Chapter 47: Beneath the Pages, Behind the Smoke
The silence after Bea's last words felt heavier than any scream. Nova sat on the edge of the old fountain behind the ruined theatre, the manuscript clutched to his chest like a relic. Rain had started to fall in fine misty lines, soft but insistent, and the world seemed to hold its breath with them.
Bea didn't speak. She stood a few paces away, arms crossed, jaw tight. The flicker in her eyes wasn't fear—it was calculation.
"What are you thinking?" Nova finally asked, voice barely above a whisper.
"That we burn the rest," she said. "Not just the chapter we found. All of it."
Nova blinked. "Burn Flames in the Night? It's everything."
"It's not everything. It's our version of everything." Bea's voice shook with the effort to stay composed. "What's buried in those pages… if it gets out, if someone sees—"
"They already have," he interrupted. "Someone knew enough to leave us that chapter. This wasn't some warning. It was a threat."
Lightning forked across the sky. The thunder followed seconds later, low and rolling, like a beast shifting in sleep.
Bea walked over, kneeling in front of him, soaking her knees in the wet gravel. "Then we don't hide anymore. We write faster. We get ahead of whoever's behind this."
Nova looked down at the soaked manuscript. The edges were curled, some ink smudged by the rain. It felt alive in his hands—cursed, maybe. But his to carry.
"They're trying to scare us into silence," Bea continued. "But silence is what got us into this mess."
He met her eyes. "So what do we do?"
She smiled—barely. "We flip the script."
---
The next day, they returned to the writing room. The secret attic above Nova's apartment hadn't been used in weeks. Dust coated the bookshelves, and the small window showed nothing but gray clouds. But the desk—their desk—still stood, scattered with notes, torn outlines, and crumpled drafts.
Bea lit a candle. The flame danced between them like a pact.
Nova laid out the remaining pages of the manuscript—the real one, their one. The mysterious chapter had been hidden again, sealed inside a hollow panel in the floor. They had memorized it, dissected it, argued over it. But it wasn't public.
Not yet.
"We write the ending ourselves," Nova said. "Before they try to."
Bea nodded. "We take control of the story again. And we write the truth—our version of it."
Their fingers flew across the keyboards in sync, each sentence a blow struck against whatever force had risen to haunt them. In this chapter, Bea's character confessed to saving Nova when he was a child—something never meant to be in the plot. In that chapter, Nova's fictional version burned the pages of his own story, erasing proof of a secret murder.
Fiction or memory? They no longer knew.
But the writing flowed.
---
Days passed. Chapter 47 bled into something much bigger than either of them had planned. The story twisted, the meta-layer deepening. Characters began referencing chapters that hadn't yet been written. One—an eerie woman named Lys—spoke directly to the authors in a voice that seemed too real.
Nova dreamed of her that night.
She stood in the ruins of the theatre, wearing Bea's old jacket, with eyes the color of firelight. "You can't write me out," she whispered. "I'm not just fiction."
When he woke, the candle in the attic had burned out, and a single page sat on the floor.
It hadn't been there before.
It read:
> "The writers believe they are in control. But the fire they lit burns backward and forward in time."
Nova handed the page to Bea without a word.
She read it and closed her eyes. "They're not trying to stop us, Nova," she said softly. "They're trying to rewrite us."