The Fandom

by Anna Day

  And that’s when I hear a familiar voice, pushing through layers of time and love and warmth. Mum. Violet, stay with me. I can smell that clean, medicinal smell again, and the faint scent of her favorite perfume, star anise and jasmine. Violet, stay with me.

  The creak of the door wakes me. Two dark shapes slip into the room, gaining detail only when they flick on the overhead light. My eyes quickly adjust. It’s Thorn and another Imp, striding across the boards toward me.

  Thorn pauses beside Katie for a moment, watching as a dream causes her lashes to tremble. He then kneels beside me and removes the cords from my ankles and wrists. “They tell me you look just like her.”

  I wait for the rush of blood to my feet and hands, but they feel completely dead, and when I try to pull the rags from my mouth, my fingers just bang awkwardly into my face.

  “Here.” He leans forward and pulls the gag free, his gloved fingers surprisingly tender.

  “Who?” I manage to say. “Who do I look like?”

  “Like Rose,” he replies. “I never met her, but Saskia and Matthew swear you’re her double.”

  Alice mumbles something through her gag. He turns to her. “It’ll be your turn shortly, princess, don’t you worry.”

  She falls silent. I briefly let my palm settle on her knee.

  Thorn extends his hand toward me. I don’t know what to do, so I take it. For a moment, I feel thankful he wears a glove, sure that his flesh would otherwise sear my own, like it seemed to Katie’s. He pulls me into a standing position, and I force myself to look into that single eye. It holds me like a spotlight.

  “I apologize for the rough treatment of you and your friends.” Again, his gaze settles on a sleeping Katie. “I fear years of oppression have dulled our humanity somewhat. It’s something we hope to reinstate. And the death of Rose, the failure of the thistle-bomb mission, have left the rebels rather shaken and confused. I’m hopeful you can answer some of our questions.”

  He looks at me again—he’s terrifying. His size, his power. But I refuse to appear weak, so I just stare defiantly into that single, piercing spotlight.

  He smiles. “Come, I’ll show you around our humble abode.”

  I can’t help wondering why he’s singling me out. I guess it’s because I look so like Rose, or perhaps it’s the canon, dragging me along again. I follow him from the room, casting a quick glance over my shoulder to Nate, whose mouth remains fixed but whose eyes blink firmly, reassuring me, lending me strength.

  Thorn leads me down a dark staircase. The Imp with a rifle follows me, so close I can hear the rattle of phlegm in his chest. We step into the main body of the church. Just like I remembered, hundreds of night-lights bathe the stone in a warm glow—a glow that never reaches the ceiling, giving the appearance that the roof is missing and we stand beneath a dark, empty sky. Most of the rebels have returned to their nearby shelters to rest. I suddenly feel very small, except for my heart, which feels all swollen and ready to split my chest in two.

  Thorn stares at a boarded-up window, and I imagine how it once looked, filled with stained glass, a kaleidoscope of color. But the Gem bombs put an end to that. A plaque rests beneath the window, roughly engraved with the words: Apes became Imps, Imps became rebels—the pinnacle of human revolution. I recall this from the book, a play on the old Gem motto: “Apes became Imps, Imps became Gems—the pinnacle of human evolution.”

  “You like our motto?” Thorn asks. He asked Rose this exact same question. The threads are twisting together again.

  “It’s very clever,” I reply, just like Rose did. It makes me feel safer, knowing the lines.

  “And what about our cause? Imp emancipation, equal rights,” he says, again, straight from canon.

  “Your cause is the same as mine.” I know it’s optimistic, but I can’t help hoping that if I just keep saying what Rose said everything will be OK. He’ll invite me to meet Baba, and I’ll say yes—just like Rose—and then I can ask Baba how we get home.

  Thorn continues to stare at the boarded-up window. Slowly, he pulls my smartphone from his blazer pocket. “What’s this?”

  Damn. Those threads have just diverged, big time.

  “My phone,” I answer numbly.

  “Saskia thought it was Gem technology. But it isn’t, is it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s old technology. Very old. And I’m guessing it’s Imp.”

  I nod.

  “Care to enlighten me how you and your little friends have ancient Imp technology in your possession?”

  I swallow. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “We’re ancient Imps.” It must sound so ridiculous, but I can’t think of anything else to say.

  He scowls and taps the phone against his chin. “A comedian, hey?” He slips it into his blazer pocket. “So why kill Rose?”

  This sudden change in conversation throws me, and I have to replay the words in my head several times before I can extract their meaning. My hands start shaking, my nails bite against my palms. “We didn’t kill Rose,” I reply.

  “Not directly, I agree. But your presence got her killed. Saskia told me. Your pretty red-haired friend alerted the guards.”

  “I know. I’m sorry … We never meant for it to happen.”

  “So what were you doing at the Coliseum?”

  I stare, transfixed by that single eye. In canon it was gray, like a piece of broken slate, like the city itself festered inside him. But current-Thorn’s eye is lavender blue … and full of hate.

  “Well?” he asks.

  I try to formulate some clever response, something that will keep us alive if not get him on our side. But it’s like the rags sucked all the words from my mouth. “I don’t know.”

  He moves toward me. A candelabrum sends an angular shadow scudding across his face, making him all the more terrifying. He holds my face with his gloved hands, the leather cool against my skin. “Saskia swears you could be Rose’s sister. Are you?”

  “No,” I whisper.

  His voice hardens. “Were you sent by the Gems to replace her and infiltrate the rebels?”

  “God, no. I was at Comic-Con.”

  His hand drops from my face and it’s like he’s pulled the rags out all over again because the words start tumbling out of me. “I’m from the past, well, not the past, from a different reality, which is your past. That’s how we’ve got the phones—the Imp technology. You see, in my world, Rose is a character from a book, which they made into a film. She’s this really cool heroine—she’s brave and strong and beautiful and everything I’m not. That’s why I’m dressed like her, so I could pretend to be her, just for one day.”

  He chuckles. “You don’t think you’re beautiful?”

  I shake my head, and my eyes drop to his boots.

  My vulnerability must rile him—he grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me forward. The sudden movement extinguishes several night-lights; their thin lines of smoke escape toward the ceiling. I find myself envying that smoke.

  “Stop playing games,” he shouts. “Tell me the truth or I’ll bring your little friends downstairs and slit their throats, one by one, as you watch.”

  “No!” I feel a stabbing pain in my head. A layer of sweat coats my skin and the rat meat churns in my stomach like it still has claws and teeth and attitude. I must look a little peaked because Thorn slips his hands beneath my elbows, taking my weight.

  “Darren,” he shouts over his shoulder. “Go and fetch the boy.”

  He sounds like he’s far, far away, and I suddenly feel strangely detached, like I really am about to watch a scene from a film.

  “No, not Nate,” I manage to say.

  But Thorn doesn’t even look at me. “You heard me, Darren. Bring me the boy.”

  Darren darts back up the stairs. I watch him go and this shapeless, horrible emotion rises up my throat. “No, no please. I’ll do anything.”

  Thorn clasps my hands to his ches
t as if forcing me to pray. “Tell me the truth.”

  The emotion takes form: fear. “I am telling you the truth, I swear it. I don’t know what else to tell you. In my world, you’re a character from a book set in the future, a dystopian one, you’re this … this flawed hero.”

  He throws his head back and laughs, revealing the ridges of his palate. “A flawed hero?”

  I know I’m babbling, but the adrenaline seems to have dulled my brain and roused my vocal cords. “Yes, a flawed hero. You’re brave and strong, but you’re also mean and blinded by revenge.”

  I hear Nate before I see him; a muffled cry followed by a series of thumps as Darren hauls him down the stairs. Nate looks so young, so helpless, his eyes revolving in their sockets like a hunted animal’s. Darren shoves him to the ground. Nate trips on his own feet, and with his hands still bound behind his back he’s unable to break his fall. I rush to catch him, but Darren pulls me back, digging the nose of the rifle between my shoulder blades.

  “It’s OK, Nate, I can fix this, I promise.” I feel my tears, cold against my skin.

  Thorn moves behind Nate, swamping his torso with a heavily muscled forearm. With his spare hand, Thorn pulls a switchblade from his belt and presses it against the smooth stretch of Nate’s throat.

  “Please, don’t!” A high-pitched wail I barely recognize as my own.

  “The truth,” Thorn says.

  I can see the slight dent in Nate’s neck where the knife pushes in, a peach about to be sliced, the skin only just protecting the soft tissue beneath. I think I may be sick. “Please don’t hurt him, I’ll tell you anything.”

  Nate keeps his eyes on me, and I get a strange wrench of sadness. Thorn was your hero, and now you’re going to die at his hand. But Nate doesn’t look sad, he looks determined, clear-headed, his light-brown eyes desperately trying to tell me something. I need to think like Nate. I need to be smart.

  “What do you mean?” Thorn shouts. “Tell me or I’ll slice him like a pig.”

  Something falls into place and I don’t feel scared anymore. Because I am a diehard Gallows Dance fan, I don’t just know things about Thorn, I know what makes him tick. If anyone can talk their way out of this, it’s me. “Ruth … you want revenge because of what they did to Ruth. The Imp girl who you fell in love with when you were young. The Gems hanged her at the Gallows Dance because she had a relationship with a Gem—you.” I watch Thorn’s grip loosen a little, the blade easing against Nate’s skin. But I don’t stop. “You see, I know things I shouldn’t, don’t I? Because I’ve read them and I’ve watched them—you’re a Gem. And underneath that eye patch is another working eye. You just wear the patch to break up the evenness of your features, because you’re ashamed that you’re one of them. And every time you punch a Gem, or scalp a Gem, or kill a Gem, you’re actually trying to kill that part of yourself that you loathe—the Gem part. Because deep down you blame yourself for her death, because if you hadn’t loved her, she would still be alive.”

  My words echo around the vast stone chamber, simply refusing to fade.

  “Shit,” Darren says, the pressure from his rifle easing against my back.

  Thorn releases this guttural noise like I’ve punched him in the stomach. He stares at me, his face caught between disbelief and sorrow, tears spilling from his uncovered eye and seeping beneath his eye patch. He raises his hand, blade glinting in the candlelight. For a heart-stopping moment, I think he’s going to stab Nate in the head.

  But instead, he pulls the gag free.

  “Baba!” Nate screams, like the word was corked up inside him. “We need to see Baba.”

  Thorn nods. “I think perhaps you do.”

  I RECOGNIZE THE CORRIDOR from the film, stone and tight and sloping downward, taking us deep into the bowels of the church. Thorn leads the way, stooping slightly to avoid knocking his head on the domed ceiling. Rose walked this very corridor, but unlike me, she had no idea what waited for her behind that wooden door. A faceless precog. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

  “This is so cool.” Nate pulses his hands in a quick rhythmic motion, his wrists still red and sore from the recently removed binds. “We’re going to meet Baba.”

  I silence him with a glare. The way he’s talking, all excited, anyone would think we’re about to meet a celebrity. We follow Thorn into the chamber. It’s just like the film set, but there’s this sense of oppression, the air almost sticky with something sweet and fresh—lily pollen perhaps. And it strikes me as odd that I can smell flowers in a place so lacking in vegetation. I imagine I can see the ghost of Rose walking beside me, about to meet Baba for the first time. I suddenly feel this sense of loss. Rose is dead.

  “Rose is dead?” a voice says, as though echoing my thoughts.

  I know exactly where to find Baba, hunched in the corner like a pile of rags. She lifts her head and I see her. The book described her as having an extra piece of skin stretched across her face, sealing in her eyes and nostrils, and a mouth that is no more than a thin opening, as though long ago a surgeon’s knife wished to hear her words. In the film, she was even worse, like some kind of gruesome, featureless monster. But the woman before me just looks asleep, her heavy lids resting shut. She doesn’t even look that old, maybe the age of my grandma, and her skin looks soft and doughy, like it would retain the indentation of a fingertip if touched. The only real peculiarity is her lack of nostrils, but I only notice that when she tilts her head back.

  I hear Nate exhale slowly, clearly disappointed by her more approachable appearance.

  “Such a shame. I liked Rose,” Baba says.

  “You never met her,” Thorn says.

  She shrugs. “OK, well, I was going to like her.”

  Thorn plumps a cushion and slips it behind her back. “Would you like me to see to the fire?” It’s strange seeing Thorn so attentive only minutes after he held Nate at knifepoint, and it’s this unpredictability that makes him so scary. He’s all smiles and cushion-plumpings one minute, only to swing into psycho mode the next. He’s the same in canon, only now of course the knife is real.

  And I think Baba must feel the same; unable to trust his kindness. She waves him away. “No, thank you. I can manage myself.” She turns to me, as though she can somehow make out my shape through her eyelids. Perhaps she can—they’re so paper-thin. “Who have you brought me instead, Thorn?”

  “God knows,” he replies.

  She laughs and her eyeballs shift beneath their lids like baby birds wriggling inside their eggs. She reaches a trembling hand toward me, and without thought, I take it. I brace myself for the bolt of pain, the shot of fire transferring through her palm into mine … but it never comes.

  She smiles, revealing a pair of toothless gums. “This flower is little, but she has other qualities. Her name is Violet. Always shrinking, am I right?”

  “You’re right.” My exact thought as I stood at the front of the class.

  Thorn steps forward, and for a moment, I think he may pull my hand from hers, but he settles for clenching his fists. “She knows things she couldn’t possibly know. It’s like she’s in my head or something. Is she like you, Baba?”

  “Do you have precognitive abilities? Can you mind blend?” she asks me.

  I shake my head, then realize she can’t see, so I say, “No,” then realize she can probably read my thoughts, so I blush and feel a little silly.

  “And what about you, Nate, any precog talents?” she asks.

  He claps his hands together and uses this fast, excited voice, as though she just gave him a permission slip to speak. “Oh my God, you know my name, that’s so cool. And you’re nowhere near as scary as you are in the film, they really got you all wrong.”

  Thorn clips him round the back of the head. “That’s what the girl kept saying, that she’s from an alternate universe and that we’re living in a book or a film or some crap.”

  Baba remains composed. “Well, that is quite simply preposterous, wouldn’t you say?�
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  Nate snorts. “Says the five-hundred-year-old woman with no face.”

  Thorn raises his hand to deliver another blow, but Baba intervenes. “That’s quite enough, Thorn. Show our guests a little respect. I like them.”

  “They’re responsible for Rose’s death.” He continues to stare meaningfully at an invisible target on Nate’s head.

  “Yes,” Baba says, like she’s addressing a child, “and when one flower dies, another blooms in its place.”

  His hand flops to his side, dejected. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s the thing about the viola flower. It’s little, but it’s rather special. It contains a scent that turns off the receptors in the nose, making it undetectable for moments of time.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles, old woman,” Thorn says.

  She laughs and dismisses him with a flick of her hand. “Leave me with them, and go and figure out this old woman’s riddle.”

  He fidgets with his eye patch, not used to receiving orders. “And why would I do that?”

  “Don’t be difficult,” she says. “You forget that I already know you’re going to leave. It’s one of the benefits of being a precog.”

  He turns on his heel and marches from the room, his features fighting to hide his annoyance. The door slams behind him and the rush of air stirs the flames—shadows dance across the granite. Baba yawns, her toothless mouth like a baby’s mid-cry. “His bark’s worse than his bite.”

  “You sure about that?” Nate says. “He nearly slit my throat.”

  “OK, they’re both pretty bad. He’s been through a lot, but I guess you already know that.” She gestures around the room. “Take a seat, Nate. Make yourself comfy. I need some time with your sister.”

  He plunks himself down, missing the cushion but not seeming to care. “You’re going to mind blend, aren’t you? This is so cool—do me next.”

  She ignores him. “Come now, Violet, let me rest my hands on your brow.”