The Sisterhood

by A. J. Grainger

  “But . . .”

  Sabrina was gone.

  Lil held the phone, already regretting not telling her aunt about Alice. Should she call back? No, Sabrina had sounded busy. She’d leave it for now. They would just have to deal with it. She went back into her bedroom and handed the phone to Kiran.

  “What did she say?” he asked.

  “That it’s raining.” Lil grinned, feigning lightness as she felt anything but.

  Kiran laughed. “Good to know our police force are so observant. Anything else? They want us to stay here, don’t they?”

  Lil nodded. “Until the storm passes.”

  “And . . .” Kiran jerked his head in the direction of Alice. It wasn’t exactly subtle.

  Alice didn’t notice him, though. She stared intently at Lil, desperate to know too.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Lil didn’t add that she had wanted to but never got a chance.

  Relief passed over Alice’s face. “They told me the world was untrustworthy, but you are not.”

  Unease squirmed inside Lil. As if to confirm the dread growing in her gut, the outside light flicked off, plunging the backyard into an impenetrable gloom again.

  Beware the world beyond the gates of the Light; Darkness there lurks.

  —THE BOOK

  It had been four full moons since Brilliance relinquished the name given to her in Darkness and took her Light name.

  It was beautiful and pure, and Brilliance loved it. She smiled to herself as she crossed the courtyard beside the house and went out into the surrounding wood, heading for the cliff top. It was raining hard, water pooling in the branches and then dripping down her neck, and the wind was like a wild thing, tearing around her. She was glad of the cloak that each sister wore, but what she wouldn’t have done for her parka right about now. But that was a part of her old life. “A sister dresses for the Light, identical to her sisters, so that we may all be equal in the glory.”

  In the distance she could hear voices. Even in the storm the sisters were felling the trees that would become the wood for the Sun’s fire at the Illumination ceremony tomorrow night. Everyone was excited about it. The Illumination was an annual event, the death of one sun and the beginning of another, but this year’s ceremony was to be extra special. As a Beta, Brilliance didn’t know everything about it, but the sisters couldn’t talk about it without smiling, even Dazzle. “Can you believe it’s nearly the Brightness?” she said, eyes wide. “The B-r-i-g-h-t-n-e-s-s.” She emphasized each letter.

  “A total consummation with the Light,” Moon had said of the Brightness. “A rebirth for every one of us.”

  Rebirth. New beginning.

  New her.

  That sounded good to Brilliance. A fresh start, that’s why they were all here.

  She pulled her hood down farther over her eyes as she cut down the path that led to the cliff top, careful not to slip on the mud. She loved this wood. Its trees were epic, with their wide, wide branches, like arms hugging the sky.

  The commune was surrounded on three sides by high walls and on the fourth by a wood that led to a cliff with a sheer drop to the sea. It was empty and quiet here.

  Brilliance had hated the remoteness of her former home. Nothing but miles of space and thoughts. Here, though, she didn’t mind it. There were so many women. Sixteen members in all. You were never truly alone, always had someone to chat with. It was good. It was nice. Even after only a few months, it felt like . . . it felt like a place she might belong.

  Brilliance was happier here than she had ever imagined possible. “How did you know?” she’d asked Moon only days after her arrival. That I was searching for this place, she’d meant, only there was no need to explain. The high priestess had understood immediately. She always seemed to understand, instinctively and easily. A gift from the Light? Or just her own special self? Either way, it didn’t matter.

  “I knew you were the Light’s daughter the second I saw you,” Moon had said. “You will find the peace you seek here, sister.”

  Brilliance had been looking for the Sisterhood her whole life without even knowing it. Desperately searching for something beyond herself, something that knotted her frayed edges together, made her whole, gave her a purpose. “There has to be more than just eating and sleeping and drinking and boys and schoolwork and then work and finally dying,” she’d said to one of the other sisters, an Alpha called Luster, who’d been assigned to help her settle in. “Doesn’t there? Something bigger than us? Some reason that we are all here on this planet. Some reason I’m here.”

  “I’m sure you will find it with us,” Luster had said with a smile.

  She had. This. Was. It. This Light. This escape from Darkness.

  The only cloud on her horizon was her family. She couldn’t think about them without feeling bad. But she couldn’t go back. To leave would be to lose the peace this place gave her, and she could never do that. She could not go back to the Darkness of her old life, her old self, her old name.

  I’m happy now. She sent the message out on the wings of a bird. I’m safe. Be happy for me. I’m going to be okay.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Leaving Alice curled up on the end of Lil’s bed reading, Kiran and Lil went downstairs to get something to eat. Lil was starving. She’d lost all track of time, and she hadn’t eaten since that toast, which now felt like a lifetime ago.

  The kitchen was colder than normal, and dark. Even with the overhead light on, the shadows stretched long across the room, and the windows were black mirrors that reflected Lil back at herself. She imagined the light spilling out down the driveway and shining like a beacon across the mountain. Anyone out there could follow that light right here. That made her uncomfortable, and she quickly dragged the curtains closed, shutting out the dark, stormy evening.

  When she turned around, Kiran was rummaging through the fridge, pulling out what few supplies they had. Lil hoped the storm wouldn’t last too long, or they’d have to start eating grubs to survive. “You guys were up there a long time. Did she tell you anything? About what’s happened to her?” Kiran asked.

  Lil shook her head. “Not much. She refused to answer lots of stuff, and when she did, well . . .”—Lil gave a half shrug—“not a lot of things made sense. Not to me, anyway.”

  Lil didn’t know what to make of Alice. She should have told Sabrina what was going on. She was realizing with a steadily increasing dread that they should have called for help ages ago. Everything had gotten out of hand. She had that sensation of being at the highest point of a roller coaster, just the second before the car you’re in plunges down the first loop and there’s no way to stop the ride, even if you want to get off.

  She should call Sabrina back, but a part of her still hesitated. She didn’t want to go back on her promise to Alice. She was scared she’d leave.

  “Look, can we just not talk about Alice for a bit? I feel . . . I don’t know. . . .” She needed a few moments to try not to think about how badly she was handling all of this. “Do you want a cup of tea?” she asked, pushing her thoughts to the back of her mind for a minute. Just while I calm down. Just a moment to think.

  Kiran eyed her a second, and she thought he was going to push her, but “Do you have any tea?” was all he said.

  Lil loved him for that. It was crazy not to talk about the elephant—or in this case, girl—in the room, but she just needed to process. Her mind was racing. “Probably not. How do you feel about hot water?”

  “That as a beverage of choice, it’s very underrated.” He waggled an eyebrow.

  Warmth rushed over Lil and she suddenly felt an urge to hug him. Being with Kiran felt so wonderfully normal. It pushed out all the weird freakiness about Alice’s appearance, her way of speaking, and Lil’s irrational sense that there was someone watching them, waiting for them, out in the dark.

  “Cai was there this morning,” Kiran said, breaking into her thoughts. “At the kayak club.”

  Lil grimaced. “Yuck. I’m a
lmost glad I fell off my bike. Did he say anything?”

  “No, too busy chatting up some brunette.”

  Lil winced. She hadn’t expected Cai to stay faithful to her sister—hell, he’d barely stayed faithful when Mella was still here—but the way he flirted with anything that was female and had a pulse made her sick. He’d done it almost the second Mella was gone. And he’d been so unhelpful in their search for her: “Dunno when I last saw her.” “Dunno what we talked about.” “Dunno where she might go.” “Dunno why.” “Dunno, dunno, dunno” was his response to everything. He was a grade-one douche bag.

  Lil didn’t want to think about Cai now, or ever, and instead rummaged in the cupboard to look for tea bags, finding a few tucked in the back. Once she’d made the tea, she carried the steaming mugs over to the table, saying, “There’s no milk. Sorry.” She sat down. “What did your dad say about you staying here?”

  “Not much. It’s better I’m here than out driving in the storm.”

  “Yeah,” Lil agreed. That made sense. “Will the twins be scared? Because of the storm?”

  “Are you kidding? They’ll have set up some kind of tracking equipment to measure the speed of the wind, and they’ll have Dad outside with a ruler, measuring the depth of the water.”

  “We had to do that for school once. Rhia and me. We were supposed to take recordings of how much rainwater had fallen every day for a month. We couldn’t be bothered to do it, though, so we made the results up. We got confused and put meters instead of millimeters on the results table, so we reported that it had rained sixty-five meters in a month.”

  Kiran laughed, and Lil felt the familiar twang of guilt that she got whenever she thought of Rhiannon these days. Kiran didn’t know that she and Rhia weren’t speaking. No, it wasn’t that they weren’t speaking. That made it sound active. It was more just a passive moving apart. Kiran was in the year above, so he just assumed that she hung out with Rhia in lessons and at lunch and on the weekends, when she wasn’t with him or endlessly, endlessly checking the Find Mella website and calling the police for updates.

  She didn’t know exactly what had happened between her and Rhia. Lil had pulling away from Rhia for a while, unconsciously at first, ever since Mella left, or maybe even before that. Rhia had three sisters and a mum and dad who actually liked being married to each other, rather than barely being able to tolerate occupying the same room, and the whole family was so close. Doing stuff together all the time and enjoying it. Rhia’s mum made Lil welcome every time she went over, but it hurt, seeing them happy, laughing, joking, getting on so well. It made Lil’s own family seem even more inadequate . . . and Lil couldn’t bear it. She hated herself for feeling like that, until in the end it was just easier not to go around. And then that came to not talking in the evenings. And finally, to making excuses not to sit with Rhia at lunch.

  It was easier with Kiran. His family was almost as dysfunctional as Lil’s. That made Lil worried, too—Am I the kind of person who can only be friends with someone if they are miserable? But Kiran wasn’t miserable. He was a 90-watt bulb, making everything around him brighter.

  The truth was, Lil had changed; the second she realized that this time Mella wasn’t just hiding out, that she’d really gone, the old Lil disintegrated, to be replaced by a new, quieter, shier, more anxious one. She looked back at the stuff she used to care about—schoolwork, the cute boy in year ten, whether the spot on her nose would be gone by Rhia’s birthday party—and she felt embarrassed. None of that stuff mattered, not one little tiny bit. She was angry with stupid, naive Lil, sweating the trivial, but also protective of her, like she was a child. That poor thing hadn’t known what was coming. She would give anything now if her biggest worries were what lip gloss she should wear on Saturday or what sweater she should buy.

  Kiran bent over the sink to add some cold water to his tea. “Too hot.” Lil made a Poor baby face and he smiled, but he was watching her closely.

  Unlike most regular-size humans, Kiran was taller than her. That was one of the things she liked about him: less neck crooking when he was around. The bad thing was his tendency to catch her eye the way no one else was able to, and to hold her gaze, like he was doing now. She ducked her head and he ducked his, following her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Don’t know.” Kiran shrugged. “You look different today.”

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s the wet hair.”

  “À la drowned rat. Thanks!” She reached forward to punch him playfully on the arm. He caught her fingers and a charge went through Lil. She tugged her hand out of his quickly. This was Kiran, friend Kiran.

  Sure, Mouse, and I’m the queen of France, Mella chimed in her head. Now you must obey my every command. I demand a crown of marzipan and a throne of chocolate. Or I’ll chop off your head.

  Shut up, Lil said feebly.

  Mella cackled, and the sound of it hurt, because it wasn’t real. Just a memory, and every day Mella faded a little more from Lil’s mind.

  “Maybe there are some biscuits in the other cupboard,” she said, moving away from him. Right now she didn’t have time for anything other than finding her sister.

  When she checked the cupboard, Lil turned back to find Kiran sitting at the kitchen table. He held up a chunk of cheese. He must have found it in the fridge earlier. “Does mold count as one of your five-a-day?”

  And whatever weirdness there had been between them disappeared.

  After turning on the oven and putting the french fries that she’d found in the freezer in to cook, she dropped back into a chair and wrapped her hands around her tea. The mug was pink with blue flowers, and the words on it said: “I’m smiling because you’re my sister. I’m laughing because you can’t do anything about it.” Mella had bought it for her the Christmas before last. She thought it was hysterical. Mella had a very odd sense of humor sometimes.

  As though waiting for the right time, Kiran studied her for a long moment, then said, “We kind of have to talk about this, Lil. We can’t just ignore it. . . .”

  Lil’s stomach twisted. She’d messed up; she should have told Sabrina. “I know. . . .”

  “So . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow. “What did she tell you? Alice.”

  Lil drew in a fractured breath and filled Kiran in quickly on everything she’d learned about Alice: the sisters-but-not-blood-sisters and about her not being able to go home. “She talks so strangely. I don’t get half of what she says. Do you know what ‘recreant’ means?”

  “No idea. I don’t even know how you spell it.”

  Lil went and got the dictionary from the top shelf of the dresser. Her mum kept it there for the Saturday crossword puzzle, not that she did them much anymore. After stroking off a layer of dust and a dead fly, she flicked to the R section. It took a moment, but then: “There . . . ‘recreant.’ ” She read the meaning aloud. “ ‘Adjective. Unfaithful to a belief; apostate. Noun. A person who is unfaithful to a belief; an apostate.’ ”

  “ ‘Unfaithful to a belief’?” Kiran repeated. “Like a religious one?”

  “I guess,” Lil said. A picture formed in her mind: ill-defined and as nebulous as a cloud but growing all the time. “Recreant,” “light,” “glory,” “sisters,” “forbidden” . . . they were all words associated with religion, weren’t they? “So she came from somewhere religious?” Lil said, thinking aloud. “A church? No. . . . Her family was religious?” She sighed. “She’s scared, Kiran. What are we going to do?”

  They exchanged a look.

  “We are so out of our depth here, Lils.”

  “I know.” Lil put her hand over her face. She’d placed Kiran into a bad and possibly dangerous situation, and for what? “I’m sorry. I just . . . it’s . . .” Lil took a deep breath. It was hard to say this, but she felt she owed it to Kiran to explain. “I didn’t with Mella. . . . I wasn’t . . .”

  I let her down, she wanted to say, but she
couldn’t. How would Kiran respond? She couldn’t bear him to look at her differently when he knew how selfish she’d been, how she hadn’t helped Mella when she needed her most. And that was the reason she wanted to help Alice and the real reason she hadn’t told Sabrina about her. When Alice had said she would leave if Lil told anyone, she’d gotten scared. She didn’t want to be responsible for someone else disappearing.

  “I want to make it right for Alice,” Lil said. Then, after a deep breath, she added quietly, “I didn’t with Mella.”

  She was afraid to look at Kiran, but when she did, understanding filled his eyes with a soft warmth, making their brown seem even richer. And Lil wondered why she hadn’t told him her fears immediately. How could she have doubted that he would get exactly what she was feeling? Or if not get it, just accept it, respect it. Because he was Kiran. He always got her. Always.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Once the fries were cooked, Lil piled them on a plate and added it to the tray of the other stuff they’d found, and carried it upstairs. Alice stared at the food curiously.

  “Sorry, it’s not much,” Lil said.

  Kiran began wolfing down the fries, dunking four or five in the ketchup in one go and shoving them into his mouth. “What?” he asked, mouth full, when Lil gave him a look. “I’m hungry!”