The plantation fields were endless, green seas of cane waving in the wind like blades ready to be drawn. Beneath their roots, blood soaked deep into the soil. Elias walked the perimeter with Jean-Noël at dawn, keeping low, voices hushed. The morning fog made phantoms of every tree.
"We'll strike first here," Jean-Noël whispered, crouching to draw a crude map in the dirt. "These fields, they feed the house. And the house feeds the ships. We cut the roots, the beast starts starving."
Elias watched him. Jean-Noël was younger than Elias expected. No older than twenty, with sharp cheekbones and a soldier's eyes. He wore a scarf like a badge of war and carried a knife like it was part of his body.
"And the weapons?" Elias asked.
Jean-Noël pointed toward the distant edge of the estate. "In the barn. Hidden in crates labeled sucre brut. Smuggled in by the last quarter moon. There's more hidden in shipment ledgers, Lucien keeps them in his study."
Elias stiffened. "I was almost caught in there."
"Then don't get caught next time." Jean-Noël gave a crooked smile. "Papa Louvier used to scare them. You? You make them curious. That's better."
Elias didn't feel better.
They parted ways with a shared nod. As Elias made his way back through the trees, he could feel the cane whispering. The land had memory. It remembered the feet that bled on it, the tongues that were cut, the bones buried beneath its sugar sweetness.
He passed the boiling houses next.
Inside, enslaved workers moved like ghosts, faces burned red from steam, hands blistered, eyes vacant. Elias had seen factories before, in his own time. But this… this was carnage with rhythm.
He paused, drawing symbols with chalk on the doorframes. Protective veves. He didn't know if they worked. But he knew they were remembered.
"Papa Louvier," a voice called behind him.
Marise.
She stood in a worn dress dyed the deep blue of river clay, eyes sharp as broken glass. Her hair was wrapped high, crowned like royalty. She did not bow. Not to Elias. Not to anyone.
"You walk like your feet remember two different pasts," she said.
He raised an eyebrow. "And what does that mean?"
"That you're still pretending." She reached into her satchel, pulling a folded parchment from a bone clasp. "Lucien's ledgers. Page torn from last week's record."
Elias took it, scanning the columns. Dates. Crate numbers. Handwriting spidery and precise.
Crate 1127: raw sugar, medical tincturesCrate 1129: iron tools, smelted
Crate 1131: No entry. Double sealed.
Elias looked up. "You stole this?"
"I borrowed what belongs to the dead," she said. "You think we haven't tried before? But they always catch our fire before it spreads. This time, you're our difference."
She stepped closer, voice lowering.
"You don't belong to this world, and yet the land recognizes you. Even the Loa whisper about your blood. That mirror of yours, it didn't just bring you here. It brought something else."
Elias blinked. "What do you mean?"
But she was already turning away.
That night, Elias returned to Papa Louvier's hut. He lit candles, arranged bones and herbs in a circle, and unwrapped the mirror from its hidden bundle.
It was pulsing again.
Faintly.
He placed the ledger page beside it.
The surface shimmered.
Then, slowly, symbols began to burn into the mirror's glass, one by one. Not letters. Not numbers. Glyphs from another language, half Vodou, half cipher. One glowed brighter than the others.
A stylized S, twisted, mirrored, doubled.
The same symbol on the girl's skin in Lucien's house.
The cipher was alive.
He touched it.
The room shifted. The candlelight bent backward. A rush of wind blew out every flame. In the dark, a voice whispered:
"Blood becomes sugar. Sugar becomes coin. Coin becomes empire. Break the chain, or become its link."
When he came to, he was lying on the ground.
In his hand, the ledger page had changed.
In the margins, a name had been scrawled in ink that wasn't ink at all.
R. Darwish