now, I need Liyana to be my life raft.
“I don’t understand,” Liyana says, still unruffled. “Isn’t he our age? Wouldn’t he have been a kid back then?”
“Yes. But”—I take a deep breath—“And this is going to sound deluded, but . . . he’s not—he’s not exactly or entirely . . . human.”
“Oh.”
“Do you think I’m deluded?”
“No.”
I’m torn between relief and surprise. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. Lately I’m starting to wonder if I am, if we are . . . At least, I’m seeing things, knowing things, doing things, that I can’t explain. Not rationally, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
Somehow, admitting this aloud and having her say it too lightens the weight of my sorrow a little.
“I mean,” Liyana says, “the way we met. How can you explain that?”
“Yes. And he’d been telling me about this place. It sounds—the dreams I’ve been having . . . It’s the same place, Ana. And how would he know?”
Liyana waits, saying nothing.
“I never told him, I never told him any of the details. But I—I’m thinking all kinds of things, like maybe he drugged me, or hypnotized me, or—”
“But if he was trying to trick you, or seduce you, or something, why would he tell about . . . what he did?”
“I know,” I say. “Exactly. He knew it’d make me—he knew I’d hate him for it. He knew I couldn’t love him anymore, not after that.”
Liyana’s silent. I know what she’s going to say before she says it.
“But you do love him, don’t you? You don’t want to, but you do.”
29th October
Three days . . .
12:01 a.m.—Goldie & Liyana
We fall into silence again. Since what is there to say? My sister is wise enough to know she doesn’t have the words, that there aren’t words. She understands that all she can do is be there and, for now, that is enough.
“I’ve been thinking about your dreams,” Liyana says at last. “About our other sisters. I think we should try to find them.”
I say nothing.
“I mean, you even know where one of them works,” she persists. “If we don’t—Anyway, I’m sure the two of us together can convince her. Don’t you think?”
“I suppose so.”
I know she’s right. And I want to find them too. But, right now, I barely have energy to breathe, let alone face another confrontation.
4:01 a.m.—Bea
“Where are you, Val? Where the hell did you go?”
Bea wipes her eyes, then slaps herself sharply across the cheek. The sting of the strike gives her a moment’s relief, but it’s not enough. It’s only when the physical pain is deep and raw enough to eclipse the emotional that Bea can breathe again. She picks at a scab on her thigh, wincing as she draws it from her skin, the flesh beneath fresh and pink.
“I’m scared, Val.” She closes her eyes, imagining he’s beside her. “I’m so fucking angry all the time. I don’t know what I might . . .”
To calm herself, Bea thinks of Dr. Finch, of their last encounter. She thinks of his skinny body beneath her, his chest almost concave as he panted. But then the memory of Vali’s plump naked body rises. Her baby owl. Bea pushes it down. She brings herself back to Dr. Finch’s weak-featured face, scruffy hair, and stubble. All affectation. What a prick. She’d never found him remotely attractive. At first the sex, after gaining admission to the Royal Aeronautical Society, had been a desire to know him more deeply—every idea, every spark of inspiration, in his supposedly magnificent mind. Until it’d soon become clear that he was more of a cuckoo than a hawk and driven by only one desire. Unlike her dear Vali, who was, in all things, a lovelier human being than any she’d ever met. Her eyes fill again.
“Help me, Val,” Bea begs. “Please, I can’t bear it anymore.”
5:04 a.m.—Scarlet
Scarlet dreams. Shifting, jolting, quivering, sliding in and out of sleep, clutching snippets of images when she wakes. It’s a dream she has often, of a place she knows but has never been to. A place of forests and rivers, stones and moss, hazy with mists and fog. It might be the Lake District, except that everything is white, as if dusted with snow. Only it isn’t snowing. Instead leaves are falling, always falling, not from the trees but from the sky. And it’s never day, only night, lit by the light of an unwavering moon.
There Scarlet is a child again, strolling along a path, hopping from stone to stone, thinking that perhaps