With a frustrated sigh, she slammed the drawer shut. I could only see the backs of her calves, smooth and bronze, still glossy from the apricot oil I’d rubbed onto her skin last night.
“No one knows,” she said. “You belong to me. I own you, body and soul. Even if I see little bits and pieces of you everywhere, Catskins.” Indigo sighed and tugged her hair. “I see you in this room and in the shadows, and it makes no sense because I killed you.”
Indigo’s tone was gentle, lilting. This was her siren’s voice. She had used it on me a few months earlier when a fever kept me in bed for days.
“Oh, Catskins,” she sang before her voice turned flat. “Why aren’t you dead yet?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Azure
In Indigo’s bedroom, I stared at my reflection in her massive silver mirror. It was adorned with acanthus leaves and miniature nymphs. I tried to focus on these details—the half-lidded eyes of a metal satyr, a delicate harp lost in a tangle of gleaming irises—but I couldn’t avoid my own gaze. The sight whispered my doubts into life:
What if Indigo is wrong?
What if we aren’t a single soul neatly shared between two bodies?
I didn’t doubt that we were sisters or even twins from some magical place. When she ached, I wept. When I had nightmares, it was Indigo who screamed for me. But there was also an uneven seam between us where our thoughts stumbled in similarity. I’d traced the raised edge of it for more than a year, struggling to see it in its entirety. That is, until the lights of the warehouse dance floor dragged it into focus. Indigo said she could feel how much I loathed the place... but really, I loved it.
Lately, I had started noticing the college announcements pinned to the bulletin board at school. I lingered before them, tracing the names of my senior-year classmates. Indigo and I hadn’t applied. There was no point. We would transform soon enough.
Going to college was rare on our island, and so the administration proudly displayed that handful of students on an ancient corkboard decorated with gold paper stars. When no one was looking, I would tap the thumbtacks on all the states they would know: New York, Georgia, New Hampshire. Even sounding them out in my mind felt blasphemous. More damning were the ideas that followed: how the rain might look candied through the windows of a new city, the texture of a breeze winding through unfamiliar streets, the serene embrace of a sea that knew only the hot touch of sultry, sun-drenched days.
Before my mother met Jupiter, she had once told me the women in our family were cursed. She never said what the curse was exactly. Still, I wondered if it had found me and filled my head with these poisonous doubts. I tried to rid myself of them. In Jupiter’s house, I poured salt in circles around my feet. I offered my mother’s gold bracelet to the water nymphs in the creek. I even begged the Otherworld to cure me. When nothing worked, I told myself it would pass. Come graduation in spring, I would turn eighteen, Indigo would age into her trust, and we would be transformed.
I would become a creature of air.
I had always envisioned it as a moment of extravagant light. But now, when I pictured the gates closing behind us, that wealth of light turned stingy. I realized to accept the hidden half of the world meant denying its counterpart.
It should be an easy choice. What was a world of metal compared to one made of magic? I knew this, and I ached anyway.
These were the thoughts of a Cast-Out Susan.
I would’ve hidden from the shame forever if the Otherworld hadn’t driven me to confess one day in December.
“I don’t see why you won’t come with us,” said Indigo as wemade our way to the wrought-iron gates. “So what if you miss a day or two of school? It’s not like it’ll matter soon.”
For the past few weeks, Tati had been taking Indigo with her into the city. There were forms she had to sign, conferences to sit through. Sometimes I accompanied them.
“Is it because of the city?” asked Indigo, wrinkling her nose. “That much iron. I know. I hate it there too.”
It was because of the city. Not because I hated it though. While Indigo waited in her meetings, I would stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows, watch strangers sitting on benches, marveling at the secret intimacy in the space between their bodies. I would count the urgent seconds people spent on a crosswalk, knowing they were needed somewhere else. And as the clock ticked down to when Tati’s car appeared, I imagined a circle drawing tighter and tighter within me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s because of the city.”
We stood at the gate of our Otherworld. Frost traced a silver finger down the iron curlicues. Behind us, sheaves of ice clung to parts of the stream.
“Ready?” asked Indigo. “Soon it’ll be the last time we do this.”
My mind snagged on that. The air whose metal scent promised snow now held the tang of blood. I pushed away the thought as we took out our starling keys and the gates swung open—
But this was not our Otherworld.
Winter was supposed to silver it—to hang pearls of ice in the oak branches, sleeve the apple trees in glass, gently curl the ferns like the fists of an infant. Our turret used to glow, promising the warmth of its woodstove, the cashmere blankets neatly tucked into chests of cedar, the samovars waiting to hold tea.
This was something else, like a pocket turned inside out. I stumbled backward.
“What’s wrong with it?” I said. “What happened?”
