“What do you mean?” Zachary asks, recalling the voices in the dark and wondering if they were such a story. Simon starts at the sound of his voice, turning toward him in surprise.
“Hello,” Simon greets him anew. “Are you here to read? I believed once that I was here to read and not be read but the story h
as changed.”
“Changed how?” Zachary says. Simon looks at him blankly. “How has the story changed?” he clarifies, gesturing upward at the pages and the statues, worried by Simon’s behavior and even more concerned about the way everything keeps repeating and becoming more confusing when it should be getting clearer.
“It is broken,” Simon answers, without elaborating as to how one goes about breaking a story. Perhaps it is like breaking a promise. “Its edges are sharp.”
“How do I fix it?” Zachary asks.
“There is no fixing. There is only moving forward in the brokenness. Look, there,” Simon indicates something within the story that Zachary cannot see. “You with your beloved and your blade. The tides will rise. There is a cat looking for you.”
“A cat?” Zachary looks up at the owl and if owls could shrug the owl would shrug but they cannot, not distinctly, and so the owl ruffles its feathers instead.
“So many symbols when at the end and in the beginning there are only ever bees,” Simon remarks.
Zachary sighs and picks up the sword. So many symbols. Symbols are for interpretation, not definition, he reminds himself. The sword feels lighter now, or perhaps he is growing accustomed to the weight of it. He puts it back in the scabbard.
“I have to find Mirabel,” he tells Simon.
Simon stares at him blankly.
“Her,” Zachary says, pointing up at the statue. “Your…” he stops himself, worried that if Simon doesn’t already know Mirabel is his daughter that the revelation might be too much so he starts again. “Mirabel…Fate, whoever she is. This incarnation has pink hair and she’s usually up in the higher Harbor. I don’t know if you can see her in the story but she’s my friend and she’s down here somewhere and I have to find her.”
Zachary thinks that now he has more than one person to find but does not want to get into that. Doesn’t want to think about it. About him. Even though the name that is probably not his real name repeats like a mantra in the back of his mind. Dorian Dorian Dorian.
“She is not your friend,” Simon says, disrupting Zachary’s thoughts, disrupting his entire being. “The mistress of the house of books. If she left you, she meant to do so.”
“What?” Zachary says but Simon continues on, pacing around statues and pulling at more ropes and ribbons, the pages and objects strung above swirling into a storm. The owl cries from the balcony and flies down, perching on Zachary’s shoulder.
“You should not have brought the story here,” Simon admonishes Zachary. “I stay away from where the story is, I am not supposed to be in it any longer. When I tried to return before, it brought only pain.”
Simon looks at the empty space where his left hand should be.
“Once I went back into the story and it ended in flames,” he says. “The last time I moved closer a woman with one sky-bright eye took my hand and warned me never to return.”
“Allegra.” Zachary remembers the hand in the jar. Maybe it was insurance, to keep part of Simon lost forever, or just her standard intimidation technique carried out beyond intimidating.
“She is gone now.”
“Wait, gone-gone or lost gone?” Zachary asks, but Simon does not clarify.
“You should come with me,” he says. “We must leave before the sea claims us for its own.”
“Does that say I go with you?” Zachary asks, pointing up at the ribbons and gears and keys, using his right arm so as not to jostle the owl on his left shoulder. Following instructions woven into a giant moving story sculpture doesn’t seem much better than taking them from book pages.
He isn’t about to go back into the darkness but there is more than one way to go from here.
Simon stares up at the story, gazing at it like he is searching for a particular star in a vast sky.
“I do not know which one you are,” he says to Zachary.
“I’m Zachary. I’m the son of the fortune-teller. I need to know what to do next, Simon, please,” Zachary says. Simon turns and looks at him quizzically. No, not quizzically. Blankly.
“Who is Simon?” he asks, returning his attention to the gears and the statues, as though the answer to his question is there in the starless expanse and not within himself.
“Oh,” Zachary says. “Oh.”