Sketches of me.
I recalled my first night with Hiromi, heat and wet and nerves thrumming, surrender at last. Consent, exquisite. She’d made a drawing of me while I’d slept, which I’d stolen and burned.
And yet here I was—sleeping, dancing, eating breakfast, throwing a knife, lounging on her studio roof. There were close-ups of my face, my hands, my eyes.
How had she hidden these from me?
Then I spotted something in one of the breakfast sketches: I was drinking from an antique teacup decorated with a picture.
Icarus, falling from the sky.
The winged figure was barely legible, a smattering of lines. But somehow Gertie had captured the cup I’d shattered the last time I’d visited her pod.
Going through the images again, I saw other marks of my cousin’s style. She crowded the page too much, just a few extra pen strokes, and in one sketch she’d drawn my new nose, which Hiromi had never seen.
Doing what the family asked, but also leaving a message for me.
Would Hiromi consider these forgeries an homage? They’d probably make her laugh.
There were other pieces I didn’t remember. I wondered how many had been forged or extruded by software. How many times would Garrett profit from my famous murder?
But this show wasn’t about money—the sketches had been sent into the world to find me. Elizabeth, still furious. On the gallery website was a comment box, inviting people to share sightings of “the lost girlfriend.”
There weren’t many responses, and none took the prompt literally. There was a rumination on cults. A poem about someone lost. Appreciations of Hiromi’s life.
But one comment stood out.
My brother knew this girl.
I will find her, and end her.
—B
Bianca knew I’d sacrificed Xavier. Likely, she understood; she did not forgive. Some nights, I dreamed of blood eagles, red against a dark sky.
Another reason to keep moving.
We left the countryon a container ship, slow and anonymous. No company for a month except six crewmen; only two spoke English.
We climbed the containers every day. The precarious metal city swayedbeneath us, stuffed with the dross of a hundred factories, a thousand spreadsheets.
“We should tell Care about you,” Sebastian said, halfway across the Pacific. We were on top of the tallest stack on a cloudy day, the breeze stinging with salt. It was the first time he’d said the name, a thousand miles from anything. “You haven’t stabbed me yet. They might trust you now.”
I nodded. I had so many plans to end my family.
“But first you’ll have to explain,” he said.
“Explain what?”
“Why Grandmother let you walk away. Why you’re alive. You never told me.”
I nodded again, but it took a while to start talking.
The ship had begun a course correction. The containers shifted and groaned beneath us, threatening to tumble into flotsam as I explained about Bellamy. Her cancer, our time together in the hospital. Our goodbye, the unsent letters left on my desk for the family to find.
The hug. The snap.
“Is that all?” he said when I was done.
