by Lanie Bross
“Yes, just like the marble showed. But … I bled. …” Corinthe’s voice trembled and she turned away before Miranda could see the fear in her eyes. Fear was a weakness. It was a feeling. And feelings were for humans. “What’s happening to me? I’m—I’m becoming like them, aren’t I?” she blurted out. She realized the question had been raging inside her since the accident. Maybe for even longer than that.
“Shhh,” Miranda said. “You aren’t like them. You’re an Executor. This is just a small scrape, nothing to get upset about.”
“I’ve never bled before,” Corinthe argued.
“Don’t fret,” Miranda said. “You’re so close to going home. That is what you want, isn’t it?”
Corinthe bit her lip. She ached to return to Pyralis, to the twilight and the scent of flowers layered through the air, to the vast horizon of stars and the trees that whispered songs to her in the half darkness, and to her sisters, singing to the sky, running through the forests. “Of course it is.”
“Then leave it be and focus.” Miranda reached out and cupped Corinthe’s chin. “This day has been long for both of us. But trust me, it means little in the greater picture. Remember—there is a pattern to everything. This will all be a distant memory very soon, I promise.”
Corinthe nodded. Pattern. That word always made her feel a little happier, a little more secure. There was a meaning and a reason for everything in life—as a Fate, she knew that inherently.
“First, we fix you up.” Miranda moved to the row of shelves roughly constructed of cinder blocks and planks. The shelves were packed with a variety of dusty bottles and mason jars. She eyed the collection carefully and finally selected two small jars, then brought them back to the sink. Taking a cotton ball, Miranda dipped it into the clear bottle. The cotton soaked up the translucent liquid quickly, and Corinthe flinched when Miranda smeared it across her wound. “To clean off the blood … I’m sorry it hurts. I should’ve warned you it would sting.”
Corinthe shook her head, bearing the pain in silence. Miranda smiled encouragingly as she cleaned the wound. As Corinthe watched Miranda’s careful hands work, she felt relieved and grateful to have a Guardian who was this thoughtful, this diligent. Without Miranda, she could not possibly have survived her exile.
Miranda then tipped a second bottle over her palm, and several dead butterflies fell out. With her thumb, she crushed them and rubbed the dusty powder into the wound on Corinthe’s face. For a moment, they stood in silence, and Corinthe forced all of her questions and doubts—still thudding in her chest, behind her rib cage—down and back. All except one.
“How much longer will it be?” Corinthe asked. “I’ve been stuck here for years.”
Miranda turned and blew the last of the powder from her fingers. Then she quietly said, “I’ve heard whispers between worlds. If the Unseen Ones are happy with your next two assignments …” She let her words trail off, let the hint hover between them. She smiled as she reached into her pocket. “Your new task. Tomorrow, at the Mission Creek Harbor.” She held out a marble.
Corinthe took the marble and gazed into its murky center. Would it be a new death, she wondered, so soon after the last one? Inside the marble, images swirled: Lots of teenagers laughing. A party. Tiny lights winked—the harbor seen from a distance. Boats bobbed in the dark water. The image shifted again, and Corinthe saw two humans kissing.
Corinthe didn’t understand assignments like this—coincidences, encounters, romance. Death was cleaner, more direct. But love? The concept eluded and confused her. As far as she could tell, the feeling humans termed love brought uncertainty. But her job was not to question, only to perform her duty.
“A party will be fun,” Miranda said with a smile. “You are a teenager, too, you know.”
Corinthe knew Miranda was teasing her. She was not—would not—be like the humans she dealt with.
Miranda squeezed her shoulder. “You can wear one of your new dresses.”
As much as Corinthe loathed many aspects of this world—the constant noise, the acrid scent of human desperation—one thing she did love was the way humans dressed: the colorful patterns; the shoes of different heights and styles; the looped, beaded, and jeweled bracelets, necklaces, and rings.
In Pyralis, the Fates all looked the same. They wove white dresses out of flower petals. By human standards, Corinthe supposed the Fates were beautiful. But humans liked color. And, Corinthe realized, so did she.
Not at first, though. Initially, this world had seemed blinding and chaotic. In the beginning, Corinthe had worn a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses everywhere she went in San Francisco—even on the foggiest, darkest days, and even though the lenses were far too big, at the time, for her small face. But that was just one of the many subtle things that had changed about Corinthe during the past ten years. Over time, she’d somehow gotten used to the sun, to the buzz of constant movement and bright lights. Her eyes had become less sensitive. Lately, she’d even found that she liked the electric energy of mornings; the calm, flat gaze of the noon sun; the long, open yawn of a summer afternoon; the dark silence of midnight.
She wasn’t just getting used to Humana—she was fitting into it. Taking on more and more human traits. Possibly even, she thought with a sudden pang, becoming one of them. But being here, in this world, still hurt her; she still felt a near-constant ache for Pyralis.
She closed her eyes, willing away the thought.
“You look tired. Have you been stitching in the gardens lately?” Miranda asked.
“No,” Corinthe admitted.
“Go, then. I’ll be here when you come back.” She gracefully skirted a beat-up table in the center of the room. “And bring me a handful of echinacea and some Brahma Kamal petals.”
Stitching. It was a word all their own, infused with a meaning only Miranda and Corinthe knew. As a Fate in Pyralis, Corinthe had been connected to the world around her. The air, sky, plants—everything held vitality, a force that nurtured her body. But in Humana, the earth hurt. The first time she secretly tried to draw strength from it, the suffering had been so painful it had paralyzed her for days. She had been convinced she was being punished.
But Miranda tended to a small, previously neglected garden on the north side of the rotunda that she coaxed back to life. Flowers bloomed and deep green leaves stretched out to the sun. Its brilliance had called to Corinthe, and when she found it, she ran her hands over the surface of the ground, feeling the slight vibrations emitted from below. She had sunk her little fingers into the ground, pressing hard enough to feel the cold soil fill the space under her nails. Slowly, her senses had sharpened. The vibrations grew louder and turned into a gentle, swelling hum.
Life pulsed from the ground, weakly at first, and seeped into her body. Corinthe could still feel the pain of the trees and plants outside this small, sheltered space, but it was muted. Still, the relief was indescribable. She could hear bees humming, could smell the delicate rosebushes at the edges of the garden, could feel the earth’s pulse thrumming under her fingers.
She had sat for what felt an eternity before Miranda found her.
“What are you doing?” Miranda wore that same enigmatic smile Corinthe had seen so many times since.
“I—I was just … just stitching.”
“Stitching?”
It was one of the newer words she’d learned in Humana. To thread a needle, then weave strings back and forth until they made something beautiful. It was the best word she could think of to describe a process that had always been innate, intuitive. She had stood up, suddenly ashamed, determined to explain. “Something … passes through me when I’m here. Like strands of color. They come up through my fingertips, stitch everything in my body together. I feel … stronger here.”
“It’s not wrong to do,” Miranda said gently. “We take, then we give back.” She tipped her pitcher over a cluster of yellow flowers poking out of the ground.
Now, when Corinthe needed strength, she knew she co
uld go there without shame. It didn’t feed her the same way Pyralis did, but at least Corinthe was able to stitch enough energy to do the jobs she was tasked with.
Exhaustion caused her steps to be heavy as Corinthe made her way out of the room and turned right, down a short hall that led to a shorter flight of steep steps. On the landing, a thick wooden door, barely a foot wide, swung open on silent hinges. The sun was gone. The sky was an inky nighttime blue, and the stars were beginning to float out of the dark.
The door opened directly into a small garden. The space was tucked at the back of the rotunda, away from the wide pathways for tourists and joggers. The garden was concealed from sight by a wall of tall, thick hedges that Miranda had planted years ago.
Though Corinthe sometimes heard voices pass close by, no one had pushed their way through the thick foliage to discover her yet. At least, not while she’d been there.
Her oasis was small, maybe five feet by five feet, but it was bursting with life. Brilliantly colored flowers crowded the ground, snaked up the trellises, burst like miniature songs from the deep, long grasses. Here, it smelled like heaven—another human concept Corinthe had learned only recently.
It smelled like Pyralis. Its scent defined who she once was, and who she would be again.
Another thing she had to thank Miranda for.
“Hello,” she whispered, and sat down in the middle of the garden, where a small circular clearing had been made, just large enough to accommodate Corinthe. She brushed her fingers over delicate blossoms and inhaled the heady scent her touch released.
She only took enough strength to survive, and only from the plants she tended to.
Stealing from nature without giving back was against everything she believed in.
When she felt better, Corinthe gathered the petals Miranda had requested for her tonics, thanked the plants, then squeezed back through the narrow door.
In the kitchen, Miranda sat at the table, surrounded by vials and dried leaves. She ground something between two small flat rocks, so engrossed in her task that she didn’t even look up when Corinthe set the petals down next to her.
Quietly, so as not to disturb her Guardian’s work, Corinthe made her way to her bedroom. It wasn’t a very big space, maybe half the size of the main room, but she had managed to make it her own. An old lamp, draped with a piece of gauzy red material, sat on a battered nightstand next to her bed. The floor was covered with oddly shaped scraps of rug. It should have been hideous—oranges and greens and pinks all mixed together—but somehow, it worked. Corinthe kicked off her shoes and kneaded her toes into the plush rug.
She’d tacked an old sailcloth to the wall over her bed. She’d found it discarded at the Marina, tossed aside because of a small tear in the fabric, and had known at once what she would do with it. Now the plain white cloth was covered in bold blue-and-green swirls around a starburst of yellow that formed an abstract sky.
A dark, jagged steeple dominated the left side of the canvas. A postcard was taped to the wall next to the makeshift canvas: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The painting reminded her of Pyralis, where the perpetual twilight stained everything purple and blue.
It was a crude rendition, but it was hers, and she loved it anyway.
Ten years ago, when she had opened her eyes and found herself on a strange rooftop in a strange world, the stars overhead were the only things she recognized. She’d stood, alone and terrified, staring up at the sky for hours, watching it begin to glow, with a mixture of fascination and dread.
When the sun had finally crested the horizon in a burst of light, she’d scrambled to hide in the dark recesses of the roof. She’d never seen the sun rise before, except in marbles. The world around her had brightened until it was blinding, until she had cried for the first time, from terror and anguish, and felt the pain of those hot tears and the humiliation of snot running into her mouth: all of it new. Miranda had found her there, cowering in the shadow of a water tank. She had spoken to her, explained, coaxed her out of hiding. She’d given her a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses and slipped them coolly over her face, bringing some relief to the intensity. Together, they’d sat in the sunlight and Corinthe had squinted through the tinted plastic lenses, watching the world around her emerge.
“Am I the only one?” tiny Corinthe had asked suddenly, peering up at Miranda with sudden curiosity.
“No. There are many of you,” she’d explained.
“Where are they? Why can’t I see them?”
Miranda had smiled. “They’re all around, but you can’t see them because they blend in. That’s what they’re meant to do—to live among humans as one of them. And that’s what you’re meant to do from now on, too.”
Corinthe could still remember how those words had washed over her consciousness like an icy wave: exiled here, in this foreign, terrible world full of obscene noises and blasts of light.
Only the stars in the sky were the same. The stars remained constant in every alternate world, the same constellations dancing across the darkened sky. It had always fascinated Corinthe to watch them move. When she was a Fate, she could commune with the Unseen Ones simply by standing at the river of knowledge and asking a question with her heart. She had asked them once if the sky moved or if Pyralis did. The answer had come back to her in silent pulsing waves:
We exist nowhere and everywhere; therefore, we move with all and none.
The statement felt so profound that Corinthe had spent endless energy trying to make sense of it, trying to find the beginning and the end of the universe in her mind.
She knew such thoughts were pointless, though; there were infinite realms in the universe, all connected by one membrane: the Crossroad. She’d been through it once and it had nearly torn her apart.
She finished undressing and slid into a soft pink robe. Silently, she padded back out to the kitchen, where Miranda now worked over a pot of steaming water, humming. Miranda always hummed when she was lost in a task or deep in thought. Next to her, on the table, were several crumpled ticket stubs, which Corinthe recognized vaguely as belonging to the city’s transportation systems. That meant Miranda had been riding again.
“Why do you ride the buses?” Corinthe asked suddenly. She had always wanted to know, but Miranda hardly ever answered a question directly.
Miranda didn’t look up. “You never know where an opportunity will arise.”
“Opportunity for what?” Corinthe asked.
“For anything and everything,” Miranda said with a smile.
Corinthe shook her head. Miranda had strange habits. She’d been known to ride around on the city buses for hours, speaking with humans. Corinthe had tried this once, hoping she might come into contact with other Executors. But it had forced her to interact with humans—and talking to them had proved too confusing. Miranda, however, seemed invigorated after these outings. Corinthe had never understood why. Perhaps it was like Corinthe’s interest in clothing—unexplainable, a fluke, a small bit of Humana that appealed to her.
Corinthe drew a bath, as hot as she could stand it. The water turned her skin pink, and she scrubbed her whole body carefully: between her toes, under her fingernails, behind her ears. Death had a way of clinging to skin, and Corinthe hated the way it felt—like her whole body was wrapped up in a cold, clammy grip.
Later, as Corinthe sat on her bed, towel drying her long hair, Miranda came in without a sound and set a steaming cup on the nightstand. She moved behind Corinthe on the bed and began to run a comb gently through her tangled waves. Miranda’s fingers brushed over her scalp as she worked the sections into a neat braid.
Corinthe missed the way her hair would wind itself daily into a long, perfect braid in Pyralis. Somehow, she could never seem to tame the wild mane here in this world.
“It’s getting harder to remember,” Corinthe admitted.
Miranda didn’t ask what or why. She just squeezed Corinthe’s shoulder tenderly, stood up, and left her alone with her thoughts.
It was here that the memories of Pyralis resurfaced—mossy, dimly lit, sweet, like the gardens themselves.
The longing rose up, threatened to choke her.
Corinthe blinked her eyes open. The ceiling was strangely blurry.
“I’m ready to go home,” she whispered.
The room was silent.
Corinthe closed her eyes and tried again to picture Pyralis Terra. But this time, instead, she saw a pair of brown eyes gazing at her, and felt the single skating touch of a hand, like a butterfly’s wing against her shoulder.
4
The party was in full swing by the time Luc arrived. He knew Karen would be pissed. He’d tried calling her, but she was obviously screening his calls.
After he got off his shift at the boatyard, he’d come home to change, only to find out his dad hadn’t bothered shopping that afternoon. There was nothing in the fridge except some mustard and beer. And the old, cracked cookie jar where they kept extra money was almost empty.
Thankfully, Luc had been paid, and his shift money would cover something for dinner. Jas was already too skinny—and Dad, well, he’d just head down to the bar and forget he needed to eat. So Luc walked to a nearby convenience store and picked up some microwavable sandwiches and a couple of Twix.
Jas, of course, still refused to go to Karen’s with him. She had said she was going to stay home, bum out on the couch, and eat the Twix he gave her. He’d reminded her: Absolutely no going out. No T.J. No parties.
Definitely no parties.
The Mission Creek Yacht Club had rules against boat parties, noise levels, and maximum capacity—but Karen’s parents were founding members, and exceptions were made.
The brightly lit houseboat was moored at the end of a private pier, and it was bigger than most people’s real houses. It had three decks and a hull of gleaming chrome. Even though he was late, Luc walked slowly, enjoying the feel of the ocean breeze on his skin, the view of the thousands of stars glittering in the night sky like shattered bits of ice.