(A pebble in a pond, the girl says, her voice so low it’s almost a whisper. That was how it started, one pebble and one pond and a million little ripples, and sometimes we didn’t even know what the pebble was, exactly, just that it was there. And then there were more pebbles, and more ripples, and by the time those ripples reached the shoreline, they were a tsunami.

A page turns - a book, real paper and real leather in a world that lives inside screens and technology and digital ones and zeroes. It whispers in the darkness, dark ink that shimmers under the lamplight. The letters are scrawled by hand, perfect and painstaking, too beautiful to be on a screen.

A face materializes out of the darkness - a child, wide-eyed, slender. A voice comes with it, quavering, unsteady, trembling in the silence. And you were a part of the ripples, the voice whispers.

The girl lifts her head, stares at the iron bars that stand between them and the hallway. Yes, she says, and her voice is carefully level, patient, but her eyes shine in the darkness and the pages rustle between fingers that shake. Yes, I was part of the ripples.

Do you regret it?

The girl turns her head at the sound of the child’s voice, and her huge dark eyes flutter closed. The pages crumple at the edges, beneath her fingertips.

Always.)

Her name is Mounia - no last name, never a last name, because last names are dangerous, last names are taboo in a world where disappearing is the only way to stay alive. She is a cabaret dancer, crimson lips and mascara-dark eyes in a world made of shadows, streets like crevasses between buildings that lean towards each other (lovers about to kiss), tales carved and lost in stone (the faces of artists, the eyes of writers, the hands of musicians). The rain is thick today, curtains of it that slide down the impossibly delicate lace of her umbrella and sparkle against the black of her boots, collecting in puddles that splash violently beneath her stilettos. She is the essence of the cabaret, gems sparkling in her eyelashes and fishnets rasping against her skin - but she is not the essence of Paris. Her skin is too dark, her hair is too wavy - a mane of it, black, with bells wound through and a headscarf embroidered so brightly it almost glows.

She stops in the alleyway in front of her favorite beautique. In the reflection of the window, her eyes are silver-gray, brilliant, ethereal.

There is a gun in her hand, silver like her eyes, carvings dancing along its barrel and curling around the handle that curves against her fingers. She watches the mirror and she does not move, still like a statue - motionless even when another reflection crowds next to hers. A woman. Taller than most men, hair cropped so short it bristles above her ears, rain dotting her face and her lips and her eyelashes. Her eyes fall to the gun before lifting again.

“You’re impatient,” Shaheen says, smiling slightly.

The cabaret dancer tosses her head. “I can’t talk long. I have to get back to the Moulin-Rouge.”

“Your red windmill,” Shaheen murmurs. “It’s so important to you, is it? You enjoy selling your body there?” She shakes her head, cigarette glowing gently between her fingers, almost put out by the rain. “The men must look at you and gawk, Mounia, you are beautiful -”

“I am a dancer,” the girl snaps, “not a whore.”

“A mirror image of Ambrosine,” Shaheen smiles. “Exactly what she would be, if she were a cabaret act and not an opera-house ballerina.” Something glitters between her fingers - a necklace, a chain that glints dark against her hands, a miniature bejeweled charm sculpted into the shape of a dancer. If Mounia turned her head, she’d see the legs kicking up in a can-can, but her eyes are fixed on Shaheen’s face in their reflection.

“I don’t know who Ambrosine is,” Mounia says.

“No, you don’t. But maybe you will soon.” Shaheen’s fingers twitch, the cigarette spins in the air and comes down again, lands so it’s pinched perfectly between her fingers. “I thought I’d be seeing you tomorrow, you know. I had a different appointment today.” The cigarette falls to the ground, smokes softly beneath the toe of her shoe.

Mounia raises her eyebrows. “Quickly,” she says, frowning so her lips make a red-stained bow. “We don’t have much time.”

“I have all the time in the world, as a matter of fact.”

“No, you don’t,” and Mounia raises the gun, and Shaheen sees it almost a second too late, ducks out of the way -

The gun shudders in her hand, silent, and then her fingers loosen on the grip and she lowers it to her side, and her eyes are wide. But in Shaheen’s mind she can still hear it as though it happened anyway, the sound of the bullet, empty, hollow, a crack that snaps through the air and against the walls of the buildings around them -

A theatre, a ticking clock, 11:59 and fifteen seconds -

Shaheen’s eyes flash. This is not how this was supposed to go - it was supposed to go the same way Ambrosine’s did, not like this, not with a gun and the sound of phantom bullets and the memories - too many memories - but she needs Mounia, she can’t afford to walk away without her. She raises her hand and her own gun is there, dark, and -

“I wouldn’t,” says a voice, low, angry. A man’s voice. She’s not sure at first if he’s talking to her, or to Mounia.

“Simão,” Mounia murmurs. Her eyes are fixed on him, lips parted, one leg jutting out carefully so her hips tilt to one side. His eyes are on her body, the curve of her hips, the quirk of her mouth, the plunge of her cleavage. He doesn’t seem to see Shaheen at all - to him, she is invisible, a ghost, she does not matter. Mounia grimaces. “I asked you to -”

“Not to follow you?” He smiles grimly, a dark smile, the kind of smile that gives Mounia the shivers. He’s got a gun in his own hands, gleaming, black to match his eyes. “I can afford to lose as many men as you have bullets, but I can’t afford to lose you.”

Shaheen takes a step forward. The man’s finger tightens on the trigger of his gun.

“I wouldn’t,” he echoes himself, low.

“Leave me alone,” Mounia says, and her voice is like a whip. “I don’t want your men to follow me anymore.” She glances between them, Shaheen and the man, and then she tosses her head so the bells in her hair ring loudly through the rain. “I’m happy with the life I have,” she says. “I am a cabaret dancer, and I will always be a cabaret dancer.”

“You will always be a prisoner,” Shaheen whispers, because she does not know the man, but she suspects. “Tell me, Mounia, are you willing to always be a prisoner?”

Mounia does not say anything. She turns so fast her tasseled skirt flies up to her waist, and, umbrella shimmering, she walks away towards the place where the red neon lights of the Moulin-Rouge light up the rain.

When Shaheen is alone in the apartment with its rain-misted window panes, the little purple lavenders of the wallpaper seem to watch her like strange, tiny eyes. Sometimes she hates it, sometimes she loves it, because it makes her feel more important, different somehow. But today she likes it. She likes the feeling of having an audience, likes the feeling that someone besides her cares, as she takes the necklace with the jeweled cabaret dancer and hangs it carefully from the slowly-spinning music box ballerina.

“Isn’t that premature?”

Shaheen turns around. “No. A girl who is willing to use a gun, with a past like hers - she’ll come around. I’m not worried.” She raises her eyebrows, nods at the deck of tarot cards spread on the table between them. “You’re very good at seeing what is hidden, though, I’ll give you that.”

“You’re not hiding any of it well.” The girl smiles. “I can tell you that.” Her hair is tied back, a ponytail so blonde it’s almost silver, fingers that tap restlessly against the surface of the table, a veil to cover her eyes. “I know your little assistant is around the corner, and the girls you have already talked to are named Ambrosine and Mounia, the opera-house ballerina and the cabaret dancer from the Moulin-Rouge.”

She is different from the others, Shaheen thinks. Where Ambrosine is delicate and prim, and Mounia is like wildfire, this girl is something different, dreamy yet grounded, undefinable. She is not any one extreme, but all of them at once. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you yesterday, Thessaly,” Shaheen says, reaching for a cigarette.

Thessaly knocks the cigarettes away gently, with one hand. “Those aren’t good for you,” she says, still smiling. “And it’s alright. You were meeting the cabaret girl, I know. She’s a lovely dancer, and lovelier in bed. The man, though, he’s something you’ll have to get past. You won’t want him and his men chasing you in circles, not once the theatre is running. This theatre, how are you going to pay for it?”

“You know a lot,” Shaheen murmurs.

“You wouldn’t have asked me here if I didn’t.”

“I don’t believe in magic.”

“You don’t need to. They need to. You only need to believe in my skill.” Thessaly curls her lips. “Your family fortune, you said - you’ve enough to finance it, to pay us too? But that isn’t the truth, is it? It was a lie, because you don’t want us to know what you’re really going to do. You’re going to hope that with the right talent, anyone will finance it, and pay for it, and you’ll be rich enough fast enough to pay back everybody you owe.”

“Maybe you know too much.”

“If I do, you certainly can’t afford to let me go. Those who know too much make the best friends.”

“And the most dangerous,” Shaheen says. She’s smiling again, watching the music box ballerina go around and around. “You’re better at this than I’d expected, you know. With you as one of our fantômes, we’ll be able to do anything we want -”

“Knowledge is a powerful tool,” Thessaly says. “It does not give you everything.” She moves her hands across the tarot cards quickly, shifting them beneath her fingers so fast Shaheen can’t keep track of their movements. “The greatest talent is to misguide, to mislead. The magic of the real world lies in misdirection. Do you believe in that kind of magic, Shaheen?”

Shaheen blinks. “Make me believe in it.”

“I don’t think I need to,” Thessaly says, rising. Her veil rustles when she moves, soft against her face. “You may not practice magic, but you understand it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have chosen a theatre as your noose. It’s beautiful, in a way.”

She turns, her blonde hair almost white in the candlelight, her fingers tapping against her deck of tarot cards as she leaves. It is not until an hour after she is gone that Shaheen returns to her dresser with the ballerina and the cabaret charm, and realizes there is something else there now, too - a voodoo doll, and the miniature model of a theatre painted in crimson and violet and gold.

“She’s good,” is all Virginia Aslow says, when Shaheen opens the door that night to her knock.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3