Luna raises a brow and waves a hand. Containers drift into the trash with effortless grace, while diagrams align themselves beneath her touch. Her magic mirrors her: efficient, polished, and infuriatingly composed.
I sigh. “I was going to do that.”
“Mhm. Just like you were going to eat yesterday’s dinner? Or the day before that?”
Silence settles between us, taut but not unfriendly. A silence only sisters know, balanced between annoyance and affection. I meet her gaze and see it at once, the fatigue and the quiet ache of someone who longs to be useful but doesn’t know how to be wanted. I’ve seen that expression before, written across her face, and I taught myself to look away.
She used to wait outside my bedroom door for hours, hoping I’d finish cataloging samples or finishing blood calibrations early enough to come play. I never did. I’d hear her out there, spinning stories to herself, her dolls acting out adventures in realms I never made time for.
I was too busy being exactly what our parents needed to realize she just wanted me to be her sister.
“Did Mom or Dad ever mention anything to you about bonds?”
She glances over her shoulder. “Contracts?”
“No, not those.” I wet my lips. “I mean the ones that came before regulation. The ones no one talks about.”
Luna’s cleaning spell falters, and a coffee cup drops with a dull clatter back to the desk. “No,” she says after a beat, too calm to be casual. “They didn’t talk to me about that stuff. You know they didn’t.”
“I thought maybe they did. Or you overheard something—”
“I wasn’t in the lab, Aria.” Her voice sharpens, but there’s something brittle beneath it. “You were the one wielding a scalpel before you lost your baby teeth. I was the one staring at the locked door.”
I glance down at the journal, suddenly unsure why I brought it up at all. “They trained me like I was going to save the world.”
“You mean like you were going to dissect it.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “They carved you into a prodigy and forgot all about me.”
“You had freedom.”
“I had silence.”
I look up. Luna’s arms are folded now, defensive, but her eyes are glassy.
“You got the lab,” she says, quietly. “You got their attention. You got to be needed.”
“I got nightmares,” I mutter.
“I would’ve taken them, just to feel like I existed to them.”
The words land with more weight than I’m ready for. We were both starving, but for opposite things. I drowned in their expectations and she withered in their neglect.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
She shrugs, but the gesture is all scaffolding. “You were just a kid too. It wasn’t your fault they picked one of us.”
I reach out, nudging the soup toward her with trembling fingers. “We both got screwed, huh?”
Luna exhales and takes a seat beside me. Our shoulders brush, and for once, neither of us pulls away. The journal lies between us, thick with the ghosts of our parents, their legacy pressed into every page.
“They trained me like a weapon,” I say eventually. “But I think I let them. I liked being needed. Even if it meant hurting things.”
Luna doesn’t flinch. “I know.”
“I think they broke something in me.”
“Then they broke something in both of us.”
She reaches out and rests her hand over mine and for a fleeting moment, the room doesn’t feel so haunted.
