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  Every two weeks. Sasha doesn’t want too much of a good thing. Keep them hungry, haha.

  I texted back a laughing crying face.

  She texted back, So you’ll be there?

  I checked my calendar. A week from next Sunday was just after Halloween—actual, not anti-Halloween. I recalled the way Sasha had moistened her lips with her tongue before asking me if I had more where that one came from. I knew Pagan was waiting for an answer but something held me back.

  “Meera?” It was Marvin, standing behind me in the line for the salad bar at the student union.

  “How did it go?” he asked. “I hear that you passed your trial. Survived the ordeal.”

  “Sink or swim,” I said. “I think I knew that going in.”

  “Spoken like a true witch.”

  His smile was still sweet but his face was puffy and one of his suspenders was frayed. I plucked it playfully. “How’s the mind-hunting research going, Marvin?”

  “Well enough,” he said. “So, you think you’ll go back?”

  I had guiltily pocketed my phone without answering Pagan’s text.

  “Haven’t decided,” I said, casually. “Term papers and all. I have to go back to FiFo in the meantime. I haven’t been for a while.”

  I ladled greens onto my plate.

  “FiFo? Let me know what the new TA is like,” he said, popping a blueberry between his teeth.

  “What happened to Jacinta?”

  “Hunter got her.” Marvin read something on his phone. “You didn’t hear?”

  I felt my legs grow cold.

  “She’s alive,” Marvin shrugged and I got a faint whiff of eucalyptus—maybe some soap he brought with him from the Rim, using it carefully to make it last. “Now the cops are looking for a black-cloaked slasher.”

  That bothered me. “But the wounds are on their backs. So how do they know what their attacker is wearing?”

  He scratched his stubble. “From what I gather from the reports and discussion threads, they are now considering the possibility that there are two attackers, and the one in black, an accomplice maybe, is who the victim sees?”

  “Well you’re the detective.” I didn’t push it. “Why all the fuss anyway, if it’s just Mades?”

  He wearily explained that a campus psycho on the loose wasn’t a great look for a posh college trying to beef up its back-end with Redress subsidies. There had already been some withdrawals from the program—no funding cuts yet, but he imagined that there would be.

  “I don’t know how you find time to keep up with the latest and ace your grades too,” I said. I took my tray and looked for a table for us, but Marvin asked for his in a box, blaming homework, and leaving me to eat alone. He acted nervous, like he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Was that the price I’d have to pay for being so . . . fearsome?

  I doubled down and opened my bottle of soda. I chugged it thirstily, like there was no tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 14

  CHIMERA

  Marvin was right about FiFo. During the weeks I’d missed, Jacinta had been replaced by another TA—a harried bearded Malemade who said his name was Corby. He was working on a PhD across the schools of media and environmental studies, about the role of heavy weather in film. He listened to our stories beneath the ticking clock—I added a jealous witch to the bird-beaver-baby story and someone said it was lame. Another student said they wanted to love it but found it derivative, and in poor taste considering the history of Wellsburg. Corby asked if the hybrid had flight feathers or a scaly tail, or both?

  “And if its tail is flat and scaled like a beaver, one would assume that its feet are those of the Passeriformes order with three forward pointing toes and one backward, all joined at the level of the foot?”

  “Yes and no,” I said, eliciting a few laughs.

  “It’s your chimera, not mine.” Corby lowered bushy eyebrows. “Although I have to say that I admire your vision.”

  A Regular gathered her books and walked out talking on the phone. “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out,” Corby said. No one laughed. Toward the end of the class he paused and looked around. “Do you know,” he said, spreading his burly arms out on the scratched oaken table, “where this table is from?”

  When no one answered he said, “At the edge of Wellsburg is an old graveyard. Some say it’s haunted and there are even tours available. Outside the iron gates of the cemetery are some other graves, all women. The inscriptions are simple. ‘Jody McCree, drowned.’ ‘Henrietta Cruickshank, hanged.’ Seven of them in total. Seven graves, women between the ages of eleven and forty-two, all accused of witchcraft under the governorship of the town’s founder, Captain Hermann Younger. All found guilty and put to death. There is a plaque to commemorate a famous seventeenth-century puritan and witch-hunter. It says something like, ‘We shall soon enjoy halcyon days with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet—’ a quote from a sixteenth century witch-hunter. The Younger family donated this table from Hermann Younger’s library.”

  Before he finished speaking, a shadow moved across the window, blocking out the star-sprinkled dusk. I was aware of the background clicking of phones and the rustling of sheets as my classmates packed their bags, but my focus was on the blue-limned form at the window—I couldn’t make out where it ended and the actual night began, and maybe it was that—the way it filled me with itself and its strange uncertain shape.

  “The past is never passed, right?” It was Corby and when I turned to see the reaction of the class, I saw we were alone, and that the bearded, blinking instructor only had eyes for me.

  * * *

  Dying seems to have galvanized my sister somehow. Given her a sense of purpose. Within days of digging herself out of the ground, she’s taken over Narn’s apothecary, sweeping piles of Cladonia into a container for compounding, sniffing blueish lobes of Siphula soaking in a beaker of urine.

  “This has expired,” she says.

  “Takes one to know one,” Narn mutters under her breath. Like me, she is unsure of how to take the rank return of her favorite, whatever deals she had to do to make it so. I watch Kai pick bugs from her eye socket. She wants Narn to make her a glass eye. Narn has made herself one from a rolled and polished agate, but has not yet been able to find a stone in the right shade of blue for Kai.

  We regard ourselves in the mirror. Kai, willowy and empty-eyed, and me, stunted and wild, black hair frizzing out in all directions. My brown eyes gleaming with a love formless enough for the both of us. Strangely, we have never looked so . . .

  “Identical,” we say at the same time, and hook our pinkies in a broken promise.

  Under Kai’s instruction, I place orders for new beakers and test tubes, a heating mantle that won’t set the whole hut on fire, a balance and a new scale—the ravens have made a nest in the old one. Kai completely reorganizes the whole lab so that like is categorized with like instead of just dumped and scattered into a shroomy unordered hodgepodge. It’s like a game for her, I think—and she’s all the players. Crucially, she finds all the cash and coin and IOUs from Narn’s customers, locks everything in a box for Narn to hide in the root cellar. She counts out a small amount for errands in Norman, twenty klicks to the East almost all off-road.

  Narn’s hut, tucked along a narrow pass high in the uncharted Starvelings, is virtually inaccessible—Mag can immediately spot anyone moving along the canyon and Eric makes a better watchdog than he does a familiar. Narn and I go into town to make deliveries or pick up supplies, neither of us having much to say to each other. I get used to her mouth soundlessly moving, the gibberish coming from multiple discordant voices that fill the cab of the truck. I recognize the name of her lost sister Tiff and my found sister Kai and sometimes my own name Meera sliced uncomfortably in between. As we skirt the terminal lake, I turn to the window, feeling Narn’s glass-eyed stare, but I am still
too furious, too self-obsessed to admit what her sacrifice means. That she did it for me.

  Her eye for Kai’s soul—so I could have my sister back as Narn had not been able to have hers. I can’t love her yet, but my gratitude, being nebulous, is also boundless. She saved me from the Father. She brought my sister back from the dungeon, saved her soul. I make a mental note to even the odds one day if I can—to find what’s left of her sister’s soul even if it costs me what’s left of my own.

  We jolt along through the slanted shade of the canyon, the abrupt emergence into dusty sunlight and the rough red road into town—kangaroos alert at the edge of shimmering paddocks, the high transparent sky that makes me feel as though across this entire restless land there is no place to hide except from where there is no return.

  * * *

  The guard was already blowing his whistle even though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. A dozen or so survivors had assembled—evening students like me, or casual workers from one of the Wellsburg bookshops or cafés. I was distracted by the memory of Corby’s unnerving stare, the thought of those seven witches put to death and disremembered at the edges of some rich man’s church.

  “You lot are a pain in the ass,” the guard said. “If you’d only just stay on your side, where you belonged, we wouldn’t be having any of this trouble.”

  “That’s a bit much,” someone said. “It’s not our fault we get attacked.”

  My heart in my mouth, the fleshy shadows beating at my back. I turned to the direction of music and laugher from the rooftop of Sweeney’s Landing.

  “Yeah,” someone else said, “if it was a Regular getting attacked, they’d call in the army.”

  On close inspection the guard had the same ruddy smirk as the Fearsome Gatherum waiters, scions of the New World Order.

  “Well this is all you got,” the guard said, thumbing himself in the chest. “A little gratitude’d be nice.”

  I couldn’t help but get all shrieky.

  “The women lying unconscious in hospital after being mangled right under your noses are truly thankful,” I cackled. “Forever and ever, Amen.”

  The guard took a step closer, eyed my wild hair and brimming mismatched eyes. I don’t know why I was crying—Jacinta was nothing to me. “All dressed up and nowhere to go, Made? You look like trouble.” He licked his lips.

  “Double-trouble,” a hammy purr floated out of the darkness. “Because by definition the system can’t be held responsible for those it was never meant to protect.”

  The guard wheeled around. “You are?”

  “Made to break,” Marvin said from where he’d materialized beneath the arch. “It’s the drinking hour, darlings, and I could murder a martini.”

  I had limited experience with unconditional friendship. By the second round at Dirty Bert’s, it had brought on a fresh bout of tears, which I attributed to my errant period being due. But where Marvin touched me was real.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad we’re still friends.”

  Marvin downed the cheap booze and made a gag-face. “If you were a real friend, you’d smuggle some twelve-year-old single malt out of Ms. Younger’s next Gatherum-ti-dum.”

  I said I’d try and he said what, to get the high-end hooch or to be a real friend, and I said both. The bar was half-empty, the bartender distracted between his watch and repeated darting glances out the door. Drinkers huddled in nervous clusters or alone on their devices. Music played and I noticed Trudy and Lara at a booth, double-dating with Malemades. They were talking and laughing, the table littered with soggy fries and greasy glasses.

  Resolutely, but with that halting confessional authority of his, Marvin said, “Back in the Blood Temple, I would lie in the dark prison of the bunkroom and listen for the drag of Master’s sandals in the dirt outside the hut. He’d open the door, letting in the light. The terrible light.”

  “I know.”

  “The world outside the Blood Temple is an illusion, a mirage,” he said. “It’s hard to unsee our fate, Meera.”

  I didn’t want to argue with him. “All I’m saying is that invisibility may not be the best choice. The Father, the Assistants, your Masters, they saw everything but us. Whenever they did to us what they did, they only saw themselves. That’s invisibility—not fate, but choice. Theirs, by definition. Narn once told me that choice was just another word for fate flashing her heinie. That Paradise the Father wanted to go back to? It was Paradise to him only because it was hell to us.”

  “Okay,” he leaned in, began moving a fry around the table to demonstrate his point. “How is being seen, stepping into the fearsome light, going to be any different?”

  “Because I control it,” I said. “I control the light.”

  But he was gone, staring into that space that I could, if I let myself, monstrously imagine. The abyss by definition: that which cannot in the end be fathomed. The bartender made a signal for last drinks. Lara and Trudy wove out with their dates, and Lara gave a little wave.

  “I see you,” I said when Marvin returned.

  “I know.”

  “You’re really Made2Break?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  We walked home through the eerily empty streets, our arms lightly touching. Steam plumed from our mouths. His hair silvery blue in the glow of the bridge.

  “What do you know about a cemetery outside of town?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I can’t remember the last time I ventured across the bridge.”

  “The new TA, Corby, told us about the cemetery where the witches were buried.”

  “Maybe he’ll take you there,” he said, his smile not reaching his pussy-willow eyes.

  I slept badly that week. I thought of the upcoming Gatherum and wondered if two weeks was long enough to be forgotten. Unable to face Corby again, I ditched FiFo on Wednesday, and when, on Halloween night, I tried to make my Thursday call to Narn the connection was so bad that we gave up. I barely slept, aware of Trudy sitting up in bed, her blue-tinged face fixed on her phone. I noticed that Lara’s bed was empty and felt a weight on my legs and I dreamed that it was Eric.

  A scream woke me in some dead hour just before dawn. Trudy sat up in the grainy dark, her eyes wide and a fist jammed in her mouth. I turned on my pillows and followed her gaze to where at the end of my bed sat the Hunter. He pixelated in and out from a curtain of static.

  “Wretch,” he said, the words not in sync with his lips. “Be gone, Vulture of Hell.”

  I lay paralyzed against the pillows, couldn’t breathe.

  He wore a hat like the Father’s Akubra, caked with river mud. His broken face loomed out of the black and blue shadows—shreds of flesh hanging off a smashed, translucent skull. He lurched threateningly to his feet but I couldn’t move. My arms and legs were leaden. I emitted a choked-off cry, but couldn’t pull myself off the bed. A long black leather duster swung on his mangled frame. The static pulled at it, gave it wings. He clutched a curved hunting knife in one hand. In the other a pistol, which he raised with a jagged, pixelated hand and aimed at my head.

  CHAPTER 15

  FRESH MEAT

  You’d never find our place high in the Starvelings unless you knew what you were looking for. The brown hills bunch at the edge of the desert, rising to an interminable prominence of rugged escarpments and sheer cliffs, below which rainforest canyons and inaccessible lowlands connect a network of underground lakes. But it is only one of many mountain ranges on this vast continent. Is it north or south? East or west? The Starvelings—a name spoken in whispers and never written—could be anywhere. Or nowhere.

  The forgotten swaggie’s hut is a steep climb up from any human civilization and is invisible behind a tangle of fern and vine, deep in the cleft of a vertical ridge. The people who come to call on Narn—who pay for her craft in coin or kind—walk, ride or drive a long dusty way, and their u
nderstanding of what, or where, the Starvelings are, varies according to their needs. There are plenty of places to hide in this vast southern land, as the Father discovered, where very little is worth the risk of being found. Narn’s magic is one of those things.

  Escaped Mades, survivors of other hells, bush people, dreamers, failures, fixers, elders and young blood, soldiers and castaways—they leave their humpies and tinnies and trailers and caves and cars and treehouses to slip through the secret byways—mainly for Narn’s Islandia moonshine, eighty proof vodka distilled from wild-grown Iceland moss made with pure mountain water flowing from the myriad caves pocking the ridge. But they come too for her healing salves and poultices, her cures for boils and baldness, for pneumonia, warts, anxiety and ulcers. Her teas for insomnia and her candles for bad dreams and her powders for eating too much and drops for loving too hard. Trusted customers might get a spell or a charm thrown in, a sprig of pennyroyal for protection or snakeroot bundled with wattle for luck, or a pricey suspension of Letharia for hopelessness. My spine tingles to hear those who speak of a Made from the Rogues Bay camp, a raven-haired enchantress who spun bunkroom tales of magic so complete, so shimmering, that they conjured the very survival of all who listened to them. Narn’s visitors speak sadly of the Made’s inevitable unmaking, of the Father so jealous of how she loved her sister enough to die for her—that he had to kill her first.

  When she first came back from the dead, Kai would brew a pot of tea for the customers, pick lemons from the gnarled tree over the vegetable patch. I’d discretely check both for maggots. But if Kai thinks that Eric will let just any stranger past the gate to sit under the cool of the veranda for a sip of homemade lemonade and a pipe, she is dead wrong. For reasons I cannot explain, Eric has taken a shine to me—he suffers Kai because he must, but it is my hand into which he presses his muzzle, and it is at my command that he rushes ahead of Narn to the gate, just in case. Narn in her gumboots is a picture of shuffling eccentricity, but there is a boline hidden in the folds of her tunic and even as her freckled hands extend for payment, her seeing eye scopes the still, pale treeline, and her dun lips mouth words of warning.