by Sarah Diemer
“I’m sorry… I can’t…” I begin, but she shakes her head, rising, pointing to the horizon that’s brightening as I watch it.
Daylight. Already. I stand, too, rubbing at my shoulders, skin pricking, strangeness sliding over my bones.
I turn, looking through the brightening woods. There is a shadow beyond the trees.
The bad house.
Bird’s eyes look haunted as she watches me.
“You’re going,” she says, and it’s not a question. How could she know? I take a step back as she scrabbles closer to me, closer and closer still until her nose is against mine, and she’s closing her eyes, pressing her forehead to mine.
“Why won’t you remember?” she breathes out, and when she steps back, there are tears in her eyes. She wraps her arms around her middle, rocking back on her heels. “You were supposed to remember.”
“Why can’t you tell me…” I begin, but she shakes her head, looks over my shoulder at the door, eyes wide.
“If they find out, everything we did, everything we went through is for nothing,” she whispers to me, breathing out. “You’ll do what you’ll do,” she says then, voice soft. “I just hope it’s the right thing.” She kisses my cheek, her lips chapped and worn and warm against my skin. “I’ll see you,” she says, and ascends the steps, shutting the church door behind her.
The woods, the quiet, silent woods, draw away from me like a map. As I step past the church, I look to the left, and I can see the house through the trees, its dark shadow. It’s beckoning me on. I should resist that beckon…
The Snatchers wanted me to come here. They wanted me to find Bird. Bird acted as if she knew me.
What does any of it mean?
Frustration mounting within me, I turn back, look at the door of the church, rub at my wrist, in the place where Bird pinched.
It slides over me, warm and strange as it coats my insides: that spellbound feeling, as if I wandered through a wall of spider webs and they’re dangling in sticky grey tendrils from my fingers. I brush my hands together but feel nothing but skin.
I know I must return to Abeo City. Charlie will be worried. And Violet and Edgar…my new friends. There’s warmth in my stomach when I think of them. More warmth, in a different space in my heart, when I think of Charlie.
I don’t want her—them—to worry about me.
But…
I look up at the shadow.
I need answers.
I won’t be long. I’ll be back in Abeo before sunset.
I set off through the forest, through this new day and daylight, angling toward the shadow ahead. As I walk, the church fades behind me, and the house begins to take shape between the trees. There’s a moment, a half-time and half-place, when I turn to look back at the church and can only make out its shadow, and ahead—there is a house, I know, but I can only make out its shadow, too.
Right now, one step in either direction would bring the church or house into focus, no longer a shadow but something real.
It’s a knowledge that’s deep in me, now, turning:
I have a choice.
I stand very still in the quiet of the wood. But I pause for only a heartbeat.
Something tugs at my heart, pulling me along.
I take a step forward, and the house sharpens into view.
Chapter Six: Sixers
I breathe in and out, stilled, as I stare at the house, its sprawling, piercing towers angling toward the sky; a misshapen, tangled nightmare of loose shingles and creaking shutters and windows boarded shut.
On the porch, as if they’ve been expecting me, two hooded forms sit on ramshackle chairs, as still and colorless as rubble, their hair tangled around the chair legs, tumbling over the ground.
I can't see their eyes, but I know they're watching me.
I have made my choice, and I will see it to its end. Fear stirs in my belly, clawing at my sides as I step forward, and then forward again, closing the distance between us until I’m at the porch steps, fingers on the worn wood of the banister.
“I’m Lottie,” I whisper into the stillness. “I was wondering…if you could help me…”
As one, the two Sixers—for that’s what they are, the unmistakable cloaked figures from the Wanting Market—cock their heads, but in opposite directions, like mirror reflections of each other.
“Help you,” they whisper, a slithering shush of sound that crawls over the broken floorboards of the porch towards me.
The battered door opens slowly, and there is the woman from the Need Shop, Matilda, arms folded, watching me with a superior smirk on her face.
In the back of my heart, as my world falls away, I know now: it’s begun.
The two Sixers on the porch seem to blur along their edges, their cloaks of misting black elongating, contorting, and then there are not two Sixers but four. Four cloaked figures that watch me like hooded birds from the porch, staring down at me behind faceless voids.
My heart hammers against my bones, but I still stand strong, feet apart, hands curled into fists. I am afraid of them, so afraid, so afraid, the fear licking along my skin with a long, cold tongue.
But there is anger within me, too, tangled with my fear. Anger so hot that it burns away the terror, replacing it with a fire that fills my belly, burns me up.
“Two,” I say then, say the word loudly, with a strength I wasn’t sure I had. “Two turns into four. But where’s your third?”
As one, the four stand, melt back into two so suddenly, as if they’re pulled into one another, slippery, gliding like feet over ice. As one, the two Sixers take off their hoods, peeling them back from their skulls with fingers that bear claws—ugly, curving, sharpened things... And beneath their hoods, I see no faces: there is only more hair, tumbling down, black and endless.
I breathe out, take a step back.
Falter.
My entire world shatters as they stare down at me with eyes I cannot see, the Sixers.
The Sixers…
As one, they shriek, claws extended, descending off the porch, snaking their hands around me, fingers pinching my arms, a maelstrom of black hair and dark cloaks and clicking claws that seize me, take me.
The Sixers.
My sisters.
The black lines in my palms pulse, pulse, everything shifting, changing, as the memories flood back, the gate, at last, creaking open—wide.
You’ll do what you’ll do, Bird said. I just hope it’s the right thing.
Darkness.
*
I crawl in a vast red land with my sisters.
There are the three of us—three with ugly, tattered wings, with sharp claws, our faces shaped like ill-formed masks, and we are crawling over the scorched rocks in search of something.
There, ahead of us. A pulse of light. We descend, screeching, and snatch it up. I am the youngest. The eldest always gets the first one. She takes the sphere of light and pulls it and twists it this way and that in her hands, until it’s a string of light, a thread of light, that she loops over and over her sharp fingers. She gobbles it up, swallowing the light down, licking her lips and claws with a rotting tongue.
In one bite, she devoured a soul.
The red land, red as blood, stretches away from us. We aren't alone here. There are many more monsters like us: crawling beasts that roam over the shapeless hills and valleys, searching for the pulses of light that appear and disappear, wink in and out.
We are, all of us, hunting the light.
We scrape claws over the red ground, red like blood, like fire, an engorged, bloody sky dripping overhead to hang low, close to us, smothering. I watch the souls appear—and then disappear, as they’re eaten… Flickering, moving orbs of light that roam slowly over the rocky ground. They are the tormented souls, and this is the in-between place for tormented souls, those not yet decided between the above or the below.
The new souls usually come all at once, and once a day, and we wait for them, hungry, starved. Their arrival prompts
a frenzy of scrabbling and devouring…
But since we—my sisters and I—are not the strongest or the fastest, we pick at the remains, the leftovers, like buzzards.
The eldest is in a rare mood today as we begin to hunt a second soul for my second sister.
“The mortals call it Purgatory here,” she hisses, gesturing with a clawed hand to the dry landscape ahead, devoid of light, of souls. “And it is a purgatory to us. Just because we know better, call it Twixt, doesn’t change what it is. We are trapped here, as surely as the souls we eat.”
I want to whisper, want to tell her, "But it wasn’t always this way." I close my cracking eyes now, remember for a heartbeat what we used to be, what we gave up. What we sacrificed.
We were beautiful once, radiant…with streaming white wings and glowing countenance.
Once. Long ago.
I open my eyes, stare at my sisters, and I bark out a snare of bitter laughter, and the eldest raises a misshapen brow; I duck my head, silenced, and I follow behind as we prowl over the landscape.
We are hideous, deformed externally to reflect our thoughts and actions. We hunt mortal souls and devour them because they satiate our hunger for something…better.
“There! Ahead of us!” hisses the eldest, and we crouch, peering over a craggy grouping of blood-red rocks. There is a soul, the dancing orb of light, out ahead in a little crimson valley. I glance at the sky, foreboding dragging over my skin, but the eldest snatches at my wrist, pulls me down and into the valley, the three of us tumbling after the soul that now floats still, as if it is waiting for us.
We race toward it, crawling and running over the ground in turns, but I hear the sound of the sky tearing before we’re there, before we reach the soul.
“No!” screeches the eldest, staring upward.
This, I think, raising my gaze to the shape descending through the red toward us. This is what we once were. I gape—we all gape—as one of our relations, with her gleaming wings and luminous shape, descends into Twixt, diving toward us.
“Grab it! Must I do everything myself?” the eldest snarls, leaping on top of the soul, taking it up in her claws, positioning it to enter her great maw. But our relation is too fast for my sister, extending her wings, crashing against her and rolling end over end.
Our relation stands, the orb in her hands, but I don't look at the orb. I look at her…
She is more beautiful than I can understand, her white wings sweeping against the ground, her skin glowing like a hundred thousand stars, her eyes bright and blue and all-seeing. Her right wing is a bit ragged, and I remember her now… I have seen this relation before. I don't know when. Perhaps when we three were not yet fallen, or perhaps after. Time is meaningless in Twixt, and memories are slippery, hard to grasp and keep.
All I know for certain is that she is so lovely, she makes my heart ache (despite everything, I think I still have a heart), and I fall to my knees before her as she gazes on us three, beatific face expressionless as she holds the orb of the soul against her body.
The eldest launches to her feet, begins to barrel across the ground, and with one dramatic upsurge, the relation takes to the sky, pumping her glorious wings with effortless power until the redness swallows her whole, and she and the soul are gone, above. I know that she takes the soul now to someplace better, that soul that was snatched out of the eldest's hands, even as she was about to devour it into nothingness.
Angered, my sister screams, a bellow that echoes, and claws at the sky.
“I will destroy her,” she hisses, curling her claws into fists, gouging out her palms until they bleed, the blood dripping into the red ground, disappearing entirely. “They can hurt us still, even here. This must change,” she says, lowering her face to our level.
I am afraid when I look into her eyes.
She plans something.
The memory changes, lengthens, contorts…
I gather with my two sisters around a green roaring fire built in a red-washed cave, far in the back where we are hidden from our relations, and my eldest sister paces back and forth, back and forth, in front of the flames.
“We need the souls for energy, for sustenance,” she says through cracked lips, pausing in front of the fire, pointing her claws to it. She speaks shrewdly, biting off the words as she watches us. “But what if we took a bit of that power and spun it into something more than a meal for a belly?”
I shrink away from her as the second sister asks, “What can you mean?”
The eldest watches me, eyes narrowed, as she steps closer, into the green fire that hisses, burning up her broken and then rehealed legs, sizzling up and over her body as she snarls out, letting the fire scald her, scorch her, and doing nothing to stop it. Enjoying it. She shows us that she is the strongest, that we must listen to her, and I cower back in fear as she moves out of the fire now, stalking toward us.
“You do not seem interested, sister,” she says to me, head to the side, staring down into my eyes. I do my best to hold her gaze, but I waver, and she sees this. She takes me up, her claws around my neck, suspending me high in the darkness.
“We Sixers must remain together,” she hisses. “Always together, of one mind. Do not forget this.”
I fall, crumpling, as she dashes me to the ground, upon the rocks, and she turns back to our second sister, the simpering sister who paws at the eldest’s elbow, cooing quietly.
I rise to my knees, press my hand against the curve of shoulder and neck, loathing rising within me with such intensity, it devours me whole, as surely as we devour souls. For too long, the eldest has bullied me and broken me and told me over and over again how she is powerful and I am dust.
I am not dust.
“Here…” says the eldest, hissing, as she waves her hands over the green fire in sharp, bright patterns. Suddenly, there is a construct in the flames, an image that flickers with the heart of the fire. It’s small and simple, hard to make out, but then I peer closer, and I see it: the construct is a city surrounded by a wall, surrounded by a forest, the trees badly sketched into the image before us, like half-formed, malformed twigs.
“The souls would appear here every day,” she hisses, pointing to the center of the city. “The city would house them, and we could leech their souls from them slowly, store the ones we didn’t want to devour for later. We need not even hunt them! We milk them for every bit of life they have, bleed them of their energy, use them up. With such time and leisure, we might invent new ways to devour them. We could make them beg us to take their souls. I have thought of ways…” She curls her fingers together with a snarl. “And our relations, the ones with white wings…” Her misshapen mouth scowls. “We could twist their countenances. Make them hideous to these souls. Make the souls run from them, as if for their very salvation!” She laughs so hard, spittle bubbles up from her lips.
And, inside of me, something shifts and pinches and hurts.
No, I think, but do not say.
No.
I do not want to do this thing. I do not want to build this illusion city. I do not want to torture the souls that come to this halfway place, already lost, already tortured.
It is new and strange, this want, but it’s born here: I remember the time before I fell. I remember love and kindness, those curse words that my sisters now spit out of their mouths, marking them ugly, foul.
Though I cannot ever have it again, still…I want it back.
And, suddenly, I find my voice.
“I do not want to do this thing,” I whisper, the words coming out as rough and ugly as I am. I shiver and shake under my sisters' baleful eyes as they watch me, unmoving, unspeaking.
I have spoken my truth.
Now will come my punishment.
They stare at me as if I’ve told them something absurd, as if I've told them we are not truly devils, after all. Of course we're devils. We made our choices.
The eldest hobbles toward me, and I raise my arms, my claws against her, waiting for the blo
w…but it does not come.
“You are our sister,” says the eldest, pinching my elbow, dragging me to her, staring at me with her flashing red gaze. “And you will do this.”
I shudder.
Many of our kind possess oddities of body or ability. We three sisters are the Sixers, for we three can become six. And, as I watch, cowering, my elder sisters now become four. And they gather about me. Me. Only me. One against three or two against six, I will lose this battle.
I am afraid of them. I have always been afraid of them. As the eldest twists my elbow, twisting it tighter and tighter beneath her curving, clawed fingers, I cry out in pain, but she doesn’t stop twisting. She loves pain, relishes it, eating it up as she devours part of my spirit.
And my second sister simply watches while the eldest towers over me, eating up a part of my soul that I will never get back.
She drops me to the floor with my broken arm, and I cower beneath her as she turns, licking her long fingers thoughtfully.
My sister is not powerful enough to do what she wishes alone. She needs the energy of souls in order to build this city, what she will call, she tells us, Abeo City. She laughs as she speaks these words, as she snatches up the orbs of souls, lengthening them into glowing threads and spinning a city out of their somethingness.
How many souls does she use to build the city? I don't dare count. She sends us, our second sister and me, out gathering, soul after soul, and if we do not find them—and often, we don't—she breaks new bones in our bodies thoughtfully, very slowly.
I don't want to do this, but I do it still. I find her souls. I snatch them up in my monstrous hands, and I take them to her, too many, so many… Because I am no better than her. I do not stop her.
She spins the city, woven from spirited light, for seven days and seven nights. In the end, at last, she stands before her construct, this bubble of a city and forest that looks misplaced, comical in the red barren lands of Twixt.
"Come," the eldest says.
And we three step inside.
“Look at us,” she breathes, turning and twirling. Now the eldest has long black hair, wears a black dress and cloak, and she looks—more or less—like a human. Or the suggestion of a human. I glance down at my human hands (that are still claw-like), feel back for my hood and draw it over my head, dropping my eyes.