“A faint one. Rusty and jangly,” I said.
“So the partner was attacked by some tribe members in Rogues Bay, supposedly, while picnicking by a waterhole with his date. Also who died. Flayed, basically, both of them—which the tribal group denied, but their men ended up in death row for it, anyway. And now, well a couple years ago, the rest of this AnamNesis guy’s family is killed in a city less than a day’s drive away from here.”
“How were they killed?” I asked slowly.
He took a deep breath. “Let’s just say that a cat-o’-nine-tails was involved.”
“Bane,” I said. “Another word for scourge.”
Marvin chewed salt off his lips. “The point is that not very far from here, someone was still taking out the Father’s enemies—even after his death—in the same way as they did in Rogues Bay.”
Further along the walkway the giant chessboard was missing most of the pieces. A dealer leaned on a rook and counted his cash.
“You okay?” Marvin tossed the remainder of his fries to the pigeons. “I mean you asked me to help you find your aunt. So . . . your guardian’s gut instinct that she’d still be in Upper Slant was probably right.”
“In which case,” I said, “you’re in danger now. You need to leave, like on the next pod.”
“Not without you, Dorothy.” He checked his watch. “Oh shit. I gotta go.” He unfurled from the bench. “Can you smell that? Coming from the river? Snow—it’ll be here soon.”
And then he was gone, making his long-legged stride up the path and back toward whoever waited for him in one of the Towers made for tomorrow.
My hangover beat against my temple. Some man’s seed sticky between my legs. Sleep tugged at me. If Marvin’s detective work was any good, then I had to find a way to convince him to leave, whoever he was now staying for. Because I was no longer so sure that it was me.
I stopped at the vending machine on our floor and bought a Coke. Lara was sitting on my bed beside the hollow left by the Hunter.
“Lara?”
She didn’t look up. She was humming some pop tune, and rocking back and forth. I took her by the shoulders and only then did her eyes partially focus. Her face was blotchy from crying. She said, “If the Hunter was a ghost, how come the rug is still damp?”
I looked down at the wet patch on the carpet and knew that it would never dry completely. “Ghosts always leave a snail trail.”
“Trudy’s in the hospital,” she said. “He got her.”
“What?” The shock was too much to take. “Why didn’t you say so?” I swayed on my high heels—an ankle gave way with a stab of pain.
Lara reached up to grab the blue velvet of my coat, like a lifeline.
I texted Marvin. He didn’t reply. There were daily pods now departing from the rooftop of the Bibliotheca to get Mades away from Tower Village. Away from the Hunter. Maybe try and lose themselves in some place whose name could not be spoken, make sure this time they were never found. I quickly packed a bag for Lara and tried to convince her to get on the next pod. She refused—not without Trudy. They’d take her to a clinic, she said, and find only one way to fix her, and Lara couldn’t let that happen.
I pulled off my shoes and limped into the bathroom, stared at my mismatched eyes ringed in makeup that wouldn’t wash off. Who was I kidding? I could write over the past with all the present I wanted. It wouldn’t erase it any more than my curated bespokery would erase the ones and zeros etched in my brain.
“I’ll always be with you,” the Father said.
And also with you.
And suddenly I saw a room not unlike the Father’s womb room, except this room was shiny and new and maybe it was in some kind of Brain Dynamics Center built with endowment funds on a campus just like Wellsburg. And instead of jars like in the Father’s womb room there were tiny drawers, thousands of them, and in each drawer a tiny piece of neocortex, the piece that merged with the Father’s chip. Numbered and named according to the unfixable Made from whom it had been removed.
No. I did not want that for Trudy. For any of us. It had to stop.
Marvin finally texted back.
A male got attacked too. Kudos for the equal-opportunity Hunter.
You could be next, I said.
There was a hissing sound now, according to media posts about the attacks. Some victims reported sounds of slithering.
Game over.
* * *
From the day that I bring her back to me, an understanding, delicate and strong as bone, will bridge the gap between Narn and me. Between self-made and unmade, failed witch and crappy twin, there is a kind of peace. Over time it will even grow into love. But I will never stop wondering if Narn wishes it were Kai who made it across Rogues Bay instead of me, if the old crone wished she’d thrown me in the trash after all. Sacrificed me to the god of blood vengeance so that the hunt for her own dangerous and disappeared sister would be lucky.
“Sometimes,” I say while changing her bandages, “sisters just want different things.”
“Maybe not the same sister anymore. Maybe Father got to him.”
“Her,” I say. “I’m pretty sure Tiff is a her.”
“Not anymore,” Narn said. “No way of knowing what it is.”
From the shadows of the porch, Mag puts a tattooed finger over their lips and I stick out my tongue, regret it instantly. Narn mutters something, trying to ladle a spoon of rabbit stew into her mouth with her left hand and dropping it onto her lap instead. I go to help her and she gibbers at me. I step back and fold my arms, and Eric’s heavy tail thumps on the floor.
“You’ll be fine,” I say. “We’re all going to be fine.”
I stop growing—by the time I’m eighteen I am just over 153 centimeters tall and although I eat enough for two, my weight hovers just below the forty-seven kilogram mark. My coarse hair is another story though and Narn has to cut a tangled inch from it every month with a pair of hedge trimmers, the effect always lopsided due to having to learn to use her left hand. The only thing that helps my vicious periods is a drop or three of Pamelia—shield lichen—mixed in coffee or moonshine, and often both. My eyes are too big for my face, but so is my nose, which makes me hopeful that no one will try to make me pretty, that no one will try to make me anything ever again.
I’m already made.
Narn is selective in what she teaches me. “Some magic cannot be taught,” she says. “Because already here.” She brings her bandaged hand to my heart.
Every evening after my chores are done, Eric and I sit on the porch together, a bottle of Islandia brew between us and the rifle over my knees, and we wait for the inevitable. I am ready for whoever, whatever, will follow in the wake of the Assistant, and Eric is readier. But slowly I will learn that the inevitable and the unexpected are as mutualistic as bacteria and fungi in lichen, and as easily confused.
CHAPTER 22
LAST CALL
Power outages at this time of the year were not infrequent in an old town like Wellsburg. The bridge became a dark wind tunnel. I thought about my “Aunt” Tiff and how wherever she was that was all she knew. Maybe if she were a twin, Kai whispered at the end of the tunnel, maybe then she would know what she doesn’t know.
Sasha had given me a second chance.
But I couldn’t do it alone. Even if my scheduled phone call with Narn was now less to get a story—I had more than I needed—than for us to check up on each other, I needed the connection more than ever. Surrounded by lies and uncertainty, Narn was my only truth. I stood on the bridge, eerily unilluminated, the restive mist over the river below and the vertical coffins of the Village Towers blocking out the stars. On the other side, the façade of the old campus slumped against the night. Disembodied voices from the Corso collided with stray scraps of music and laughter from Wellsburg. The glow of a lantern here, the white arc of a phone flashl
ight there. The power out for hours at a stretch.
“Another Gatherum?” Narn said groggily into the phone. “Fearsome bitches can’t get enough.”
She had gone early to bed. I pictured Eric lying across her feet. There was a drought, she said. Cattle dying in the fields, birds falling out of the sky. Fewer travelers passed through the Starvelings. The last time she’d been to town the post office was closed. The dry had shriveled the golden-eye on Kai’s grave.
“Tower Village is half-empty now,” I said. “Mades are leaving in droves. Scared off by the Hunter and taking their subsidy money with them.”
“Power back in old hands now. Old money, old blood—”
“Yeah well she needs me more than I need her. She’s shown her hand.”
“—boss bitch will get the last word.”
Maybe Sasha was the surly counter-revolutionary face of old-school alumni that Marvin had told me about weeks ago. Maybe her faction had voted against Wellsburg participating in the Redress Scheme. But I couldn’t help myself. A part of me still loved her. Longed for her. Owed her.
“You can’t think the Hunter is . . . convenient for Sasha? Seriously?” Too late to take back the defensive wheedle in my voice.
“Working together maybe. Power like lichen,” she said. “Oldest thing in the planet. Has to feed itself or it dies.”
“Feed itself? Or feed on itself. Because they’re two different things, Narn,” I said like the know-it-all I would never be. Truth be told, I just wanted to make this call last forever.
“Redress justice and old justice serve one power—play both sides. Kill Zone.”
“Okay, but the Gatherum—Sasha, the whole movement to beef up Wellsburg’s coffers—it needs us. It still needs our stories. Pagan’s office is filled with activist literature—she believes in it, at least.”
And I felt that to be true.
Narn blew a derisive raspberry that sounded like thunder in my ear. “Whole world turned its back on Blood Temples, on witches’ purges and Mades’ suffering.” In my heart, I knew this also. How even before the self-serving activism, witches in the Rim had tried to circulate secret atrocity footage. Underground groups, dark web interviews with escapees, marches, graffiti, memes—“them rich bitches knew and did nothing.”
“Still, I doubt even Sasha’d resort to hiring someone to scare off Mades just so they can have Wellsburg back the way it was. For one, they need our fakelore. Where would the Gatherum be without it?”
She sighed. “Not all lore is fake.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Already told.”
“Tell me again.”
So she did. How after Tiff ran off, she and Mag needed a third sister to make up the magic number—to be whole again so they could fulfill the bargain they made with the goddess. Having searched for Tiff from one side of the planet to the other, Narn followed her south to the Rim and into the hinterland, to the Blood Temple, where she had disappeared. She suspected that the Father and Tiff had discovered each other, found an infernal mutualism that couldn’t be denied. Made a deal against which Narn and Mag alone would be no defense because the chain was broken—the triple charm undone. So Narn decided to make a third sister from scratch.
“That’s where Kai and I came in,” I said, because it never gets old.
“Only in bringing number back to three, could sisters be a match for two—Tiff and the Bossman,” a partnership forged not from godjizz but from man’s own hellish grasp.
“So you chose one egg from the Father’s supply, fertilized it but put a special lichen extract into the dish to give it some protection it from the Forever Code.”
“Not enough. Never enough.”
“Then you said some conjure words. And maybe they were the wrong words, or maybe not. But they conjured two eggs from one!”
“A double-yolker good for rainy day. Eggs grow. Plenty conjure for both and power shared is power doubled.
“An eye for an eye, a sister to avenge your lost Tiff—eaten alive by darkness.”
Before implantation in the surrogate, Narn continued, she noticed that one egg was too small. Again, she decided to dispose of it so it wouldn’t drain the nutrients from the good egg but when she took it to the sink, something happened. The good egg started to bleed.
“Blood in dish. Couldn’t let good egg die. Talked to Mag—wrote conjure on paper to put bad egg into surrogate with good. Broken eggs need each other. Broken eggs fix each other.”
“And we did. Tell me everything else.”
“Don’t remember.”
“Tell me anyway.”
The wind tunnel on the bridge was a crescendo of sighs. “Didn’t tell surrogate about twins inside her. Made ravens sleep, sent Assassins—”
“Assistants,” I said.
“Sent them from lab, Matrons too. Strong twin came out first, alive. Runt second, not breathing. Not moving. Left to die and cut cord of strong one—started to scream. Good twin wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t breathe until runt breathed.”
“So you said some words to bring me back from the dead.”
She had only spoken of my stillbirth once before.
“No one sees. No one knows. Narn puts twins side by side in nursery, wouldn’t be separate. From then on, twofer was one.”
Students trickled by, angled against the wind. I slid down, collapsed against the rails, my face bathed in neon sky. “And the end?”
“Twins work together like stories. Conjure protection and protect conjure. Nature of the beast.”
There was movement again on the opposite bank. It was dark but in the reflected light of the river, I made out an amorphous shadow. It changed shape, leaving a snail trail of phosphorescent green. It crawled slow as a sloth, then sped up like a nightmare, shapeless, but with an indelible impression of bones, of haunches and gaunt ribcage.
Narn said something else, or sang it, but it was in the old tongue that I couldn’t decipher above the sound of the sobbing wind, crying like I was twelve years old again and Kai’s head was in my lap and her eye was half in and half out, and I didn’t know how to fix it and didn’t know if I wanted to.
That was our last call.
CHAPTER 23
SWEET SIXTEEN
It is a chilly June on our sixteenth birthday. One of Narn’s customers comes to the fence with news from the Blood Temple. It is the woman who gave us the first aid kit. She is an escapee from the mainland. It took her a year to cross the desert. “Hard to find the place unless you know what you’re looking for,” she’d said.
She was a surrogate and at first believed the Father’s lies about Paradise until she’d wandered, doped and in a panic into one of the labs. There she saw the robot surgeon hunched over a petri dish, Assistants in white coats watching a screen displaying what looked like the curvature of the earth mapped with delicate crimson tributaries. Tiny blood vessels, they were, beating to the rhythm of her own heart, she said, the robot hunched over the embryonic brain—“could have been one of mine”—inserting the Father’s code into it on the downbeat. She tells us how she still wakes up in the night with that pulse in her head. Badoom-BOOM. Badoom-BOOM.
“After that I knew there was too much I didn’t know,” she says. “About the Father. About everything.”
No one went to the authorities because of the ravens. Staff and surrogates were fed stories of how the ravens were the Father’s eyes. His brain. His children. Everyone was terrified of the ravens—no one dared to go against the Father.
Narn laughs so hard she cries. “Ravens not Bossman’s children,” she screeches. “Ravens be witch’s eyes.”
The woman has a heart condition. She takes the moonshine and shield lichen from Narn and tells us news of how the Father’s pet raven attacked him.
“Dani?” I say.
Dani, Kai giggles. What a rush.
I step away from the porch and go down the path so I can hear her better.
“The other ravens joined that big bird in pulling him to bits. By the time the Matrons had set the place alight, like the Father made them promise to do, the Assistants had made a run for it. They knew they were done for. Authorities took Mades, the ones who hadn’t escaped or fled, into state care. Arrested what Assistants they could, some already in their pods.”
The cloud of ravens, a kindness of Corvus rising toward a winter sun in a shitting screeching rage of rose-stained plumage, each with a piece of the Father in their beaks. Dani, his pet with the biggest piece of all.
“The Father’s head hung from the beak of that huge bird,” the woman recalls, shuddering, “by a dirty blue ribbon.”
“She did it,” I say to Eric. “My sister, Kai.”
The bloodwoods rain blossoms down on her grave, and I don’t have to look to know that she is now really there, in soul as well as body. The ravens sing “Happy Birthday to you,” and the property rings with the sound of their song.
* * *
No one knows that once . . .
The stories had kept coming.
Until they didn’t.
From my window in the high dorm where I was finally alone, I gazed down at the bridge, blue as an eye, blue as a lie. Expensive new clothes lay scattered across my bed. Sprigs of Letharia vulpina dried on the windowsill. Fearsome Gatherum had grown so large that Sasha would not hear of me having a weekend off, not even to spend time with Trudy. The membership was growing, and the stories had to deliver. No more cliff-hangers, Pagan warned me over coffee. No more chances, remember? She reminded me of how Sasha had pulled me out of the wilderness. She reminded me of all the clothes and money, and protection. Especially from the Hunter from whom I was safe even if my Made sisters were not.
“But you’re not like them,” Pagan said. “You’re more like us.”
Trying to get that straight in my head was exhausting.
“We’re like the Three Graces—get it?” she said. “Sasha Younger, Pagan Case and Meera Made.”
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