Journal 3 Cover Novels & Stories

I won’t last a day without sugar, I want to eat something sweet! I felt depressed thinking about the foods I wanted but I haven’t so I threw myself on the tattered bed. Heavy dust puffed out from the sheets making my nose irritated. I started sneezing and sniffling so I crawled out from the bed. The sheet clung to my feet so it fell on the floor with me. I heard a loud thud of something hard that fell on the flooring. I searched on the sheet cover and found a handmade journal. The cover seemed to be made of softwood. There were unfamiliar characters carved at the bottom.

It was wonderfully, messily alive. Liora found a stall selling parchment and inks. The old man running it had kind eyes and ink-stained fingers. “Looking for anything special, miss?” he asked. “A blank book,” Liora said. “The biggest one you have.” He smiled and pulled a heavy, leather-bound journal from under his counter. The cover was a rich, dark brown, and the pages were creamy and blank. It smelled of new leather and possibility. As she paid for it, her fingers brushed against the old one in her pack. It felt like saying goodbye to an old friend.

Maybe it had been left here by whoever used this tent before me, forgotten in their hurry to move on. My hands trembled as I pulled the satchel out and unbuckled it. Inside were journals. Three are bound in dark leather with pages yellowed at the edges. The top one had a name embossed on the cover in gold lettering that had mostly worn away. Camryn Chavez.

She set it on the table between us, her voice scarcely a whisper. “Then let’s see it through to where they left off.” And just like that, everything was different. Her words fell between us like a thunderclap. The journal, its cracked leather cover showing signs of wear and fraying edges, stared back at me. This was it. The key to everything. The truth the Council had covered up, the reason people had died. My fingers tingled to grab it, but I thought better of it.

I'm sure you'll know it's him when you cross parts with him* *If you find a girl or a boy(hopefully it's a girl hopefully she's lovable enough for you. You know what I mean) with the frequency, she will need the journal. Not this one. There's another journal. She probably won't be able to read it until she's ready, but when she is, the Harland collection has a companion text that describes the process. The companion text is called the Respondent. If the man has the collection, he may have the Respondent too.*

“Three?” “Three,” she confirmed. “Oh, and the Swiss collection secured a spot in Luxury Jewel Magazine this morning. You’re the cover story for their ‘Emerging Stars’ issue.” I blinked. “The cover? Seriously?” Clara handed me her tablet, and there it was— one of my pieces front and center on the glossy digital page. There is an article attached featuring Estrella Designs alongside some of the biggest names in the industry. “It’s stunning,” I whispered “I may have hounded their editor for weeks. But it was worth it.” she admitted, smirking.

The cover worn smooth in the specific way of something that was carried rather than shelved. "What is it," I say. "Mine," she says. "I left it in the estate when they moved me. I thought it was gone." She runs her thumb along the spine without opening it. "I wrote in it for the first three years. Before I understood that writing things down was a way of letting go of them and I could not afford to let go of anything." She looks at the cover. "After that I memorized everything instead." She opens it. --- The journals are five in total.

Something printed. I zoomed in. It sharpened slowly. A magazine cover. Lumière's. The one from eighteen months ago. The first major international feature. The photograph on the cover was me in the bronze dress from the Paris preview, Noah beside me with his hand in mine, his face turned up toward the camera with that gap-toothed grin and those dark eyes and the jaw I had long since stopped pretending I did not recognise. He had the cover. Kept it. Folded it or cut it or printed it. Small enough for a jacket pocket. And he had been carrying it. Into the regulatory hearing. Into this boardroom this morning. Through every room he had walked into in recent weeks with that jacket on.

"If you want to hit someone, hit Luna Hester." "Oh, no. I'd rather go through this detention with grace." We climbed the stairs, Jasher groaning quietly with every step. Seeing this vulnerable side of him made him seem sweeter somehow. His pain made him seem real—and, strangely, more irresistible. When we reached the third-floor balcony, we leaned against the wall and looked up at the clear blue sky. "Don't cry again," Jasher whispered. "I'll find out who started that stupid rumor." Someone had sketched me fully nude in those journals, and the images had spread. I had no idea who it was. Genesis had distributed dozens of journals, many of which were discarded, making it harder to track down

Instead, there were three thick, leather-bound books, their covers dusty and worn down at the corners. Julian reached in and carefully lifted the books out, placing them gently on the large mahogany desk. I touched the cover of the top book. The leather was a deep, dark brown, and stamped into the bottom corner in faded gold letters were the initials: C.C. "Callum Carnegie," I whispered, my voice trembling. "These are my father's journals."