The Sisters of Reckoning

by Charlotte Nicole Davis

  As much as Aster enjoyed the landscape art, though, she liked Raven’s self-portraits even better. Most of them were drawings of Raven now, that catlike imperiousness glinting in her eyes, with her locs piled high like a headdress or falling loose across her variegated face. But there were a few of her as a child, as well, when she’d still willed herself to try to live as a boy and gone by a name that was now dead to her. Her drawings were real to her in a way the world was not, Raven had explained, the only place she could imagine herself as the girl she’d never gotten to be or as a woman made of softness and curves. It was something Aster had always admired about her, and even envied—not just the ability to envision a different world, but to bring it life.

  “So, are you gonna tell me?” Raven asked from her bed, where she had sat down to peel off her hose.

  Aster struggled to pull her own dress off over her head. “Tell you what?” she mumbled through the fabric.

  “Tell me what message it is you’re trying to get to Clementine.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on, now,” Raven said, raising a brow. She had an intuitiveness that sometimes reminded Aster of Clem—which only made it that much harder for Aster to lie to her. “I saw you slip something to the wagon driver. I know it wasn’t for him.”

  Aster rolled her eyes as she tossed the merchant’s dress aside. A rash of gooseflesh ran up the rich, deep brown of her bare arms, muscled from lifting weights and hitting the heavy bag. In the months since joining the Lady Ghosts, Aster had set about making herself stronger—never again did she want to feel as vulnerable as she had in those first days on the run, too weak to even sit up straight in her saddle.

  “Listen, obviously it’s not going to be me who peaches to Priscilla,” Raven went on when Aster didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m just warning you, if she finds out, she’s not going to be happy. You know the rules—no contact with the outside world without her say-so.”

  Priscilla was the leader of the Lady Ghosts, the kindly older woman who had first welcomed Aster and the other Green Creek girls a year ago.

  Aster scowled as she dug through her trunk of clothes. Priscilla was in every way Mother Fleur’s opposite—patient, generous, forgiving. Aster respected Priscilla. The last thing she wanted to do was disappoint her.

  “There’s nothing in the letter for her to worry about,” Aster promised.

  “So you admit to having written it.”

  Aster huffed. “Look, I just wanted to get in touch with Clem, make sure she’s doing okay. Even back at the welcome house, I could … we’ve never been apart like this before. But I’m no fool, I wrote in code. Even if that letter falls into the wrong hands, nobody’ll be able to trace it back to us.”

  Raven shook her head, sighing like a woman three times her age. “One of these days, Aster, you’re going to push too hard. I only hope somebody’s there to catch you when you get pushed back.”

  They finished changing. Raven slipped into her favorite skirt and blouse while Aster shrugged into a worn red homesteader’s dress. Long-sleeved and ankle length, it was the sort of practical clothing that the Lady Ghosts typically wore when they weren’t going in disguise. Once she tugged on her ankle boots, she followed Raven down to the mess hall so they could join the others for supper.

  It had been unreal, the first few weeks with the Lady Ghosts, and sometimes it still was. Living with some fifty women and girls was, in many ways, like being thrown back to Green Creek—the friendships and friction that formed between age mates, the common complaints about pockmarks and split ends, the rumors and gossip that passed from mouth to ear. But every girl at Green Creek had been a prisoner, while every girl at the Graveyard was here by choice. The mines might not have had the luxuries of a welcome house, but neither did suffering hang heavy in its air—and that made all the difference. Even now, as Aster walked down the dimly lit underground passageway, she felt more grateful than she ever had walking along the ornately carpeted hallways of the Green Creek mansion.

  Aster and Raven entered the mess hall, a low-ceilinged room filled with worn wooden tables topped with mining lanterns. Brown-yellow light bathed the faces of the former Good Luck Girls crowded together on the benches. They’d already started eating, bent over their plates or reaching for pitchers of water. The moment they saw Aster and Raven, though, the other Lady Ghosts erupted into cheers. Aster felt her cheeks warm as the applause washed over her.

  “Congratulations on another successful borderjump, Ladies,” Priscilla said once the noise died down. “That makes six so far this year. Those are some of our best numbers yet. Raven, Aster—fix yourselves a plate. You deserve it.”

  Aster’s chest swelled with pride, a grin breaking through her carefully constructed calm. She dipped her chin deferentially and hurried off towards the serving table behind Raven. The girl behind the table smiled at them and heaped generous spoonfuls of baked beans and mashed potatoes onto their plates. As always, memories of Eli tugged at the back of Aster’s mind, and, as always, she pushed them away. Eli was still working in the kitchens for the Scorpions as far as she knew, and still soft-spoken and serious and bald as a cue ball. As many new allies as Aster had made among the Lady Ghosts, it was hard not to miss the friends she’d left behind—the ones who had seen her through the hardest time of her life.

  “Thanks,” Aster said, grabbing a biscuit and taking her seat next to Hannah and Lucille. Raven slid in next to her and started in on her food without bothering to greet the table.

  “So how’d it go?” Lucille asked them, raising a brow curiously. She was eighteen, like Aster, with light brown skin and straight black hair she wore in a single braid. Her favor was a cascade of rubies, but, like most of the Lady Ghosts, she went by her given name. Aster and Raven were rare exceptions—Raven had left her former name and identity behind, and Aster still preferred to share her true name only with those she trusted completely.

  “Went about as well as could be expected,” Aster said, looking sidelong at Raven. “Had a little hiccup—the border agent stopped us at the last minute and asked to see our favors—but nothing too serious.”

  “If it had been something serious, the dead only know what this one would’ve done,” Raven said with a smirk, taking a bite of her pulled chicken sandwich.

  Aster ducked the other girls’ glances. “It’s true—I damn near threw hands when I saw that armyman coming back for us,” she admitted. “But what if he had found the false bottom? Or if he’d realized our guarants were ill got?”

  “Hasn’t happened yet,” Hannah said with a shrug. She had frizzy blond hair she’d tried desperately to contain beneath a dustkerchief and a favor of a bird of paradise along her white skin.

  “Well, it’s bound to eventually,” Aster said stubbornly, straightening in her seat. Most of these girls had never been on the run in the way Aster had. They had been bought out of the welcome houses by fairblood allies pretending to take them on as fortunas, allies who would then see the girls safely to the Graveyard. Only one in a hundred girls had broken themselves out by force like Aster had, and so only one in a hundred knew what it was to try to survive the road with raveners and lawmen on your tail.

  You had to be prepared for anything.

  “All I’m saying is, I’d feel better if we were allowed to carry weapons,” Aster went on. “It doesn’t even have to be a gun. I’m better with my knife anyway—”

  “You know we can’t jeopardize the operation like that,” Lucille said.

  “But shouldn’t we at least have a plan?”

  “We do,” Lucille answered, matching Aster’s tone. “If you get caught, you give yourself up peacefully and reveal nothing.”

  And the Lady Ghosts lose a valuable agent that we can’t spare.

  “It’s just … it’s hard enough trying to help these girls,” Aster said with a tired exhale, sopping up some of the gravy on her plate with her biscuit. “I don’t see why we’re making it even ha
rder on ourselves. I mean, six girls borderjumped for the year? We’re already halfway through summer. We could do so much more if we were willing to take a few more risks.”

  “This is the way we’ve done things for years, Aster,” Hannah said, an edge creeping into her voice. “Slow and steady, working through the system. The second our fairblood allies get a whiff of trouble on our part, they’re out. We’re not going to risk that just because you’re feeling a little restless. You did good today. Don’t take away from that.”

  Aster didn’t argue further, though she itched to. She was still finding her feet here at the Graveyard. This wasn’t like being on the trail with girls she’d known half her life. There were rules here, strategies, a hierarchy—and Aster was no longer at the top.

  She glanced at Raven, who gave her a small shrug. Aster knew she wasn’t the only one who wanted to push the Lady Ghosts further. She and Raven had talked about it before. It cost thousands and thousands of eagles to buy a Good Luck Girl out of her welcome house, and thousands more to get the paperwork to sneak her across the border. The Ladies were entirely dependent on charity from a handful of trusted fairblood allies and what little shine they could raise themselves by selling the goods they made here at their base. To borderjump even one Good Luck Girl represented months of painstaking labor and careful, coded correspondence. And while there were girls who might escape from their welcome houses on their own, they still had to find the Lady Ghosts without getting caught, and the Ladies had no infrastructure to help them. How many had been lost to the Scab or recaptured by the law?

  They had to do better. They couldn’t keep being ruled by fear. Every day that passed was one day too late for some girl.

  But it’s not up to me, Aster thought. She was lucky to even be here. It wasn’t her place to make demands.

  At least, not yet.

  The clear ringing of a triangle cut through Aster’s thoughts. She looked up at the head table, where Priscilla sat with two other women at her side. To her right was Marjorie, her second in command, an older woman with a warm, round face, a button nose, and salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a messy tail. She was a member of the northwestern tribe, one of the Nine Nations that had made up Arketta before it had been transformed into a prison colony. Aster knew that those who had resisted the Empire’s advances had gone on to become its first dustbloods, and that many of their descendants lived in the Scab still. But despite that, Aster had never seen much of Nine’s cultures before, forbidden as any such open allegiances to them were. And so Marjorie, with her collection of miniature whalebone figurines and her stories passed down from the time before the Empire, had always been one of Aster’s favorite Ladies to learn from. Marjorie and Priscilla had been working together for decades now, though neither had been in the field themselves for several years. These days, Marjorie spent most of her time running correspondence with their allies.

  Standing to Priscilla’s left was Agatha—Aggie—the one ringing the triangle. Aggie was younger than the other two women, perhaps in her mid-twenties, with dark brown skin and thick hair drawn back in a bun. She had run the most girls into Ferron of any of them, and she oversaw the logistics of the border crossings. Aster could not help seeing herself in Aggie, and imagining a future where she might be the one at the head of the Ladies’ most dangerous missions.

  “Thank you for your attention,” Aggie said once the hall had fallen silent, and then she began running through the announcements for the day, as she did every evening at supper. The repairs on the western tunnels were underway. A new horse had been purchased for the stables. They’d added twelve more signatures to a petition to be sent to the government. Aster’s mind began to wander back to her argument with Hannah and Lucille, her frustration still simmering. They just didn’t understand—

  “Finally,” Aggie began to wrap up, “we’ve just received word that Jerrod McClennon is going to be making a big announcement of his own next week in Northrock. No action to be taken on our end, but let’s brace ourselves all the same. That man can’t sneeze without whipping up a windstorm.”

  Aster sat up at the mention of McClennon, her nails biting into the wood of the bench. The last time she’d seen Jerrod McClennon had been in his manor outside Northrock, where he had offered Aster and her friends up to his raveners like meat on a platter—where Violet still might be, even now.

  Anger rose in her throat like a hot coal. According to the papers, McClennon had been spending the past few months campaigning in the Scab, where he was running for governor. So what was he doing back in the big city? What announcement was so important that he’d come home to make it?

  Aster imagined herself stealing away into Northrock, blending into the crowd gathered to hear him speak. She couldn’t try anything, of course. That wasn’t the Lady Ghost way. But she could at least find out what he was planning. And if the opportunity to take more serious action presented itself …

  She glanced at Hannah and Lucille. As much as she respected them both, neither of them would help her hurt McClennon, if it came to that. But Raven, staring up at the head table from behind her black locs, her knee bouncing beneath the table, her impatience near as palpable as Aster’s own—Raven might just understand.

  I can get the two of us permission to go to Northrock, I’m sure of it, Aster thought. They were in Priscilla’s good graces after their successful mission, after all. And it was just reconnaissance. Nothing more.

  Or at least, that was what Aster was going to tell them.

  3

  Northrock was a completely different world in daylight.

  The last time Aster had been here, it had been the small hours of the morning, the city suspended in the dark in a bubble of the blue-white light crackling off its streetlamps. The streets had been crowded with drunks and gamblemen, and Aster had only just managed to disappear into the chaos before the law apprehended her. It’d been obvious then that she hadn’t belonged: a mud-covered Scabber in denims and a dustkerchief, her eyes wide as she took in the sights around her.

  Aster still couldn’t help gawking like a fool, but at least she looked like she belonged here this time around. Once again she and Raven were dressed as Anthony Wise’s fortunas, guarants on hand for when they’d inevitably be stopped by any lawmen who saw their favors. As busy as the streets had been Aster’s first time in Northrock, the crowds were at least three times as thick today, drawn by McClennon’s imminent appearance. Fairblood families pushed past one another as they bullied their way in and out of storefronts. Dustblood workers swept away the confetti and peanut shells that soiled the sidewalks. Horse-drawn coaches clattered down the brick streets, and vendors shouted from every corner, offering everything from newspapers to sunhats to bottles of root brew. Faces were flushed under the heat of the summer sun, and the air was thick with the sound of commerce and the smell of sweat.

  “This ripping place,” Raven swore, adjusting her hat. It was a garish thing, all bright flowers and feathers. Aster’s was even more ridiculous, were that possible. If she made it to the end of the day without stuffing it in a trash bin, she would consider the mission a success.

  “What, aren’t you used to the city by now?” Aster asked. Raven had been with the Ladies for almost three years, and they made regular runs to Northrock for supplies.

  “You never get used to Northrock,” Raven groused. “It’s the asshole of Arketta.”

  Aster hid a smirk. “Come on, now, it’s better than the Scab, surely.”

  “Says who? At least in the Scab they don’t charge an ear and an eye for every little thing. I figure so long as I’m suffering I might as well be able to afford a damn drink. Listen, how much farther until we get to City Hall? This heat is killing me.” Raven fanned herself.

  Aster drew the map of Northrock from her handbag. The Ladies had given it to her to help them find their way to City Hall, where McClennon would be giving his speech, but they almost didn’t need the directions. The crowd seemed to move as one, herdin
g itself towards the main event.

  “Looks like we’re about three blocks away—”

  “Filthy Luckers,” an old woman suddenly hissed in Aster’s ear, and then she shoved Aster hard from behind. Aster stumbled into the fairblood couple in front of her before she could catch herself. The man whirled around, his face red beneath his derby hat. When he saw Aster’s favor, he grew even redder.

  “Keep your hands off me,” he snarled, taking his wife by the arm and pulling her away from them.

  Aster’s cheeks warmed with a rush of anger. “I didn’t—”

  “You just stay back, or we’ll have the law on you,” the woman said, bristling.

  A pocket of space had formed around Aster and Raven, the people on the streets giving them a wide berth. Some looked on with hungry curiosity, others with obvious disgust. Folks had been shooting them looks all afternoon, but this was the first time anyone had actually called attention to their presence. The crowd’s whispers washed over Aster like dirty dishwater.

  “What are they doing here?”

  “I thought there were no welcome houses outside the Scab—”

  “Are they with a brag? Where is he?”

  Shame churned in Aster’s gut, and she hurried to swallow it back.

  “Come on,” she muttered to Raven, grabbing her hand and pulling her down the next street. “Let’s go before someone makes a scene.”

  Or more of one.

  Aster didn’t think she could ever get used to it—walking the streets with her favor laid bare. Covering her favor up had been painful in its own way, of course, but this pain … feeling the heat of people’s scorn, her suffering exposed like an open wound for all to see … this was, in some ways, worse. It was bad enough trying to hold her chin high when dealing with a handful of border agents. Northrock was a city of hundreds of thousands.