Chapter 15 - The Journal's Warning

They left the city by the north gate as the morning fog was lifting.

She didn't look back. Couldn't. Every street corner held a memory of someone she'd infected, every building a reminder of the damage she'd caused just by existing nearby. The port city had been a waystation, a place to gather information and regroup. Now it was another wound she was leaving behind.

Linn walked beside her, quieter than usual. The girl had been struggling since they'd woken up, asking questions she'd already asked, losing the thread of conversations mid-sentence. Bad day. One of the bad ones.

"Where are we going?" Linn asked. Third time in an hour.

"North. Away from the stories."

"What stories?"

She didn't answer. Just kept walking.

The road wound through farmland for the first few miles, fields lying fallow in the late season, farmhouses scattered across the hills like dropped stones. Normal country. Normal people living normal lives, unaware that the world was missing most of itself.

By midday the farms thinned out and the road started climbing. Foothills, the leading edge of the mountains that rose somewhere to the north. The air got cooler, the trees got thicker, and the sense of being watched that had followed her through the city finally started to fade.

"Can we stop?" Linn was breathing hard. The girl wasn't weak, but the pace had been punishing. "Just for a few minutes?"

They found a spot off the road, a flat rock overlooking a valley that stretched out to the south. From here she could see the city in the distance, a smudge of buildings against the gray horizon. Small from this height. Insignificant.

Hard to believe it had caused her so much trouble.

Linn sat down heavily on the rock and pulled out her water skin. Drank, wiped her mouth, stared at the view with empty eyes.

"It's pretty," she said. "Have we been here before?"

"No."

"It feels familiar."

Everything felt familiar to Linn now. The girl's mind was filling in gaps with false patterns, seeing connections that weren't there. A symptom of the Disease, probably. The brain trying to make sense of the holes by inventing things to fill them.

She sat down next to Linn and pulled out the journal.

She'd been putting this off. Hadn't wanted to look, hadn't wanted to count the damage. But she needed to know how much time she had left, and the only way to know was to face it.

She opened to the first page. Blank.

Second page. Blank.

Third, fourth, fifth. All blank.

She kept turning, faster now, a cold weight settling in her stomach. Page after page of nothing, white paper where her life used to be.

The first writing appeared maybe a quarter of the way through. An entry she didn't remember making, the handwriting shakier than she liked.

The Cartographer's Daughter. Lighthouse. Maps of what used to be.

Below it, in different ink, she'd added more.

She forgot. They all forget. Everyone I touch.

She kept turning. More entries appeared, scattered and fragmentary. Notes about Vera's scar. Notes about the stitched waters. The coordinates to the island, copied three times in case one version disappeared.

But the older stuff was gone. Everything from before the search, everything from the years she'd spent with the sibling, all of it erased. Just blank pages where a lifetime of memories should have been.

Eighteen pages left with writing. Down from twenty-two when they'd left the city.

Four pages gone in less than a day.

"It's accelerating," she said. Her voice came out flat, distant. "The erasure. It's speeding up."

Linn looked at the journal but didn't seem to understand what she was seeing. "Is that bad?"

"It means I have less time than I thought. Weeks, maybe. Not months."

"Weeks until what?"

"Until I forget why I'm doing this. Until there's nothing left."

She closed the journal and held it against her chest. The leather was warm from her body, familiar in a way that felt like mourning. This book had been with her for years. Had held everything she was, everything she'd experienced, everything she'd loved.

Now it was almost empty.

"We should keep moving," Linn said. The girl stood up, brushed off her clothes, looked north toward the mountains. "If we don't have much time, we shouldn't waste it sitting here."

She was right. Of course she was right.

But something made her hesitate. Some instinct, some half-remembered thought.

She opened the journal again.

This time she didn't flip through looking for her own entries. Instead she went slowly, page by page, looking at each blank sheet with attention she hadn't given before.

And she found something.

Near the back, on a page that should have been empty, there was writing. Faint, almost invisible, like it had been written with water instead of ink. She had to tilt the page toward the light to see it at all.

I knew you'd find this.

Her heart stopped.

That wasn't her handwriting.

She'd know her own writing anywhere, the cramped letters, the way she pressed too hard on downstrokes. This was different. Looser, more flowing, the handwriting of someone who wrote for pleasure rather than desperation.

Someone else had written in her journal.

She turned more pages, looking for more. Found another message, three pages later, just as faint.

The ink appears when other ink fades. I figured out how to hide things in the margins of your memories.

And another, a few pages after that.

I'm sorry I couldn't tell you what I was doing. I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye. But if you're reading this, it means you came looking. It means you didn't give up.

The sibling. These were messages from the sibling. Hidden in the journal somehow, designed to appear only as her own entries disappeared.

She flipped through faster, looking for more, tears blurring her vision.

I found out what they're afraid of. Not just memory. Connection. They can erase a person but they can't erase the love that person left behind. That's the gap in their system. That's what you can use.

Don't follow the Backwards River alone. That's where I'm going and I know it's a mistake but I'm out of time. You'll have more warning than I did. Use it.

There are others like us. People who remember, people who refuse to forget. I found traces of them in the archives. A network, scattered across the world. Find them. Build something they can't erase.

The journal isn't just proof. It's an anchor. As long as it exists, as long as someone is reading it, I'm not completely gone. Keep it alive and you keep me alive.

She was crying now, really crying, the tears dropping onto the pages and making the faint ink run. But she didn't care. The sibling had planned for this. Had known the erasure was coming and had left messages, breadcrumbs, a trail for her to follow.

They weren't just gone. They were still here, in a way. Still fighting. Still helping her even after they'd been cut out of the world.

"What is it?" Linn was beside her, concerned, trying to see what she was reading. "What did you find?"

"Messages." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "From the person I'm looking for. They hid them in the journal before they were erased."

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know. Some kind of ink that only appears when other ink fades. They must have figured out how the erasure works and used it against itself." She laughed, a broken sound that was half sob. "They were always smarter than me. Always thinking three steps ahead."

She turned more pages, looking for anything else. Found one final message, longer than the others, on what would have been the last page of the journal if it weren't for the blank sheets that followed.

By the time you read this, I'll be gone. But gone isn't the same as dead. The Editors cut me out of the world, but they couldn't cut out what I left behind. The journal. The messages. The love.

You're going to want to come after me immediately. To follow the River, to find the Editors, to fix everything in one desperate rush. I know because that's what I did, and it got me erased.

Don't make my mistake.

The network exists. People who remember, scattered across the world, each one holding onto fragments of what was lost. Find them. Connect them. Build something bigger than any single person, something that can't be erased because it's too spread out, too interconnected.

I tried to fight alone because I thought there wasn't time. There's always time. Even when it doesn't feel like it. Even when the pages are going blank and the memories are fading and everything seems hopeless.

Trust the slow work. Trust the connections. Trust that love is stronger than erasure, even when it doesn't feel that way.

And when you're ready, when you've built something that can survive what's coming, then follow the River. Then face them. Then bring me back.

I love you. I've always loved you. Even when I couldn't say it, even when we were fighting, even now when I'm nothing but words on a page.

Don't give up. Please. Whatever happens, don't give up.

Wait for me. I'll be waiting for you.

She read it three times. Four. Memorized every word, burned them into her mind where hopefully they'd last longer than the ink on the page.

The sibling had known. Had understood exactly what was coming and had prepared for it. Had left instructions, warnings, a roadmap for how to win a fight that seemed unwinnable.

And they'd told her not to rush. Not to make the same mistake they'd made.

But how could she not rush? The journal was dying. Her memories were dying. Every day that passed was another day closer to losing everything.

She looked at the pages again. Eighteen with writing. But now she knew some of that writing wasn't hers. Some of it was messages that had been hidden, waiting for the right moment to appear.

How many more were there? How many more would surface as her own entries faded?

And what would happen when there was nothing left to fade? When the last of her memories was gone and all that remained were the sibling's hidden words?

Would she even remember who had written them?

They made camp early that night.

She couldn't walk anymore. Couldn't focus on anything except the journal and its impossible messages. Every few minutes she'd open it again, check the pages, look for new words that might have appeared.

Nothing yet. But the entries she'd made that morning were already starting to fade. She could see it happening, the ink growing lighter at the edges, the words dissolving into the paper.

"Tell me about them," Linn said. The girl was sitting across the small fire, wrapped in her traveling cloak, looking more present than she had all day. Good moment. Lucid interval. "The person who wrote the messages."

"I've told you before."

"Tell me again. I want to write it down."

So she did. Everything she could still remember, everything the journal still held. The yellow scarf. The smooth rocks. The endless questions about things that didn't make sense.

But this time she added the new pieces. The planning. The cleverness. The way they'd figured out how to hide messages in a fading journal, how to turn the weapon of erasure against itself.

"They were brilliant," she said. "I never told them that. Never said how impressed I was by the way they saw the world. I thought they were just being difficult, asking annoying questions, refusing to accept easy answers. But they were seeing something I couldn't see. Something I didn't want to see."

"Why didn't you want to see it?"

"Because it was scary. Because if they were right, if the world really was full of holes and missing pieces, then nothing was safe. Nothing was certain. Everything I thought I knew could be wrong."

She poked at the fire with a stick, watching the sparks rise into the darkness.

"It's easier to think the world makes sense. Easier to believe the gaps are natural, the forgetting is normal, the losses are just part of life. Because if they're not, if someone is doing this on purpose, then you have to do something about it. You have to fight back. And fighting is hard and scary and you might lose."

"So you ignored it."

"I ignored them. Told them to stop asking questions. Told them to just be normal and stop making everything so complicated." She threw the stick into the fire. "And then they were gone. And I realized I'd spent years dismissing the most important thing they ever tried to tell me."

Linn was writing in her notebook, recording every word. Good. Let her write. Let her create another copy, another anchor, another piece of proof that might survive when everything else was gone.

"The messages say to find others," Linn said without looking up. "People who remember. A network."

"Yes."

"Do you know where to look?"

"No." She pulled out Havel's translation, the pages she'd barely had time to study. "But he mentioned it too. Archives scattered around the world. People hiding fragments of what was lost. There has to be a way to find them."

"What about the Cartographer's Daughter? She had maps. Maybe one of them shows where the archives are."

She thought about the lighthouse. The old woman burning her life's work by firelight, memories dissolving even as she tried to hold onto them.

"She's probably forgotten everything by now. If she's even still alive."

"We could try."

"It's three days' travel in the wrong direction. And every day I stay in one place is another day the stories spread, another day more people get infected."

"So we keep moving north."

"We keep moving north."

But toward what? The mountains rose ahead of them, vast and indifferent. Somewhere beyond them was the Backwards River, flowing toward its impossible source. The sibling had gone there. The sibling had been erased there.

And the messages said to wait. To build something first. To not make the same mistake.

She pulled out the journal again. Opened it to the last message, the long one.

Trust the slow work. Trust the connections.

But the slow work took time, and time was exactly what she didn't have. The journal was dying faster than she'd expected. Weeks, not months. Maybe less.

How was she supposed to build a network in weeks? Find scattered archives, connect with people she'd never met, create something strong enough to survive the Editors' attention, all while her own memories were dissolving and everyone she talked to started forgetting?

It was impossible. The sibling must have known it was impossible. So why had they told her to try?

Unless they'd known something she didn't. Unless there was a piece of the puzzle she was still missing.

She flipped through the journal again, looking for more hidden messages. Nothing new. Just her own fading entries and the sibling's words, waiting patiently for her to understand.

The journal isn't just proof. It's an anchor. As long as it exists, as long as someone is reading it, I'm not completely gone.

An anchor. What did that mean?

She thought about what Havel's translation had said. Memory could undo cuts. Sufficient proof, shared widely enough, could make the erasures fail.

But her journal wasn't sufficient proof. It was fragments, pieces, the scattered remnants of a life that was mostly already gone. Not enough to threaten the Editors. Not enough to bring anyone back.

Unless the journal wasn't the only anchor.

Unless there were others out there, holding their own fragments, their own pieces of proof. And if those fragments could be connected, combined, turned into something larger than any individual could hold alone...

"The network," she said out loud.

Linn looked up from her notebook. "What about it?"

"That's the point. Not just finding other people who remember. Connecting the memories. Building a shared record that's bigger than any single journal, any single mind."

"How would that work?"

"I don't know. But the sibling knew. They found traces of it in the archives. People already doing this, already preserving fragments, already fighting back." She stood up, energized in a way she hadn't felt in days. "We need to find them. Not just to survive, but because they might have pieces I'm missing. And I have pieces they need."

"We still don't know where to look."

"The translation." She grabbed Havel's papers, started flipping through them again. "He mentioned the archives were hidden in places the Editors couldn't find. Maybe there's a pattern. Maybe there's a way to figure out where they'd be."

She read by firelight, squinting at Havel's cramped handwriting. Most of it was about the Editors themselves, their methods, their history. But near the end, in the section about fighting back, there was a passage she'd only skimmed before.

The resistance has always existed. For as long as the Editors have been cutting, there have been people trying to preserve what was lost. They hide in the seams. They live in the places that don't quite fit, the communities that should have been erased but somehow survived. They pass their knowledge through stories, through traditions, through practices that look like superstition but are actually memory in disguise.

The seams. The places that didn't quite fit.

She thought about the road that looped unless you walked it backwards. The city with wrong angles and too many statues. The island that shouldn't exist but did.

Everywhere she'd been, she'd found evidence of the cuts. But she'd also found people who remembered fragments. The old woman with the blue flowers. Vera with her scar. Maren's grandmother who talked about islands nobody else could see.

They weren't random. They were the edges of something larger. A network that already existed, scattered across the seams, waiting to be connected.

"The seams," she said. "That's where we look. The places where the cuts left scars, where the world doesn't quite fit together. That's where the people who remember would hide."

"But we've been through seams. The road, the waters, the island. We didn't find any network."

"Because I wasn't looking for one. I was looking for the sibling. For answers about what happened to them." She folded Havel's papers carefully. "But the sibling left a trail. The archive, the messages, the warnings. What if there are more trails? What if the people in the network leave signs for each other, ways to find them if you know what to look for?"

"What kind of signs?"

She didn't know. But she knew someone who might have.

"The Cartographer's Daughter. She had maps of the seams. Maps of where the cuts were made. If anyone knows how to read the signs, it would be her."

"You said she's probably forgotten everything."

"Probably. But she also kept records. Wrote things down, same as I did." She looked at the journal in her hands. "Maybe some of those records survived."

"It's still three days in the wrong direction."

"I know."

She stared at the fire, weighing the options. North to the mountains, toward the Backwards River and the Editors' source. Or back to the lighthouse, looking for clues that might not exist anymore.

The sibling's message echoed in her mind.

Trust the slow work. Trust the connections.

Three days wasn't much. But it was three more days of journal entries disappearing, three more days of Linn forgetting, three more days of time she didn't have.

Then again, rushing had gotten the sibling erased. Rushing was how the Editors won, by forcing you to make desperate moves before you were ready.

"We go to the lighthouse," she said finally. "Look for whatever records survived. If there's nothing useful, we head north and figure out another way."

Linn nodded, but her face was uncertain. "And if the Cartographer's Daughter remembers you? If seeing you makes her forget faster?"

"Then I stay away. You go in alone, see what you can find. I'll wait outside."

"I might forget why I'm there."

"Write it down. Read your notes if you get confused. We'll figure it out."

She said it with more confidence than she felt. The truth was, she had no idea if this would work. No idea if the lighthouse held answers or if she was just delaying the inevitable.

But the sibling had told her to build something. To find the network. To not make the same mistake.

And right now, the lighthouse was the only lead she had.

She read the hidden messages one more time before she tried to sleep.

I love you. I've always loved you.

Don't give up.

Wait for me.

Words from someone who'd been cut out of the world. Words that had somehow survived the erasure, hidden in the margins, waiting for her to find them.

She pressed her hand against the page, feeling the texture of the paper, the faint indent where the pen had pressed.

"I'm coming," she whispered. "I'm doing it your way. Building something. Finding the others."

The fire had burned low. Linn was asleep, breathing softly, her notebook clutched against her chest.

She closed the journal and held it against her own chest. The weight of it, the warmth of it. All she had left.

But not all. There were hidden messages she hadn't found yet. Pieces of the sibling preserved in invisible ink, waiting to appear as everything else faded.

For the first time in months, that thought didn't feel like grief.

It felt like hope.

She closed her eyes and let herself believe, just for a moment, that this might actually work. That she might find the network, build the connections, create something strong enough to bring back what was lost.

That the sibling might be waiting for her, somewhere beyond the cuts, ready to come home.

The night wrapped around her, cold and dark and full of things she couldn't see.

But morning would come. And with it, the next step.

She held onto that thought as sleep finally took her.

Morning. The lighthouse. The slow work of hope.