Chapter 1: The Argument
The heat in the courtyard was a physical weight. It pressed down on Vanja’s shoulders, soaked through the thin cotton of her blouse, and made the air above the cracked concrete shimmer. She caught the scent of wild thyme from the overgrown borders, fighting against the ever-present tang of diesel from the street. The old fountain in the center was just a dry bowl of litter and dead leaves, but it was where everyone gathered anyway. Clusters of students stood talking, their voices a low, tense murmur in two different languages that she understood perfectly.
That’s where she saw him. Leaning against the sun-warmed stone of the fountain’s edge, holding court. Dren Kelmendi. Even from across the courtyard, he had that easy, gravitational pull. Tall, dark hair falling just a little too perfectly over a brow that was too serious for an eighteen-year-old. His friends were laughing at something he’d said, but his own smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. They were sharp, green, scanning the crowd. They landed on her, and stopped.
She meant to walk past. Really. But her feet carried her right toward him, a current she hadn’t agreed to swim in.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said, her voice cutting through the chatter of his friends. They fell silent.
Dren straightened up, his gaze narrowing. “About what, Kastrati? I’ve said a lot of things today.”
“About all of it. The protests. The petitions. This whole… march toward a cliff.” She crossed her arms, feeling the sun bake her scalp. “It’s a dead end. A bloody one.”
One of his friends, a guy named Petrit, snorted. “Listen to her. What, you get your politics from Belgrade TV?”
Vanja didn’t look away from Dren. “I get them from history. From cause and effect. You push, they push back harder. You know how this ends.”
“With dignity,” Dren said, his voice calm, low. It was infuriating. “With our rights recognized. Or do you think we should just sit in our classrooms and thank them for letting us have an education in our own language? As a privilege they can revoke whenever they want?”
Her mind fractured. In one layer was this moment: the sweat on her upper lip, the chipped red polish on her thumbnail, the defiant set of his jaw. In another, a cascade of ghost-sensations: the gritty taste of tear gas she’d never actually breathed, the pixelated news footage of a burned-out library, the hollow sound of a surname being read from a list years from now. Kelmendi.
She swallowed the phantom dust. “There are other ways. Slower ways.”
“We’re out of time.” He took a step closer. He smelled like soap and sun-warmed skin. “Your father’s Albanian. Doesn’t he tell you what’s happening in the villages? The ID checks, the ‘interviews’?”
“My mother is Serbian,” she shot back, her green-gold eyes flashing. “She tells me about the fear in her sister’s voice when the nationalists on her street start painting slogans on walls. It’s a trap, Dren. You’re walking right into it, and you’re going to get everyone behind you caught in the jaws.”
“So what’s your solution?” His calm was cracking, finally. A ripple of frustration under the surface. “Be quiet?Be good? Hope they change their minds?”
“I don’t have a solution!” The words burst out of her, louder than she intended. A few students from other groups glanced over. “I just know this one leads to ditches and burned houses and graves no one will ever find. I know it.”
Silence hung between them, thick and hot. His friends were utterly still, watching this strange girl who spoke of graves with such certainty.
“You don’t know anything,” Dren said, but his voice had lost its edge. It was just a statement, puzzled. “You’re guessing. You’re afraid. That’s all.”
The ache in her chest was unbearable. It was the truth, and it was a lie. She was drowning in knowledge she could never prove. A museum exhibit she’d seen in another life, a scholar’s dry paper on ethno-nationalist conflict, the heartbreaking poetry of a survivor born years from now—it all condensed into a leaden certainty in her gut. But to him, it was just a feeling. A girl’s fear.
“Yeah,” she whispered, the fight draining out of her, leaving a hollow exhaustion. “I’m afraid. You should be, too.”
She turned to leave, the world tilting slightly.
“Vanja.”
She stopped. Didn’t turn.
“You’re impossible,” he said. Not an insult. It sounded like a discovery.
She looked over her shoulder. The sun caught the gold in her hair, lit the fierce angles of her face. “You’re stubborn. And you’re going to get yourself killed playing your father’s game.”
“It’s not a game.”
“It will be to them.” She finally faced him fully, the distance between them feeling both vast and infinitesimal. “And when they start playing, the rules are theirs. You’ll lose.”
He studied her, his head tilted. The political fury was gone from his eyes, replaced by a deep, unsettling curiosity. “Why do you care what happens to me?”
The question hung in the air, buzzing like the trapped heat. She cared because in the fragmented echoes of a life not yet lived, she had read his name. She cared because his smile, when it was real, was something the future had never described and now she couldn’t unsee. She cared because she was trapped between two worlds, and he stood firmly in one, and she stupidly, desperately, wanted to bridge the gap.
She offered him the only piece of the truth she could shape into a believable answer. “Because someone has to.”
She walked away then, her footsteps echoing on the concrete. The shadows from the old oaks stretched long and distorted like grasping fingers. She didn’t hear him follow. She didn’t hear him call after her. She just felt the imprint of his gaze on her back, a brand more permanent than the sunburn on her skin.
He watched her until she disappeared into the dark mouth of the old library doorway. Petrit clapped him on the shoulder, said something crude and laughing about Serbian girls who liked to argue. Dren shook him off, absent, his mind elsewhere.
Impossible, he thought again. The word had a new shape now. It wasn’t about her argument. It was about the terrible, convincing certainty in her eyes when she spoke of graves. It was the way she seemed to be arguing with a ghost only she could see.
He pushed off from the fountain. The meeting with the others was in an hour. Plans to make, leaflets to distribute. His path was set. But for the first time, the clear, straight line of his future felt like it had wavered, just for a second, bent by the heat-haze and the fierce, frightened gold in a pair of unforgettable eyes.
But for the first time, the clear, straight line of his future felt like it had wavered, just for a second, bent by the heat-haze and the fierce, frightened gold in a pair of unforgettable eyes.
He walked home slowly, the city sounds reasserting themselves—the rattle of a tram, a mother calling a child in from a balcony, the static hiss of a radio news broadcast bleeding from an open window. Her words replayed in a loop. Ditches. Burned houses. Graves. They were just words. Propaganda from both sides used worse. But she hadn’t said them like propaganda. She’d said them like a memory, her voice hollowed out by a certainty that chilled him more than any militant’s shout.
Dinner at the Kelmendi house was a loud, crowded affair. His father, Adem, held court at the head of the table, his voice a steady, compelling river of analysis about the week’s protests, the latest police provocations in Drenica. Dren’s younger sisters argued over the radio tape. His mother piled more pite on his plate, her eyes worried, saying nothing.
“The committee meets tomorrow,” Adem said, his eyes finding Dren’s. “You’ll be there. It’s time to move beyond talking. Time for direct action.”
The pite turned to clay in Dren’s mouth. He saw Vanja’s face, the desperate shake of her head. A dead end. A bloody one.
“What kind of action?” he asked, pushing the food around his plate.
“Symbolic. For now.” Adem’s smile was thin, sharp. “A message they can’t ignore. We paint their monuments, we disrupt their parades. We show them we are not afraid in our own streets.”
“And when they stop being symbolic?” The question was out before Dren could stop it, in Vanja’s tone, with Vanja’s ghost behind it.
The table went quiet. His father’s gaze hardened. “Then we meet that reality when it comes. We do not live in fear of their next move. We force the moves.”
Dren nodded, the obedient son. But the taste was still there, sour and metallic. Fear. Not of them, but of the cliff’s edge she had described, and the sheer momentum pulling them all toward it.
He saw her again two days later, not in the sunny courtyard but in the dim, cavernous university library. The air smelled of dust and decaying paper. She was tucked into a carrel in the history section, a fortress of books piled around her—20th century Balkan conflicts, works on partisan resistance, sociological texts on ethno-nationalism. She was scribbling furiously in a notebook, her brow furrowed, her hair a messy dark-gold cascade over one shoulder. She looked like she was preparing for a war, or trying to prevent one.
He leaned against the end of her carrel. “Researching your dire predictions?”
Vanja started, her pen skidding. She looked up, and for a second, pure, unguarded relief flashed in her eyes before it was shuttered behind wariness. “What do you want, Kelmendi?”
“To talk. Without an audience.”
“We talked. You called me afraid and wrong. Conversation over.”
“You said I’d get myself killed.” He kept his voice low, a murmur in the dusty quiet. “That’s a pretty specific insult. I want to know why you think that. Not about politics. About me.”
She leaned back in her chair, the wood creaking. The green-gold of her eyes was dulled by fatigue in the weak light. “You’re Adem Kelmendi’s son. It’s not exactly a safe title to have.”
“That’s not it.” He pulled a chair from the next carrel, spun it around, and sat facing her, his arms crossed on the backrest. He was intruding on her space and he knew it. “Plenty of people have warned me about danger. You didn’t warn me. You told me I was walking into a trap. Like you’d seen the blueprint.”
She closed her eyes. A long moment passed. The only sound was the distant scrape of a chair on another floor. When she opened them, they were glistening. “What if I have?”
The whisper was so quiet he barely caught it.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head, stacking books with abrupt, sharp motions. “Forget it. Go to your meetings. Plan your symbolic actions. Just… be careful, okay? Avoid the town square after eight. Don’t ride in cars with Petrit. He drives like an idiot and the police look for any excuse.”
A cold finger traced Dren’s spine. These weren’t generalizations. They were specific, odd, personal warnings. “Vanja—”
“I have to go.” She stood, gathering her books, hugging them to her chest like a shield.
“Why do you know these things?”
She was already walking away, heels clicking on the linoleum. He followed, his longer strides catching up to her easily in the empty aisle between towering shelves. He caught her arm, just above the elbow. She flinched, hard, as if his touch burned, and spun to face him.
The force of her reaction made him loosen his grip, but he didn’t let go. The air between them crackled, charged with everything unsaid—her inexplicable terror, his consuming curiosity, the magnetic pull that had nothing to do with politics or prophecy.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice rough.
She searched his face, her breath coming fast. He saw the conflict there, a war waged behind her eyes. The truth, whatever monstrous shape it held, was right there, pressing against the dam of her lips. The fear of being thought insane. The loneliness of carrying a burden no one could share. And beneath it, a raw, desperate need for him to listen.
He saw it all. And in that moment, the arguments, the factions, the looming shadow of his father’s war—it all receded into a muffled silence. There was only the dust motes dancing in a sliver of window light, the frantic pulse in her wrist beneath his fingers, and her eyes, wide and terrified and beautiful.
He pulled her close.
It wasn’t a romantic gesture. It was an anchor. A bulwark against the sheer vertigo he saw in her. She stiffened, the stack of books digging into his chest. Then, with a shuddering sigh that seemed to come from the depths of her, she melted. Her forehead dropped against his shoulder. He felt the tension leach from her muscles, one by one. He just held her, there in the silent history aisle, surrounded by the ghosts of other people’s wars. Her hair smelled like sunlight and rain, a scent utterly at odds with the decay of paper and the dark future she described.
Her hair smelled like sunlight and rain, a scent utterly at odds with the decay of paper and the dark future she described.
He didn’t know how long they stood there. A minute.An hour. Time in the library had a different grain, thick and suspended. He felt her breath warm through his shirt, the slight tremor in her shoulders subsiding into something quieter, more weary.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she mumbled into the fabric.
“I already think you’re impossible. Crazy is just a different street.”
A wet, muffled sound against his shoulder. Was that a laugh? A sob? He couldn’t tell.
She finally pulled back, putting air between them again. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. She looked exhausted, but also clearer, as if some internal storm had briefly passed. She didn’t meet his gaze, instead focusing on straightening the disordered books on her carrel with meticulous care.
“I have memories,” she said, her voice low and flat. “Not memories. Pictures. Sounds. Facts. Like I read a book a long time ago, a really detailed, awful book, and now I can’t forget the plot.”
Dren stayed in the chair, watching her. He didn’t interrupt.
“In these… pictures… someone with your name does something stupidly brave in the town square. In 1994. And someone with Petrit’s license plate wraps a car around a tree on the road to Gjilan next autumn. And the library…” Her hand rested on the stack of books, her fingers tracing the cracked spine of a historical survey. “It doesn’t smell like dust anymore. It smells like smoke and wet ash.”
The chill was back, spreading from his spine to his limbs. He believed her. That was the most terrifying part. He didn’t believe in prophecies or clairvoyance. But he believed in the absolute, gut-wrenching conviction in her voice. This wasn’t a girl seeking attention. This was someone confessing to a haunting.
“You’re ill,” he said, not as a dismissal, but as a clinical possibility. “You said you were sick. A high fever, for a long time. My aunt had encephalitis. She saw worlds for a month afterwards.”
Vanja nodded slowly. “That’s what the doctors say. A vivid, prolonged psychotic episode triggered by illness. A paranoid fantasy structured around real political anxieties.” She finally looked at him, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “It’s the most logical explanation. I know it is. I have a degree in analyzing this kind of thing.”
He blinked. “A degree?”
She waved a hand, dismissing her own words. “Forget it. The point is, I know how it sounds. I know what the logical conclusion is. But Dren…” She leaned forward, her hands gripping the edge of the carrel, her knuckles white. “The logical conclusion doesn’t feel like this. It doesn’t feel like remembering. It feels like I’ve lived it. The fear has a taste. The loss has a weight. And I look at you, and I see two people. The boy in front of me. And the man in the ground.”
The silence that followed was absolute. It swallowed the usual library sounds, the distant footsteps, the rustling pages. It was just her words, hanging in the dusty air between them, too horrific to acknowledge.
He stood up. The chair legs scraped against the floor, a shockingly loud sound. He walked to the narrow window, looking down at the sun-bleached courtyard where they’d first argued. Students passed, laughing, their backpacks slung over shoulders. Normal life. The life she was telling him was already doomed.
“What do you want me to do with this, Vanja?” he asked, his voice tight. “Do you want me to quit? To run away? To tell my father his cause is lost because a girl with beautiful eyes has a bad feeling?”
“No.” The word was sharp, definitive. He turned to look at her. She was standing tall now, her expression resolved. “I don’t want you to do anything different. That might make it worse. I don’t know the rules of this… whatever this is. I just needed you to know. I needed someone to know. So when I tell you not to go to the square on a certain day, or to check the brakes on Petrit’s car, you might just listen. Not because I’m prophetic. But because I am… informed. By the world’s worst source.”
A bleak laugh escaped him. He ran a hand through his hair. “Informed. Right.”
He walked back toward her, stopping an arm’s length away. The curiosity was still there, a burning coal in his chest, but it was banked now by a profound and unsettling responsibility. She had given him a piece of her nightmare. He couldn’t just drop it on the floor.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’m listening. I’m not promising to obey. But I’m listening. No more calling you just afraid.” He reached out, slowly, giving her time to pull away. He tucked a strand of that dark golden hair behind her ear. Her skin was warm. “But you have to talk to me. No more cryptic warnings. If you know something, you say it. Straight.”
She leaned into his touch for a fraction of a second, her eyes closing. Then she nodded. “Straight.”
The tension broke, not into ease, but into a fragile, shared compact. The weight was still there, but now it was suspended between them, a burden divided.
“So,” he said, forcing a lighter tone, picking up one of her history books. “What does the world’s worst source recommend for the rest of today? Any impending disasters I should avoid? Falling ceiling tiles? Poisoned coffee?”
The real smile she gave him then was small, but it reached her eyes, turning the green-gold to liquid light. “Just the usual. Boring lectures. Overpriced coffee. The existential dread of a generation on the brink. Nothing specific.”
“Good. Then you can walk with me to my next lecture. Since you’re informed, you can tell me if Professor Hoxha is going to pop a vein today over constitutional law.”
They gathered her things, the ordinary ritual of stacking notebooks and capping pens somehow intimate after what had just passed. As they walked side-by-side out of the history stacks, shoulders occasionally brushing, the world outside the library windows seemed both sharper and more fragile. The laughter from the courtyard was louder, the scent of thyme sweeter, the cracks in the concrete more pronounced.
He had a meeting with his father later. Plans to discuss. A path that was set. But now, walking next to her, that path felt different. It wasn’t just his path anymore. It was a path she claimed to have seen the end of. And for reasons he didn’t fully understand—reasons that had nothing to do with politics or fate and everything to do with the way she’d felt in his arms, solid and trembling all at once—he knew, with a certainty that rivaled her own, that he wouldn’t be walking it alone.
And that changed everything.