Page 56 of The Quiet
“What?” he asked honestly.
“She’s the closest thing I have to a friend here,” Ella said, “and she doesn’t exactly love you.”
He smirked, “Look, she probably respects you more now. She even said so. I’m a catch.”
“You’re a headache,” Ella said back flatly. “Come on. Let’s go. Outside.”
He chuckled at her as they started off, humor fading as they left the palace and entered the streets. In their initial exploration of the town, Jackson seemed intent to face forward as if intentionally refusing to see the sights around them. Jackson’s refusal to notice the world only spurred Ella on to engage with it, noting a specific set of colorful plants, a pleasant smell of breakfast cooking, or music playing nearby.
Jackson acknowledged it only passively until Ella found herself less engaged in involving him and more wrapped into enjoying the things herself. Oddly enough, this seemed to catch his attention much more.
“Why don’t you relax? Let yourself enjoy things?” she asked, feeling some responsibility for his mood. “Jackson,” she added at last as if in defeat of not being able to change his perspective, “I can’t apologize for waking you up.”
They sat now at a table near a cobblestone town square. A group of kids were playing in the distance in the mid-afternoon. One toddler tripped and started screaming before someone hurried him off.
Ella watched the mother walk off, the interaction, even the child’s pain for that brief moment seeming pleasant in its wholeness. This world still had hurt, and Ella found comfort in that. These people were real.
She noticed something that looked much like a memorial in the town center and examined the flowers planted around it in the silence. Kids had been drawing around it earlier with charcoal and it was covered with burned down candles that had collected water from the most recent rain.
The memories of the day made her smile softly, a smile and lightness she hadn’t found in a long time. She glanced back over at Jackson to see him watching her like he had for much of the day.
Just say it,she wanted to push, but refrained. She’d knew what it felt like to not have the right words.
“Do you feel guilty about the Burning?” she asked.
“No,” he said, surprising her. “At least, I don’t let myself. I knew what we were doing when we committed to doing it. We all did. I guess I wasn’t expecting to survive it, and now, with Lambspeak, it’s going to happen again.”
“Why does no one else seem to think that?” she asked, and at last Jackson seemed to look around with open eyes. She saw the faintest flickers of doubt as the kids charged off for dinner,a couple of them laughing. She wondered how long it had been since he’d seen children that young.
He nodded back toward the memorial Ella had been watching. “That’s not a memorial,” he said, “it’s a shrine.”
Ella inspected it, noticing text inscribed onto the block, but unable to read it further.
“The lamb speaks,” Jackson said, Ella assuming he was reading the inscription. "The Quiet is Peter’s creation in its own way. Peter was death,” he started and the words struck her as if they’d been drawn from her own head, “Brutal, but like a natural disaster. Objective, consistent, quiet, and absolute. His death isn’t just necessary for this new empire to grow securely, it’s symbolic. In the quiet, the lamb speaks. That’s a reference to the blood we’ve all shed. We were treated like livestock, but our bloodshed was never a symbol of death. We saw hope in that one day it would speak for us. The survival of the human race is built on generations of bodies,” he recited the phrases back to her as if reading some kind of scripture.
“That’s why they call him Lambspeak,” Ella started, “but why give that name to a Strike if the ROSE were founded to fight them?”
“Because Lambspeak is the only Strike we know of, maybe the only Strike in history, that only hunts other Strike,” he replied.
Ella wasn’t sure how to respond. The concept was so foreign to her.
“What will he do when there aren’t any left?” Jackson asked the question before she could reach it on her own, but with it came another realization.
“You’re hoping Peter’s alive,” Ella whispered.
“I just wished they’d killed each other,” he replied.
Ella nodded once and looked off, exhaling quietly. “Well, we’ll know about Lambspeak soon, won’t we?” Ella asked. “Paris said he’ll be here in a month or so.”
“She thinks it’s that soon?” Jackson asked, leaning back in his chair. He seemed deeply troubled by the news, Ella impulsively reaching for his hand.
She meant it as a simple reassurance, but he received it with surprising interest. Seemingly innocent, he rolled her hand up on the table and opened it, spreading his fingers from the inside of her palm. The gesture flattened her hand against the surface and caused her to catch her breath. Interlacing his fingers with hers, he lifted the back of her wrist up to his mouth and kissed it. Ella had offered it as a friendly gesture and was unsure how Jackson made something so common, feel so strikingly intimate.
She hoped he wouldn’t notice her surprise and gathered herself when he glanced over at her, still holding her hand as if that’s the exact purpose she’d given it to him for. Ella didn’t say a word, holding under the pretense that all ROSE could have very well interacted with each other like this.
“Does all of this really make you that happy?” he asked thoughtfully.
Ella was relieved with the excuse to look away, wondering why something so subtle had such an effect on her that she felt it difficult to catch her thoughts.
