Bea waits. “I might not have to do anything—if they choose the dark.”
“Yes,” her mother admits. “But you should ready yourself, niña, in case.”
Bea says nothing.
“In a fight,” Cleo continues, “I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble with Liyana. But Scarlet and Goldie are a different matter.”
“True, she was the most . . .” Bea draws up from her memories. “Scarlet was the strongest, Goldie was by far the fiercest, and Ana was . . . nice, struggling to free herself from her mamá’s grasp.”
“But then rather uncorked by her death,” Cleo says. “It knocked the fury and the fight right out of her.”
“How do you know that?”
Cleo ignores the question. “Just because my death wouldn’t take the spring out of your step, niña, doesn’t mean other daughters are quite so cold.”
Bea thinks again of those Sunday afternoon visits, of the birthdays and Christmases spent with strangers after her abuela died. “You’ve hardly been a paragon of maternal devotion, Mamá.”
Cleo ignores this remark too. “Isisa Chiweshe was a nauseating example of motherhood. Those tiger mamás living their ambitions through their daughters. It’s pathetic.”
Bea frowns. “How did you know Ana’s mamá?”
“I didn’t, not personally,” Cleo says with a shrug. “I watched her, heard her thoughts, felt her heart, no more than that.”
“¿Cómo?”
“When you stand in the shadows you can see into the light,” Cleo says. “But when you stand in the light you can’t see what’s hiding in the dark.”
“¿Que?” Bea opens her eyes. “Mamá?”
But she’s alone. Dreaming? Surely not—the conversation was as vivid as if her mamá were sitting on the bed right beside her. Words and sentences return. A plan. What is it? Scarlet. Goldie. Ana. Who are they?
24th October
Eight days . . .
6:33 a.m.—Goldie
I’m shaking when I wake, adrenaline in my blood, a scream on the air. I shut my mouth and pray I didn’t wake Teddy. I realize as I settle that my screams weren’t fuelled by fear but by courage.
The tendrils of the dream unwind . . . I wasn’t a victim but a warrior. I was Joan of Arc, Artemisia, Boudicca. I was going into battle with breasts bare, spear held aloft. Although I’d stood not on a battlefield but in a forest—one unlike any forest I’d ever seen before. For a start, all the trees were white. And their leaves blew in the winds but also scattered from the sky. Rain fell too, and the air was so heavy with fog that the trees were barely visible in the moonlight.
Everwhere.
I wasn’t alone. I stood in a glade with three girls: Ana and our two sisters. I knew their names then, though I can’t recall them now. I spoke with them in the dream. We stood in a clearing looking up at the leaves falling with the rain. We were meeting after a long time apart. We love this place, we’ve always loved it. It is our home. But something was wrong.
I reached for my sisters’ hands, when into the glade walked a man. He looked at us and smiled. Who was he? Why were we there?
Then I remembered. He was our father. And we were there to fight him.
I bury my face in Leo’s bare chest and he, ever awake, wraps an arm around me. I don’t speak—I don’t want to open a discussion of fantastical worlds—I just breathe him in. I feel his solidity, his surety, and use it to calm my heart. Until I feel less like a clutch of leaves being whipped up by the wind and more like the ancient and immovable rock of Leo. I think of his claim to be a fallen star. Energetically, it describes him perfectly. He certainly feels as permanent and timeless and ethereal as a thing that’s been in the cosmos for a million years. And that dream . . .
I can’t help but wonder if, given everything else, that’s quite so impossible after all. Is it conceivable he’s been telling the truth? The dream felt so real, as real as this man beside me now. Despite my doubts, I feel the seed of hope being sown in my thoughts—desperate and insistent as a weed.
“I had a nightmare,” I whisper, not minding that he can’t hear me. I wish I could sleep with him every night of my life. In which case, I’ll have to introduce him to Teddy. I take a deep breath. My dream-father was terrifying. I wish I could unsee his face. Yet, even as I