The homework schedule was daunting. I had already missed two reading assignments on cell division, mitosis and meiosis, and there was a DNA quiz in two weeks. The only microscopic life I had seen was my own. I would need all the help from Lara and Trudy that I could get, even if it meant attending the Thanksgiving “Feastaroony”—which they were already trying to rope me into.
I finished studying on Thursday and I exited the overheated Bibliotheque and lifted my face to the lavender dusk. I went straight to the bridge, keeping my head down. Narn picked up on the first ring like she was waiting for me, berated me for hanging up on her.
“No more cliff-hangers!” she warned. “Ever.”
“Sorry. Just some partiers from a place called Sweeney’s across the bridge. Spooked everyone. It was session break. There was an anti-Halloween party in one of the rooms on the weekend.”
“Disrespecting witches,” she growled.
“Disrespecting the disrespectors,” I said.
I thought of her orange clown hair, as fake as a Halloween wig, and how it became her. I wondered how long it could go on, this chaotic upcycling or becoming. I missed the old hag. I missed her more than I could say.
There were fewer callers than normal for this hour—maybe because of the Hunter. Or the fall in temperature. I overheard one of the Mades mention snow.
“So what have you decided?” I scraped silver paint from under my nails. “Will you help me with stories for the Gatherum?”
“Conjure is a heavy weapon. Him doesn’t know how to use it yet.”
“I can learn.”
“Rich bitches are real wolves. Old story. Starving.”
Starv ing. I smiled grimly. “I need you to throw me to those wolves, Narn. You can’t protect me anymore. To be honest, you kind of suck at it.”
The ravens sobbed. Baiit. Baiiit.
I belched, tasted punch. And the salt on Marvin’s skin. My mood was turning ugly as the day.
“Hard to keep double-yolker safe from Boss,” she protested. “Powerful trouble—no charm good enough. No charm firm enough.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I saw a movement on the opposite bank, a phosphorescent glow in a clearing and then a spreading darkness like spilled ink.
But Narn could see my ugly and raise me. “Crappy twin doesn’t know this: ravens saw bad sister show himself to crappy twin in stolen Made body.”
I stared at the phone. “You knew about that? That I’d seen Tiff—the little snake girl—in the Blood Temple? Twice?”
“Once, twice. Bad sister sees crappy twin in itself. Double-trouble.”
I felt a rising fury. I gripped the rail, the phone hot against my ear. “And did the ravens tell you that I didn’t take the bait? Did they tell you what I did to that little bitch? How I sent her away for good?”
“Away,” Narn said gently. “but not for good, that one. Never for good.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I heard rustling, the scrape of a match. Impossibly, I smelled burning sage and bone broth. My eyes hurt from the neon lights on the Corso, from all the misinformation. The palpating blue lights of the bridge were making me nauseous. I peered down at the bank. Some birds burst from the trees, shrieking.
“It will never be for good,” I said. “Until it is.”
“Why does Meera want this?”
I thought about it. “Justice?” I said. “Revenge?” I didn’t know the difference. Maybe that’s what I wanted. To find out if there was one.
“Conjure tales take no prisoners,” Narn growled. “Conjure’s cure more dangerous than his disease. Tales only work by leaving nothing safe.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said. “But when we get off the phone, you’ll go to your cave and carve out penance on your skin, on your flesh. And Eric will cry and the ravens will shit and Mag will shoot something—and none of that will bring either of them back. Is it too much to ask for it to stop, Narn? That’s all I want.”
“Yes,” she said. “The end is too much to ask.”
Maybe it was the restless glowing movement on the riverbank, the desolate neon-lit bridge stretching into the mist or just my hangover roaring back, but before I could stop myself, I held the phone away from my ear and sobbed into the mic across the unspannable gulf between us: “You didn’t follow your sister here because you didn’t have the heart. To do what needed to be done. What still needs to be done.”
Something splashed in the mud far below. Narn said something about how it wasn’t a matter of the heart, and what would I know about souls anyway—it was time I started acting my age and not my shoe size, and I was all, fine, if I had a shoe size which I don’t, never having had a pair of shoes to call my own, and whose fault was that? Narn asked. And we went back and forth like that for a while until finally, I gave up. “You knew Tiff had her eye on me, and you knew why—double-trouble. You knew that I’d put on her clothes and be able to put myself in her place, imagine what it feels like to be her—the criminal sister—imagine what I’d do in her place.”
“So?”
“So, the Malemade told me about this thing called mind-hunting, Narn. Like, it takes one to know one. And it works both ways. The profiler becomes the profiled—hammy as that sounds.”
Haaa-aaam, cried the ravens. And wafting on the breeze, a leathery smell like wet dog.
I said, “Remember when you made me pick something out of the trunk to wear to our last dinner together? You said how Tiff’s clothes became me, fit me like a glove. And she saw me coming, witch—just as you dreaded, as you hoped. Well here I am.”
“Couldn’t throw filthy sister’s rags away.” She was crying. Deep old-woman sobs. “Cheap and cheerful . . . ”
“Shhhh, Narn. We both knew this day was coming. No one is to blame.”
We wept. No one took any notice—it was a bridge of tears. I knew what she’d do to herself in the cave, and she knew I punished myself every day just by being alive. Just by having survived. We all make our own scourges. We want it to end. And we want it never to end.
The silence between us grew thick, the miles short. It hurt to swallow, the past like broken glass in my throat. “The Gatherum is the bridge between sisters lost and found, Narn.”
“Silence!” Narn said in a reverberant screech that made my knees buckle. I clung onto the blue-lit rails. “Bridge has eyes and ears.”
The guards had begun pacing back and forth, each lap getting longer. Advancing on us. Mades hung up, herded back like sheep, indigo shadows slouching behind them.
“Help me, Narn,” I whispered. “Help me burn the bridge.”
A branch cracked far below. A flash of queasy yellow. Narn said something that came out as a burble. The bridge emptied and the wind had died utterly. The guard clomped from around his post, jabbed at his watch with a fat finger.
Then slowly, tearfully, the burbling through the phone became deep. And grew deeper. It had no beginning or end. And somewhere in the formless depthless middle, the answer hurled itself after the question, breakneck for the finish.
No one knows that once . . .
CHAPTER 12
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
Snarling and spitting, the clown-haired witch presides over Kai’s midnight burial behind a thicket of bloodwood trees, attended by the mute Mag who wields the shovel. I have been in the Starveling Hills for two days, battling the first of many sore throats that will plague me all my life. White blossoms chase the small enshrouded body down into the black hole—the blossoms stick to my face. I am surly, tearless. As unwilling to live without as with her, unwilling to see the merits in living at all.
Getting from the coast to the hut in the Starvelings is a blur—I know that the journey was long and that Mag was my shadow, but once I cut my sister down and gently pressed her remaining eye back in, I would not let them near her agai
n. I had bundled her belongings into a pillowcase before we left Rogues Bay—her shoes and some dice, a deck of cards and her blue ribbon—and I would not let the twisted sister near these either.
“That freak strung her up,” I observe coldly. “Like some weird ceremony.”
“Old time sacrifice. Mag tried blood offering to the dead to take sister as its own.”
Narn has gouged out an eye to match that which the ravens took from my sister in death. It is an affront to me. Kai is mine alone to mourn. Mine. I alone claim the right of atonement. And that of revenge.
“I don’t care what it was. She’s mine and you tried to take her.”
Narn gibbers over the grave, as if to offer atonement by way of her own anguish and loss. Her grief is a torment to me.
Narn intones a little unconvincedly, “Mag summoned ravens to take twin’s soul to proper dwelling.”
Narn is clearly trying to defend her sister, but it is just as clear to me that it was not Mag’s place to summon the ravens. However well-intentioned, this was an overstepping—the two weird sisters have been furiously arguing about this ever since our arrival. Narn’s multiplying mutterings whirl and collide with Mag’s defensive thoughtforms like a flock of birds driven off course in a storm. The ravens were necessary, she tries to explain, to carry the soul to its proper dwelling. Mag only wanted to keep Kai’s soul safe, she mutters and I throw dirt at their tattooed face and sob that keeping Kai safe was my job.
Mine.
Whatever agreement the sisters come to at last, excludes me. Like they excluded the dissenting Tiff when taking a new deal they knew she’d never agree to. I feel Tiff’s rising fury. I feel it in my blood.
“You took her eye!” This I will never forgive, even if Narn gave her own eye in return. I will never forget. “I promised to get her out whole. Unhacked!”
The agony is blinding. It is the beginning and the end of me.
Narn mutters about blood justice, sacrilege for sacrilege. She points to the gore-filled hole on her face as if it settles the score. Trauma has drained her hair of its vibrant color—it is the old gold of a rotten peach. Her remaining eye is swollen with grief—in her gaze I see only that she wishes it was me being lowered into the ground instead of Kai.
That makes two of us.
The bleak silent Mag shovels too quickly. I rush to stop them, but Eric, snarls and stands between us. He looks like a regular thylacine with that stiff tail, the long face and body striped darkly crossways. But because of how he is the product of an unnatural union, his loyalties are divided. This is apparent in the prominence of his ribcage, an exaggerated musculature around the shoulders and a threatening mobility to the wide hinge of his jaw. Mag resumes, chastised and surly, peering out from under their hood at Narn whom they have displeased, and who will forgive—as is her nature now. This is something that I will learn living with these two—that nature isn’t always as natural as you’d think.
I gather from Narn’s incantations that my cutting my sister down will have—what did she call them—repercussions. Narn moves more slowly, is a little more bent than at Rogues Bay, and her eyehole smells infected. No wonder. I imagine her gouging it out with the same boline she uses to dig roots from the earth or trim candlewicks. I will drown in the terminal lake of Narn’s remaining eye unless I say what cannot be unsaid:
“You killed her! You killed my sister because you couldn’t have yours. Kai told me all about her, how she ran off because she couldn’t stand you. Do you think I believe all that about the ravens keeping her soul safe? Safe from what? I think they”—I point to Mag—“offered my sister—mine—to your sister as a kind of barter, a balancing of the scales. Like if that bitch can get one of us on her side, then it’s two against two.” I clench my teeth, half ashamed, talking to myself more than anyone. “Like that’d ever happen! Do you think Kai’d go over to her side any more than I would? I’m going to find your shitty sister, I promise, and when I do, you’ll be sorry. You’ll all be sorry!”
Narn is staring at me with her clown mouth in a terrible stretched smile, a smile that circles her head. A magenta tear hangs off the edge of one eye. But there will be time enough for tears. We turn at once at the sound every Rim-dweller knows at the base of their spine. A one meter brown snake has slithered out from behind the bloodwood tree and is heading straight for my sister’s grave. Eric is there in an instant and has the snake between his jaws, bites its head off, and Mag’s shovel does the rest.
* * *
Narn’s story broke me open, the indecipherable syllables and discordant music a deeper cut than I bargained for. Seeping into my bones so that my blood could make sense of the layered thought forms flying, even if my brain could not. And then, out of the flocking recall materialized the winged creature—the one I’d felt haunting me for weeks—atop the slated roof of the guard house. Two fierce eyes in a face across which scraps of blue cloud blew and Orion wheeled, a form so camouflaged against the firmament that you would never see it unless it wanted to be seen.
No one knows that once . . .
I would show Narn that I wasn’t after all the crappy twin, and that she was right not to throw me away. Finding her lost sister as she had failed to do was one reason I needed her stories. But the real reason why she gave them to me was probably so I could make good on the most important promise of all—the one I made to myself. Either way it seemed to be enough for her, for a sense of justice for which she wasn’t made, but which she had learned over time and at great cost.
I tore away from the bridge before I could forget. Translating the story as soon as I returned to my room: it began with a virgin who gives birth to a beaver covered in black feathers with a human mouth. The virgin holds the beaver-bird-baby in her arms and walks the streets, trying to work out how it happened, because maybe if she can find the source, the ravaging image that seeded such an abomination, she can unfind it. The beaver-bird-baby rustles its feathers and gives her directions in a human tongue. But the destination was still fuzzy. To try and pass the time until it came to me, I opened my tablet to try and learn more about the Fearsome Gatherum and its mysterious curator.
Narn always said I had exceptional vision, that I could see through walls, but it just came down to knowing where to look. I read about Sasha Younger, but none of it really told me anything. I read that she was young, heir to some fortune, “unconventionally beautiful.” I read that she took on the Dean for the right to hold the controversial reading series, and won. But most of what I found was about the series itself, as part of an underground movement:
Which privileged subjective experience in all of its diverse shades of pain
Which didn’t truck in shame
Which sought to put words back in the mouths of those whose tongues had been torn off, figuratively speaking, in the Blood Temple
The readings worshiped fear in all its forms. Its manifesto stated that:
Fear is a human right. Fear makes us value our freedom. Fear returns to humanity the virtue of authenticity. Fear finds our truth.
But it comes at a price, the manifesto said. Sacrifices must be made. Leave your triggers at the door.
Over the next two days, I kept searching, following links, sidebars, cross-references. Even when I could find no answers, the more questions I asked, the more I felt my brain changing. The more I felt myself changing. On Saturday afternoon, I was deep in some discussion forum about the nature of fear, when Lara burst into the room. “I need to find Trudy. There’s been another attack.”
After several texts, Trudy was found safe at the indoor pool, training for the Village Games. Lara dropped her phone on the bed and collapsed beside it.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” she said, smoothing a chestnut curl. “It’s not just the Redress Schemers who supposedly want to study our brains or turn us into weapons or slaves or whatnot—now there is this, like, this Ghost Hun
ter who wants to eliminate us with extreme prejudice. Like some kind of culling. Like what happened to the thylacines in the Rim. Is that what they want to do to us?”
I looked over my device at her. I thought of Eric, and my heart fluttered. Not everyone’s guardian was a necromancer—in that at least I did get lucky.
Lara got to her feet and went over to the window, angled so I couldn’t see her face. I could tell that she was looking not at, but beyond Wellsburg, to the south where we all came from, as if trying to work out how in the world to get back.
“It’s like we’re being punished for surviving,” she said, “when he did not.”
“Lara,” I said gently. “The Father’s dead. His own mutant ravens turned on him. They found bits of his body over a five-kilometer radius. He can’t hurt us now.”
She went to the bed and picked up her phone. At the door she stopped and turned. “Liar”
I averted my eyes, and she slammed out the door.
Being human is characterized by dread, the Gatherum manifesto continued. Without fear, life has no meaning. The comment thread was as instructive, at least to me, as the posts.
Life is triggers, @shiversdliver commented.
@shiversdliver your idea of a trigger is your vibrator, @made2break replied. You’ve never been truly triggered or you’d know that these occur not as a response to life, but in the presence of anti-life; not at the prospect of mortality, but at the certainty of something far worse—the total impossibility of self-defense. That’s fear, @shiversdliver. Not your bullshit Fearsome Humdrum.
Get over yourself, @made2break, @shiversdliver replied. Everyone else is.
I read about how the reading series was a “safe space” for those who didn’t wish to be triggered by trigger warnings. It was a safe space to learn that everyone is responsible for their own safety. To discover where you ended and the world began.
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