When I left the slag heap, the air was clammy, damp with autumn and the rain that never seemed to stop.
I climbed up the side of the ravine and crossed the footbridge, then started across Orchard Circle, headed for home. On Concord Street, porch lights glowed in a line all the way down the block.
Inside, I stood at the top of the stairs and leaned against the banister, making sure I was composed, before padding down the hall to Emma's room. I opened the door a crack, pressing my mouth to the gap so I could whisper without letting too much light in.
"Emma?"
There was a sigh, a rustle of blankets. "Yeah?"
Relief washed over me, making my chest relax. I stepped inside and closed the door and then there was just the splash of light shining in under it. I lay on the carpet beside her bed and looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. She didn't say anything, and I knew she was waiting for me to talk.
"I met some people tonight."
Above me, she rolled over but still didn't say anything. Then she took a deep breath. "What kind of people?"
The dead kind. The still-walking-around kind. The reeking, stinking, rotting-from-the-inside-out kind. Toothy and grinning, nasty with the dark and the dust of abandoned strip mines. But none of that was the whole truth. They were more than that. They were Carlina and Luther, electric on the stage, and the Morrigan with her hand on my arm like she knew me and had known me my whole life. And not the Janice who showed up after school to work on botany homework and was bony and weird looking, but the one who lived down in the House of Mayhem and was beautiful, and the girl who liked stars was happy and pink and sort of cute.
"Why is Janice your lab partner?"
Emma answered in a tight, controlled voice. "Well, because group projects pretty much always involve a group."
"Are you lying to me?"
Emma was quiet a long time, and when she answered, she sounded defensive. "I saw her brush against a stainless steel table. She pulled away and then looked around to make sure no one was watching. I thought she might be . . . like you. I asked if she wanted to work together."
"You took something from them," I said, pressing my hands flat against the floor.
"To help you," she whispered. "Only to help you."
"This isn't free, Emma. I think they want something back."
"Then we'll pay them," she said, and I closed my eyes at the conviction in her voice. "We'll do what it takes."
"What if it's not that simple? What if they want something weird or impossible or . . . bad?"
Neither of us said anything after that. Sometimes things are so big and complicated that you can't actually talk about them.
"They make blood sacrifices," I said. "Just like in the books. I mean, it sounds crazy, like something someone made up. But it's the truth."
Emma didn't respond right away. When she did, her voice was unnaturally calm. "Maybe that's not surprising. A lot of cultures have a history of human sacrifice."
"It is surprising because it's insane. This isn't the Stone Age. We don't go around sacrificing people to the gods."
She laughed and it sounded shrill and breathless, almost like a sob. "We do, though. We take for granted that sometimes you lose a child. And sometimes everyone else gets hit by the recession. Everyone else's unemployment skyrockets, and their tech plants go bankrupt and their dairy farms fail, but not ours. Never ours, because if you feed the ground, the ground feeds you back. You get food and prosperity and peace, and there are no disasters or plagues, and nothing bad happens."
"Except that every seven years, someone kills one of your kids."
"You have to understand: It wasn't always bad."
"So, some little kid gets murdered, but it's cool?"
For a second, Emma was so quiet it sounded like she was holding her breath. When she answered, she stayed very still. "I think it's complicated. It wasn't always a kid. Some of the Germanic tribes believed that volunteering to be sacrificed was a kind of magic by itself. Like a transformation. One of the old druidic texts in the Bevelry volume talks about going into a cave to be eaten by a goddess and coming out as the greatest poet of all time. They went into the dark and came out reborn."
I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars. "How can you be eaten and then become a poet?"
"Stop being so literal. It's a metaphor and you know it." Emma rolled over and her voice sounded farther away, like she was talking to the wall. "The prosperity rituals work on a trade-off. The cost is a way of showing that you're serious, that you'll give something up in order to gain favor."
I nodded, but it was more complicated than a straight trade. She wasn't just talking about what it cost to feed the Lady or look the other way while kids disappeared from their beds. I came from somewhere. I could have lived an ugly life in a world of tunnels and black, murky water and dead girls, with a little tattooed princess to watch over us. I would have belonged there. Instead, I was just a stranger in a strange house, with too many lights on. That was a cost too.
"It's been hard for you," she said finally. "All the time. How do you think that makes me feel, that everything is poisonous and everything hurts you and there's nothing I can do about it? And everything has to be a secret. Everyone's always asking how we can be so different from each other. They all want to know how you turned out to be the delicate one, like it's my fault that my brother's prettier than me." Her voice was higher and softer than normal. "Girls are just supposed to be pretty."
"You're pretty," I said, and knew that if I could say it, that made it true.
Above me, Emma laughed like I'd just said I wanted to grow up to be a toaster oven or a giraffe. I got up and switched on her desk lamp.
She squinted at me, blinking in the light. "What? What's wrong?"
I sat on the edge of her bed, trying to get an idea of what other people saw.
"Stop it," she said. "What are you doing?"
"I'm looking at you."
Her face was soft, broader and flatter than mine, her hair limp, coming to just past her shoulders. It was brown, faded looking against her daisy-print pajamas. She was sitting up now, holding the blankets in a fierce double handful. Her cheeks were pink and shiny.
Around us, the bookshelves reached almost to the ceiling. Books about chemistry and physics and gardening, sure, but mythology and history too, all kinds of folklore and fairy tales. She read academic journals and ordered books online. She stockpiled literary criticism and essays. Her room was a private library of answers, trying to help me, save me, decode me. It was just another part of what made her beautiful.
She was looking off over my head. "They trade their sick children for healthy babies."
I nodded.
She hugged herself and still wouldn't look at me. "Sometimes, if the new mother loves it and takes really good care of it, the sick baby gets better. It stops being ugly and grows up strong and healthy and normal. Sometimes, if the mother just loves it enough, it becomes beautiful."
I knew that part too, but the way she said it was miserable, like she was trying to tell me something else. She was looking past me. Maybe thinking in the back of her mind that if our mother had just loved her more, she would have turned out looking like something in a magazine and not like the girl I'd known my whole life. I wanted to point out that strong, healthy, and normal were not words anyone would generally apply to me.
Anyway, the stories always missed one crucial thing. Mothers didn't love the hungry, scary things that replaced their kids. It wasn't their fault or anything. They just couldn't bring themselves to love something that awful. But maybe sisters could, if they were miraculously unselfish, if the trade happened when they were young enough.
My whole life, Emma had just been there. Cutting my hair with the aluminum kindergarten scissors just so I didn't have to go to the barbershop downtown, with its metal countertops and its stainless steel shears. Making me breakfast, making sure I ate and went out with my friends and did my homework. Making sure nothing bad happened. I wanted to hug her and say that everything was much better than she believed. It was just so strange that she couldn't see.
"Emma--" I got a tight feeling in my throat and started again. "Emma, Mom didn't make me like this. Keep me alive this long . . .You did."