Neither Agnes nor Juniper seem overly concerned. Juniper even looks slightly eager, like a child anticipating fireworks.
Bella suppresses an urge to shake the pair of them until their teeth rattle. “People live here! Lots of them! You can’t just drop a library on top of them! The Mother only knows what it would do to our wards. And I still don’t understand why we’d want to call Avalon in the first place—”
“He took her.” Agnes’s voice is quiet but ragged-edged, like a distant scream.
“Who did?” But Bella knows who.
“Gideon Hill. And he’s scared, Bell. He has his shadows and his city and my daughter, but he’s still frightened of something.” Agnes looks up at her. “OfAvalon. Even though all the books are burned.” Bella presses her fingertips to the paper-dry petal of the rose in her pocket, the only thing she saved from the ashes. “He asked me if they were still there. And I thought—who isthey?”
“Sometimes when it was real quiet at Avalon I heard voices. Or thought I did.” Juniper speaks slowly, feeling her way toward the edge of the impossible. “And down in the Deeps I heard . . . somebody.”
She doesn’t look at Bella, as if she expects scorn or pity, but Bella is quiet. She’s remembering the times when she was alone in the rose-scented silence of the tower, when her attention wandered and she heard whispers murmuring and scuttling in the shadows. Words spoken in voices of dust and ivy, there and gone again.
There’s a rustle of wool as Cleo shifts on the bed. “Do you mean . . . ghosts?” Bella feels a rush of relief that Cleo seems willing to entertain the possibility rather than edging quietly out of the room.
“I don’t think they could be. What ghost could last four hundred years?” Ghosts were lingering specters, especially tenacious souls that clung to life a few hours beyond death. They didn’t haunt towers or castles for centuries, except in wives’ tales and rumors.
Cleo shrugs. “Some kind of spirit or memory, then? Perhaps preserved by—”
“I don’t care what they are or aren’t. I’m going to find them.” Agnes touches her damp dress-front and reaches for the floor with fingers slick with milk.
“Wait!Please.” Bella catches Agnes’s hand in her free one, so that she stands between her sisters with their fists tight in hers. “I’ll help you. But not here.”
“Where, then?” Agnes’s voice suggests she ought to decide quickly.
Where can they call a burned black tower back into existence without being seen and caught? Where in New Salem is free of both Inquisitors and innocents?
Then Bella remembers fleeing from the north side just the previous week, pausing at the padlocked gates of the Centennial Fair. It had closed after the election, but deconstruction was delayed in the name of the city’s crisis. The sight of that long boulevard, empty except for crows and scattered puddles reflecting the blind gray of the September sky, had sent a shiver of melancholy down Bella’s spine.
“The Fair,” she breathes.
Her eyes cross Cleo’s and for a moment the memory of that June afternoon blooms between them, shimmering and sweet, when they swayed together in the glass cage of the Ferris wheel. Bella feels a surge of regret that she wasted those precious minutes on worry, rather than wringing every ounce of joy from the world while she could.
Bella sees some of her own wistful hunger reflected in Cleo’s face before she stands and places her derby hat neatly on her head. Her chin lifts. “Shall we, Misses Eastwood?”
Bella tries to tell Cleo she ought to run, that she doesn’t have to follow them this far into madness, but the words lodge like swallowed stones in her throat. Instead she finds herself reaching for Cleo’s hand as the four of them sweep down the steps of South Sybil and out into the dying day.
The nearest entrance to the railroad is two blocks east, down a set of stone steps and through a door readingMiss Judy’s Tea Shop: CLOSED. Cleo shows the door her patterned scar and it opens into cool darkness.
They follow the tiger’s-eye of Cleo’s witch-light in silence. Bella thinks about the hands that carved the tunnels like veins beneath the city, the bodies laboring unseen and unfree; she thinks of the ways people make for themselves when there are none, the impossible things they render possible. She looks at the white of Agnes’s knuckles and begins, just a little, to believe.
They emerge from an outhouse door on the north side. It’s after curfew, and every door is locked tight, every curtain drawn. There’s no one to notice four women filing through the alleys with familiars winging behind them. No one to hear the steady clack of a black-yew staff across the cobbles.
No one to see them pause beneath the high arch of the fairground entrance, or to wonder how they open the gate despite the stout iron padlock and the heavy chain around the bars.
They could hardly have chosen a better setting for the summoning of undead spirits. The bones of the Fair hulk around them like the remains of some prehistoric creature: the Ferris wheel, skeletal and dark; the sagging strings of light bulbs; the empty stands and tents, canvas flapping in the wind. The only sound is the dry capering of old ticket stubs across the boulevard and the cawing of crows.
The sun seems to be graying rather than setting, as if someone is wrapping stained gauze around it, but the tower would still be far too visible. “We should wait for full dark.” Bella’s voice echoes eerily.
“Why not make our own?” Juniper withdraws a red-dyed handkerchief from her skirt pocket. She spits into the dirt at her feet and whispers to the wet earth.Red skies at night, witch’s delight.
She calls, and the storm answers. Above them the clouds darken like bruises. The watching crows go silent, vanishing into the blackening sky behind them. Strix and Pan circle, visible only by the firelight of their eyes.
“How’s that?” Juniper’s face is flushed with the heat of witching, eyes shining.
“Good enough.” Agnes kneels on the cold stone and lays her candle-stubs and matchsticks in a circle a second time. Bella and Juniper kneel beside her. Agnes lets three drops of thin milk fall into the circle. Juniper scrapes her bloodied palm on the ground.
The wind rises. It lifts their hair from their shoulders, three shades of black tangling together, and buffets the wings of the owl and hawk high above them.
