by Sarah Diemer
The illusion is well formed. There is the forest that slopes away from us, and ahead a wall that I know surrounds the city, as the eldest imagined it.
Darkness begins to fall, and red lines stretch away in the illusion: bits of Twixt showing through.
“What’s happening, sister?” asks the second sister, gripping the eldest’s black-sleeved arm. “Why is it becoming dark now?”
The eldest purses her lips, staring up at the counterfeit sky. “I…do not know. Perhaps I misjudged time and—”
Darkness falls instantly, absolutely, like a black cloak cast off, covering the forest and the city with its shadows.
There is a great tearing sound in the air. We three look up, and through the night descends a monster. It’s an atrocity built of bone and beak and wing, a truly ugly beast that frightens me, even though I know what it is, its true nature. Even though I know it is we who have made it appear this way.
It descends, flapping its wings, confused, turning its bone claws over and over again. It falls against the earth, rising, pushing off again. It crouches near us, watching us with deep black hollows for eyes.
“Do you see yourself, you ugly perversion?” The eldest whispers, advancing on our relation. “You are hideous, and every soul that comes to this place will run from you, screaming.” She grabs its clavicle, heaving it up, though this thing is three times her size. “You will be run from. You will be cursed. People will fear you as they have feared us. Now you will know exile. The tables have turned,” she says, smiling, and then she breaks off the bone she’s holding. The creature howls, tilting its head back, but she is too quick. She clamps a hand around the creature’s neck, and she squeezes.
It screams and screams as she devours its soul, and it crumbles to dust in her hands that she licks off her fingers, turning to stare at us, eyes red and glowing beneath her black hair, triumphant.
“Come, queens,” she whispers, holding out her dusty hands to us. “Come see our city. Our kingdom.”
As we pass through the walls of the city together, we see shadows up ahead. A boy and a girl who wander toward us, eyes wide, clothing as ragged and dirty as the dismal city sprawling before us.
“Please…” the girl whispers. She has long brown hair and has been weeping. The boy grips her hand, won’t speak, eyes wide and dark in the stillness. “We can’t remember anything. Please help us…”
The eldest steps forward, a hungry look flitting over her face for a heartbeat before she lifts her chin, swallowing. She reaches into her pocket then, drawing out something dark that shifts in the small breezes here. She holds it up, and I stare at it as the boy and girl stare at it, too.
It is one of the feathers from our relations, blackened to fit their illusion in this place now. It is hideous in comparison to what the feathers look like truly: glowing, lovely things that shine with their own light.
You can place an illusion upon an object, but it retains, at its heart, its true essence. Even as she holds it, the feather is luminous in the dark.
“I will give this to you. It will give you a single memory back…” says the eldest, leaning toward the boy and girl with bright eyes, “but you must give me something in return…”
“What?” they whisper, staring at the feather, hands clasped together. They salivate as they stare at it, and my heart pinches again as the eldest leans toward them.
“I’ll take a snip of your hair,” she whispers, threading a hand through the girl’s long mane. The girl shudders, leaning away from her, but she nods, and, quick as death, the eldest curls her fingers in the girl’s hair, yanking down so hard, the girl drops to her knees, screams.
The eldest holds up the hank of hair, turning it over and over in her hands with shining eyes. “Here…” she whispers, letting the feather drop to the ground. And then slowly, almost reverently, she feeds the hair into her mouth, long tongue licking it up.
She swallows it down in a single gulp.
The boy and girl stare up at her, eyes wide, shaking. She stares down at them, holding up a single sharp claw.
“Let me show you how to use it…” she whispers, licking her lips again with a smile.
Again, the memory shifts.
I am pacing in my own small room in the house outside of the city.
The plan has followed as the eldest hoped it would: flawlessly, perfectly. Our relations have appeared to save the souls, and because the illusion paints them as hideous, monstrous, the souls run and hide from them. Though there have been a few souls that were not fast enough, were Snatched, as we are now calling it, for the most part, we retain the souls with no work at all.
And we devour these souls slowly, savoring the flavor of their spirits, and their pain.
And I grow sicker, angrier, wearier.
And the eldest knows.
I become two again, merging back to one as I nervously pace. Over and over, I become two and then one, two and then one. When I am two, we pace together. We do not look alike, but we are the same creature, she and I.
The eldest is at the door of my room, glancing at me. There is suspicion in her red eyes.
I stop pacing, sit, but I have already given myself away.
That night, when we return from the city and I enter my room, I pause, hand on the knob, still, the metallic scent of blood all around me. I glance up and up, up at the bodies of birds nailed to the wall, their drying blood too bright, their smell too sickening.
Eight clawed hands at the small of my back push me into the room, and the door is shut fast behind me. A key turns in the lock, and I know now that I am caught. That it is all over for me.
My favorite pastime is restricted: I can take only three steps across the room before I must turn now—because of the birds. I become two for comfort, for company, and we pace back and forth, moving like clockwork over the creaking boards.
The night is long and still and full of terror. At first light, my other glances at me, and we pause in the center of the floor. She holds up her hand, brow up, questioning, and I press my palm against her palm.
They are coming for us.
My eyes widen as I stare at her, at this knowledge she’s given me that I did not possess. She cocks her head, shakes it softly, slowly.
Too late.
The door opens.
The eldest stands there, cloak tied about her chin. They have grown as grotesque as the Snatchers now, my sisters, with hair too long, dragging behind them, always tangled with trash and twigs. Because I have not devoured as many souls as they, my hair is more manageable, but still long enough to graze the ground.
I have not eaten a soul in days, days and days and days. I don't know how many days.
And now, finally, my sisters will reprimand me for it.
“Let us go for a walk,” whispers the eldest, holding out her hand. I shake my head, we shake our heads, take a step back, but the eldest is in the doorway, becoming two, and they advance on us, hands out, smiling beneath the endless, shining hair.
“Come,” she hisses to us, and then I am one again, and her hands are around my shoulders. The second sister is in the doorway, and she will not look at me, will only stare down at the floor.
“No,” I whisper, clawing at the edge of the bed.
At the front of the house, there is a knock at the door.
The eldest drops me, and I bruise against the ground. She snarls, turns, and slams the door shut behind her, turning the key in the lock.
Matilda is here, come to give the Sixers their morning report: how much Nox was consumed, how much more is required, even though we Sixers know this already, know everything. Matilda wants to be important. Here, now, I crawl over the floor, beneath the bed, clawing…
The memory jerks me to the side, and it’s over. I don’t know what happened between then and now, but I am beside the stream, and the eldest grips my hair with her hand, arching my head back, staring down at me with a too-wide smile.
Can you kill an immortal?
Of
course you can.
Just like flying, you can fall.
Just like living, you can die.
She reaches down to me, tracing a hand over my throat almost lovingly before her claws are back, and in one smooth, slight motion, she slits my throat.
Somewhere outside of myself, I see her throw my body into the ice. It breaks the ice, forming a hole, tumbling beneath the water.
The second sister takes the eldest’s arm as they walk away from the stream. They don’t look back once.
But a Sixer was not meant to be murdered. Not in her own construct, the city she helped create.
So it didn’t work.
But something…changed.
And when I awoke, my two halves were scattered, separated into two different bodies, and the lines of the illusion shifted to accommodate this mistake.
As the Sixers bore the illusion of youth, of humanity in their own city, the illusion stuck to me, as well, clung to me, but began to shape something different. I was the youngest, so I was a young woman still. But now there were two of me, the two halves to me, divided and apart.
Lottie.
And Bird.
As the memory begins to fade away, I see the girl appear at the edge of the hole in the ice. She’s on her back, wearing a tattered black lace dress. Beside her, laying in the opposite direction, is a girl covered all over in furs. They both have black hair, these girls. They both have shocking blue eyes, which they open at the very same moment.
And as the first girl sits up, the second one bolts towards the valley.
And everything begins again.
*
My back arches beneath me, and I choke on air, trying to breathe, scrabbling as my bones contort, no longer my own.
I breathe in, and I breathe out.
The memory races beneath my skin, and it remains, though the rushing has subsided, though the raging pulse in my wrists has stilled. I hold up my hands, stare at my palms, at the black lines there.
I contain multitudes.
I close my eyes, press my fingers against my face, rub them over my skin that I know is not my skin, not really. I open my eyes again, stare at my fingers as if they’ll change before my eyes, but of course they can’t. They won’t. The eldest has woven the construct too soundly for me to unmake it simply by thought, by remembering my hands as the claws they truly are.
I am nothing more than a monster. Less. I am less than a monster. Only half…
And now it all makes sense.
I woke up in the wrong place because everything was wrong from the beginning. I was not supposed to die here, was not supposed to die, and because I did, my soul bounced back in a strange, complicated way. I am separated from my other half, not whole. The Snatchers—our relations—did not want me because I am not a real soul or spirit, a human spirit, in need of saving. I am a monster, and a helpless one at that.
I breathe in and out, everything I hold inside of me breaking, like ice. I wanted out of this; I wanted to destroy Abeo City, our false, fatal playground. And my sisters murdered me because I was no longer theirs to control, and I—we, Bird and I—returned, because everything, all of this…was a mistake.
I stare at my hands as if seeing them for the first time: pale skin, blackened lines across their palms. They are soft and fair, like a young woman’s hands...
All I am is a lie.
A sob escapes my throat, and I turn over onto my side. I’m on a bed. It crinkles beneath me, and I lift my gaze, knowing what I will see, dreading the sight.
There are small bodies nailed to the walls.
I sit up quickly, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Hundreds of birds are nailed to the walls, and even covering the door, in a tidy pattern—like wallpaper. A single rusty nail sticks out of the center of each of their feathered chests. Along the top of the wall, there is a border of crows, and everywhere else, there are songbirds, their beaks open, tiny tongues shriveled, their eyes dull in death.
Every inch of the walls is covered in small, broken bodies. I cower in the center of the bed. They did this before they murdered me so that I would not go through the walls. I cannot walk through death, will not. It holds me here, trapped. My sisters know this.
Rage pulses through me like blood, like the blood dripped down the walls, solidified and staining.
I draw up my knees and hug them to me, pressing my forehead against them.
I breathe in and out.
And I listen.
“She has been separated.”
I open my eyes. I can hear them through the door. Do they know I listen? Maybe they think I’m still Memming—a delayed reaction triggered, I think, by the nearness of my sisters, to the Nox I took at Black House...
I keep breathing evenly, still my racing heart.
“It won’t be hard. Where in Abeo could she be hiding? We’ll ransack all of the Safe Houses, no stone unturned. We will kill this one again, and then the other. Easy.”
“I don’t like it. It didn’t work before.”
“Perhaps we should kill them together?” ponders the eldest. I know her voice. It makes my whole being recoil.
“Yes, yes. Perhaps. Matilda, you will remain here. You will watch. You will see that she does not leave. And if she does, you will make her Mem so that you can contain her.”
“Yes, ma’ams,” comes her sniveling, groveling voice.
And then they are all gone.
Bird.
They’re after Bird.
I know her now. Know why I recognized her, why I felt her so close to me, why she made sense. Because she is part of me, as I am of her. We are divided, but we are the same, she and I, but so different. I chew at my thumbnail, feeling the tears squeeze at the corners of my eyes again, but I won’t let them fall. I won’t.
I have to get out. I take a deep breath, stilling my heart.
I have to.
I close my eyes.
It’s a compulsion, the strongest one I’ve felt yet, stronger than when the Snatchers chased me.
Wait.
The Snatchers.
Our relations.
They wanted me to find Bird…led me to her.
I rake my fingers into my hair, tug. What does it all mean? I’ve remembered everything now, but I don’t know how to put it together yet, and I must. Does Bird remember? Is that why she couldn’t tell me, because the Sixers built this city, and they might hear her speak of it aloud?
I breathe in and out, shaking.
And the Sleepers.
Charlie and Violet and Edgar, all of them…
They’re not Asleep. They'll never Wake.
They’re dead.
I press the heels of my hands to my eyes until all I see are rich, changing colors. All I am inside is empty, is aching, is pain. Charlie thinks she’s going to wake up. That she can try again, make her life better. But she’s dead. Violet’s dead. Edgar’s dead.
And the Sixers are sucking them dry until there's nothing left. Until they Fade.
They won’t exist, not a hair of them, once the Sixers finish with them.
I sit up again so quickly that my head whirls and spins. No. They won’t have them. They won’t. I think of Charlie’s kindness to me. Of her soft smile, the way she threads her fingers through mine. She doesn’t know what I am, and now that I know... I swallow, the tears falling from my eyes.
What was happening between us is over. I’m a monster, only a monster. But I can still tell Charlie the truth.
Perhaps, I…I…
I gulp down air, gulp down a sob.
Could I help them escape? Could I guide them out of Abeo City, beyond the Gray Line, into Twixt? And then the Snatchers—not Snatchers at all, not really—could save them, carry them away from here.
Outside of the Gray Line, the illusion fades away. The Sixers only constructed the illusion up to the Gray Line, and after that, the truth is as plain as sight.
I rise from the bed, stand in the center of the macabre room, dead
bird eyes staring at me.
My hands curl into fists.
The Sixers are powerful. They killed me before. They’ll do it again, and this time…probably for good. Fragmented as I am now, I won’t come back, not a second time. My sisters will take my half-soul, freshly vacated from its body, and they’ll eat it up. And I will become nothingness.
…everything we did is for nothing.
That can't be. I have to find Bird. I have to find Charlie and Edgar and Violet. I have to tell them, tell them the truth. I close my eyes, bite my lip, swallowing tears as I imagine what Charlie will say, the look on her face, the betrayal in her eyes as she finds out that she is not sleeping, as she finds out that I am a monster. Hideous. Ugly beyond understanding.
My friends are so afraid of the Sixers, and I am a Sixer. I frightened them all, before…
But it doesn’t matter, none of it, not if they can be saved. If they can get past the Gray Line.
Whatever happens to me, I will get them past the Gray Line.
I remember the Snatchers refusing me, herding me to Bird. Do they know?
Were they…trying to help me?
Too many questions. Too many missing answers. I pace the tight confines of the room, turning well before I reach the walls of birds. Three steps. All I’m allowed is three steps.
As I stare up at the walls, at the stiff wings and the open beaks, I pause for a moment, for a heartbeat. I stare harder at the flock of bodies, unfocus my eyes.
I still my breathing, still my thundering heart. This was my room. They kept me in here before they decided to murder me. I remember pacing; I remember that I could take only three steps. I remember what it felt like to contain myself and how my two halves were not really so separate, merging and unmerging at will.
I remember something else…
There are loose boards beneath the bed.
I gasp, turn, drop to my knees without a sound, crawling beneath the rickety bed frame—a bed I never slept upon, never needed.