The cane fields were silent in the day, but Elias could feel the coming night in his bones. A date circled in red ink inside Roe's cipher journal repeated over and over in his thoughts:
August 14, 1791.
The night the air would spark.
He pored over Roe's code again in Papa Louvier's candlelit hut, matching symbols he remembered seeing during the Vodou ceremony with phrases in the journal. His blood still tingled from the brand left on his skin, A, the second cipher letter revealed to him by the spirits.
A map was beginning to emerge.
Not of places, but of time.
And all signs pointed to that night.
Elias rubbed his temples, distracted by the presence he now always felt. Not a ghost. Not quite. Something in between, the Watcher lingered like a smudge at the corner of his eye, never fully there but never gone.
That night, Marise came again, face drawn tight.
"It's begun," she said without flourish. "The north, Bois Caïman, they've lit their fires. Here…" She gestured at the ground. "We are late, but not too late."
She handed Elias a scrap of cloth, embroidered with veve-like stitching, one he didn't recognize. "Wear this when the smoke rises. It will keep the spirits from mistaking you for the wrong soul."
Her eyes bore into him. "You are marked. The dead will come close."
Elias barely nodded. Every breath he took felt thinner now, like the air around him refused to give him peace.
Later, in the slave quarters, Jean-Noël pulled him into a hidden room beneath a floorboard.
"We strike tomorrow night. The code's been sent out. Look—" He unrolled a piece of sugar-paper, smeared with tobacco-stained writing.
"Flames cleanse. Eyes open. Cane cracks."
Jean-Noël tapped his temple. "Those are the words."
Elias stared at it. A part of him remembered seeing those same words on Roe's page, transcribed like a mantra.
"Tomorrow," Elias whispered. "August 14."
Jean-Noël raised an eyebrow. "How'd you know that?"
Elias didn't answer.
Because he didn't know how he knew, only that the code had led him here. That everything aligned to this point. Even Rae's silence. Even the relic's glow.
The relic, tucked in the folds of Papa Louvier's robes, pulsed like a heartbeat.
He returned to his hut in the night, unable to sleep. The cipher journal lay open beside the mirror, which now shimmered faintly even without blood.
The mirror began to show faint images, like ripples in ink.
A burning field. Screaming. Chains split like brittle roots. And behind it all, a figure, blurry, tall, walking through the fire, untouched.
Elias gasped. It was him.
No—not him. But someone like him. Eyes familiar. Skin marked in symbols. Holding the same relic in one hand and Rae's pendant in the other.
The cipher flared in his head again. A third letter sizzled onto his arm.
I
R. A. I.
He knew what word was forming. The word carved into the hut wall days ago. The word he didn't remember writing:
CIPHER
Each letter branded onto him. Not randomly. In order.
He suddenly felt the Watcher again. Closer now. He turned, and for a moment, he saw it clearly, standing in the mirror.
It looked like him. Elias. But aged, twisted, cracked. Wearing rags of memory and time.
And it spoke.
This time, it used his voice:
"When the flames rise, do not run toward the mirror.Walk through the fire. Only then will you leap true."
The mirror snapped dark.
Elias fell to his knees, breath shallow.
Tomorrow, the world would burn.
But he would not flee it.
He would walk into it.