by Elizabeth Lo
“Correct.”
“How?”
He sighs.
“You know how.” He looks at his hands. “You thought of my dad as the murderer, and through the curse, your brother got into me. I guess it just goes to show that my old man still thinks he cares about me.”
“You father…?”
“You didn’t know? My father—retired General Beauregard Falcon of the Imperial Forces.”
The General Beauregard Falcon?
“What, do you hate me even more now?”
I shake my head. “No… At this point, stuff like that doesn’t really matter anymore. Why… did you hide it all this time? You could have told me sooner.”
He shrugs.
“I didn’t really want to. I was just used to keeping it a secret, I guess.”
“So you knew everything about me already?”
“No. I only figured out he was your brother when I was able to cross reference the apple tree memory you told me about with one of his. He didn’t talk much otherwise.”
I’m not really sure what to say.
To have been so close to my brother without knowing… I had never looked at Lafayette with True Sight before—I’d always just assumed that he was, although a little intimidating and haunted, a magically normal person. Go figure, right?
“I guess I should say I’m sorry for tricking you,” he says, pushing his hair back once more.
“No, no. In fact, it should be me apologizing. I activated the curse for you, right?”
He just shakes his head.
“No need. But now that’s out of the way—oh. Orion says he’s missed you.”
“Orion?”
“That’s what he named himself.”
I smile at Lafayette and Black combined. When his golden eyes meet mine though, truly, all I see is Lafayette.
“I missed you too.” I’m not sure which person I’m talking to.
For a moment, both of us are just searching for questions. Here I am… face to face with the person who has my brother’s spirit in him. You’d think I would have a million questions… But very little is coming to mind now.
“What… what did he do when he left? I mean… before his execution. What did he do?”
“He…” Lafayette presses his eyes shut. “He infiltrated Felicius Harvey’s lab… Succeeded in downing the poor guy—but no one else, ‘cause he was a softie, as you know. Everyone saw it as murder. Orion—your brother—was then captured by guards and then… you know the rest.”
“Was… Artemis there? Artemis or Annabelle?”
“Yeah. They were there. That redheaded girl back there was the only one who could take him down.”
Hearing this story for the first time… Learning all this… It makes me feel a bit sick. I know why he did it… but still… hearing it still makes me feel guilty that I couldn’t help Black when he was at his worst.
“Are you sure Black—Orion—didn’t influence your actions? That the reason why you saved me from the plane? And… helped me along my way?”
The words choke on their way down. But I kind of want to hear it. I want to hear him say that all this time he hasn’t cared about me. That he was just doing everything because Black told him to.
Lafayette visibly flinches.
“What are you talking about?” His eyes zone in on me with an unexplainable intensity. “When I killed all of those soldiers, that was all me. When I saved you at the cliff, that was me. Maybe it was on a whim, but nevertheless, me. Telling you about… my life… of course that was only me. I assure you, the only person you ever met was me.” He sits up, glancing at me then turning away again.
No, Lafayette. You can’t say that. Distance yourself from me. So you won’t hurt when I leave.
And so I won’t hurt.
My teeth grit together, and my hands clench as I use sheer willpower to keep my tears safe inside their glands. Now is not the time to cry.
A different question. Quick.
“Lafayette?”
“Yeah?”
“You never quite told me… What it means to you to live.”
Nothing in his movements give anything away, but the slight delay in his response is already enough of an answer.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Should there be a grander meaning to it? To me… A life is like a continuously building structure. Maybe a mistake or two is forgivable, but too many flaws lead the whole thing to collapse in on itself.”
“Have you ever thought about rebuilding it?” I ask, figuring my life already fell apart long ago.
“If you consider yours a toppled-over castle, Mid, then mine’s probably a wood house that burned down no matter how many times I tried to start over.”
“Well… what burned it down in the first place?”
“Hmmm… Me? Or maybe it was built off of a flimsy foundation in the first place.”
“I see,” I say, quietly, leaning back and watching the clouds moving slowly above me.
He glances over at me then also gazes upward.
“‘You still exist,’” he says like a breath in the wind. “You said that before… What… did you mean by it?”
“Oh, that?” I raise a hand into the air to stare at my fingers. “Maybe… I was talking more to myself. Something in me still wanted to struggle and fight.”
“To live?”
“No… to find a reason to live.”
“Is that so…”
“You know… with or without me, the world will still keep going. With blessings and curses… but nevertheless, it will still exist. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be nice to live the way I want someday? I think that’s what I might have been thinking. What if there was a way to do that?”
“In the end, it’s impossible, right?” he says.
I laugh.
“Yup. In the end, it’s impossible.”
“But… it shouldn’t be impossible for you.”
Time seems to stand still for once. How I wish it could stay like this for just a little longer.
“You’re the first one,” I murmur. “You’re the first one to say something like that to me.”
He rubs my head, chuckling.
“Look at you, sounding so depressing,” he teases. “You’re my travel buddy; of course I care about you.”
His words seem to surprise us both. He clears his throat.
“After all… even if it was just a few days, for once it was nice to be alive just for that little bit.”
For once, an effervescent giggle bubbles up in my throat like a kid’s.
“Aw, how honest. Thank you,” I say, patting his shoulder. I dip my head down to hide my face. “Really.”
“You’re quite sentimental today,” he observes.
“As are you.”
We chat some more about miscellaneous topics and laugh as if we’ve known each other for a while, walking back just in time to witness Princess Sucre’s awakening.
When Sucre rises, he knocks a good bit of low-hanging branches off the trees, and when he shakes them off, he dismantles parts of the woods even more.
Oh, for… he grumbles to himself.
He tries to resettle himself in a better spot in the clearing.
Dammit, he keeps mumbling, and he ends up settling down with his body snaked through the trees. I was built for the mountains, not living in this dense little shrubbery.
I just laugh at his efforts.
“Only you can call trees, ‘shrubbery,’” I say, sitting down in front of him.
He mimics rolling his eyes at me.
I wait. An irrational part of me, after seeing what the Palace had in store for us, waits with unfounded anticipation for an impromptu “Oops! Turns out there is this other obscure way to get rid of this curse that we forgot about. Looks like you can go home now.” Or even a “Let’s come back later.” But I know just from Sucre’s confident posture that this gathering is for forming a battle plan, not a retreat.
“So anyway…” I
say, as steadily as possible. “I think… we should explain some things to Lafayette.”
Sucre’s eyes narrow at Lafayette.
Is this another one of those zombies from Hanbury?
“No, no.” Well… Actually… “I mean, technically he is a survivor of the Hanbury fire… but he’s not one of those over there. He was the one I met in the forest after I split. The pilot. Laf…”
Lafayette stands and takes a fake bow.
“Lieutenant Colonel Lafayette B. Falcon. At your service.”
Sucre analyzes him a little more.
I see. I hadn’t gotten a good enough view to notice the two souls within him until now.
“So… about the Memento Mori curse,” I start, facing Lafayette. “I didn’t tell you this before, but apparently I can… remove it from the country completely. I’ll basically move the effects all onto myself. Because of the nature of my body… I can manipulate magic itself. It’s also why my eyes are like this and why I can come back to life. I’m the only person in Galviton with these eyes that’s willing to go to these lengths so… Well… I guess I should ask first if Black ever mentioned anything about this to you.”
Lafayette’s eyebrow twitches. Something I take as a sign of surprise.
“No, actually,” he says. “Orion didn’t talk much; he mostly just kept to himself.”
I see. Sucre says. The more a spirit uses its energy or magic to try to take control of the body or just uses their magic in general… they start absorbing raw magic energy from their surroundings, and they corrupt faster… The soul inside you is in pretty good shape, all things considered, but there’s still been some corruption in it. So be careful.
Lafayette nods.
“I didn’t know about how the corruption worked until now, but I suspect Orion did. He rarely used magic… Until last night, of course, during the fight.”
Sucre’s eyes narrow.
You humans and your belligerent ways.
“Indeed,” Lafayette says, smiling. “It’s how we like to run the world.”
I smile along, hoping my face looks natural enough.
“So, why are you here at the ruins of the Summer Palace?” Lafayette continues. “Not sightseeing, I presume.”
“No…” I answer, my throat dry. “I’m here… for the curse.”
“Why here? Couldn’t you have just done it…” He cuts himself off, and I can practically hear him talking with Black as his eyes narrow onto the ground. “So you’re getting this Stone, aren’t you?”
“Yep, you guessed it,” I say, laughing half-heartedly.
“You at least know what it will do to you, right?” His voice is lowering dangerously.
“Yes. I do.”
“You’re willing to do that just to break the curse?”
“Yeah. I mean… It’ll make me like any other normal human girl, don’t you think? I’ll actually be able to die and stay that way.”
“Normal is overrated,” he says stiffly, straightening up to look me in the eye. “But there was no other method other than this?”
Well, there was, Sucre interrupts. I was going to just wait for my magic to replenish again, so I could break the rest of the curse, but… Of course, with the recent developments with Glorieux, there isn’t any other time left to wait. So we decided, Phelix and I, that we’re willing to pay the sacrifice.
“The sacrifice…?” Lafayette’s eyes narrow.
At that moment, Annabelle and Artemis come back into the clearing. Artemis trails behind her, slouched forward a little. Annabelle had gone out to rescue Artemis and allow him to recover, but I think they ought to have stayed a little longer.
“Why?” Lafayette continues. His eyes don’t waver off of me, ignoring them. “Why go to these lengths to break the curse?”
“Why? Well, because…” I try to force a smile, but my back starts heating from the pressure he has applied. “Like you said… it’s hard to put in words. But I’ll be saving people, Lafayette. Glorieux’s mind has already gone far beyond haywire, she’s burned down Hanbury, and who’s to say she won’t do more. I’ll be saving people like you and those soldiers you were forced to kill.”
“I wasn’t forced to kill them,” he says, an edge to his voice. “But I did it anyway. You won’t really be saving as many people as you think.”
“Why are you so angry?” I bite back. “It’s not like you’re the one who’s going to die.”
Immediately, I smack my hand onto my mouth. Whoops.
It’s like I just punched Lafayette in the gut. His eyes widen, and he slowly turns to look at me, for once his entire face registering shock.
“What?” he breathes. “What did you just say?”
“I-I…” But I’m not really sure what I should say.
We just stare at each other for a few moments.
“Die?” he asks, his voice hardening again.
In the corner of my vision, Annabelle sits Artemis down and shoots me a worried glance.
“The curse…” I stammer. “It’ll transfer all of the dead souls that haven’t been released from the world… into me. And… in order to really set them free and end the curse, someone needs to kill me.”
He goes quiet and runs a hand through his hair. On the side, I hear Annabelle ask Sucre who Lafayette is, and she nods with a knowing look on her face after he apparently repeats Lafayette’s introduction. Everyone waits for something else to happen, but he seems to go into very deep thought, ignoring all of us. Of course, he can’t oppose this. He can’t deny the importance of all this. He can’t deny that I have to die in order to free them.
He can’t deny that it’s inevitable.
“Well,” Annabelle, says, breaking the awkward silence. “Now that we’ve gotten that off the table… Now we have to address how we’re going to get in there in one piece. Or at least… How Mid’s going to get in there.”
Nod persistently. Maybe he won’t say anything more.
There are two main things to focus on, Sucre says, glancing at Lafayette, then back to me. There’s those twelve Hanbury survivors—well, twenty-four if you count each individual spirit, dead or alive. And then there’s Glorieux, who accounts for a total of nine souls in one. Glorieux is going to be the harder one to deal with, because she has very refined magic, unlike those other humans who, well, are just blinded by the desire not to die. I have a feeling she collected the most far-gone ones—corrupted as much as the spirits inside of her, if not more. He shifts his haunches.
“So…” Annabelle starts.
“Forgive for interrupting again,” Lafayette says, though he doesn’t actually seem to care. “But Mid… how are you still alive right now? You were killed in the fire, weren’t you?”
“Oh, I… it’s a long story… When I fell from the cliff, I thought I would die… so I duplicated. And then you saved my other body, and I then had two bodies for a couple of days.”
“So… death itself doesn’t actually activate the curse.”
“Yes.”
“And so… I can assume that in general for all curses, they’re activated by the belief of the inevitability of death versus the actual death? And things like ‘love’ would be activated by a feeling of caring for another person in the moment?”
Correct… Sucre says, his eyes now focusing on Lafayette fully. I’m not good at reading cat expressions, but whatever is on Sucre’s face is very similar to that of a cat staring down a snake. Wary yet curious.
“The activations of this curse seem very easily manipulated…” Lafayette says, mostly to himself. “You really only need the four basic elements—a killer, a victim, a witness who cares about the victim, and someone the killer cares about at the moment, correct?
Yes…
“Was the entire world cursed? Most of the affected soldiers in the military are cursed with souls from people far outside of Galviton.”
If a person has a concept of how big the world is, I’m sure they could curse the world, however since Glorieux’s worl
d merely consisted of this country, she could only curse Galviton at most.
“Hmmm… So that means not everyone involved in the activation has to carry the curse.”
Yes, yes… Really, just one person involved has to carry the curse for it to activate. It’s a viral curse, after all.
“Then… Could someone perhaps play multiple roles in the activation?”
Yes, Sucre answers. In fact, that’s how the queen got the first soul in her. She tried cursing her father, but at the moment, he happened to be thinking much about her, and so… despite her playing the “witness” role, in your words, she also played the killer’s loved one.
“I see… So is it possible to transfer a victim’s soul without them actually dying?”
The curse can only move dead souls. A live soul is tied to its body—the only way a soul can move from its body in any way is if it’s dead.
“Oh? That’s quite interesting.”
What are you getting at?
“Just curious.”
Sucre’s ears flick with suspicion but he doesn’t say more.
Lafayette’s questions seem dangerous. I feel like he can see something more in the answers that Sucre gives. He asked questions about the curse that I didn’t even take into account all the while gleaning miniscule, perhaps arbitrary information that feels neither miniscule nor arbitrary when he thinks that hard about them.
He’s planning something. But what, I don’t know.
Anyway, Sucre continues, now that you’re done with your questioning, let’s move onto the matter at hand.
As usual, there’s a momentary pause of indecisiveness when no one knows who’s going to speak first.
“All right, so…” I start, but then I realize I don’t actually have any ideas myself. “Um…”
“So… you separate those two threats. The queen and her army… Take on one or none on the way in,” Lafayette says, taking control of the conversation once more. He’s very good at controlling conversations when he wants to. His back has straightened out more now, and he faces everyone except me. “It’s really only Midnight who needs to get in there, right? We can just sneak her into the castle some other way.”
Wow. He’s already on board.
That… was a quick transition. One second he sounded like he cared when he realized I would die… and now he sounds as if he’s been with us the whole mission. As expected of Lafayette. He grasps the situation easily.
