The announcement was met with baffled consternation, the staff murmuring together in low voices. Some of them cast confused looks in my direction. Dad had instructed me to be there for the announcement in case anyone had questions; but of course, the questions people did ask were ones I couldn’t answer honestly. Why was the most common.
“To celebrate the war swinging in our favor,” I said primly. I’d rehearsed the line in Dad’s office.
“We’ll be bringing in outside help,” Mr. Whittaker told the staff. “You’ll be expected to assist but won’t need to participate in any of the planning.”
This earned a sigh of relief, although the quiet murmuring didn’t stop. No one believed this was about the Coromina Group winning the war. Who celebrates victory before a final battle?
Mr. Whittaker dismissed the staff and then turned to my sisters, who were sitting together on the sofa. Adrienne looked excited; Daphne looked bored. Isabel sat sulking with tangled hair and a tired expression, staring at him if she wanted to burn him down. She didn’t even look at me, although I looked at her—studying her, the way I did now, trying to see traces of the alien in her features. But all I saw was the elder Isabel. I barely even saw our father.
“You will, of course,” Mr. Whittaker said, “be required to attend.”
Daphne rolled her eyes.
“This is a very important moment for your father, and it’s imperative that his daughters be present.” He gave them a steely look. “It’s also imperative that you look your best. Esme will accompany you to Undirra City the day of the party to have dresses prepared and to have your hair and makeup styled. It will be a bit of a rush, of course, but it was the earliest we could have the appointments made.”
The twins swiveled their heads toward me, waiting for confirmation. Isabel picked at her shirt, her head tilted down.
“It’ll be fun,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it.
“Whatever you say, sis,” Daphne said, and she flopped back on the sofa. Adrienne hit her in the shoulder.
“It will be,” she said. “You’re the one complaining nothing ever happens.”
The next two days were a whirlwind of preparation. I was put in charge of the arriving mercenary troops, which meant I spent the time at the estate, watching the decorations go up on the lawn. Floating lights and flowered garlands and round cocktail tables. A stage, too, supposedly for the orchestra. I knew better.
The troops arrived at staggered intervals, and I directed them to different stations set up around the estate. The officers were placed in the guest rooms in the house, unused since the first Isabel’s death; the others set up camp along the perimeter of the woods. I hated going near the woods. I hated the green shadows, the sweetly rotting scent of undergrowth. Nothing strange ever happened out there during the preparations, though. I never saw any flickers of moment, much less tall, feathered monsters or a room full of lights.
When my mother’s troop arrived the day before the party, I placed them along the path to the beach, away from the woods. I didn’t have a chance to speak to Harriet that day; everything was too hectic. But I saw her unroll her tent with a trio of other soldiers, their movements quick and professional and familiar, and for one shivery moment, I thought about how this could have been my life instead, following her footsteps and fighting for the mercenaries instead of keeping all my father’s secrets.
The morning of the party, I woke up early, just as the sun was rising up over the tree line. I leaned out my window and breathed in the balmy sea breeze and looked at the lawn, all the decorations shimmering with dew. It was like a party for ghosts.
As Mr. Whittaker had promised, I gathered up my sisters and took us all down to Undirra City. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. Isabel kept slinking off, disappearing out of the dress shop while the dressmakers were busy with Adrienne or Daphne or me. I’d look up and she’d be gone; fifteen minutes later, I’d step out of the dressing room and she’d be standing up on the pedestal while the dressmaker scanned her for sizing. I wondered if the Radiance were here in the city, too, if she was vanishing off to go meet with them. At one point, when Daphne and Adrienne were busy in the changing rooms, I sidled up to her. She glared at me from behind her hair.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” she said, and walked away before I could ask any more questions. After that, she avoided me completely.
Of course, my sisters weren’t the only ones who had to get ready for the party. Dad expected me to look resplendent, an heir to him in every way possible. So, I tried to set my worries about Isabel and aliens out of my mind, and I swiped through the holos of the different dresses, unhappy with each of their cuts or styles. Nothing looked right on me. My body owed too much to my mother.
“The tailor bot can alter these,” the dressmaker said. I turned around on the pedestal, gazing at myself in the mirrors. The dress was a long, slinky champagne thing, but it didn’t hang right on me. Every time I moved, the holo flickered and you could see snatches of my bare skin and my underwear.
“The color is an excellent one for you and the detailing at the shoulders really flatters your décolleté.” The dressmaker sounded bored, and I was vaguely aware that I was at the root of it. By that point, my sisters had all picked their own dresses and were in the waiting area while the tailor bots spun them out. But my dress was more important than theirs, since I was to be part of the unveiling ceremony tonight.
“I don’t like how it looks at my hips,” I said.
The dressmaker sighed. “What about this?” She tapped her screen and the dress shimmered and was replaced by one from earlier. Dark green and with a wider cut through the hips. “We can combine the two.” A few more taps on the screen. The dress turned champagne and the sleeves slipped away to reveal my bare shoulders. I stared at my reflection, standing still so that the holo wouldn’t flicker. I imagined myself in this dress, standing up on the stage, lights twinkling around me as the R-Troops marched in front of Dad’s investors.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
The dressmaker sighed. Finally, that sigh said, and I gave her a dark look that she ignored.
Afterward, John corralled all of us to the salon. We sat in a square, wearing the holos of our dresses so that stylists would know how best to pretty us up. This was easier: no decisions to be made. Isabel sat across from me, and she sulked as the stylist pulled and combed out her hair.
Hair, makeup, clothes. Adrienne picked out jewelry as well, a shimmering silver necklace that flowed like water down the front of her chest. I’d forgotten about jewelry, and when the car brought us back to Star’s End, a couple of hours before the party was to start, I rooted through my lockbox until I found a thin chain I’d bought years before. My champagne dress was waiting for me, laid out on my bed by one of the staff, having been delivered while we were still at the salon, and I draped the chain across it to see how it would work. I thought it looked nice, even though it’d been so long since I’d worn anything except Coromina Groups suits, I wasn’t sure.
The house Connectivity chimed, and Mr. Whittaker’s dry voice spilled into my room. “Ms. Coromina, Mr. Coromina would like to speak with you. He’s in his suite.”
I sighed and stepped away from my bed. “Right now?” I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror: my hair had been pulled away from my face in a low ponytail, my eyes lined and smudged so that they stood out against my skin. For one breathless second, I didn’t recognize myself.
“Yes,” Mr. Whittaker said. “Right now.”
I clomped up to Dad’s suite. The halls were more flurried than usual, with contract staff, on loan from the company enclave, scurrying back and forth carrying stacks of platters and armfuls of lights and other party accouterment that had been dug out of storage. I breezed past the staff, feeling like I wasn’t even in my own house.
Dad’s door was shut. I stopped in the hallway and looked at it. He’d actually called me up here, to his own personal space. I
didn’t know what to make of it.
I knocked once. No answer. I lifted my hand to knock again when Dad’s voice drifted out to the hallway—“If this is Esme, you can come in. Anyone else, take it to Mr. Whittaker.”
I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The sitting room was empty.
“I’m here!” I called out. “I was getting ready; what do you want?”
Silence. I peered around the room, taking in the expensive furniture, the view of the forest from the window. Then the bedroom door swung open and Dad stepped out. He wore a tuxedo cut in the Coromina Group style, narrow lapels and a long waist.
“Well,” he said, hardly glancing at me. “I’m glad to see you took my request seriously.”
“What request?”
“To make yourself presentable.” He lifted his head. “The salon did a nice job with your hair. None of those ridiculous styles I see coming in from Amana.”
That was the closest he came to a compliment.
“I need to get dressed,” I said.
“Yes, I know. You took longer than I expected down in Undirra City.” He fiddled with sleeves, smoothed one hand over the side of his hair.
“Well, we only had three days. I’m shocked anyone’s actually going to show up at this thing at late notice.”
Dad gave me a half smile that made me feel like I was being mocked. “They’re company folk. They know to drop everything for something like this. Plus the soldiers. We’ll have a good crowd.”
I rolled my eyes.
“The party’s necessary to get people watching,” Dad said, fiddling with his shining cuff links. “On the newsfeeds. A big society event like this grabs people’s attention. They might even be watching on the OCI planets.” His eyes glittered.
I sighed. I’d never been good at this kind of PR machinations. I worked better behind the scenes. I supposed that made me a good Ninety-Nine.
“I wanted to make sure you understand your part in all this.”
“Introducing the R-Troops. A prewritten Formal Two ceremony.” We’d been over all this already.
“Have you been practicing?” he peered up at me, his expression sharp.
“I thought that was the whole point of having preplanned ceremonies,” I said. “So you can work them in at the last moment.”
He grinned, and I felt like I’d passed some kind of test. Either way, the steps for the Formal Two ceremony were fairly simple. A few quick words, a few strikes of a gong. Maybe I’d laugh about it later with Adrienne and Daphne. Isabel didn’t do much laughing anymore.
“I still want you to look over the steps,” he said. “I don’t want you embarrassing me.”
“I won’t embarrass you,” I said as sweetly as I could. Then I left his room before he could say anything else.
Back in my own suite, I activated my lightbox and drew up the Formal Two ceremony recording so that the holo would play in the background as I got dressed. I dabbed scent on the back of my ears and watched the actors go through the motions. The familiarity of it was a slow dawning in the back of my mind. I’d first learned these steps when I was a teenager, attending tutoring every day with Mr. Garcia. He’d taught me all the ceremonies.
I watched through the recording two more times until I was certain that I had it. Then I went downstairs, ready to face the evening.
I floated toward the party. The closer I got to the gardens, the more tumultuous the house became; in the hallways, I passed scuttling contract staff, but downstairs was a whirlwind of people, some familiar, some not, all of them dressed in Coromina Group uniforms. I threaded my way through, wondering if I might pass by Harriet in the maelstrom. But I didn’t see any soldiers down there. Not the guests, and certainly not the R-Troops. They were probably going to drive them in, a whole convoy of miracle soldiers.
Outside, in the garden, things were much calmer. The ordinary soldiers were milling around in their uniforms—I looked for Harriet but couldn’t find her. The decorations that had seemed so dead earlier were illuminated as if they’d been infused with some sort of magic. The otherworldliness of it caught in my throat, and I thought of the place I’d gone in the woods, the place with the monsters. I wavered, harsh whispers threading through my thoughts. I saw teeth, sharp claws, scaly skin.
And then I saw nothing but a party. I took a deep breath. The Radiance had never come slinking out of the woods before; the night I had gone to them, I had found their hiding place. They were not going to crash the party tonight.
I drifted over to a table set up in the grass and draped myself in one of the chairs. The lights glimmered around me, bathing the pineapple gardens in that soft, icy glow. The woods were a dark boundary in the distance. I didn’t want to turn my back to them.
I stayed at that table and watched the Four Sisters come out. All of them were present today, in various states of undress: Amana was full, a bright blue-green disc against the inky sky. Catequil a sliver like a frown. Quilla half-waned. All of them danced around Coromina I. I held my hand up to the sky and closed one eye and counted the finger’s width between the Sisters and their anchor. Three, two, four. Crimson storms surged across Coromina I’s surface.
“How long have you been out here?”
I jerked my gaze away from the planets. Daphne was striding across the lawn in her little blue cocktail dress. The salon had curled her hair and swept it over her shoulder, and it fell down the side of her face like a dark waterfall.
“You look lovely,” I said.
“Oh, please. You already saw me.”
“That was a holo.”
Daphne rolled her eyes and sat down beside me. “Staring up at the planets, huh?” She hooked her ankle around a nearby chair and dragged it over so she could prop her feet up on it. She sat like that, lounging, leaning back in her chair.
I shrugged.
Daphne dropped her head back. The red light of Coromina I fell across her face. “Doesn’t it mean something when they’re all ringed around C-One like that? Some astrological thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course not.” Daphne grinned at me. “You’re too smart to go in for that sort of thing.”
My cheeks burned. “That’s not what I—”
But Daphne just looked back up at Coromina I. “Oh, I wish I could remember! Isabel would know, but she’s been so gloomy lately, I don’t know if she’ll want to talk about it.”
My heart twisted.
Then Daphne sat up and snapped her fingers. “Oh, I got it now! It’s impending doom.”
I gave her an annoyed glare, I couldn’t help it. She laughed.
“No, really. Well, not that dramatic. But it means something’s coming.” She gestured with one hand. “All the Sisters crowding around C-One like that, that’s the sign for a violent change. It’s an attack, get it? The Sisters attacking the anchor?” Then she pointed at Catequil. “And when Catequil frowns, that always means unhappiness.” She spread out her hands. “Impending doom.”
The wind gusted. It knocked the lanterns around, and for a moment, they were blown out of their magnetic patterns, scattershot across the yard.
“Impending doom?” I said. “More like impending rain.” I tried not to think about the Radiance in the forest. “I don’t know what Dad was thinking, throwing an outdoor party so close to the start of the rainy season.”
Daphne didn’t have an answer to that. We sat side by side and watched the staff spill out of the house, readying themselves for the first guests. Adrienne stood up on the porch, shining in a long white-silver gown that was like an extension of her pale skin. She and Daphne might be identical, but this evening, they couldn’t look more different.
The door jerked open behind Adrienne; it was Dad, striding out in his stupid Coromina Group tuxedo. The Alvatech and Andromeda Corps generals walked with him. The buckles on their dress uniforms shone in the lights.
“Where’s Isabel?” I said, still thinking about the Radiance, about her strange disappearances.
Isabel stepped through the doorway, stoop-shouldered and shuffling but breathtakingly beautiful anyway. She wore a dark red gown with a long train—it hadn’t looked so dramatic as a holo. The fabric smeared like a trail of blood behind her as she walked. The stylist had twisted her hair up into a knot to reveal the curve of her long, elegant neck rising out of the drape of her gown. She was as beautiful as her mother had been.
And she looked like she wanted to be anywhere else.
Daphne lifted one hand. “Isabel! Over here!”
Isabel’s head turned toward us and I could feel her taking us in. Her expression didn’t change.
“Come on!” Daphne shouted. “Before the old people start showing up!”
A pause. But then Isabel glided toward us, her gown rippling in the dark. Guilt twisted around me. And maybe it wasn’t just guilt, either. She had something in common with that monster in the woods.
So did the soldiers I was going to be introducing in a few hours’ time.
I stood up. “I’m going to see Dad about preparing for the ceremony,” I said, and walked away. Isabel and I passed each another on the path. She glanced at me, slightly, turning her head at an angle.
Our gazes caught. Just for a second, but it was enough.
I walked around the side of the house until I came to the staff courtyard. It was frenzied with activity, but I stayed on the edge, lurking in the shadows and watching contract staff bustle back and forth with trays and drinks and platters of food. Voices rose up in a shout: “They’re starting to arrive! Faster, faster, we’re running late with those cocktails—”
It was an odd thing to see, like splitting open a lightbox and looking at the light-wires running through its innards. Here’s how a party worked. Lots of invisible people shouting at each other in a courtyard set away from the guests.
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