An Introduction 4 страница

Bella clears her throat pointedly. “Anyway, we—well, my sister—half-sister, I suppose—is interested in joining the Women’s Association. ”

The secretary beams at them in a way that makes Juniper think they don’t get fresh blood all that often, says, “Oh, of course! I’ll fetch Miss Stone, ” and skitters into the back rooms. Juniper catches an angled glimpse of desks and stacks of paper, hears the businesslike chatter of working-women, and feels a familiar lonesomeness well up in her throat, a sisterless hunger to be on the other side of that door.

“Please do make yourselves comfortable, ” the secretary calls as the door shuts.

The two spindly chairs in the office don’t look like they can hold anything heavier than a canary, so Juniper stays on her feet, weight hitched away from her bad leg. Bella stands statue-still, hands politely clasped. When did she get all proper, all ladylike? Juniper remembers her as a creature of sighs and slouches and soft-tangled hair.

She watches the clatter of the street through the window, the carriages and trolleys and iron-shod horses. Sober black letters hover over the scene, painted backwards on the inside of the window: HEADQUARTERS OF THE NEW SALEM WOMEN’S ASS’N. A thrill sizzles through her.

A day ago she was lost and reeling, spinning through the world like a puppet with its strings cut. And now she’s here, with the smell of witching on the wind and the promise of power painted on the window above her. And a whole pack of brand-new sisters waiting just on the other side of the door.

Juniper shoots a sideways look at Bella, all prim and nervous, and hopes politicking proves thicker than blood.

The secretary comes bustling back into the room accompanied by the white-wigged lady who made the speech in the square the day before. She looks older and tireder up close, all cheekbones and worry lines. Her eyes are a pair of brass scales, weighing them.

“Miss Lind tells me you’re interested in joining our Association. ”

Juniper ducks her head, feeling suddenly very young. “Yes, ma’am. ”

“Why? ”

“Oh. Well, I was there yesterday at the rally. I liked what you said about e-equality. ” The word feels silly in her mouth, four syllables of make-believe and rainbows. She tries again. “And what you said about the way things are. How it’s not fair and never has been, how the bastards take and they take from us until there’s nothing left, until we don’t have any choices except bad ones—”

Miss Stone raises two delicate fingers. “No need to do yourself a harm, child. I quite understand. ” Her eyes harden from brass to beaten iron. “But you ought to understand—whatever your personal troubles—the Women’s Association is no place for bloody-mindedness or vengeance. There are no Pankhursts here. ” Juniper doesn’t know what a Pankhurst is. Miss Stone must intuit this from the blankness of her expression, because she clarifies, “This is a respectable, peaceable organization. ”

“… Yes, ma’am. ”

Miss Stone pivots to Bella. “And you? ”

“Me? ”

“Why are you joining us today? ”

“Oh, I’m not—that is, you certainly have my sympathies. But I’m awfully busy at work, and I just don’t have time—”

Miss Stone has already turned away from her. She addresses Juniper again. “Miss Lind will add your name to our member list and discuss upcoming committee meetings you might join. ” Juniper tries to look eager, though she finds the word committee unpromising.

“And will you be making a contribution to our Association fund? ”

“A what now? ”

Miss Stone exchanges a look with her secretary as Bella hisses, “Money, June. ”

“Oh. I don’t have any of that. ” Never has, really. What work Juniper did back in Crow County was paid in kind—jarred honey or fried apples or cat-mint picked on the half-moon—and Daddy never let them see a cent of his money. “I’m between jobs, see. ”

“Between—? ” Miss Stone sounds puzzled, as if she is unfamiliar with the concept of jobs, as if money is just a thing a person finds whenever they reach into their handbags. “Oh. Well. No woman is barred from our cause by poverty. ” She says it all lofty and generous, but her tone hooks under Juniper’s skin like a summer briar.

Miss Lind launches into a lecture about all their various letter-writing campaigns and subcommittees and allied organizations. Juniper listens with her temper simmering, bubbling like a pot left too long over the fire.

“And then the Centennial Fair is coming up in May, of course, and we feel it’s an excellent opportunity for another demonstration. Get people’s minds off th-the equinox. ” Miss Lind’s throat bobs in a dry little swallow. “Anyway. What projects interest you? The campaign for the vote is paramount, naturally, but we also promote temperance, divorce rights, property ownership, and various charitable—”

Juniper tilts her head and says, “Witching. ” It lands like a bare-handed slap, flat and loud. Beside her, Bella makes a soft, pained sound.

“I beg your pardon? ” Miss Stone’s mouth has gone very small and dry, like an apple left too long on the windowsill. The secretary’s mouth is hanging wide open.

Juniper is tired of this mincing and dancing, sidestepping around the thing they ought to be running toward. “You know. You saw it: the tower and the trees, and the mixed-up stars. ” Both of them are blinking at her in horrified unison. “That was real witching, the good stuff, the kind that could do a whole lot more than just curl your hair or shine your shoes. The kind that could cure the sick or curse the wicked. ” The kind that keeps mothers alive and little girls safe. The kind that might still, somehow, find a way to steal Juniper’s land back from her dumbshit cousin Dan. Juniper spreads her arms, palm up. “You asked what I wanted to work on, that’s it. ”

Miss Stone’s mouth shrivels even smaller. “Miss West. I’m afraid—”

Her secretary interrupts in a nervous little blurt. “The men did it. Those union boys in Chicago last year—they say machines rusted overnight, and coal refused to burn…” Miss Stone casts her the sort of look that turns people into pillars of salt and the secretary subsides.

“The Women’s Association is not interested in what some degenerate men may or may not have done in Chicago, Miss Lind. ” She draws a deep, not very calm breath and turns back to Juniper. “I’m afraid you have entirely misunderstood our position. The Association has battled for decades to afford women the same respect and legal rights enjoyed by men. It is a battle we are losing: the American public still sees women as housewives at best and witches at worst. We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power. ”

She pauses, her mouth shrinking to the smallest, bitterest apple seed. “I don’t know who was responsible for the abnormality at St. George’s, but I would turn her in myself before I let such activities destroy everything we’ve worked for. ”

Miss Stone extracts a ruffled copy of The New Salem Post from the front desk and flings it at Juniper and Bella. The splashy over-sized headline reads MAGIC MOST BLACK, with a smaller line printed beneath it: MYSTERIOUS TOWER TERRORIZES CITIZENS. Some imaginative artist has provided a sketch of a great black spire looming above the New Salem skyline, complete with brooding storm clouds and little bats flapping around the top.

Juniper squints her way through the adjectives and hysteria, skimming past excitable phrases like “terrified wailing of innocent children” and “malevolent apparition” and landing on the last few paragraphs:

While Mayor Worthington’s office has claimed there is “no evidence of serious witchcraft” and urges the citizenry to “remain rational, ” others are less sanguine. There are rumors that the notorious Daughters of Tituba may be behind the occurrence, although the New Salem Police Department maintains that no such organization exists.

Miss Grace Wiggin, head of the Women’s Christian Union, points to the recent and virulent fevers that have run rampant through New Salem and recalls the ancient connections between witchcraft and plague. “Surely we need not wait for a second Black Death before we act! ”

Mr. Gideon Hill left us with this sobering reflection: “I fear we have only ourselves to blame: in tolerating the unnatural demands of the suffragists, have we not also harbored their unnatural magics? The people deserve a mayor who will protect them from harm—and there is no harm greater than the return of witching. ”

Indeed. And Mr. Hill—an up-and-coming member of the City Council and third-party candidate for New Salem mayor—might be just the man for the job.

Juniper tosses the paper back on the desk. “Well, ” she offers, “shit. ”

Miss Stone regards her grimly. “Quite. ”

“Who are the Daughters of Tituba? ”

Bella opens her mouth, but Miss Stone answers first. “An unsavory rumor. ” She stabs a finger at the paper. “Listen, Miss West: you are welcome to assist the Association in our mission. Saints know we need every warm body we can get. But you will have to abandon your pursuit of this, this”—she taps the article—“ devilry. Am I understood? ”

Juniper looks at her—this little old woman with a powdered wig and a big office on the fancy side of town—and understands perfectly well. She understands that the Women’s Association wants one kind of power—the kind you can wear in public or argue in the courtroom or write on a slip of paper and drop in a ballot box—and that Juniper wants another. The kind that cuts, the kind with sharp teeth and talons, the kind that starts fires and dances merry around the blaze.

And she understands that if she intends to pursue it, she’ll have to do it on her own. “Yes, ma’am, ” she says, and hears three sighs of relief around her.

Miss Stone invites Juniper to report to the Centennial March planning committee the following Tuesday evening and instructs Miss Lind to add her name to the member list and give her a tour of their offices.

She turns back once before she sweeps into the recesses of the office, her apple-seed mouth unshriveling very slightly. “It’s not that I don’t understand. Every thinking woman has once wanted what she shouldn’t, what she can’t have. I wish…” Juniper wonders if Miss Stone was ever a little girl listening to her grandmother’s stories about the Maiden riding her white stag through the woods, the Mother striding into battle. If she once dreamed of wielding swords rather than slogans.

Miss Stone gives her shoulders a stern little shake. “I wish we might make use of every tool in our pursuit of justice. But I’m afraid the modern woman cannot afford to be sidetracked by moonbeams and witch-tales. ”

Juniper smiles back as pleasantly as she knows how and Bella whispers “yes, of course” beside her. But there’s a look in Bella’s eyes as she says it, a struck-flint spark that makes Juniper think that her sister doesn’t intend to give up her moonbeams or witch-tales at all; that maybe she, too, wants another kind of power.

Beatrice Belladonna leaves the New Salem Women’s Association headquarters with her cloak pulled tight against the spring chill and an anxious knot in her belly.

She walks down St. Patience thinking about the way her sister looked as she added her name to the list of members, bold and foolish, and the way Beatrice’s fingers itched to copy her.

Thinking, too, about the words she found written in the margins of the Sisters Grimm and her growing certainty that, in speaking them aloud, she had touched a match to an invisible fuse. Begun something which could not now be stopped.

Because Beatrice’s eyes are on the limestone cobbles, her shoulders hunched around her ears like a worried owl, she doesn’t see the woman walking toward her until they collide.

“Oh my goodness, pardon me—” Beatrice is somehow on all fours, feeling blindly for her spectacles and apologizing to a pair of neatly shined boots.

A warm hand pulls her upright and dusts the street-grime from her dress. “Are you all right, miss? ” The voice is low and amused, her face a blur of white teeth and brown skin.

“Yes, perfectly fine, I just need my—”

“Spectacles? ” A half-laugh, and Beatrice feels her glasses settle gently back onto her nose.

The smudge resolves itself into a woman with amber eyes and skin like sunlight through jarred sorghum. She wears a gentleman’s coat buttoned daringly over her skirts and a derby hat perched at an angle Beatrice can only describe as jaunty. The only colored women on the north side of New Salem are maids and serving girls, but this woman is quite clearly neither.

The woman extends her hand and smiles with such professional charm that Beatrice feels slightly blinded. “Miss Cleopatra Quinn, with The New Salem Defender. ”

She says it breezily, as if The Defender were a ladies’ journal or a fashion periodical, rather than a radical colored paper infamous for its seditious editorials. Its office has been burned and relocated at least twice, to Beatrice’s knowledge.

Beatrice shakes Miss Quinn’s hand and releases it quickly, not noticing the way she smells (ink and cloves and the hot oil of a printing press) or whether or not she wears a wedding band (she does).

Beatrice swallows. “B-Beatrice Eastwood. Associate librarian at Salem College. ”

Miss Quinn is looking over Beatrice’s shoulder at the Association headquarters. “Are you a member of the Women’s Association? Were you present for the events in the square on the equinox? ”

“No. I mean, well, yes, I was, but I’m not—”

Miss Quinn raises a placating hand. Beatrice notices her wrist is spattered with silver scars, round pocks that almost but don’t quite make a pattern. “I assure you The Defender isn’t interested in any of that breathless witch-hunt nonsense printed in The Post. You may be confident that your observations will be presented with both accuracy and sympathy. ”

There’s a vibrancy to Miss Quinn that makes Beatrice think of an actress onstage, or maybe a street-witch misdirecting her audience.

Beatrice feels exceptionally drab and stupid standing beside her. She smiles a little desperately, perspiring in the spring sun. “I’m afraid I don’t have any opinions to offer. ”

“A shame. Suffragists have a reputation for opinions. ”

“I’m not really a suffragist. I mean, I’m not a formal member of the Association. ”

“Nor am I, and yet I persist in having all manner of opinions and observations. ”

Beatrice catches a laugh before it escapes and stuffs it back down her throat. “Perhaps you ought to join, then. ”

She can tell by the flattening of Miss Quinn’s smile that it’s the wrong thing to say, and Beatrice knows why. She’s overheard enough talk at the library and read enough editorials in The Ladies’ Tribune to understand that the New Salem Women’s Association is divided on the question of the color-line. Some worry that the inclusion of colored women might tarnish their respectable reputation; others feel they ought to spend a few more decades being grateful for their freedom before they agitate for anything so radical as rights. Most of them agree it would be far more convenient if colored women remained in the Colored Women’s League.

Beatrice herself suspects that two separate-but-equal organizations are far less effective than a single united one, and that their daddy was as wrong about freedmen needing to go back to Africa as he was about women minding their place—but she’s never worried overmuch about it. She feels an uncomfortable twist of shame in her belly.

Miss Quinn’s smile has smoothed. “I think not. But the equinox, Miss Eastwood. Why don’t you tell me what you saw? ”

“The same thing everyone saw, I’m sure. A sudden wind. Stars. A tower. ”

“A door with certain words inscribed on it and a certain sign beneath them. ” Miss Quinn says it mildly, but her eyes are yellow, feline.

“Was there? ” Beatrice asks lamely.

“There was. An old symbol of circles woven together. It’s of… particular interest to me and certain of my associates. Would you—a librarian, I think you said? —happen to know anything about that sign? ”

“I—I’m afraid not. That is, circles are common in all sorts of sigils and spell-work, and the number three is a number of traditional significance, isn’t it? It could be anything. ”

“I see. Although”—Miss Quinn smiles a checkmate sort of smile—“I don’t believe I told you how many circles there were. ”

“Ah. ”

“Miss Eastwood. I was just heading to the tea shop on Sixth. Won’t you join me? ”

As she says it, she gives Beatrice a particular kind of look through her lashes, heated and secret. It’s a look Beatrice has spent seven years carefully neither giving nor receiving nor even wanting.

(When she was younger she permitted herself to want such things. To admire a woman’s peony-petal lips or the delicate hollow of her throat. She learned her lesson. )

She takes an anxious step back from Miss Cleopatra Quinn and her long eyelashes. “I—I’m afraid I must get to work. ” She attempts a cool nod. “Good day. ”

Miss Quinn looks neither offended nor discouraged by her abrupt departure, but merely more intent. “Until we meet again, Miss Eastwood. ” She gives Beatrice a sober tip of her derby hat and spreads her skirt in a gesture that is half-bow and half-curtsy. Beatrice blushes for no reason she can name.

Beatrice walks the three blocks back to the College with her eyes on her boots, not-thinking about moonbeams or witch-tales or the thin wedding band around Miss Quinn’s finger.

She barely hears the scintillated whispers of the passersby or the paper-boys darting like swallows through the streets, calling out headlines (Witches Loose in New Salem! Hill’s Morality Party on the Rise! Mayor Worthington Under Pressure! ), and if the shadows on the streets behave oddly—peeling away from dark doorways and coiling out of alleyways, trailing after her like the black hem of a long cloak—Beatrice does not notice.

Bye baby bunting,

Mother’s gone a-hunting

A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret

Two weeks after she found her long-lost sisters and lost them again, Agnes Amaranth is standing in a dim back-alley shop just off St. Fortitude. There is no sign or title on the door, but Agnes knows she’s in the right place: she can smell the wild scent of herbs and earth, just like Mags’s hut, out of place in the cobbled gray of New Salem.

The proprietress is a handsome Greek woman with black curls and dark-painted eyes. She introduces herself, in an accent that rolls and purls, as Madame Zina Card: palmist, spiritualist, card-reader, and midwife.

But Agnes hasn’t come to have her fortune told or her palms read. “Pennyroyal, please, ” she says, and it’s enough.

Madame Zina gives her a weighing look, as though checking to see whether Agnes knows what she’s asked for and why, then unlocks a cupboard and tucks a few dried sprigs into a brown paper sack.

“Steep the pennyroyal in river-water—boil it good, mind—and stir it seven times with a silver spoon. The words cost extra. ” Madame Zina’s eyes linger on the eggshell swell of Agnes’s belly. She’s barely showing, but only women in a particular state come to visit Zina’s shop asking for pennyroyal.

Agnes shakes her head once. “I already have them. ” Mags told them to her when she was sixteen. She hasn’t forgotten.

Madame Zina nods amiably and hands her the brown paper sack sealed with wax. Concern crimps her black brows. “No need to look so glum, girl. I don’t know what your man or your god has told you, but there’s no sin to it. It’s just the way of the world, older than the Three themselves. Not every woman wants a child. ”

Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.

But Agnes wanted to take care of her sisters, once. She won’t bring another life into the world just to fail it, too.

She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.

“Let me read the cards for you. Free of charge. ” Zina gestures to an armchair that looks like it was once pink or cream but is now the greasy color of unwashed skin. Ragged red curtains droop over the arm.

“No, thank you. ”

Zina runs her tongue over her teeth, eyes narrowed. “I could read hers, if you like. ” Her eyes are on Agnes’s belly.

Agnes sits as if something heavy has hit the backs of her knees.

Zina settles herself across from her and produces a pack of over-sized cards with gold stars painted on their backs and edges gone soft with use.

“Her past. ” She flips over the Three of Swords, showing a ruby-red heart with three swords run cleanly through it. Agnes thinks of her sundered sisters and the terrible wounds they’ve dealt one another, seven years old and still unhealed, and shifts uncomfortably in the chair.

“Her present. ” Zina lays out three cards this time: the Witch of Swords, the Witch of Wands, and the Witch of Cups. Agnes almost smiles to see them. The Witch of Swords even looks a little like Juniper—her hair a wild splatter of ink, her expression fierce.

“Her future. ” The Eight of Swords, showing a woman bound and blind, surrounded by enemies. The Hanged Woman, dangling upside down like a sacrificial animal on the altar. Agnes avoids her gaze.

Zina sets the deck on the table and taps it once. “You draw the last one. ”

Agnes reaches out her hand but a sudden wind whips through the open window—night-cool and tricksome, scented faintly with roses—and scatters the deck across the floor. The wind riffles like fingers through the fallen cards before whispering into silence. It leaves a single card face up: the Tower, shadowed and tall.

Agnes’s blood burns at the sight of it. “Here—” She claws the cards off the floor and shoves them at Zina. “Let me choose properly. ”

Zina purses her lips as if she thinks Agnes is being a little stupid, but shuffles the deck. She knocks the edges on the table and presents it again.

Agnes turns the card and the Tower leers up at her a second time. A black spire of ink surrounded by white pinpricks. Up close she sees the border is actually a tangle of thorned vines with smears of dull pink for blooms, like tiny mouths. Or roses.

Agnes stands very abruptly. “I’m sorry. I have to go. ” She wants nothing to do with that tower or that wicked wind. She knows what trouble looks like when it comes slinking through the open window to tug at the loose threads of your fate.

“Oh, it’s not such a bad reading as all that. She’ll face trials, but who doesn’t in this life? ”

Agnes can only shake her head and stumble backward toward the door. She hears Zina call after her—“Come see me when you change your mind. I’m the best midwife in West Babel, ask anyone”—before she is out in the alley, turning right on St. Fortitude.

She walks with one hand fisted in her pocket, palms sweating into the brown paper of the sack, cards hovering behind her eyes like portents or promises: the tower; the heart stabbed thrice over; the three witches.

She can feel the edges of a story plucking at her, making her the middle sister in some dark witch-tale.

Better the middle sister than the mother. Middle sisters are forgotten or failed or ill-fated, but at least they survive, mostly; mothers rarely make it past the first line. They die, as gently and easily as flowers wilting, and leave their three daughters exposed to all the wickedness of the world.

Their deaths aren’t gentle or easy in real life. Agnes was five when Juniper was born, but she remembers the mess of stained sheets and the wet-pearl color of her mother’s skin. The old-penny stink of birth and blood.

Her father watching with a jagged wrongness in his face, arms crossed, not running for help, not ringing the bell that would bring Mama Mags and her herbs and rhymes.

Agnes should have rung the bell herself, should have slipped out the back door and hauled on the half-rotten rope—but she didn’t. Because she was scared of the wrong-thing in her daddy’s eyes, because she chose her own hide over her mother.

She remembers her mother’s hand—white and bloodless as the blank pages at the end of a book—touching her cheek just before the end. Her voice saying, Take care of them, Agnes Amaranth. Bella was older, but she knew Agnes was the strong one.

That first night it was Agnes who washed the blood from her baby sister’s skin. Agnes who let her suck on the tip of her pinky finger when she cried. Later it was Agnes who brushed her hair before school and held her hand in the endless night behind the cellar door.

And it was Agnes who left Juniper to fend for herself, because she wasn’t strong enough to stay. Because survival is a selfish thing.

Now her sisters are here with her in the sinless city and their daddy is dead. Agnes ought to be relieved, but she’s seen enough of the world to know he was just one monster among many, one cruelty in an endless line. It’s safer to walk alone. The brown paper bag in her pocket is a promise that she’ll stay that way.

She passes a tannery, eyes watering with acid or maybe something else. A butcher shop, a cobbler, a stable half-full of police horses idly stamping iron hooves. St. Charity Hospital, a low limestone building that smells of lye and lesions, built by the Church to tend to the filthy, godless inhabitants of West Babel. Agnes has seen nuns and doctors walking the streets, proselytizing at unmarried women and waving purity pledges. But girls who give birth at Charity’s came out grayish and sagging, holding their babies loosely, as if they aren’t certain they belong to them. At the mill most women prefer mothers and midwives, when their time comes.

Now St. Charity’s echoes with the hacking sounds of the summer fever. Someone has drawn a witch-mark across the door, a crooked cross daubed in ash. Agnes wonders if the rumors are right and a second plague is coming.

She crosses the street and distracts herself by reading the tattered posters pasted along fences and walls. Advertisements and ordinances; wanted posters with rain-splotched photographs; bills for the Centennial Fair next month.

On the corner of Twenty-Second Street the brick has been entirely covered by a single repeated poster, like grim wallpaper. It’s crisp and new-looking, the image printed in bold black and red: a raised fist holding a burning torch against the night. Smoke coils from the flames, forming ghoulish faces and animal bodies and distorted words: SIN, SUFFRAGE, WITCHCRAFT. Smaller, saner lettering across the top urges citizens to Vote Gideon Hill! Our Light Against the Darkness!

Three men stand clustered ahead of Agnes, holding paste buckets and stacks of posters, each wearing bronze pins engraved with Hill’s lit torch. There’s something vaguely unsettling about them—the odd synchrony of their movements, maybe, or the fervid glaze of their eyes, or the way their shadows seem sluggish, moving a half-second behind their owners.

“Tell your husband—vote Hill! ” one of them says as she passes.

“Our light against the darkness! ” says the second.

“Can’t be too careful, with women’s witching back on the loose. ” The third extends one of the posters toward her.

Agnes should take it and bob her head politely—she knows better than to start shit with zealots—but she doesn’t. Instead she spits on the ground between them, splattering the man’s boots with cotton-colored slime.

She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place. Maybe because she can feel her wild younger sister with her in the city, tugging her toward trouble.

Agnes and the man stare together at the spit sliding off his boot, glistening like the snotty trail of a snail. He stands very still, but Agnes notes distantly that the arms of his shadow are moving, reaching toward her skirts.

And then she’s running, refusing to find out what those shadow-hands will do to her, or what the hell kind of witchcraft is on the loose in New Salem.

She runs down Twenty-Second and turns on St. Jude’s and then she’s back in Room No. 7 of the South Sybil boarding house, panting and holding her barely showing belly. She withdraws Zina’s brown paper bag from her apron.

Pennyroyal and a half-cup of river-water: all it takes to keep that circle drawn tight around her heart. To stay alone, and survive.

She did it once before—drank it down in one bitter swallow, felt nothing but rib-shaking relief when the cramps knotted her belly—and never regretted it.

Now she finds herself setting the brown paper sack on the floor, unopened. Lying down in her narrow bed and wishing her oldest sister was here to whisper a story to her.

Or to the spark inside her, that second heart beating stubbornly on.

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