Elly had shaken her head. Her face had been tucked in the crook of Corin’s neck, so her hair tickled below Corin’s chin whenevershe moved. Corin had retaliated by tickling her stomach. Elly had shoved her elbow into Corin’s face with a huff.
“There were people who visited her tower before the castle was buried. In all their drawings, she wore a crown of moonflowers. Those only bloom every hundred years, and they bloomed on the night she fell asleep.”
“Is there a purpose to this story, or are you just rambling to annoy me?”
Corin had known the flowers were Elly’s latest fixation, their concrete surroundings etched in clumsy chalk recreations. She didn’t like the way the story clung to her sister like false hope.
“I counted the years. They’re going to bloom again in three days’ time,” Elly had said, wide-eyed and breathless. “What if that’s when the princess will wake up?”
Corin had diminished her sister’s beliefs by stamping out her chalk drawings and reminding her of reality. No one could fall asleep for centuries, let alone be the savior to a kingdom overthrown by war. Desperate travelers who ventured inside the tunnels chased after a fantasy, where skies were filled with magic and faeries instead of warplanes and smoke. Not only were these ideas foolish, but they were also dangerous. Despite hundreds of people attempting to find the princess, no one had ever made it out of the tunnels.
Corin stared at the abyss and pictured Elly walking into the darkness, motivated by inane stories and imaginary flowers. As she rolled up her sleeves, gripped onto the rocks, and climbed down into the hole, she thought about how she’d underestimated the gall that a child of twelve could have. She would not let her sister pay the price of stupidity with her life.
The tunnels turned colder the deeper Corin traveled, goosebumps prickling her flesh even as she massaged her arms with muddied gloves. She tried marking each turn she made with lines of gravel, but there were other stones in each corner, trails left behind by those who’d inevitably become lost.
“El?” she called out.
No one responded but her own echo. Corin inhaled a deep breath, gritting her teeth.
“When I find you,” she called again, “you’re going to be in so much trouble.”
• • •
SHE DID NOT find Elly.
Corin lost count of the hours, her awareness of time ebbing and flowing like the wash of a tide. Blisters oozed between her toes, each step in the endless tunnel laced with pain. Rocks cut through her gloves and scraped her skin.
At first, the excitement of following Elly’s trail had propelled Corin forward. She’d recognized the chalk drawings of moonflowers on the walls and the clumsy scribbles that could have only been etched by her sister’s hand. But as the hours stretched along endless passageways and wore down her body, she wondered how Elly could have survived this far. She dreaded turning a corner where the chalk no longer remained and finding her sister’s body instead.
A jagged stone cut her back as she leaned against a wall. Even breathing was difficult, the stale air thick with dust and dirt. She wanted to give up and cry. Not because she was tired, but because she could only imagine Elly walking this same path, her body hollowing from the inside out until she was nothing but bone.
“We can’t survive without each other,” their mother had toldher when Elly was born. “You have to protect your little sister.”
And she’d tried, hadn’t she? After their parents died, she’d kept Elly out of trouble, steered her away from open streets when the warplanes came, traded favors with other artists in the commune so they’d look after Elly while Corin looted shops during air raids. She threw herself into destroyed homes and threw fists at strangers who gave her broken ribs and black eyes while calling her a low-life thief.
That was what eldest daughters were supposed to do. Their survival was her responsibility, because she was born first.
“Hmm...I don’t think that’s the full story, Corin.”
A familiar voice echoed through the cavern walls. A young woman sat on a rock beside her, dirty chestnut hair strewn over sunken cheeks and black eyes. Her skin was summer brown, her mouth set in a hard line, the way Corin recalled her a year ago. The woman picked at dirty nails through her fingerless gloves, a matching pair to the set she’d gifted Corin when they first met.
“I don’t remember you being so responsible when I found you,” said the woman. “Or have you already forgotten?”
Great. Corin was so hungry she was hallucinating the dead. She clenched her jaw, trying to shut out Harlow’s figure, but ended up drawing the memory closer instead. Corin was barely a teenager when the artists found her beneath the bridge that spanned the river, her body curled around a shadowy recess where concrete jutted over the ledge. They’d tried getting her attention, but she couldn’t lift herself from the ground to tend to the dirty child beside her, couldn’t even bother responding to Elly shaking her shoulders and whining that her head was itchy from their filth.
They’d carried Elly across the river, while Corin had to be dragged like a corpse. They’d cut Elly’s hair and massaged soapinto her scalp. After, they’d ripped pieces of bread and hand-fed Corin while she sat blank-eyed and silent.
Corin was twelve, and her parents had been dead for a year, and she couldn’t muster the strength to try anymore. It was easier to tune out Elly’s crying and pretend she was no longer a person, but a ghost.
“You were a wreck,” Harlow said. “Maggie told me your body was there, but your mind wasn’t.”
Corin hadn’t bothered learning everyone’s names those first few months, because they didn’t feel real. She saw herself living among them as if she were a distant entity, watching from above. There was her body, carrying tables along the riverbank, washing berries to share with the others. They were a group of ten to fifteen vagrants, some young, some old, and a few came and went throughout the seasons. Memories of her new beginning and acquaintances were a blur. They didn’t crystallize until the morning she woke to Elly and Harlow’s laughter, the two of them skipping rocks down the stream.
Seeing Harlow’s gentle gaze toward her sister, Corin had realized it wasn’t that she resented her parents for making her the eldest daughter. She just wasn’t cut out for it.
“I’ve thanked you countless times for everything you did,” Corin muttered to the empty space beside her. “But I’m better now, and I don’t need you anymore.”
She forced her aching bones to move, if only to ignore Harlow’s ghost. The flame on her torch was nearly dying, but she saw enough of a path ahead and touched the rocks beside her to feel the wide artery of granite. The passage covered with Elly’s drawings turned lower, forcing her to crawl. A rotten-egg smell struck her face, rank and pungent. The longer she crawled, the stronger the stench of decay wafted in the air.
