did the circles have eyes? Or tails? Could they have been serpents, do you think?”
“Maybe. Why?”
But Bella ignores the question. Her eyes are searching Juniper’s face now. They land on her lips, where Agnes can see the dark blush of a bruise and the tattered red of torn skin. Bella lifts her fingertips toward it, her expression filled with wonder or maybe terror. “Maiden’s blood,” she whispers. Juniper flinches from her touch.
Bella’s fingers fall away. Juniper’s plate clangs to the floor. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have to go. Very sorry.” She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.
“What? You’re leaving?” Juniper is sputtering, cheeks reddening. “But I just found you! You can’t just leave.” Agnes hears the unspoken again hovering in the air, but Bella is already gone, calling back carelessly, “I rent a room in Bethlehem Heights, between Second and Sanctity, if you need me.”
Agnes watches her leave with a strange hollowness in her chest. “Well.” She scrapes her sister’s eggs back into the pan with unnecessary force. “Good riddance.”
Juniper whirls. “And why’s that?”
“Because Bella can’t keep her damn mouth shut! God knows what Daddy would have done if you hadn’t—” Agnes shivers hard, as if winter has come early, as if she’s sixteen again and her daddy is coming toward her with that red glow in his eyes.
Juniper doesn’t seem to have heard her. There’s a glassy vacancy in her face that makes Agnes think of a little girl watching her father yell with her hands pressed over her ears, refusing to hear.
Agnes unpeels her fingernails from her palms and carefully doesn’t look at the cedar staff propped by the door. “My shift starts soon. I’ll talk to Mr. Malton, see if they need another girl on the floor. You can”—she swallows, feeling the bounds of her circle stretch like seams that might split, and makes herself finish—“you can stay here. Till you’re on your feet.”
But Juniper lifts her chin, looks down her crooked nose at Agnes. “I’m not working at some factory. I already told you: I’m signing up with the suffrage ladies. I’m going to find that tower. Fight for something.”
It’s such a youngest-sister thing to say that Agnes wants to slap her. In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny than her sisters. The other two are too ugly or selfish or boring to get fairy godmothers or even beastly husbands. The stories never mentioned boardinghouse rent or laundry or aching knuckles from a double-shift at the mill. They never mentioned babies that needed feeding or choices that needed making.
Agnes swallows all those horseshit stories. “That’s all well and good, but causes don’t pay much, I heard. They don’t feed you or give you a place to sleep. You need to—”
Juniper’s lips peel back in a sudden animal snarl. “I don’t need a thrice-damned thing from you.” She takes a step closer, finger aimed like an arrow at Agnes’s chest. “You left, remember? I made it seven years without you and I sure as shit don’t need you now.”
Guilt worms in Agnes’s belly, but she keeps her face set. “I did what I had to.”
Juniper turns away, pulling on her cloak, running fingers through her black-bracken hair. “Bella knows something, seems like. Is Bethlehem Heights a county or a city?”
Agnes blinks. “It’s a neighborhood. On the east side, just past the College.”
“Don’t see why a city should need more than one name. So where’s Second and Sanctity?”
“The streets are numbered, June. You just follow the grid.”
Juniper shoots her a harassed look. “How’s that supposed to help if I don’t know where—” Her face goes blank. Her eyes trace some invisible line through the air. “Never mind. Don’t need a damn grid, after all.” She takes the cedar staff and limps into the hall as if she knows precisely where she’s going.
Which, Agnes realizes, she does. She feels it, too: a tugging between her ribs. An invisible kite-string stretched tight between her and her sisters, thrumming with unsaid things and unfinished business. It feels like a beckoning finger, a hand shoving between her shoulder blades, a voice whispering a witch-tale about three sisters lost and found.
But witch-tales are for children, and Agnes doesn’t like being told what to do. She shuts her door so hard the cross-stitched verse swings on its nail. She listens alone to the uneven thump of her sister’s