At the same time that she was there, in Ari-Eil’s kitchen, she was entering other houses, watching other faces. Among them were women who hadn’t been as lucky as Hayva, but had been young when the gods ruled Weep. It hadn’t been Weep then, of course. That name came with the bloodshed, but it suited the two centuries of Mesarthim reign. If there had been anything in abundance in all those years, it had surely been tears.
All these homes, all these people. Scattered toys and battered boots and everything so different than it was in the citadel. There was no mesarthium in these houses, but tile and wood and stone. Handmade quilts and woven rugs and cats curled right beside the humans in their mussed-up beds. Sarai went to them. The humans, not the cats. Her moths found the sleepers in their beds. Their touch was light. The sleepers never woke. Men and women, children and grandparents. The moths perched on their brows, or on the ridges of their cheekbones. There was intimacy in it. Sarai knew the scents of humans, and the rhythms of their breathing. She was a connoisseur of eyelashes—the way they rested, the way they fluttered. And the texture of skin around the eyes, how fragile it was, and earliest to wrinkle, and the dart and flicker of the orb beneath the lid. She could tell at a glance if a sleeper was dreaming or was in that restful state between dreams. No one who ever lived, she thought, knew more of shut eyes than she did.
She saw her share of bare skin, too—brown, not blue—and watched the pulse of unprotected throats and tender, pale wrists. She saw people at their most vulnerable, both alone and together, sleeping or else doing the other things that are done in the dark. There were, it turned out, an untold number of ways that bodies could intertwine. That was an education. It used to be funny and shocking. She would tell the others about it first thing in the mornings, and they would gasp and giggle, but it wasn’t funny or shocking anymore. It had crept over her imperceptibly: a kind of stirring, an allure. Sarai understood Ruby’s hunger. She didn’t spy on such private moments anymore, but even the sight of a strong, bare arm crooked gently round a waist or shoulder could make her ache with the yearning to be held. To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty.
To wake up holding hands.
Up in the citadel, Sarai’s throat constricted. Her hands clenched into fists. Such was not for the likes of her. “I kiss dozens of people every night,” she’d told Feral earlier that evening.
“That’s not kissing,” he’d said, and he was right. Kissing was not what Sarai did to humans in their sleep. In fact, everything up to this point was preamble—the flight from the citadel, the squeezing down chimneys and perching on brows. Sight and feel, smell, taste and touch, they were just the threshold of her gift. Here was the fullness of it:
When a moth made contact with a person, Sarai could step inside their dreams as easily as stepping through a door, and once she was there, she could do as she pleased.
Their minds lay open to her—or at least, the surfaces did, and whatever bubbled up from beneath to paint them in streams of imagery, sensation, and emotion, endlessly combining and recombining in the ceaseless effort at making sense, at making self. For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions. When a moth perched on a sleeper’s brow, Sarai was plunged into their dream. What the dreamer was experiencing, she experienced, and not as some hapless spectator. As soon as she entered—an invisible marauder, unseen and unfelt—the dream was hers to control. In the realm of the real, she might have been just a girl, in hiding and in peril, but in the unconscious mind she was all-powerful: sorceress and storyteller, puppeteer and dark enthraller.
Sarai was the Muse of Nightmares.
Minya had given her the name, and the purpose that went with it. Minya had made her what she was. “We need bad, Sarai,” the little girl had said. “For vengeance.” And Sarai had become the weapon Minya wanted her to be, and punished humans in the only way she could: through their dreams. Fear was her medium, and nightmares her art. Every night, for years, she had tormented the sleepers of Weep. “Did you make anyone cry?” Minya would ask her in the morning. “Did you make anyone scream?”
The answer was always yes.
For a long time, this new, exciting thing had been the focus of their lives. The other four would come to her room at dawn to crowd into her bed with her as soon as her moths returned, and she would tell them everything: what and whom she had seen, what the homes were like in the city, what the people were like. Minya just wanted to know about the nightmares, but the others were more interested in Weep itself. She would tell them about parents who came to comfort their children when nightmares woke them, and they would all go still and quiet, listening with a terrible intensity. There was always, among them, such a stew of envy and longing. They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone’s child. And since they couldn’t have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.
So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness—self-preservation of an uglier stripe. And thus did they harden themselves, by choosing to meet hate with hate.
Sarai settled a moth on Hayva, Ari-Eil’s sister, and on other sleepers in other houses. All across the city, she sank into the dreams of Weep. Most were mundane, the mind’s rote bookkeeping. Some dreams stood out. One man was dancing with his neighbor’s wife. An old woman was hunting a ravid with nothing but a demonglass knife. A pregnant woman imagined her baby born blue, and hoped it were the blue of death sooner than the blue of gods.
Hayva dreamed of her brother.
Two children played in a courtyard. It was a simple snippet of memory. There was a dead tree, and Ari-Eil was holding Hayva on his shoulders so she could hang paper flowers on its branches. Like most of the trees in Weep, it would never bloom again. They were playing that it was still alive.
Sarai stood by, invisible to them. Even if she’d wanted them to see her, they wouldn’t. This was the limit of her gift as she knew it from long experience. In the early days she’d tried everything to catch their attention. She’d hollered and hissed and they never heard her, pinched them and they never felt her. In the dreams of others, she was as a ghost, fated to never be seen.
She was used to it now. She watched the two children decorate the dead branches with paper flowers, and wondered if that was the most that Weep could ever hope for. A pretense of life.
Wasn’t that what she had, too?
What was she doing here, in this home, in this dream? If she were trying to earn Minya’s praise, she wouldn’t hold back, but would use Hayva’s tenderness and grief against her. Sarai had an arsenal of terrors. She was an arsenal of terrors. All these years she’d been collecting them, and where could she keep them but within herself? She felt them at the core of her, every image and scene of fright and foreboding, of shame, shock, and misery, of bloodshed and agony. It was why she dared no longer dream: because in her own sleep she was like any dreamer, at the mercy of her unconscious. When she fell asleep, she was no sorceress or dark enthraller, but just a sleeping girl with no control over the terrors within her.
When she was younger, she wouldn’t have hesitated to plague Hayva with dread visions of her dead brother. She might have had him die a hundred new ways, each more gruesome than the last. Or else she might have made the little boy in this sweet memory into a ravenous undead thing who would hurl his sister to the ground and sink his teeth into her scalp as she woke screaming.
Once upon a time, Sarai would have imagined Minya’s delight, and done her worst.