“You knew.” I try to shout into his chest. All my anger dissipates, in spite of myself. “You knew it all.”
Obel releases me from the hug but holds my shoulders as he gazes seriously into my eyes. “What I know about your father is only good.”
“No,” I shake my head, trying to find the words – trying to work out how to make him see. “He protected blanks. Lived with them. Helped them. Fathered a child…” I break off as another sob rises in my throat.
“I think it’s time we talked.” Obel starts walking towards the back room. “Come on, I’ll make us some tea. Solves everything, remember?”
I sit at the familiar wooden table and feel a pang of sorrow at all that I’ll miss. Before the ceremony, as complicated as life felt, things were good. This studio, this career – this was my place. I could be me. But now I feel like a stranger in my old life.
The back door bangs open and there’s Oscar. He looks as shocked to see me as I am him. I don’t know whether to fight him or thank him. He betrayed me – but justice was done, wasn’t it? And what’s one more betrayal?
To my surprise, Obel ruffles Oscar’s hair, and gestures for him to sit down.
“You know each other?” I ask incredulously.
Obel looks a little ashamed. “Sorry, girl.”
Oscar shakes him off, but eventually, reluctantly sits down as far from me as he can manage to be. “If I’d known she’d be here I would never have come.” I can’t tell if he’s angry with me or ashamed.
Obel takes another mug from the shelf and sighs. “I didn’t know she was coming either. It was the last place I thought you would come, Leora. But you’re here now, aren’t you? And you always have surprised me. We might as well talk – we may never have the chance again.”
He pours the tea and hands a mug to Oscar while putting the other mug in front of me carelessly, spilling a little as he does so. That carelessness feels so unlike him.
“Let me tell you a story.”
Oscar and I both look up but avoid looking at each other.
“Once upon a time there was a woman whose skin didn’t have any marks on.”
“Yes, we know how it goes, Obel,” I sigh. “She was banished by the prince and was never heard of again. Blah, blah, blah. I’m not here to be told fables; I’m here to be told the truth.”
Obel smiles ruefully. “All right, maybe I shouldn’t have started it that way.” He sips his tea. “Leora, your mum – your real mum – was beautiful.”
My chair falls as I stand. I can hardly get the words out. “Don’t call her my mother. She was not beautiful. She was a freak. She was evil. She was disgusting.”
Obel doesn’t move; he doesn’t even look at me. “She was none of those things. Your mum was a beautiful, exceptional woman.”
“Obel!” I’m screaming at him now – my throat burns with it – “Shut up. You shut up now. She was blank – she was nothing. She’s nothing to me.”
I hear Oscar let out a breath. I turn to him, rage making me shake. He drops his gaze.
“You can’t even look at me, can you?” I speak slowly, spelling out the horror of my situation. “My mum was a blank. He married a blank.” I feel nauseous even saying it. I can’t believe I have her blood in me – her deviant heart begat mine. I turn to Oscar. “Did you know, and that’s why you betrayed me?”
Oscar stands up and I think he’s going to leave, but he’s just getting his bag. “They threatened me,” he says so quietly I can hardly hear. “Before we broke in they came to my house at night. They told me they knew everything about your dad, about my dad – everything that we had done.” He snatches a glance at me. “They gave me an ultimatum: give them the skin and they would let my dad go. Why do you think it was so easy for us to break in?” He sighs and begins to unbuckle his bag. “And if I didn’t do it, they said I would never see him again. I’m so sorry. I didn’t dare tell you, but I did have a plan.” He reaches into his bag and removes something, and slides it across the table to me.
It’s Dad’s skin. The mark, the scar, it’s all there.
“How?” I gasp.
“In the archives, I took a backup piece. Just in case.” He looks down at his hands. “That was the piece I gave them.”
I can’t bring myself to touch the missing piece of Dad’s book. The one part of him that remains. I slam my hand on the table.
Obel clears his throat. “Leora, there is something I have to show you, and we don’t have much time.”
I look over and it’s only then I notice what Obel’s doing. He’s got the flask of alcohol we use to clean skin before we ink. He holds a rag over the neck of the flask and tips the liquid on to it. He carefully places the bottle back on the table and begins to rub his arm with the rag.
I see the smudge of colour on the white rag. He folds the cloth over and uses a clean piece to keep on rubbing his skin. And then the images fade and beneath the beautiful, intricate layers of ink his white skin shows.
Empty.
Blank.
Chapter Forty-One
“I could never read you,” I whisper.
Obel looks up from his arm and smiles gently. “Sorry about that, girl.”
“How long…”
“Before I moved here. I had to, didn’t I?”
“So what, are you some kind of blank spy, sent to watch us?” I shudder. Up until now I’d never seen a blank in real life. And yet, I’ve been working with one all these weeks. The sickness rises within me and I hold on to the table to counter the dizziness. I look over at Oscar and am relieved to see that he looks as shocked as I feel. “Don’t you have a soul?”
“Leora,” Obel pleads, putting down the rag. His skin is beginning to look red where it’s been rubbed with the pungent liquid. “I’m just like you.”
I laugh darkly.
“Hear me out, Leora. I wanted to be something – to have something that was mine. I wanted something to be remembered for.” He looks at my unimpressed face. “Blanks want it too, you know girl – you’ve not got the monopoly on wanting to leave a legacy. I knew I could be a great inker. Why should I be invisible just because I’m blank?”
“But why didn’t you just get marked, Obel? Why go to all this trouble to decorate yourself when you could have just done it once and been one of us?”
Oscar’s moved closer to Obel now. He’s touching his skin, examining his marks. Obel holds out his other arm for Oscar to look at.
“Because I choose not to. Because I demand that choice.” He smiles at our faces. “Yes, it’s been a disguise that’s hard to maintain. I’ve been painting myself with this ink for years – topping up the faded patches each day, checking for smudges and mistakes.” He lets Oscar turn his arm. “But your dad needed me.” He looks at me. “And yours did too,” he says nodding towards Oscar. “They needed one of us to be here, to help the cause.” I grit my teeth and shake my head. “They were fighting for us. Us blanks wouldn’t be able to survive without people like your dad sending us resources: fuel, food. They saw the injustice and they fought. You mustn’t believe what Longsight says – it’s not about war or land or any of that; it’s just about survival. And I was a link between the worlds – their contact.”
I don’t believe it – it can’t be true.
“What are you saying? What was my father doing?” I turn to Oscar. “Did you know? Is that why you talked to me, that first day at the museum?”
“I didn’t know about this,” he gestures to Obel’s arm, “but I knew your father knew mine. They’ve been working together for years, like Obel says, making sure the blanks are getting what they need. They’d starve otherwise, Leora.” I scoff. As if I care. “My dad wanted to make sure the legacy your father built wasn’t lost. The blanks still need us – need you. He told me Joel Flint’s daughter would be a powerful weapon. I just didn’t know why.” His face is hard and sad.
So this is what’s been happening in the background of my life. Did everyone know?
All
the things I’ve been taught, everything I’ve believed has been dragged from under me. It used to be so neat: you get more and more marks until one day you die. And then you’re either a book or you’re burned. But now it all seems like a tangle. I can’t take it. I can’t manage any more of this.
I look at them both: Obel with his calm, sad face; Oscar, his expression mirroring my confusion. I remember his hands on mine and his grin in the dark.
There have been too many lies.
I grab my things and leave, and neither Oscar nor Obel try to stop me.
Chapter Forty-Two
When I reach the house, (it’s hardly home any more, is it?), I peer through the windows to see if I can see her – Mum – Sophie. There’s no sign of her, no lights on, and I can’t see her coat hanging up. I try the door and it’s locked. I use my key, open up and go inside. I’m confronted by all those smells that you usually don’t notice – the amalgam of scents that make up home. It should be the most comforting thing in the world and yet it turns my stomach.
I call out, ready to run if I hear her reply, but everything’s quiet. I head to my room and repack my bag. I’ll need another change of clothes, and I find some bandages from the bathroom that I can use if I need to change the dressing for my new marks. Mustn’t forget my notebook – the one with all my sketches in. It should be under my bed. My fingers close on something hard and papery. I edge it out and, while I’m half trapped under the bed, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs.
When she comes into my room and finds me I feel like the girl from one of the stories Dad used to tell. The girl that wakes up in the den of a family of bears. The one who runs for her life when she sees their ferocity and the mess she’s made. She’ll kill me, I think. She’ll eat me alive. I wriggle out from under the bed.
It’s too late for me to run away – the bear’s got me. She comes right at me with a menacing silence. A roar would be better than this. Her hands reach out, her fingers like claws. I cower close to the bed, but there’s no escape. She grabs me. She snarls; her words bite.
“You stupid, stupid, stupid girl. You stupid, idiot girl. What have you done? What have you done?”
I flinch and try to break free but she’s stronger than me. For a moment my body goes stiff as I brace myself for her attack.
But she’s not devouring me; she’s stroking me. She’s not growling her wrath; she’s weeping and whispering. I go limp and my tiredness rises to the surface. I can’t fight a bear and I can’t fight her. I let myself be embraced and spoken to softly. Tears rise, ready to drown me. But I’m cocooned in her arms. She keeps me safe.
“You stupid, stupid girl,” she whispers with tearful tenderness. “I’m so sorry, Leora, my little light. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I should have trusted you.” She strokes my hair as though I’m a wild cat that might bolt any second and needs to be soothed. That’s not too far from the truth.
I move from her touch and switch on the lamp on my bedside table. We both squint at the glare and look at each other blinkingly as our eyes adjust to the brightness.
“Wait here,” she says, getting to her feet. “Please, just let me get something. I’ll be right back.”
She returns a minute later with a papery package and passes it to me. I sit on my bed and untie the string that is keeping the paper wrapped tight around whatever is inside. The knots are tight and I have to use my teeth to ease them apart. Eventually the string comes away and I toss it to the side; it clings to my blanket for a second before falling down the side of my bed. The paper is thick – bent rather than creased as it encases whatever treasure Mum has hidden. I let it unwrap itself and the parchment pings back as though exhaling after having its belt loosened.
Inside is a book. Of sorts. It’s more of a notebook – no inscription on the cover, nothing on the spine to give away what’s inside. The front is like the back is like the front; I try to guess which way round it goes. The suede-like texture of old paper is soft under my hands. I open the cover – nothing, so I turn the book over and upside-down and try again.
And then I see the beautiful blank face of the White Witch and I throw it down. “I don’t need another book of fairy tales, Mum. What good is this to me?” I’d hoped it would be something – anything – that would make sense of all of this. I wanted something that would right my upturned world. But no, here I am with another book about the White Witch.
“Please love, just look,” she says gently. “This isn’t a fairy story.”
For a while I just stare at the book, sending it hateful messages with my mind. But eventually I pick it up again. I flick past that first picture of the witch and find that I’m not reading fables – there’s no “once upon a time”-ing or “happily ever after”-ing. It’s a journal – no, it’s a letter. A message.
“This was hers?” I ask. Mum nods. “Was this what she looked like?” I show Mum the drawing at the front of the book.
“It’s her, yes, a drawing your dad did of her and kept. He was a talented artist as well as a flayer. He showed it to me so that I could see the likeness between you. He told me the blanks believe your birth mother was a direct descendant of Moriah and the White Witch. You see the likeness, surely? So yes, it’s his picture, but it’s not his handwriting, it’s hers. Her story.” She looks over my shoulder. “I’ve never read this. I was keeping it for you, for when the time was right.” She sighs and tucks my hair behind my ear. “The right time just never seemed to come.”
I turn the pages of neat slanted handwriting. “She wrote this bit when she was pregnant, Mum.” I’m excited in spite of myself and show Mum the passage I’ve found.
You’re moving all the time, little one. You’re getting so big! I love to hold my hands on my skin and feel your bony limbs slide beneath my touch. I think you can feel me too. I’m getting so tired, but you’re worth it all.
But a few pages later the handwriting stops and another hand picks up the story. “But look – here, the writing changes towards the end.”
I don’t know who it was who wrote the end of her story, who filled in the gaps. I wish I’d had this sooner. Before Dad died – before everything. I think I wish that. Maybe I don’t – maybe it’s been for the best that Mum felt like my mum through all of the mess of the past few months. I don’t know what we’ll be to each other now, but we needed each other then.
And anyway. They (whoever it was), they don’t know the ending. That’s not where I finish – it’s not the end of my story.
I wonder how much of my birth mother’s story she knows. There’s no way of telling from looking at her face – she just looks tired and concerned. And sad. She looks terribly, awfully sad.
“Tell me, Mum,” I whisper. “Tell me everything.”
“Julia introduced us,” she says, looking at the patterned surface of my bedspread. “You and me.” She had been given the task of getting rid of you – there were regular raids on blank strongholds and babies were taken. You were dangerous; blank blood in your veins.”
“You don’t mean that—?”
She smiles bleakly. “But she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do such a terrible thing. She came to me, Leora. I’d read for her before she became pregnant and we’d formed a friendship. I lived on the outskirts of town. There she was on the doorstep with you in a bundle resting on her own belly.”
I hear her sigh then – the relief of telling her story without having to lie any more.
“You were beautiful. Perfect. No one could know where you came from – if they knew who your mother was they wouldn’t have let you live. And so I was going to name you and you would be mine.”
She risks another glance and strokes my arm. I don’t turn to her, but I don’t move either.
“When I took your blankets and clothes off that first time, I saw it. Leora, you were marked already. But it wasn’t the usual black mark: it was purple. This tiny baby I’d been told was a blank was just like Moriah. You were born marked – born ready named. I kne
w it must be a sign that you were good. Just like Moriah,” she says again, thoughtfully. “We had your mark covered over in black ink so no one would know. And you were my little girl.”
I look at her then. Can this be real?
“You had been with me for six months when your father showed up, demanding I give you back. He’d spent all that time trying to find you, to find out if you were even alive.” She rubs her hands over her skirt and shakes her head. “Oh, I read it all straight away – what he’d done – and I hated him for it. He was worse than a blank; he had betrayed us and gone over to their side. He was polluted, barely human.”
She gently pulls my hand into her lap and plays with my fingers.
“I wasn’t going to turn him over to the authorities – he was your father after all – but I wasn’t going to let him within a mile of you. But he kept coming and one day, just to shut him up, I let him in. And I suppose you can guess the rest. We fell in love. He agreed to make a new life with me in Saintstone. I vouched for him, approved his marks at the government building. I lied for him. By the time we moved to this house we were just another married couple with a charming little baby. No one knew, no one guessed. My parents didn’t approve. Dad has the gift of reading too, and he could tell that something was wrong. When I wouldn’t tell him what, he and mum disowned me.” She looks sad. “But by then I had my own family. You were our perfect secret. You were even a secret from yourself.”
I flinch at this and finally look her way. “So everything about me being sick, about me and Verity at the maternity unit together, meeting Dad in the government building – that was all made up?”
Mum nods.
“So, I wasn’t really born on the same day as Verity?”
She shakes her head. “No, love. You’re almost nine months older than her, give or take. But we can’t be sure when you were born.”
I laugh coldly. “So I don’t know my real mum, I don’t know where I was born, and I don’t even know my birthdate? And at no point did this seem like an awful, cruel idea, keeping all of this from me?”
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