LES DÉSCENDANTS

Chapter 19: La Balle Gelée (The Frozen Bullet)

After I asked my question, Enjolras was silent. I turned to face him. His eyes were pleading with me, begging me to not take lives, a plea to preserve my pacifist nature.

I looked closer, than froze.

Enjolras was still...almost too still.

I turned to the Guards, who had just begun firing their first charge. I watched the bullets emerge from their rifles, almost in slow motion, and approach us. They had already won. Before thinking it through, I quickly squeezed the trigger of Enjolras's rifle with all my might.

I watched as my bullet emerged from the rifle and began its trajectory straight toward the first Guardsman's heart. A lone tear made its way down my cheek.

Yet the bullets remained at a sluggish pace, slowing, slowing...

And then, they stopped completely, in midair.

I had seen this only once before, and then, I had yelled for the bullets tearing their way through my fellow bunkmates in Marseilles to stop, and they had somehow yielded to my command.

Perhaps such utterances only obeyed the commander in one's own world. The bleak future in 2020 P.D. Marseilles was the world I was born into. 1832 Paris was not my world, and I had not wished for the bullet to miss.

This was not my command...yet the bullets were frozen. The Guards, too, in their positions, remained frozen with angry snarls upon their faces.

I looked to Enjolras...perhaps this miracle was his wish? But he, too, was frozen in time, staring at me with a sadness in his eyes which I had not seen since he...since we...

Don't think about that, sister.

I leaned to caress his cheek, but before I could lay a finger on Enjolras, there was a noise at the back of the room. I quickly dropped to my knees to re-load the rifle. "STAND BACK!" I yelled.

"Ah-vehn-ear, please. Do not wake him up at this moment." A voice of velvet.

"Montparnasse? Is that you? Here? How are you still moving-"

"Shhh." I could see his silhouette in the doorway.

"Do you have the magic within you too; did you make this wish?"

Silence, then a quiet sob.

I moved closer, carefully around the soldiers, for any contact would wake them up. "Montparnasse? What is going on?"

The young man was hugging his knees to his chest, his face hidden in his knees, and beside him was the book Les Misérables.

I slowly fingered the book's spine of aurumite as I knelt to join Montparnasse. "You stopped the bullets, didn't you?"

Another sob.

"Jean Prouvaire sent you, didn't he?"

Montparnasse slowly raised his emerald eyes, now watery, to meet mine. "He saw you die," he said hoarsely.

"I remember," I breathed. "I remember...he came back from the future, and he collapsed on the couch...it was one of the last times I saw him. The despair in his heart...he used the aurumite to make himself forget his grief. But he remembered enough beforehand to send you here..."

"To save you," Montparnasse rasped. "I didn't see-" His voice cracked. "The book, the wish, it brought me to the street outside...and he was not there at the barricade. He was not among them."

Sister...I'm already gone.

"He's never coming back," Montparnasse sobbed, and I gathered him into a hug as he continued. "I can't lose you, too. He told me...all about you."