by Lana Popovic
“No.” I could feel the resolve hardening within as I said it, like cooling glass taking on its final shape. “She can’t do without you; I could feel that much. You’ll have each other, and Luka—he’ll find someone else. It should be me who goes.”
Lina struggled upright, balling her fists against her thighs. “I won’t let you. Not this time. And even if I were willing, think what it would be like for me. I’d have to have babies, Riss, to carry on our line. How could I do that to Niko, drag her into all of this, make her watch me groom my children—ours, maybe, if she were still with me after all that—for sacrifice? Would she even stay with me? And if she did, how could I live and watch her get old, die in front of me? I won’t do it, I won’t. I’ll go—you stay. You have all the things you’ve never had.”
I drew away from her, unsteady. An ache began building in my center, growing outward, until it sank through my skin and bowed my skeleton down toward the earth.
“Really?” I whispered. “After everything you just told me, everything you’ve already gotten to have that I didn’t—you won’t even let me make this one choice? After all that fighting I did, all the struggling, all the barbed-wire shit that meant nothing while you hid in plain sight? Now you won’t even let me be the one to sacrifice, if that’s what I want? I don’t want to be the one to stay behind.”
She shook her head, her eyes pooling, pale and clear as spring water. “You’re not taking the hit for the both of us, not again. Not ever. I’m the prepped one, anyway. I’m the one they groomed just in case, you know?”
Resignation thudded over me, heavy as soil dropped on a casket. “Then I suppose we’ll see what sort of contest happens when sisters can’t decide.”
“ONE DAY TO prepare,” Sorai said through her teeth. This time she stood as we knelt before her on the cushions, the roses wheeling around us. Her eyes glittered with tamped-down fury, and the skin beneath them was dusky with fatigue. “That is all the time I can give you foolish, self-indulgent fledglings—my hold frays already, the curse bucks beneath my will. Faisali has tried to wake four times since I saw you last. Four times in two hours.”
Guilt poured over me, prickly with panic, and beside me Malina made a low sound of distress. We were putting so much at risk because we couldn’t come together the one time it truly mattered. But there was no splitting the difference here. I wouldn’t let her go willingly any more than she would let me.
“Death will be your judge, and you will agree to abide by the decision. There can be no dissent once that is done, do you understand? Not even an inkling of it.”
“I do,” I said softly, my throat tight. Beside me, Malina nodded silently. We weren’t holding hands this time.
“Then go to bed, rise early, and begin. I will send someone for each of you. If you truly wish to fight each other for this, you will do it tomorrow night.”
“What . . .” I cleared my throat. “What will it be like?”
“After your lessons, you will be readied for the ritual banquet, where you will then perform. Everything done to you—and everything you do—shall be in the service of beauty. That is your work now; make yourselves lovely. Azareen has the advantage here, Lisarah. She has been learning from Naisha since she was a child, where you have been given far too much free rein. So, you will do everything in your power tomorrow to smooth all those jagged edges—in which you seem to take such pride—into something fit to be beheld and beloved by Death.”
Even though I’d decided to do this, committed myself fully to fighting to win, everything in me bucked in protest at that imperative. In my lap, I curled my hands into tight fists. I could do it, if that was what it took to save her. I could force myself soft.
“What about me?” Malina asked quietly.
“As I said, you are already primed to win. But your sister has been fierce like you never have. Where she should learn softness, your challenge will be to grow truly bold; now is the time to shed that meek veneer, show us what truly lies beneath.”
“Can I . . .” Malina’s voice cracked. “I’d like another bedroom, please. If you have one to spare, I mean?”
I could feel my insides splitting, cleaving in two. So this was heartbreak. At least now I knew what that felt like.
TWENTY-FIVE
EVEN WITH THE BONE-DEEP EXHAUSTION OF THE PAST FIVE days turning my marrow into lead, I hadn’t thought I’d sleep at all without Malina breathing beside me. But Shimora had kindly scented me into some semblance of peace, stroking my hair while waves of her perfume lapped me into sleep like some gentle tide. In the early morning, my heart still throbbed like a rotting tooth, but otherwise I felt more awake than I had in days.
We had breakfast in a massive, sunlit dining room, at a polished table so long it could easily have seated fifty people. A row of iron chandeliers swung above, square cages nestled within cages all the way down to the minuscule, metallic birds trapped within each. Shimora sat between me and Malina, like a buffer; there were about thirty others of our family there. I wasn’t even sure what to call them, all these grandmothers so many “greats” removed. Relatives? Kinswomen? “Grandmother” felt jarringly strange when they were all so youthful, that ripe, full bloom of Mama’s age. So many pairs of mothers and daughters, indistinguishable from each other without the telltale indicia of years.
I recognized falling-star Ylessia from the night before, smiling at me as she forked burstingly sweet heirloom tomatoes, brined feta cheese in olive oil, and curls of salty Njeguši prosciutto onto her plate. All the food was so perfect and simple it tasted lavish, an elegance that made me ache for Mama. Oriell was there too, the teal-haired ballerina, and the Valkyrian bell-ringer named Xenia.
Despite a nearly tangible undercurrent of tension—they all clearly knew that everything depended on us, and that we couldn’t align; it was obvious in the sidelong traded glances, the hushed whispers down the table from us—they all flocked gracefully to us between bites, eager to greet us and skim our cheeks with affectionate hands, as if we belonged naturally to them even after years apart. After so much time with just Lina and Mama, it felt impossibly surreal to be surrounded by these gorgeous, ageless women, so hemmed in and awash in family. I could feel the kinship of their gleam, twining and curling fondly against mine. It was beyond wonderful, a warm web of joy and belonging. It made me wonder again how Mama could have ever snipped herself loose from it.
“Where’s Natalija?” Malina asked. “Naisha, I mean. Shouldn’t she be here?”
Shimora glanced around, brow furrowed. “She wasn’t feeling well earlier this morning, I believe. But yes, she is here. I’m sure she’ll find you later.”
“And where is everyone else?” I asked Shimora as I washed down a bite of oil-soaked, divinely crusty bread with a tangy sip of yogurt. “Four thousand years of us, and never dying—there should be more, shouldn’t there?”
“There are,” she confirmed. “With a new pair of daughters every twenty years or so, we’re over two hundred by now, scattered all over the world. We have other strongholds like this one, though we began here, built this one first for ourselves. There’s also a lovely little palazzo in Venice, and a castle in Spain belongs to us. Quite a few others, too. With so many years to ourselves, why not roam as we please—especially if we can do it together? We have companions, too, of course, for as long as we choose. We live however we like, and we always have each other to return to in our little enclaves.”
“How?” Malina asked quietly. “All this is so . . . grand. Where does the money come from?”
“Clever investments, for one, with so many years to accumulate profit. And we’re consummate performers, exquisite ones. What we do can be easily reframed as a spectacle for the wealthy. As long as we’re careful to keep it in the proper setting, contained within the trappings of mundane entertainment. You can imagine what we can charge, performing together.”
“Like a circus,” I murmured. “Only we’re real.”
“Precisely.” Shimora
dabbed daintily at her mouth and rose in one smooth movement. “Now, will you come? Azareen, Xenia will take you.” The freckled Valkyrie from the night before stepped next to her, her smile restrained but warm. “Though everyone else will soon be here, it will take too long to wait for one of our melodic empaths to tutor you today. And you’re already well on your way, besides.”
My stomach clenched into a fist at the throwaway mention of Malina’s greater strength. They all thought that she would win. “And me?”
“Ylessia will teach you. She doesn’t have the infinite bloom—what we call your fractals—but only one other of us has that gleam variant in any case. It’s one of the rarest forms. And . . .” She hesitated for a beat, and I glanced at Malina out of habit for her reaction; she was staring intently at Shimora, her nose slightly wrinkled the way it did when she was listening avidly to someone. “And she’s much too far away. Let us not waste time while Sorai struggles.”
BACK IN MY bedroom, Ylessia sat across from me like a yogi, cross-legged with one calf tucked over the other and foot pointed in a display of flexibility that made my inner thigh ache in sympathy. Other than the pale eyes we all shared, she looked nothing like Malina, Mama, or me, especially with the riotous froth of her black ringlets bouncing freely to her waist, rippling with ribbons. She reminded me of the South American tourists we sometimes saw in Cattaro, tanned beauties with tiny noses and impossibly full lips, round faces and prominent bones very different from my own jutting angles.
She pursed her lips at my scrutiny, dimpling. “Have I passed muster, Lisarah?” She had a sweet, lilting accent, and her voice was surprisingly deep and musical for someone so small. It reminded me painfully of Niko. “Or shall I hold myself captive for you a little longer, until you’ve examined me at your leisure?”
Hearing her speak so formally jarred me. There was such a disconnect between that young face and the almost archaic structures of her speech that belied her true age.
“I was just wondering where you were from, if that makes sense. You look . . .”
“Foreign?” A curved brow arched up. “Unusual?”
I dipped my head, a little embarrassed. “Typically those apply to me.”
“Understandable,” she said simply. “You’re magnificent. Even by our standards. Faisali made a very wise choice with your father, whoever he was.”
“What?”
“We cherry-pick fathers for wit and beauty, those of us whose . . . burden is to carry on the line. Once a sister is chosen to sacrifice, the other must get with child as soon as possible. Each chosen one only endures twenty years at the very most, and when she burns out, the next generation must be ready to serve. Jasmina waited nearly a year to have you, which is far longer than we normally take. But she was grieving badly for the loss of Anais. We understood the time she took.”
I thought of Luka, and the uncanny valley. He’d been right, to a degree. If this was true, Malina and I were human and born, but we were made, too.
I bit the raw inside of my cheek, thinking how awful it must be to have to even consider it, to think of designing your own children in the wake of losing your sister. What a desperate, miserable thing.
“It sounds terrible, does it not,” Ylessia said bitterly, as if she could read my mind. “And it is, at times. We, all of us, have lost a sister and a daughter, and the pain . . . the years erode it, but do not erase.” She turned her hand over, moving it until the tiny crystal caught between her veins sparked in the light. “That is what these are for—once we fulfill our final obligation and give up a daughter, this diamond locks us into place within Mara’s spell, the counterweight to the curse.”
“Why diamonds?”
But even as I said it, I remembered Luka’s lit-up face as he told me how diamonds could be used for quantum computing, how the tiny flaws within their atomic structure could hold over a million times more information than silicon systems. Something about nitrogen pockets, maybe. I’d tuned out as I sometimes did when he turned the nerd dial to ten, but now that I might never see him again, I wished with such a fierceness it bordered on yearning that I could remember exactly how his voice had sounded as he said it.
“Because they’re what we’re made of, in a static state. Carbon in its purest form, a natural conductor for magic.”
“Can I touch it?”
She held out her wrist to me, presenting her hand as if it were a gift. I ran my finger over it, a tinge embarrassed of my clammy hand. The hard surface lay flush against her satin skin, as warm as she was. “Did it hurt?” I asked softly, tracing its facets, peering into the tiny, yellow flickers of flaws in its depth.
“Yes.” Her voice was husky. “When the spell spears through you for the first time—it feels like I imagine dying might, which I suppose is only fair.” She cleared her throat. “Let us begin.”
The parquet between us was littered like a three-dimensional found-object collage. Trays and bowls held bolts of snakeskin gleaming with a liquid sheen, strings of rainbow beads, glittering crushed powders, piles of multicolored stones, spiderwebs glistening with dew pinned between sheets of glass, birds’ nests with eggs, even what looked like a heap of preserved butterflies with nearly transparent orange wings.
“Go on,” she said, gesturing toward it all. “Begin.”
“But I don’t know where to start trying,” I protested. “There’s so many.”
“Don’t start ‘trying’ anywhere.” Her eyes were level. “‘Trying’ won’t make you the one who wins. Do all of them, at once, with everything you have. You’re back in coven now; your gleam might not be honed and precise like your sister’s, but you should be near to full strength, as we all are when we are close to each other. It’s been paining you to gleam fully thus far, because you were not taught how to do it properly, and it stunted you. But now I’m here to guide you. Now it will be a glory, so do not be afraid of it.”
I dug my nails into my palms and began—and as soon as I did, the whole of the room kaleidoscoped between us, shattering into a behemoth fractal. And as Ylessia had said, now that I was no longer holding back or panicked, it felt like my human insides had been replaced with an endless, surging flood of light, a rushing river of pure relief.
Diamond trails of green snakeskin blazed everywhere, crisscrossing one another like reptilian bridges, while helices of multicolored beads spiraled through them. The powder grains whirled around each other like miniature tornadoes, near blinding in their brilliance, and as they multiplied, the piles of different stones bathed the room with light—agate, violet, periwinkle, crimson, a spectrum of my own making.
In the very middle, a writhing column of dead butterflies rose up like an organic Chihuly sculpture, surrounded by a chain link of nests with endless arcs of speckled eggs.
And the dew-flecked spiderwebs stretched out around it all, anchoring every corner, encompassing the whole of it like a dangling dreamcatcher.
“Beautiful!” Ylessia whispered, low and fierce. “Now stand. Walk among what you’ve created. Hold your head up and be lovely.”
She stood along with me, moving as I moved. I kept the fractals fracturing, shuffling them like some glorious tarot deck, even as I stepped between them delicately, ducking my head beneath the floating snakeskin arcs, slipping my hands through the pearled strings of the beads, stepping over glowing stone paths that looped around our feet. Ylessia corrected me with light touches as I walked through the world of my own making—lifting my chin, shaping my limbs, guiding me toward grace.
“Be strong, yet soft,” she whispered into my ear. “Be fierce, yet so fastidious. Remember what all this power is for—to serve, and play, and always please.”
Another ripple of rebellion stirred hot in me; I could do all this, whirl the world into orbit around me as if I were a sun, and I had to be soft while I did it? I could whip this gorgeous fury into motion all around me, tug it toward me with my own gravity like a black hole, and I was supposed to be fastidious about it?
That couldn’t possibly be right.
And then I heard Malina’s song.
She could have been rooms or even floors away, and it didn’t matter; it sounded as if an entire army of angels had crashed calamitously into the earth. This wasn’t just a fundamental and an overtone, or two, or even ten—it was an orchestral score from some hybrid of heaven and hell, so staggering and celestial that hearing it crushed my fractals with its aural weight, dissolved them into motes of sparkling dust.
It sounded like the world’s most epic victory march.
She thought she was winning. She was going to win.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I forgot about Ylessia and her instructions; I closed my eyes to the materials outside me and reached inside myself, as if I were striving to close my fist around my own heart. I thought of Sorai and her black roses—and like flinging a javelin from deep within myself, I flung out the repeating pattern of branches and flowers that made a massive wisteria tree, a living, thriving fractal in the shape of my own will.
Ylessia was screaming something—it might have been something like stop!, or please!, if I’d had even the slightest room to care—as slim branches and pink and purple blossoms surged all around us, in the most delicately dangerous headlong rush. They funneled toward the center of the room, where they collided, building a waterfall arch of wood and flower like a wedding wreath. In their center they formed a portal, opening into somewhere I had never seen—a pale, pastel night sky cluttered with stars, as seen from beneath the stony overhang of a sea cave, neon streaks of aurora borealis reflected in the placid water beneath.
I could actually see the splash of the Milky Way, like a sparkling cream dissolving into the thicker liquid of the night.