skin, burning her flesh into a scream.
No, she thinks, let me go.
Silence falls. Darkness. And Bea is floating again.
Where is your honour? Where is your spirit, your dignity?
Her father reaches inside her, his fingers in her veins, injecting his own poison: a refined dilution of pure rage.
Bea opens her eyes.
She looks at the soldier, her glare unbending. In his shock, Dr. Finch loosens his grip and Bea breaks free.
Kill him. It is your duty, your destiny. Kill him.
As the poison pulses through her veins she feels such strength, such power, as she’s never felt before. It beats with her heart, igniting anger that swells into a circling tornado of uncontainable fury, dragging her into its vortex. She battles against its pull, fighting to tear herself free.
Surrender to it. You’ll be invulnerable. You’ll never feel pain again.
Finally, Bea succumbs. It’s a relief to stop struggling, to allow the rage to swallow her whole.
She straightens. Dr. Finch steps back. The falling leaves suspend in the air. The mists dissipate and the fog rolls back. Bea raises both hands, and the largest stone in the clearing lifts into the air, hovering among the leaves. With a flick of her fingers, Bea brings it down on his shoulder, piercing skin, shattering bone. He collapses, one arm clutching the other. His screams would crack the stone, had it been glass.
Bea smiles as she steps over to the squalling man. She places her booted foot over his nonexistent heart, kicks down hard and crushes his chest. Then she takes hold of his feet and begins to rise into the air, higher and higher, until she’s grazing the tops of the trees. Then she drops him.
When Bea alights again on moss and stone, she steps over the dead soldier’s broken body and walks out of the glade to find her sisters. Her father is quiet, but he’s inside her. And she knows that if she drew a blade across her thigh now, her blood would no longer be red but inky black.
The suspended leaves again start to fall.
Scarlet
“I wish you’d run.”
“No.” Scarlet is still thinking of Walt and how wrong she’d been. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” Her mother hesitates. “Your grandma . . . she doesn’t need you anymore.”
“I’m not abandoning her now,” Scarlet says. She sits beside her mother on a blanket of white moss and stone, only inches from a little pile of ashes. “I . . . I can’t. Not till I’ve laid her to rest.”
“I wish I had the strength or skills to fight your father. But I’ll come with you. I might be a momentary—”
Scarlet strokes her neck, wincing slightly. She looks at her mother as if seeing her for the first time, again. “You’ve been running from him for nearly ten years, and now you’ll just let him kill you?”
“I’d be a distraction; it might give you an early advantage.” Ruby plucks a leaf of ivy from its vine winding beneath her feet. “It’s the least I can do.”
“No,” Scarlet says, her voice fierce as fire and immovable as stone.
“I want—” her mother begins, but Scarlet shakes her head.
They sit in silence for a while.
“Are you sure you’ll be—?”
Scarlet nods. “I’ll be fine.”
“Then look, I . . .” With the aid of a nearby rock, Ruby pulls herself up from the ground to stand. It’s an effort, Scarlet sees. “I should go.”
And even though Scarlet had said that she could go, she finds that she’d hoped her mother would choose to stay, despite the futility of it all. But the sacrificial and the selfish had fought within her mother and, ultimately, the latter had won. As it always had.
“I mean, if you won’t come with me. If I can’t, if you don’t want me to . . .”
“It’s okay,” Scarlet says. “Go.”
Ruby reaches out, places a hand on her daughter’s shoulder—heat flushes Scarlet’s arm—then she turns and walks away.
Liyana
Liyana stands at the edge of the lake, face turned to the moon, allowing the water to evaporate. She has proved her strength, has killed her soldier; now she needs to go, to find her sisters, to face her father. Liyana glances down at the droplets still clinging to the backs of her hands. In the moonlight her black skin has the blue sheen of a raven’s wing. Liyana thinks of BlackBird. No longer her idol but her equal, her counterpart.
It was her sister, Liyana realizes now. It was Bea she based BlackBird on, the sister she always aspired to be. As fierce and