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  “That is correct. Anything is possible, I suppose.” I muse, I believe with him, that if anything were impossible, it would be possible in a world like this. “But a body is not suggested to stay on the other side for long. The longer they stay over there... the more... unlikely.”

  “Who are you?” It’s not me that speaks, but Isaac’s charge – her words questioning, prodding, requesting.

  “Me?” He’s using that stupid accent the two of us had messed around with – that Westernized Southern one, and none of them have seemed to catch on to his lie.

  I interrupt them to speak to Thomas.

  “How long?” I question.

  “Oh, I’mma... new friend, that is,” Isaac interrupts, and I watch him smile at his charge, someone I’m sure he believed he’d never meet.

  Thomas talks over them. “What?”

  Suppressing a sigh, I push, “How long do you recommend someone stay over there?”

  “I don’t recommend that someone like Isaac go over there in the first place.” His voice is brutally sharp. “His control was weak. He was broken before you even met him. This only turns those, um, glass shards, into... uh...”

  “Sand,” I interrupt in a whisper.

  “Right, I’m sorry.” His charge is grinning at him, shaking his outstretched hand as if unsure. Being careful. “I just – didn’t see you walk up, or... or anything.”

  “That’s awright. Nice t’meet ya, missy. Name’s Todd.”

  Todd? I blink up at the image of him through my watery eyes. His name is Isaac – he knows that.

  Where would he have gotten – ?

  Suddenly, jolting, I remember what he was saying last night.

  I thought I was Isaac. Am I not Isaac?

  “No,” I whisper, stepping away from the barrier, hands wrapped around each other pressing in my chest as I pace. I feel my heart rate begin to accelerate as I take in my realization. “Oh no.” What have I done? By being too wrapped up in my fear to think – to help – to understand... I wrote my brother’s death sentence.

  “Todd, huh?” Her voice is in the background, quiet, murmuring against my thoughts, hardly present, distant, as I see her shake his hand. “Right. Todd. Hello.”

  “Ives?” Thomas’ voice is confused but still gentile.

  “The tattoo. He said – it made him question who he was.” I look up, eyes wide and hopeful. “It must have said Todd.” Another name. “Thomas, does – does Todd mean anything to you?”

  “No.” He’s very quick to answer. “Todd means nothing to me.”

  “Somethin’ wrong with my name, little miss?”

  “What? Oh, no – of course not. I’ve just...” She releases an uneasy laugh. “I’ve never heard anything like it. Sounds like a sicklepod.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, y’know, that plant?” Embarrassed that he doesn’t seem to understand, she pushes, “Or mod. Or... sod.”

  “Ain’t ya silly? Ain’t ya just a little rascal?”

  She chuckles and shrugs at him, but I am not watching – I am somewhere else, pulled by a simple turn of phrase that has claimed my thoughts, my mind.

  Little rascal.

  The world around me blurs, fades – and then, suddenly, it jumps forward, into an explosion of new color and light, and I’m looking at me, and Isaac, and whiteness, and we’re on the staircase, this staircase, the one that cannot be seen, and we’re standing in positions we’ve never stood and doing things we’ve never done. I am in and out of my body, there and still tethered to another mind – and I am lost, and helpless, and so confused that all I can do is watch and let be. The pair of us both have a small paddle and we’re hitting a light pink ball back and forth, back and forth.

  “Bollocks! You little rascal,” he swears as the ball flies by him. He’s using his voice – the one God gave him – with the correct inflections. He sounds like himself. And somehow, though I do not know what I mean, he looks like himself.

  “Five out of five. You are going to be so disappointed in yourself when you lose.” The me in this world holds my paddle above my head and turns it in the light, watching it with an obvious sense of pride.

  His voice is much more melancholy than my cavalier one. “You’re older, and thus, you’re stronger.”

  “Thirty or so seconds does not mean I am inherently more apt to deal with life.”

  “It totally does.”

  “It’s a difference of seconds, Isaac.”

  He picks up the ball, spins, and hits it between my legs which are shoulder width apart all in one movement. I swing, a bit wildly, to stop the flying flash of pink, but my paddle moves too late to make a difference.

  I huff my frustration.

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Your reaction time and the ball’s movement was only a difference of seconds,” he jests as I watch my body move to locate the small orb on the staircase.

  “Oh, ha-ha.” I flip my hair as I rise again. “That was cheating.”

  “Your existence is cheating.”

  “You never deign to make any sense, do you?”

  “Not as a rule of thumb,” he says, grinning and getting back into position as I join him once again, “no.”

  And then it’s gone. The world, or memory, or whatever it was trying to be. It sinks and disappears into some depth of my mind and I’m left gasping as I’m violently pulled back into this this one, with a floor beneath my feet, where there is no Isaac, where I am supposed to know nothing about any other life.

  “Ives? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I’m gasping, attempting to find breath as the senses from the memory fall late on me. The feel of the rubbery ball, the swell of laughter in my heart, the pinch of guilt in the back of my mind, the air, and the stairs, and the sense I got in my own body in another world...

  “Ives, tell me!”

  I am not fit enough to answer, but I already know my decision.

  This moment, this thought, this... memory... is mine. I do not need another thing that Thomas can brush off. I do not need another thought that he can pretend is a fancy of a mind, or nonexistent.

  No.

  This is mine.

  Besides, I know nothing about Thomas. He need not know everything about me.

  The vision gave me a fuller sense of Isaac. Maybe a better one – a sweeter one – one that was my brother and not just the husk of someone who was supposed to be one. One that I shared time with, and talked to, and cared about. A person that I never got to know.

  For some reason, that loss hits me harder than I could have ever imagined.

  I rise to my feet, shirking the emotions that seem to totally engross me every time I’m introduced to the slightest provocation.

  “Ives? Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  I’m not listening to him. I’m watching the barrier, where a brother that should not be broken is living, a soul that should not be lost is offering himself up, and I recall my recent memory – a time when we both smiled, and lived, and were each other’s friend.

  I wonder if he would be that for me, if this world were different. If he had woken up a different way, in a different place, with different people.

  If I hadn’t left when he was alone and afraid.

  If I knew what to say, or how to comfort, or how to be the person that I am supposed to be to him.

  Perhaps in this version, neither of us truly know what we are doing.

  The question is festering in the back of my mind, questioning itself and gnawing at its own lip, until finally, it explodes from me without my permission.

  “What would happen if I go through?”

  “Don’t.” His voice is hard, without any room for negotiation.

  But I do not care what him or his voice wants, so I continue.

  “I will go through, then.”

  “Ivory... don’t.”

  “Stop me, then.”

  And I move to go rescue my only brother from the depths of a hell I cannot express
.

  I do not expect Thomas to honestly have any power that would result in stopping me. Thus far, he has been a passive watcher – gazing down on our world and giving short bursts of advice, but doing nothing more to influence us and the world around us. It was I who got up and ran away from Isaac when my fear permitted me, I who chose every step. Perhaps, despite his once-claim to never allow harm to come to me, I believe him to be somewhat powerless.

  I am finding out how untrue that belief was.

  As I move towards the barrier, I feel a most unsettling sensation in my limbs. At first it’s cold and heavy, and I feel difficulty in lifting my feet once again, and then, it disappears long enough for me to reach towards the barrier before it returns, with a startling frequency and power. Fire, as if plucked from a star, ignites in every bone, crevice, beat of me. I lose my breath. I am in space, within a star – there is no air here.

  I cannot move. I tug at my limbs and muscles, and they will not move. I tug until the entirety of my body is tensed and frozen. Until I am nothing but a frozen form, unbreathing, unmoving. A statue stilled in the middle of a step, a single hand outstretched towards the barrier.

  It hurts, in the simplest of ways, of forms, of words. It is killing me. I do not exist. I am merely pain. There is no more beginning to me, no more end. Just pain. Magnificent, amazing pain.

  “We’ve lost Isaac already. We are not losing you too.” I can hardly hear his emotion-touched words through the insane ignition. I feel my eyes water, now, for a different reason, my throat unable to scream.

  We. Like we are a team, still. Like he still counts on me. Like a third of the team didn’t die today.

  But currently, I am dying, and the rest of the team we have left must be causing it. Tears track on my face and I can hardly see through blurring gray and white, pain of noiseless colors.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. But I can’t lose you.”

  It takes a few moments, but finally, gently, I feel my body slowly release. Relax. Starting at my feet and going up – I collapse first to my knees, then as the rest of me relaxes, my body sinks to the floor, swinging with a broken momentum, no strength or power left in a single bone, atom, or muscle. I can feel my memory forgetting the moment as it’s happening, and through the shapes and colors I can hardly see through, I believe I can make out one of the figures from the Ashen Staircase take another’s hands, and move forward with the group.

  “I’m sorry,” I hear, and all the colors, all of everything, fades into black dotted with white, falling lights, the stars and colors of a sky I should not know blurring and collapsing in front of me, with me.

  Nothing but black and a voice.

  “I’m so sorry, white blossom.” His voice is broken enough to perhaps mean it. “I just... I can’t lose you. Not again. Please, not again.”

  Again? my mind whispers, but before I can understand, it’s gone.

  thirteen

  I do not remember yesterday.

  Perhaps that is inaccurate. I do, in a sense of the word. Remember.

  I know that Isaac is not here anymore, and I know why. Thomas has not turned on the view in the barrier, and yet, I know with every fiber of every bone in my body that he is over there, no longer here.

  I know that I was considering chasing him.

  I know minute details and facts, like that he is now using his accent, and that his charge was confused by his name. I know that he calls his charge little rascal, and that he seems to be content in a world that he does not know and does not know him.

  But I do not remember.

  It is as if I am reading the script instead of being part of the play production.

  I know what happened, but exactly how every moment transpired is somewhat of a mystery to me.

  Thomas tells me I fell asleep in sorrow after deciding not to chase him through the barrier.

  I do not believe him, but I do not voice that belief.

  Days move, as they have always moved, and Isaac never returns to this side. There is no light, there is no dark. I judge all my feeling on the other world – the world that does have light and dark, or some effect of that. At night, it’s too dark to see, now. In the day, red mist swirls in and out, fitfully, expressions of emotion. My life is spent watching – just watching.

  It’s become an unspoken agreement that I take on Isaac’s charge, now. Now that Isaac is lost, despite what my vision tells me, I must become the new anchor for a charge. Of course, she does not know I am there, and of course, she is my first charge in this life, and I do not know what to do – but still, I hope that my mere presence gives her some sort of sensed, unspoken hope.

  Thomas and I do not speak much. Our conversations center around voids, and our words fall fitfully in and out of them.

  It is empty.

  Life is empty.

  I suppose, in a way, it always has been, and always will be. According to Thomas, this society relies on the fact that I watch other people live their lives.

  And no matter how much I lose along the way... I have some sort of duty to an unknown community, and somehow, spying on strangers is a heavy contribution to them.

  Isaac is not much himself in this stranger world – not that I ever knew what himself was. He sits with the group and talks to them, but seems to have a special attention on his charge, whom he calls Rascal. Any voiced fears are answered with poorly executed jokes, and Rascal always responds in the same polite way:

  “You always know just what to say, Todd.”

  He doesn’t catch the slight inflection in her voice, doesn’t see the shimmer in her eye. He never suspects the truth – that, perhaps, he never knows what to say.

  Perhaps that would have been okay, had he not been dead set on saving a world.

  Or a staircase.

  ... Or just Rascal.

  I wonder what it would be like, to live in that world with those people continually circling and hounding you. Everyone’s voices were different and strange to my own – Rascal, who pronounced things with long “ay”s instead of “ah”s; the older man, who left off vowels and accented middles of a word and let each word seem to fall and rise with their brogue; Glasses, who spoke with “h”s where “h”s weren’t and spoke so quickly, her words were sometimes not distinguishable. Of course there was Todd. With his “y’all”s and “d”s instead of “t”s. And at times, as I watched their story unfold, I had to remind himself that he wasn’t “Todd the stranger” – he was “Isaac my brother”.

  Perhaps the two meant nearly the same thing.

  It is getting cooler on this side with each step. It would not have been a vast exaggeration if one had suggested that it was just my own emotions playing on myself. I am alone – thus, I shall feel it colder, not in the air, but in the depths of what soul I may have left.

  I decide to cease contemplating this side, where there’s nothing, and I turn my attention to that side, where all are.

  The other world – the Ashen Staircase – has strange characters, indeed. Glasses spends most of her time crying and clinging to Rascal. The baby intimidates all by pretending to spill over the staircase every now and again, to the point that I wish she would, just so she can stop her foolish game. The older man lobs odd jokes as them, and even tries to eat a bit of the staircase occasionally. The one with the long, red hair, that never speaks, transforms pieces of the staircase and herself in front of her group just to frighten them. She must get some sick satisfaction out of the horror on everyone’s faces.

  I can only be glad that I am not there to appease her – not as though my tired, empty gaze would ever be what she was looking for.

  Out of the group, I suppose, the two that have held my interest are the least colorful. Todd seems to be liked by everyone, on some level, as if he has a natural charisma about him, and Rascal is a neutral in everyone’s lives, save for Glasses and Todd. She seems wildly unimportant in a story where she’s the star.

  And so, life goes. They walk, as they’ve alw
ays walked, as all that they’ve known how to do.

  And then they fall.

  First, the baby. The middle of the night, so dark none can see. One of her jokes gone awry. They hear the screech and crack of bones prior to seeing what happened. When light returns, Rascal and her friend get violently ill over gazing, apparently, at whatever part of her body they can make out when they crane their attention downwards. Glasses’ eyes are now just puddles of tears behind the huge spectacles. No one else seems to care too much over the toddler’s death, but Isaac – Todd – whomever – still stays to comfort Rascal for a while. Her head is bent and her breaths are uneven, but he holds her freckled fingers and rubs her back enough for her body to move and sigh with the contours of his hand.

  When the older man falls, it’s something of a blessing. Todd relaxes, Glasses sighs contentedly. But there is still an apologetic horror that freezes Rascal’s face, and thus, my sympathy is not lost on him.

  I imagine two Moderators who just lost their charges. Two people, like me, watching other strangers live out their own life, who had such a short amount of time to fall in love with their charge, or fall back into a sleep.

  I feel Thomas closer in my mind, as if he can hear my thoughts and is attempting to comfort me in the bare way that he can.

  It’s turned to just a foursome of walking, now. They seem to still be close to the bottom of the staircase, as Rascal continually looks down, her face paling as if she can still see the bodies of her fallen comrades below. It only takes a few brightenings and darkenings of the sky until the redhead stops walking altogether, plopping herself down on a staircase and allowing the group to pass her by. Rascal attempts to question her on her decision, to reason with her, in slow, careful vowels and questions, but the lost soul doesn’t speak, and thus, the conversation is quite one-sided. The wear and tear of this world is starting to crease Rascal’s face, despite the slight cheeriness that always seemed to be present. She tries until she seems to understand such grapplings are in vain, and then she turns, joins the others still on their sojourn forward.