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“They’ve already assigned him another woman. He’ll be calling her tomorrow.”
Her face froze.
“When did you last hear from him? Really? These past few days?”
Her breath rose and fell in her chest. “He’s… people get busy—”
“Busy preparing to seduce another woman into sacrificing herself. Busy because you’re not his project anymore. He’s not signing that lease. It’s been over a month. If he was going to sign it, it would be signed already. It was bait, Jess. The lease, the store, the future. I bet he told you that you’re exceptional, didn’t he?” I said with more venom than I knew I had. “I bet he told you that you were born to do this, to follow your dream, and that he could make it all happen for you.”
“Shut up, Marlowe,” she said, but it came out more like a protest than a bite. “Just shut up!”
“You know it’s true. You’ve known for weeks. You just weren’t ready to hear it. He doesn’t love you, Jess. He doesn’t care.”
I thought, at first, she was going to hit me.
“I hate you, Marlowe. I hate you! It’s not fair. You get to keep yours. How fucking convenient for you while we all—”
“It’s not just me,” I said, in the mood to cut deeper, and because we were running out of spare seconds to argue. “Kai’s with us. He has been for weeks. I didn’t tell you because I had a horrible feeling about you, and I was right.”
She stared at me, her lower lip moving, but nothing left her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you and Priya drew the short straws. It isn’t fair. None of this is fair.” I pointed back, south, at the dark. “But the women whose names I just read out loud lost their lives. You’re throwing yours away on a man who has no remorse. A man whose affection is a fucking illusion. At least you still have a life to throw.”
The fog coated my throat. Beyond the gate somewhere, a fire was feeding a god.
“He was never going to sign, was he?”
I watched it all move through her, the anger sliding off me and finding its true address as blood seeped from her hand, onto her wrist. Her face went from wild to broken, then, when the betrayal hit her, to hardened, her lips in a thin line. She looked at the gate’s cold halo one more time, at the future she’d already furnished in her head, complete with light fixtures and jewelry cases and a happy ending, and then I heard her speak in a voice I’d never heard her use.
“No,” she said, then, the single word that I’d been fighting for. “Okay.”
“We need to move.”
We scrambled down the gully like we’d lost our minds entirely, skidding, rolling, yelping when shale sent me face-down into filth. I grabbed my robe along the way, tucking it under my arm as I tried not to sprain an ankle, and threw it back on at the bottom.
The tide had crept in quickly, flooding the sand. We charged through it, holding up our robes, the fabric soaked knee-high, our shoes filling with water.
The cave mouth was suddenly there, gaping in the fog, and we ran inside, back over the dead crabs and the seaweed that were now being pushed deeper into the cave, riding on the bubbling surf.
Priya and Callie were gray-faced, trembling, hands locked, silently crying, still bleeding, holding the circle with everything they had left. The water had saturated the hems of their robes.
Callie let out a cry as soon as she saw us, like she’d been holding it in the entire time.
Nobody said anything because there was nothing sayable. Jess cut her hand a second time, herself, unasked, given not taken. We reformed the circle, water rising quickly.
“Is he still feeding?” I said, panting.
“He has smelled his wives,” Clemency said in my skull, cold and furious. “Half of him is at the table. The other half is deciding whether to rise. If he rises before the cup is spilled, no working of mine will seat him again. Begin now.”
Shivering, not from the cold but from everything else, I recited the words that she crisply delivered inside my skull:
“By blood given, not taken,
By names kept in their number, and never lost;
We came unto his waters as wives,
And from them we depart belonging to no man.”
