“I guess there’s no point in objecting any longer,” Jackson said behind her.
“This is why I’m here,” Ella replied as they muddled forward.
She couldn’t resist the draw of the Bleeding Grin. Scarred and empty, it was a coffin that held all her buried secrets. It held the world’s buried secrets.
She knew it was a risk, but the draw of her past was irresistible now, and she was convinced that someone, something, had created this for her.