I should have said my Aunt Leila and I found a way.
The night my father had been sent to the cages, I was lying on the pullout sofa in Aunt Leila’s office, staring dry eyed at a crack in the ceiling. I felt as if the crack might open into a great yawning abyss and swallow me up, erase all traces that our family had ever been. I wanted it to.
Aunt Leila came in, walking softly with bare feet on the worn carpet, and lay down beside me, not touching me but curled around me like a parenthesis closing around a word. Aunt Leila was not often affectionate: this was a big deal for her. I turned slightly and looked at the locks of her very straight black hair crossing my hair like bars, and at the edge of her dark eye staring up at the ceiling crack.
“Do you remember the story of how they almost beat your grandfather to death when they found out he was practicing Dark magic in the Light city?” she asked.
I had heard the story hundreds of times, so of course I did, but Aunt Leila never said anything unnecessary. I knew this was important.
“That Grandma got in the way. She threw herself in front of him,” I answered, my voice a thread, barely hanging on. “Yes.”
“The mob caught him before he got to his house, and she saw him being beaten and went to run out into the road. Her family tried to stop her. They said, He broke the law, you mustn’t, there’s nothing you can do, think of your baby, stop, you can’t do it, please stop. And she said . . .” Aunt Leila prompted.
“Tell the wind and fire where to stop,” I answered. “But don’t tell me.”
“Would you stop?” Aunt Leila asked. “Or would you do what needs to be done?”
I wanted to cry, suddenly, as I had not been able to cry for days. But I didn’t want to cry in front of Aunt Leila, who was the strongest person I knew. It was impossible to imagine Aunt Leila ever crying.
“I’d do anything,” I said. “But I can’t fight the cages, I can’t get in the way of the . . . of the spikes. There’s nothing I can do!”
“There’s something you can do,” Aunt Leila said. “It’s just something different. You have your own weapons. The question is, are you willing to use them? Are you ready to do whatever needs to be done?”
Aunt Leila stopped looking at the dark jagged line in the ceiling when she said “weapons.” She looked at me instead. She even touched me, in a light, thoughtful caress: not my skin, but my hair, and the stones in my rings.
Tell the wind and fire where to stop, but don’t tell me.
“Look at you,” Aunt Leila murmured. “I could put your face on a banner and march into the Light city. They won’t even want to stop you.”
The next day, I went down to Green-Wood Cemetery. I passed through the main gates, which had spiky towers and fretwork like lace made of stone and which resembled the entryway of some villain’s fortress. Inside were rolling hills, gravestones like spires, even a lake and a pyramid. And past the bronze statues, hanging from pear trees and golden rain trees and dogwood trees, from branches that formed massive arches and leaves that were golden clusters, were the cages.
The cages cast coronas of darkness even by day. The smell of blood permeated the cemetery. Magicians stood underneath, absorbing power, catching the blood in vessels, reaching up to press their hands against the bars.
Inside the cages were the bleeding, moaning animals that pain had turned people into. I looked at the cages long enough to know which one held my father, and then I looked away.
In an ever-expanding ring around the cages were mourners. Not mourners for the dead in this cemetery, but mourners for the living trapped in their cages. Some of those who loved the caged were so racked with misery that they looked barely human, crouched around their pain, faces distended, screaming until their hoarse, cracked voices sounded like birds: they looked as bad as the contorted creatures in the cages.
The other people standing there were the audience, people who came out of curiosity, out of macabre interest in someone else’s tragedy. Some of them were reading, or even making grocery lists, as they did so. This was only a stop for them, a diversion before they carried on undisturbed with their real lives. There were even a few women knitting.
They were bored. And there were thousands of people in the Dark and the Light cities who were just like me, who were a little saddened and a lot embarrassed by the ugly, epic tragedy of this place.
What I had to do was make everybody watch.
I was wearing a long white dress. White was not a common color to wear, as it was seen as too plain next to all the colors we wore to contrast with the black of the doppelgangers’ hoods. I stood out like a ghost among the living.