In the dreamscape of Skye Harper and Elias Marlowe
The screen went dark.
For a long moment, nothing in the cinema moved. The three of them sat in a row — Skye in the middle, Elias on her right, the thing wearing Anna’s face on her left — and the dark on the screen stayed dark, as if the reel itself had needed a moment to recover from what it had shown them.
Skye became aware of her own breathing first. Small, shallow, the kind of breaths you took when your body had been holding them without asking permission. Then she became aware of the silence. Not the careful silence of the classroom earlier. This was heavier. The silence of a room that knew what it had just witnessed and was not sure whether to let the next sound in.
Then she became aware of Elias.
He was not moving. His hands were on the armrests. His knuckles were white. He was not crying in any of the ways Skye had seen adults cry. No shaking. No sound. Just a stillness that frightened her more than crying would have.
She understood, in a way she could not have understood a day ago, that this was what a hundred-year-old grief looked like. Not fresh. Not raw. Something polished by time into something harder. A man who had lost his parents in exactly the way they had just watched him lose them, every time he had closed his eyes for a hundred years.
She reached across and put her hand on his.
She did not say anything. She was twelve and she had just watched two people die and she did not have the words for what the adult beside her was feeling, but she knew he should not be alone in it. Her hand was small on his. His was cold.
He did not look at her. He did not move his hand. But he closed his eyes for a long moment, and she felt his breathing change beneath her palm — exhale, inhale, exhale — and she understood that this was his version of thank you.
Death came down the aisle.
Not with any of the theatre she had brought to the classroom, or the stage, or the place where Skye had been before. She was walking. Just walking. A woman in an usher’s uniform that she had not bothered to take off, her shoes making no sound against the carpet because the dreamscape did not require sound unless she wanted it to.
She sat down on Skye’s other side.
Not in front. Not behind. Beside. The three of them in a row now, facing the dark screen, as if they were all ordinary people who had come to see a film and were waiting for the lights to come up.
Skye did not look at her directly. She could see Death’s face at the edge of her vision, the face she had stolen from the girl in the film, and she did not want to look at it right now any more than Elias did. But she registered the change. Death was not smiling. Not performing. Not arch. Her face — Anna’s face — was unreadable in the specific way faces became when the person inside them was organising something they had not had to organise before.
Silence stretched.
Then Death spoke. Quietly. To the dark screen.
“I have collected millions of people over that war.”
Skye felt Elias tense under her hand.
“A great many of them innocent. Others less so.”
Elias did not speak. He did not move.
Death’s voice went slower. Smaller. The voice of someone saying something she had not said before.
“Your parents, though. When I collected them—”
Elias’s head turned. Just slightly. Enough for Skye to see. Enough for Skye to feel the change in him, the specific way his attention had narrowed.
“They asked if you had made it out. They wanted to know how you were all doing.”
Skye felt something move through Elias that she did not have a word for. Not a flinch. The opposite of a flinch. Something closing, deep, in a part of him she had only started to see the shape of.
His shoulders shifted. Not much. His other hand — the one Skye was not holding — rose slowly to his face and stayed there.
Skye leaned into his shoulder. Not dramatically. Just so he knew she was there.
When he finally spoke, he did so without lifting his head. His voice came out thick but steady.
“So they saw me fail.”
Death was quiet for a moment.
Then, carefully: “By the time that happened, they were no longer in my care. They had moved to a — brighter place.”
Skye felt Elias understand. Not in the way an adult might — not with a word or a nod or any visible thing — but in a small slow exhale, a long one, as if something inside him had been holding its breath for a century and had just now, for one moment, been allowed not to.
He did not speak again for a while.
And Skye, without quite knowing why she was doing it, reached across with her free hand and took Death’s hand in hers.
So she was sitting between them, holding both.
Death looked down at the small hand in hers with the specific confusion of something that did not know what was happening but had decided, for now, not to interrupt it.
Eventually Skye sat up.
She looked at Death. She was crying — she had not noticed she had started, the way you did not notice rain until you realised your sleeve was wet — but her voice came out in the particular steady way twelve-year-olds could be steady when they had decided something mattered more than their fear.
“Hi. Sorry. Ms Death.”
Death blinked. “Ms—”
“I don’t know what else to call you. I can change it if you prefer something else. But I wanted to ask — can you change into someone who isn’t Anna? Elias has been through a lot and I need him right now and he can’t look at her anymore. Please.”
Death looked at her for a long moment.
“Skye,” Elias said quietly, without looking up, “you don’t have to—”
“Yes I do.”
Elias did not argue. Skye was not sure he had the strength to, right now. She kept her attention on Death, because Death was the one who had to decide.
Something shifted in Death’s expression. Not quite surprise. Closer to consideration.
“Who would you prefer?” Death asked.
Skye thought about it for a moment, the way you thought about things that had already been decided before you asked the question. She knew the answer before Death had finished the sentence. She did not like it that she knew the answer. It was too small and too private and the kind of thing she usually did not let anyone see.
“My mum,” she said.
Her voice came out very small.
Death’s face did not change dramatically. There was no horror this time, no clay, no cartilage sliding. It was gentle — the way light shifted across a window when a cloud moved. Between one moment and the next, the woman in the seat beside her was no longer Anna.
Skye did not have to describe her. She knew. Every line of her. Every inch. The specific way her mother’s shoulders sat when she was tired, the way her hands folded in her lap when she did not know what to do with them, the particular tilt of her head that was her mother and no one else. Death had rendered her without any of the wrongness Death usually carried into a shape. Exact. True.
Skye made a small sound. Not quite a sob. The sound a child made when something in the shape of comfort arrived and they could not pretend they had not needed it.
“Is this acceptable?” Death asked.
Her voice, now, was her mother’s voice.
Skye nodded. She was crying properly now, the tears coming without permission.
She stood up. Her legs felt uncertain again. She took the three steps to where Death was sitting, the steps short and shaky and not fully committed, and she bent down and put her arms around Death’s shoulders and held on.
Death went very still.
”…What are you doing?” Death asked, and there was something in the voice now — her mother’s voice — that was not her mother at all. It was genuine confusion. Something that had never been held before trying to understand what was happening to it.
“I don’t know,” Skye said, into her shoulder. Into her mother’s shoulder, except it wasn’t, except it felt like it was, except she did not care right now whether it was or was not. Her mother’s perfume, which Death had somehow known to include. Her mother’s cardigan. Her mother’s shape.
Her mother had nearly hanged herself.
That was the thing Skye had not been able to stop thinking about since last night, when she had heard the arguing downstairs through the floorboards and pressed her ear against the carpet and caught fragments — Alice saying I was twenty-one, I was checking bottles to make sure you weren’t dead, and her mother saying something that took a long time to arrive because her mother had been crying too hard to finish it, something about a cupboard, something about a rope, something about being stopped only because someone had come home.
Skye had been the one who had come home.
Her return had saved her mother’s life. She had worked that out very slowly, lying in her childhood bed in her childhood room with five years of dust taken off the shelves so she wouldn’t know she had been gone. She had not asked anyone to confirm it.
She held on to Death tighter.
Behind her, quietly, from his seat: “She’s pretending. She is trapped in a coma and she misses her mother and she is twelve. Let her pretend.”
Elias’s voice was kind. It was also tired in a way that told Skye he had understood, without being told, what Skye had understood last night.
Death, slowly, lifted one hand and rested it on Skye’s back. The specific awkwardness of something that had never done this before. She did not pat. She did not rub. She just held her hand there, flat, steady, and let Skye cry into her mother’s shoulder for as long as Skye needed to.
Skye broke the hug slowly. She stayed standing near Death. She was still crying, but the crying had changed — had settled into the quiet kind, the kind that was not a storm but a weather.
Death, in her mother’s voice now, careful, not cruel:
“I wish I could send her home. Truly. But you know what happened when you saved her. When—”
“She saved me first,” Elias said.
Skye turned. “Wait. What?”
Elias looked at her directly now. He did not look at Death.
“When I was thrown into that place — I had been there for a long time. I don’t know how long in your time. In mine it was—”
He stopped. His hands closed. Opened again.
“It was a very long time. There was no air. There was no space. There was no end to it. I died over and over and came back over and over because the place did not allow staying dead and did not allow being alive. I don’t know how many times.”
Skye was very small when she asked: “How long?”
Elias looked at the dark screen. “Felt like a billion years. I stopped counting after the first million.”
Skye’s face did something she did not have the vocabulary for.
Elias continued, his voice worn soft at the edges now, the way voices went when they were telling a story that had been kept inside for a long time.
“And then something happened. A butterfly — a bright one, too bright — moved through the dark. I didn’t understand what it was. I followed it because following it was the first thing I had been able to want in — in a very long time.”
Death, carefully, in her mother’s voice: “Her spirit.”
Skye blinked. “Wait. My spirit is a butterfly?”
Death turned to her. Her mother’s voice softened further.
“Skye. This might be overwhelming. Our spirits, in what they look like — they are close to what some cultures call a spirit animal. You see yourself, in your heart, as a butterfly. So that is what your spirit is.”
Skye absorbed this. She did not speak for a moment. Then, in her direct way:
“Butterflies start as something else. Right?”
“They do.”
“And then they become what they actually are.”
“Yes,” Death said, softer still. “Not because butterflies are pretty. Because butterflies know who they are before the world does.”
Skye nodded once. She did not cry. She had understood something she did not need to explain.
She turned back to Elias. “What’s yours?”
Elias, with the particular weariness of a man who had been called many things in a century: “I don’t know.”
“A wolf,” Death said.
Elias laughed. It was not a real laugh. It was the sound of a man receiving information that did not surprise him.
“Of course.”
A beat.
Then, quietly, to Death: “That’s if I ever actually die.”
Death’s voice was even. “You have died, Elias. I have collected you before. Many times.”
Elias went cold. Skye saw it, in her hand, in the way his hand stopped being warm even under hers.
“You’ve — you’ve collected me before?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you keep sending me back?” His voice climbed — not a shout, something worse, something cracked. “Why couldn’t you send me to be with my family? They were right there, you said — a brighter place — why didn’t you let me go to them?”
“I wished I could.”
It stopped him.
Death stood. Her mother’s form held itself with the specific dignity of something that did not usually have to explain itself.
“Believe me. I wished I could. Every time I collected you, I tried. The threshold would not accept you. Something in you — something that happened before you died the first time — prevented it. You were returned because the in-between itself refused to keep you. Not because I chose.”
Elias stared at her.
Death walked over and knelt in front of him. Not submissive. Anchoring. The way Elias had knelt in front of Skye in the classroom earlier. Skye noticed the mirroring, and she knew Elias noticed too, because the muscles in his jaw shifted.
“Something was done to you, Elias. I do not know what. I do not know by whom. And I have been doing my job for longer than there have been words for it, and in all that time, only one other being has ever taken a soul from me against my will.”
“Who?” Elias asked, quietly.
Death did not answer.
Elias absorbed the silence. “You’re afraid.”
“I am cautious.”
“No. You’re afraid.”
Death did not deny it.
Elias looked at Skye. His hand tightened around hers, just slightly.
“Then Skye’s safety is my priority. Not yours. Not the question. Her.”
Death stood. Something in her face that was close to respect — or at least Death’s version of it.
“Of course. The sooner we resolve this, the sooner she can go back to hiding from the world — where everyone believes she is dead. What a wonderful life that will be.”
The irony landed.
Skye felt it land on her specifically.
She thought about it, then. In the quiet.
The wonderful life Death described: going back to her room. Her family keeping her existence a secret from the world because there was no paperwork that said she existed. No school. No friends. No Ben. No Mr Evans — the real one, the one who existed somewhere and still taught a class she was no longer in. A life indoors. A life of being watched.
She had only been back for a day.
Last night was when she had learned she had been dead. The fact of it was still new — so new that her body had not caught up to it yet. But she already knew what the life Death was describing would look like, because she had spent the whole of today living inside it.
She thought: I cannot stay hidden forever. I cannot do that to them. I cannot do it to me.
She thought: If everyone already thinks I am dead, and I am not, then they should know.
She thought: I am autistic and I am twelve and I do not like being stared at. But they will stare whether or not I am there. So I might as well be there.
She thought, carefully, the thought arriving at the end of the others: And Elias would not let them hurt me. I can tell. I do not know why I can tell. But I can.
She did not say any of it aloud.
She filed it.
“Uncle Elias?” she said, quietly.
He turned. The surprise on his face was visible.
“Uncle Elias?”
“Well — yes.” She looked at her hands. “You saved my life. And apparently I saved yours. And — I don’t know. I feel like I can trust you. I don’t feel that way about many strangers.”
Elias, after a moment, in a voice that was slightly wet: “I hope I can earn that name.”
A beat. He cleared his throat.
“Sorry. What was your question?”
She had not asked one yet, but she did now.
“Why was Anna writing a story about me? A hundred years ago. The girl in the drawings. That was me, wasn’t it?”
Elias breathed out. Death’s face — her mother’s face — sharpened with interest.
“That is a good question,” Death said.
Elias sat down on the edge of the cinema stage. He looked tired now, the specific tiredness of a man who had answered this question to himself a thousand times and had still not made peace with it.
“My sister Margaret. She had visions. From when she was very small — seven, eight years old. She saw things before they happened. She saw our parents die. She saw Anna and me die in the camps. She saw what I became afterwards. What I did. What I survived. She saw — all of it. She saw you.”
Skye absorbed this.
“Then why didn’t she do anything?” Skye said. “Why didn’t she stop it? Your parents. Anna. You. If she saw it all, she could have told someone.”
Elias’s voice, when he answered, carried the specific weight of a man who had spent eighty-seven years asking exactly that question and who had only very recently been given the answer.
“She did try. When she was small. She told people. Our mother, our father, our teachers. No one believed her. They thought she was a strange child with a strange imagination. By the time I came home from New York — the day before the invasion — she had stopped trying to tell people. She tried to tell me once. She almost did. And then she stopped.”
“Why?”
“Because she saw what happened if the path changed.”
He paused.
“She didn’t explain it to me until — until very recently. The night I brought you back. She told me then. She said changing any of it — even a little — would unmake everything. The past. The present. The future. She said something happens, in this present time, right now, that reaches back and makes all of it necessary. Fixed. Unalterable. She didn’t tell me what. She only said that if the path changed, nothing would exist at all. Not the world. Not — any of it.”
“What happens?” Skye asked. Her voice had dropped.
“I don’t know. I don’t think she knows exactly either. Only that it happens. And that it is why my parents died, and Anna died, and I — became what I am.”
Skye’s voice, quieter: “She let her parents die because someone in the future told her they had to.”
“Not someone. Something. Events. A shape of things she could not change without destroying everything that existed. She carried it alone for seventy years before she could tell me. I had no idea. For eighty-seven years I thought she had simply — chosen. The night I brought you back I learned she hadn’t chosen at all. She had been trapped inside a path she wasn’t allowed to step off.”
Skye looked at him for a long moment.
“That’s — that must have been a lot to carry.”
Elias looked at her. Something cracked in his face at the particular kindness of that observation from a twelve-year-old.
“Yes. It was.”
A beat.
“For both of us, it turned out.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, because he had started and seemed unable to stop:
“Before I brought you back, I was not — well. I was tired. I was exhausted. I was angry in a way that was not useful anymore. I had been angry for a hundred years and the anger had gone somewhere I did not like. Sometimes I could not sleep. The only way I could—”
He stopped.
Skye: “What?”
Elias did not answer.
Death, quietly, not to mock him: “He had his own way. As an immortal does.”
Skye said “Oh.”
Then, smaller: “Oh.”
She did not push. She did not know the specifics — she was twelve — but she had arrived at the edge of something she was not meant to walk into, and she understood, in the quiet, that the only kind thing to do was to stay at the edge and let it be.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Elias said. “I’m sorry.”
A long breath.
“I have lived for a century. I have seen things I cannot unsee. I was — I was tired of losing people.”
“You said that before.”
“I keep saying it because it stays true.”
A silence. The three of them in the dark cinema. Her mother’s form was still. Death’s usual performative energy was entirely gone.
Skye, because she wanted to give him something in return:
“My dad is a pilot. Simon. He’s — he’s probably worried sick right now. He loves me a lot. He cried when I came back. My mum cried too but Dad cried in a way that made me feel like I should not have been dead.”
Elias’s face softened.
“He sounds wonderful.”
“He is.”
A beat.
Elias, very quietly, almost to himself:
“I’m proud of my daughter too.”
Skye stopped.
“Wait. What?”
Elias did not meet her eyes. He stood up. He brushed his hands against his coat. He spoke briskly — not coldly, but in the specific way people spoke when they were closing a door on something they had not meant to open.
“We should move on.”
Skye pressed, gently, the way twelve-year-olds pressed when they had just been told something enormous:
“You have a daughter?”
Elias, after a moment, in the voice of someone who had not said this out loud in a long time:
“I did. I do. It’s — complicated, Skye. I will tell you sometime. Not now.”
“Okay.”
A beat. Then, because she could not help herself:
“I hope you get to see her.”
Elias looked at her. He did not answer.
But Skye saw something land in him that she had not seen before. Hope, maybe. The first possibility of it. She did not have a word for it. She did not try to name it.
He turned his attention back to the screen. She could see him deliberately shifting — putting the daughter conversation away, taking up the weight of what they had come here for.
Death stood. When she spoke now, her voice had changed again — become the voice of something doing its job rather than performing it.
“Before we begin the next memory — a question. Do not answer it yet. Let it sit. Let the memory answer it when we find it.”
“What?” Elias asked.
“Before you died for the first time. In the years between 1939 and when the Nazis found you and Anna in 1942. Three years. You were a Jewish boy in occupied Poland. You should not have survived three days, let alone three years. I do not believe you survived on the streets without help.”
Elias’s face shifted. Something beneath the surface arranging itself.
“Think carefully. Was there someone who helped you? Who hid you. Who hid Anna. Who hid Margaret. Someone who asked for nothing in return. Someone who seemed — too good. Someone whose kindness did not cost him anything, and did not ask anything of you, until it was too late.”
Elias stared at her. His breathing changed. Skye saw him go somewhere — saw the memory arriving at the edge of his face — saw him pull back from it with effort.
“I — yes. There was — yes.”
He did not say more.
“Good,” Death said. “Do not answer yet. Let the memory find us.”
A beat.
Then Death’s face changed. Not clay-shifting. Something smaller. The specific expression of someone who had just followed a line of reasoning one step further than she meant to and had not liked where it arrived.
Skye saw it. Elias saw it too.
“What?” Skye asked. “What is it?”
“No,” Death said, to herself more than to them. “No, no.”
“What?” Elias said.
Death spoke slowly. The words arrived one at a time.
“A man is given the power to defy death. Quietly. Without being told. By someone who then vanishes from history. Eighty years later, that same man — still unable to die — is the one standing in the right place at the right moment to bring back a little girl from the place even I am not meant to retrieve from.”
A beat.
“And the path between those two events is fixed. Unalterable. Shaped by something in the present that reaches backward and makes all of it necessary. Your sister told you so herself.”
Elias went very still.
Death’s voice had gone strange — flatter, quieter, the specific tone of something absorbing new information about the shape of its own universe.
“That is not coincidence. That is not luck. That is not even fate. That is a plan. A very long, very patient plan. One made by someone who could see both ends of it at the same time.”
“A plan to do what?” Skye asked quietly.
Death did not answer her. Death was looking at Elias.
Elias’s voice was almost a whisper. “You think whoever gave me this — whoever helped me in the war — you think they planned Skye.”
“I think they planned all of it. I think you were a piece that needed to exist in a particular shape so that, many decades later, it could do a particular thing. I think she—” Death looked at Skye. ”—is what they were building you toward.”
Skye’s hand tightened around Elias’s.
“We are pieces on a board, Elias. You and I both. I think we have been for a very long time.”
Skye, in her direct way: “A chess board?”
Death looked at her. Something almost tender passed across her face.
“Yes. A chess board. And the hand that moves the pieces has been moving them for longer than I have been counting.”
Elias, slowly: “Who plays chess across a century?”
Death did not answer.
Skye: “Why are you scared?”
Death’s answer landed with the full weight of what she had just realised.
“Because there are very few beings in existence who can plan across that kind of time. And most of them are either gods — or in Hell. I hope, for all our sakes, that whoever made this board was the heavenly kind.”
Elias gulped. Skye saw him gulp.
Death turned toward the screen. She raised one hand.
“Let us find out.”
The screen began to glow.
Skye sat back down. Elias sat beside her. He took her hand without ceremony, and she let him.
The cinema was warmer now, somehow. Not safer. Never safer. But the three of them — Skye, Elias, Death — were no longer strangers to each other in the way they had been at the start.
Skye whispered, because she was twelve and the moment called for it:
“Uncle Elias?”
“Mm.”
“If we are pieces — if we find out who was moving us — what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Elias said, quietly.
“That’s not very reassuring.”
Elias gave the first small laugh of the scene. “No. It isn’t.”
He looked at her properly then. Not at the screen. Not at Death. At her.
“Skye. Listen to me.”
She looked up.
“I don’t know what we’re about to find out. I don’t know what kind of person that man was. I don’t know what he wanted with me. I don’t know what he wants with you. I don’t know any of it yet.”
He took her hand in both of his.
“But I know this. Whatever is on that screen. Whatever we learn next. Whatever has been moving us around a board for a hundred years. I am not going to let anything happen to you. Do you understand me?”
Skye nodded, very small.
“Say it back to me.”
“You won’t let anything happen to me.”
“No. I won’t.”
He squeezed her hand once and let it go.
Death, from her other side, in her mother’s voice: “We watch. We learn. We act. In that order.”
Skye nodded.
The screen had fully lit now. The first frames of the next memory were beginning to form. Skye could not quite see what they were yet — but she could see light, and the outline of a place she did not recognise, and the back of a figure she could not place.
She leaned against Elias’s shoulder.
He did not move her away.
The screen filled. The three of them sat very still in the dark. The hand that had been moving them was about to show itself.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBhX4U7tck3
and then Add to home screen.