I realized my jaw was hanging open, and closed it with a click as Naisha dipped to pluck her shirt from the ground, shaking her hair loose as she buttoned it briskly back up. Even that was gracefully done, nimble and quick like fingers flying over piano keys. My mouth had gone dry, and everything inside my head swam giddy. I should have been shocked to see something so dazzlingly strange, but the shock felt very far and faint, eclipsed by envy and wonder.
“Do you see?” Sorai said softly, reaching out to graze the crown of my head with her nails, Malina’s with her other hand. A tingling current ran through me, and I nearly arched my back like a cat at her touch. “This is how you should be. So beautiful that you can wound with it. Your beauty is a force, you know, a power all its own. It can be both sword and shield for you, and win you anything you want.”
“But I—I don’t know how,” I said hoarsely. Malina made an uncertain hmm beside me, as if she somehow almost knew what that meant, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Sorai enough to question her. “Will you show us?” I yearned for them to stay so badly, to remind me how to gleam.
“Oh, you will learn again when you need to,” she replied, still stroking my head. “It hasn’t died inside you. I see it merely asleep, like a fox kit curled up in her den. And even what is deeply sleeping nearly always wakes again. But remember that it burns inside you, a fox fire in your chest. Even if it might be simpler, never let yourself forget.”
“What about me,” Malina asked thickly. “Why aren’t you telling me not to forget?”
Sorai gave a bright, stirring laugh, a cluster of nested bells rung together. “Because you are my cuckoo, are you not, baby songbird? All that false meekness in your mother’s nest.”
“Are you going to . . .” Naisha hesitated, then cleared her throat. Sorai turned to her with a languid, too-slow swivel of her head, fine crow’s-feet crinkling as her eyes narrowed. “Do you wish to take them, then?” she finished.
“No, let her keep them still. She’ll serve as she needs to, when it’s time. She will, and they will.”
She turned back to me, dropping quick yet weightless to her knees, as if she were at once made of feathers and lead. The feathered gown pooled around her, and she tipped my chin up with a warm, curled finger—I could feel the sharp edge of her nail sink almost painfully into my skin—before leaning forward, her hair sliding like a curtain around both our faces. Her eyes were so bright I could barely stand to look at her, and my own slid closed as her lips covered mine in a smooth, chaste kiss, a long exhale of that dizzying perfume. It had deepened and darkened, too, turning closer to the earth; patchouli, frankincense, and even tobacco.
Everything seemed to slide away—the ground beneath me, the grit of the stone block against my back, the warm brush of Lina’s arm by mine—and I funneled into a thick and fragrant black.
AS I BLINKED against the darkened, frayed edge of the memory, I looked up to see the woman on the bastion gather her skirts in one hand and leap nimbly over the other side, beyond the Northern Gate—into the ?kurda River. I raced headlong through the gate, but there was nothing, no one, just the lacy green-and-white churn of the water rippling around rocks beneath the bridge.
I stood for a moment with the back of my hand to my forehead, reeling; the way she moved had been so fluid it was nearly inhuman. And now that I remembered her—remembered them both—I couldn’t believe that I had ever forgotten. I could recall the rest of that afternoon perfectly, almost too well, as if the excision of that memory had crystallized the remainder of the day. Lina and I had gone on as if nothing had happened, used some of the glasswork money to split a hazelnut and strawberry gelato before we headed to the beach with Luka and Niko. And there’d never been a single mention between us of a woman wrapped in feathers and scent, or another that could draw animal prints using nothing but her own skin.
It was the perfume that had done it: a perfume that made us feel things and then forget them, just like Mama had said our grandmother’s gleam had done before she died.
And both of those women had our eyes.
Those women were family, somehow, they had to be. And if they were, then everything Mama had told us—the three of us, all alone in the world—was a lie. And from what Sorai had said, the gleam she saw inside us was something not to be tamped down, but to be coaxed into full flame just like I’d always wanted.
But who were they to us? Why had Sorai given me back a memory she had stolen from me years ago, just like she had considered stealing both me and Malina from our mother? Why had they even wanted to take us—and why had they left us with Mama anyway when they could have spirited us away so easily, luring us with that perfume like some scented pied piper?
The only thing I could latch onto was that one of these three women, Dunja, Sorai, or Naisha, had hurt our mother, then somehow suspended her just short of death. It was Dunja’s name that Mama had spoken last, but then again, that “don’t” . . . now I wondered if she was truly our only suspect. Everything felt like twist-tied nonsense, without end and beginning, like the world had spun itself into a M?bius strip. I yearned suddenly for Luka, who’d taught me about M?bius strips and then indulged me endlessly when I caught a fascination with them, wondering how they could be worked into my glass fractals. If he were here, what would he tell me to do? How would he cut to the root of this tangle?
The root. That was it. Mama was the root of this, and even if I couldn’t go to her directly, I still had all her things.
TEN
I CROSSED THE BRIDGE OVER THE ?KURDA, WHICH LED TO the shop-lined street that backed ours. I was nearly home when it struck me that I had no actual plan for confronting any potential murderer lying in wait in our apartment, and that this was a thing I might want to consider.
Glancing around the riverbank, I armed myself with a rock and a sturdy branch snapped off from our oleander tree. Tucking the stick under my arm, I tried the doorknob; it didn’t budge under my hand.
Squatting near the base of the oleander, I dug gingerly around the roots, wary of beetles and things with stingers, until I found the spare key nestled there. The apartment felt hushed and stale as I let myself in, and my stomach contracted at the stubborn, lingering tang of rakija. Still clutching my stick and rock, and feeling only slightly like an asshole but mostly like a subscriber to the “best have it and not need it” school, I poked through the kitchen, bathroom, tiny living room, and two bedrooms—the pile of Lina’s shoes tipped precariously against one wall, like an abstract sculpture of stabby heels and glossy straps, seemed like it had multiplied exponentially, but that was always the case—until I was satisfied that no one was going to dart out at me from under a bed or behind a door.