Bernadette looked thin and haggard. I reminded myself that she had been thin before she’d been relegated to the Hold, but it didn’t soften the shock of seeing her. Her eyes, always large, appeared to be bugging out of her skull, with deeply purple shadows sunken beneath them. Her hair was matted and tangled, hanging on either side of her hollow-cheeked face in great clumps. I swallowed hard against a lump in my throat, and then against the anger that followed it. This woman had held my mother hostage—had been content for my mother to die so that some ghostly ancestor could take her place. How dare she elicit my pity?
“Are you okay to be here?” Persi asked, and I turned my head sharply to see that she was watching me intently. “I’m sorry,” she went on, and her expression was the softest I’d ever seen it. “It was pretty thoughtless of me to invite you here to do this. I should have realized it would be hard for you to see her.”
“I’m fine,” I said, not because I actually was, but because I was grateful to her for recognizing the position she had put me in; and also because I wanted it to be true. I wanted to be fine. I wanted the woman in front of me to hold absolutely no more power over my life. Even if it wasn’t true yet, I was determined to make it true, out of sheer stubbornness.
“Are you sure? Because you don’t have to?—”
“I said I’mfine,” I replied through gritted teeth.
Persi nodded once, and I was relieved to see that she accepted my answer. In a strange, unexpected way, I felt part of the wall between us crumble in that moment. I couldn’t reallyprocess it right then, while staring into the face of the other woman in the room, the one who had tried to kill me, so I pushed it to the back of my brain.
As we had this hushed conversation, Bernadette was watching us with a curiously hungry expression. Persi stepped forward, and Bernadette cooed at the sight of her, wrapping her arms around her midsection.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away,” Bernadette said in a sing-song voice that made the hairs on my forearms leap to attention. “But who have you brought along with you?”
I stepped forward to stand beside Persi, and watched the exact moment when Bernadette’s confusion turned to recognition. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider, and she slid down to crouch on the very end of the bed with an almost animal motion.
“Wren Vesper. You’re here,” she whispered. Her voice was raw and scratchy, like she’d been deprived of water, though I could see a glass of it sitting on the fold-down table beside the bed.
“It’s not a social call,” I said, the words coming out staccato as I practically choked on the anger surging up my throat. The sound of her voice, casually speaking my name, burned away the pity I’d felt at the first sight of her. How dare she talk to me? How dare she speak any words to me that weren’t an apology?
“But I’ve been asking and asking to speak with you and they… they wouldn’t allow it. How did you change their minds?” Bernadette asked.
Persi was frowning. “No one changed their mind. This isn’t a sanctioned visit. We came on our own.”
She tsk-ed loudly, and Persi flinched at the sound. “Breaking rules, as usual.”
“Do you remember what we talked about yesterday, Bernadette?” Persi asked. Her posture was as languid andunbothered as usual; but her knuckles, I noticed, were white—she wasn’t nearly as relaxed as she let on. I wondered if Bernadette could sense it, too. After all, she knew Persi much better than I did.
“Oh yes, I remember. Why did I do this, why did I do that? Why, why, why?” sang Bernadette. “Such an exhausting conversation. It seems to be the only question you know how to ask.”
“It’s the most important question, in my opinion, and yet you can’t seem to answer it,” Persi said, “and so I keep asking it.”
“Oh, but I did answer it,” Bernadette said, running her fingers back and forth across the bars. “You just didn’t like the answer.”
“I didn’t like the answer because I don’t think it’s yours,” Persi said, her voice still admirably calm. “I think it’s Sarah Claire’s.”
Was it my imagination, or did something shift in Bernadette’s eyes? There was a momentary flash, like a change of color, and then it was over, like a trick of the light. I had just decided that I’d imagined it when Persi muttered out of the corner of her mouth. “Did you see that? In her eyes?”
“Yes,” I murmured back. “What is it?”
“It’s why we need to do the Cleansing. There’s more than Bernadette inside that cell.”
12
Her words sent a shiver skittering down my spine. “Persi, what do you…”
“Shh,” Persi said, for Bernadette was now rising from the bed and coming closer to the bars, head cocked to one side, as though curious about our whispered conversation.
“It’s not nice to keep secrets,” Bernadette sang from inside her cell.
“Do you hear it?” Persi asked, ignoring Bernadette’s words as she placed her backpack on the table, and started rifling through it. “When she speaks, do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” I asked, but Persi just shook her head and then cocked it toward Bernadette, who was now pouting and talking to herself on the other side of the bars. I paused for a moment, and listened hard.
Now that Persi had pointed it out, there was something very strange about her voice. I barely knew Bernadette—I think I had spoken to her a total of three times before she was arrested, and even then, I was hardly making a study of her voice—but even I could hear it, now that Persi had drawn my attention to it. There was something in the cadence, something… antiquated. The only way I could explain it was the difference between listening to anactor in a contemporary movie, and then listening to that same actor perform in a period drama. There was a different style, a different lilt and rhythm to the words that sounded, to my ear, to belong to another time. And I was quite sure it hadn’t been there when I’d spoken to Bernadette before.
I looked at Persi again, and she was watching me, watching that realization kindle in my eyes.
