Page 37 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

LETHE PROCEEDED DOWN the path of the silent genocide.

As he passed the people, they bowed and then twisted back, transforming and assuming new roles as new people, posts, horses, or other objects from his past. The houses behind them collapsed as if they were dominoes and rebuilt themselves in sheets across the city.

The walls of Xal Xel fell back like cards, and from their collapse rose the dark towers that, a thousand years ago, Mystic time, had marked the outskirts of the Strike’s greatest city, named after its monument, The Bleeding Grin.

“Don’t touch anything,” Lethe said, looking back once at Cal. The boy turned left and right, his eyes wide and taking everything in.

They reached the town center, and the largest Xal Xel tower split open, darkness crawling forth like spiders hatching from a carcass.

The tower bent down and back, and from it formed The Bleeding Grin, returned to its former glory from Lethe’s memory.

A screaming crowd appeared around him, throwing their fists up toward it.

A stone balcony was carved out from the face of the mountain.

A stage bubbled from stones on the ground.

Lethe grabbed Cal’s shoulder to prevent the appearing crowd from pushing him away.

“What is this?” Cal whispered. “Lethe,” he prodded in alarm.

“We’re inside my memories,” Lethe said. “But time doesn’t apply to the Strike…not like it does to us. The more powerful ones may be able to see us through the past. For us, memory is like a movie screen, but for them it’s a two-way mirror.”

“Even though they’re dead now?” Cal whispered, looking around. “And it’s only a memory?”

“It’s how they look into the future. We’re looking at them now. Just know, some will be looking right back at us,” Lethe explained.

“Can they hurt us?”

“Maybe.”

Cal searched the roaring crowd, “Well then, this isn’t like a memory at all,” he whined.

Lethe kept his eyes focused on the stage as a familiar group appeared upon it, a group of slaves with a single purple-eyed Strike among them. Shrouded in black, Amiel held fast to a woman, a knife to her throat.

The woman was Anne Rue. Lethe would never forget her.

“Kill her!” Lethe heard a woman howl and then laugh. Cal seemed to hear it too. He started searching until his eyes locked onto the corner of the stage.

“Evira,” Cal said, nudging Lethe. “Evira is here.”

“Kill her, now!” Evira shouted again.

Several others with her cheered, demanding a slit throat for which the Bleeding Grin had been named. “Give us a smile!” they called.

There were mixed opinions from the crowd. Many had already turned, submitting to the absolute rule of the Strike and drawing the broken arrow on their body as a sign. Of the rest, a new example would be harvested and killed each week, bending the survivors into submission.

The Strike had created food, water, and shelter.

First, they had asked for nothing of those they sheltered, and then, all at once, they asked for everything.

The resulting rebellion in the city had been tolerated patiently.

The Strike hadn’t facilitated any mass slaughter, no angry, demanding speeches, just one more fresh body each week.

It was a slow, controlled strangulation of the Resistance, as calm and sure as the wrap of a python.

All along, the notorious beggar, Anne Rue, had refused to accept food and water from the Strike, even at the risk of starvation.

Lethe’s eyes moved up to the balcony, and there, with his hands spread across the banister, was a face he well recognized.

Strike Peter was dressed in a light blue shirt that matched the stark blue sky behind him, his blonde hair cut so that it barely dusted the shoulders of a long black coat.

The coat was a matching adornment to his fingertips, exposed in a demonstration of his power.

He didn’t flinch at the crowd’s insubordination.

His expression seemed vacant, his green eyes moving over the faces before him with the patient examination of a scientist.

Behind Peter were the Strike who led the Bleeding Grin, four of them, shadowy conductors in the play performed at their feet.

In an interruption of Peter’s calculated analysis, his gaze flickered straight to Lethe’s.

They locked eyes, Lethe remaining completely still. The cheering around them, in his mind, fell silent, and even from this distance, Lethe could see the glowing red rings of Peter’s irises.

He remembered those eyes, so strongly associating their ever calm with the infliction of pain. Those eyes had seen through him, and he wondered what Peter saw now.

Lethe breathed in steadily through his nose and out through his mouth, balancing his pulse as he watched his torturer.

Peter leaned away from the banister, the longest of his fingers still lingering over the stone. He looked down at the stage where Amiel watched, hidden in black.

Peter offered a subtle, upward nod of his chin, and the Strike slit the woman’s throat. The dirtied beggar gasped as she bled.

The crowd roared with a mix of excitement and rage.

Amiel let the woman fall to her knees, tossing the knife up to Peter.

It spiraled up toward the balcony. Peter extended a hand only quick enough to catch it before his eyes searched the crowd again.

He turned back into the Bleeding Grin, pinched fingers moving along the blade of his knife to clear off the blood.

Amiel evaporated into a black vulture and flew after Peter.

Peter disappeared in the darkness of the doorway and was replaced by the four leaders, who presented themselves to the crowd with a cheer. Lethe read off all their names in his mind as he watched them on the balcony. He remembered burning each one, marking off the ledger on his own skin.

Black ash and embers filled the air from bonfires nearby. The sky morphed to an empty gray as if it were made of smoke. Other objects flickered like they were unable to retain their shape at the exact time of Lethe’s memory.

Like a wave, quiet broke across the crowd.

Lethe stood in that same awe, reliving the memory as the newly executed Anne Rue crawled slowly to the base of the Bleeding Grin.

These details he remembered in complete perfection as she painted the base of the structure with her fingers in bright red strokes.

The still human followers of the Strike stood there in silence, looking down at her as if unsure what she was doing, unsure if they needed to stop it.

The pattern made no sense in logic or beauty, but as her hand fell limp against the stone, a single finger trailed down the base of the stone structure. It completed some bright, red act of desperation, small lines of human blood at the feet of a symbol that filled any onlooker with a primal fear.

She’d crawled to it willingly.

“This was the moment,” a man said coolly from beside Lethe, making Cal flinch.

The stranger was dressed in a heavy brown cloak with a hood over his face. Lethe didn’t have to look over to know who it was. Ivan Rowe.

“Most of us felt a sense of accomplishment and pride at seeing someone like that bleed out, but when I see you in this memory…” Ivan shook his head under the hood. “You have this look in your eyes. It was like you’d fallen in love.”

Lethe continued watching the scene ahead. The crowd still stood in silence as if the echo of Anne’s desperation was vibrating through them.

“She was a beggar,” Lethe said.

“I know,” Ivan replied with a scoff. “You said the same thing then. She was a beggar who defied the regime with her own blood, which we’d spilled.

When we captured you, this was the first memory of yours I looked into.

I had to understand the moment when you chose them.

The ROSE… I just…I just will never understand it.

You could have been a lion but you consented to being a lamb. I didn’t know why.”

“This was when the Strike finally started showing their true colors, offering great things until one day you come and collect in blood and bodies,” Lethe replied.

“Kind of like you ended up doing with Xal Xel.” He watched as the followers of the Strike started scattering the people, pushing them away from the scene of Anne Rue.

“I didn’t do it at first,” Ivan replied, still concealed in the memory. “But boredom is hungry work.”

“You ate their minds when you were tired of their souls. They’re nothing but empty husks. Is the State your next target?” Lethe responded firmly. “Were you the one who gave them The Great Light?”

The people had dispersed. It was just Cal, Ivan, and Lethe standing in the city square at the base of the Bleeding Grin, its doors high, dark, and wide.

Cal kept looking between Lethe and the hooded figure. Lethe caught Cal’s eyes a second before stabbing his knife through the cloak. The knife made contact; the figure gasped for breath and stumbled back.

Now, it wasn’t Ivan at all, only a bystander, a ruddy man with long, black hair.

The man fell as he took his final breath. Lethe spun around, searching the area.

“I wouldn’t start hacking away at your memories just yet,” Evira said, Ivan Rowe speaking through Lethe’s memory of her. She was suddenly sitting on the edge of the stage, her chin propped up in her hand.

Lethe and Cal turned to face her.

“You have to find me in your memories, Lethe, and then we will have a fight, or the fight, I should say. It’s the last survivor against the last survivor.

That’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?” Evira rubbed her hands together as she hopped off the stage and started walking off.

“I can’t wait. It’s almost like we’re the ones who really get to end the war—see who wins. ”

Lethe didn’t move, watching as she cleared from the area. It was quiet now aside from a few men who had come to cart off Anne Rue’s body.

Cal nudged him after a moment.

“Lethe?” he said. “You have a few memories of Ivan, don’t you? Can’t we just go there and find him?”