Page 5

For a while, I was lost in the cradle of warm cacao and string lights, finding names for the taste of fog in my sinuses. Sky dew. Ghost water. Ocean’s breath.

The firewood crackled. I watched Callie’s wine glass, then the wine inside it, then, somehow, I was looking right inside that too, as if it were a little aquatic planet of its own.

“How far are we from Eureka?” Priya said to no one in particular.

They talked back and forth about the distance, about where we really were. I never understood.

“Who owns this land, anyway?” The question was mine. I hadn’t meant to ask it aloud.

Aurora’s eyes met mine across the fire. The glow of it was playing across her face.

“The investors do,” she said.

Behind Aurora, the air had gone strangely still.

Investors. The word settled into the soft furniture of my mind, but the question I wanted to chase it with never made it out.

“Investors in what?” Priya said.

“In the work, sweetheart. In all of it. Drink your cacao,” Aurora said, like she was closing the door on a child at bedtime.

Callie was laughing at something nobody had said. Jess was studying the bracelet around her wrist, as if she’d only just discovered what bracelets were for. Her shoulders were slack, her mouth lazy. It was the first time I noticed she wasn’t sheltering herself from us.

The aftertaste of the cacao was suddenly very noteworthy. It was a question mark at the back of my tongue, but it didn’t hold its shape long enough for me to ask a thing about it.

“I love you,” Callie said to all of us. “I love every one of you. Have I said that? I’m going to say it again because I might forget. I love every one of you.”

“You’ve said it three times.”

“Then I’ll say it a fourth.”

I tipped my head back to look at the sky. There was the moon, fat and yellow and right where it should be, and beside it, a smaller, paler, second moon, and beside that one, smaller still, a third moon, the three of them lined up like some sort of sentence I was supposed to read. That is not how moons work, I thought, and it was the last clear thought I would have that night.

By the time I lowered my head, Kai had appeared with the tray again, this time with five woven floral crowns. He set it down and left immediately.

“For your ascendance, my beautiful women,” Aurora said, rising from her seat and picking up the tray.

The first one was for Callie, who dipped her head reverently when Aurora placed it on her hair.

I watched the motion blankly at first, but some small part of me surfaced to think, that’s a little—

I sat up in my chair.

She placed another on Priya’s head, where it sat askew until Priya fixed it. Then Jess, who received it nonchalantly.

Then me. Aurora’s fingers angled the crown onto my head. “Now you’re ready, Marlowe,” she said, like she’d tied my ballet shoes for a recital.

“Let us gather.”

I watched the three women join her by the fire, then rose, the feeling liquid in my legs.

She handed out feathered quills and set a pot of ink on one of the skull-sized stones. Then she gave each of us a cream index card decorated with a small red ribbon. The beaded bodice of her dress caught the firelight, opaline.

“Real ink for real fire. Real purpose. This isn’t a moment for shorthand. It’s the moment that shapes you.” She clasped her hands together and waited for the four of us to go still. The night breeze moved the white fabric. We looked like pieces of the fog.

The fire rose, flames leaping at the sparks it spat into the air.

“My loves,” Aurora said. “Thank you for coming.”