if they radiate light. They’re as fierce as they are tender, as furious as they are calm, as evil as they are good. Just as I am. Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / Hover through the fog and—
“Goldie!” Liyana shouts, gleeful. “You made it!”
My sister. My sisters. I step forward to meet them.
Sisters
We’re sitting in our glade once more. In a circle, as we’d done a decade ago. I’m slightly surprised by how happy I feel to be with my sisters again. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them. I feel that I’ve come home, to a home unlike any I ever had on Earth. With them I’m able, at last, to be exactly as I am.
Soon, we’ve fallen back into old rhythms. Scarlet is setting light to twigs, Liyana juggles three dense balls of fog, and I am coaxing tight-curled shoots from the earth. Bea watches us, smiling. And, as usual, she is enlightening us with all the vital information of which we might be ignorant. Ever the fount of knowledge, ever the know-it-all.
Scarlet sighs and the flame on her stick flares. She could, if her account of killing her soldier is anything to go by, set fire to a whole forest right now, just as Liyana could turn a lake into a tsunami and I could uproot every tree in Everwhere. Bea is the only one who hasn’t divulged any details of her own battle, hardly a surprise.
“S-o.” Bea elongates the word. “Tonight we choose.”
“Right.” Liyana nods. “What’s everyone thinking?”
She isn’t, I note, assuming the decision is a foregone conclusion, that we’ll naturally favour the light. Of us all, Liyana has changed the most. As a child she was so timid, wanting to be liked by everyone, always eager to please, trying to keep the peace. Now she’s reckless, fearless, as if she doesn’t give a damn about anything at all.
Silence falls over the glade, like the static before a storm. I shift, my skin irritated by the prickle of the air.
“Well . . .” Liyana prompts.
“You say it like we’re choosing what to have for dinner,” Scarlet says. “Not between good and evil, for the rest of our lives.”
“And life and death,” Bea reminds us. “If we don’t choose in favour of our father, we won’t live to tell about it.”
“So you keep saying, but we’re far stronger than we were.” Liyana slices a finger through a ball of fog and rain-tears fall like juice from an orange. “I say we fight him.”
“Oh, you have no idea.” Bea lets out a wry laugh. “No idea at all.”
“Don’t be so defeatist.” Liyana stands. “We’re like, I don’t know, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. If we combined forces, I bet we’d be powerful enough to kill him.”
“Kill?” Bea’s tone is torn between mockery and praise. “I remember when you couldn’t even say that word.”
“You seem to remember more than any of us.” Liyana eyes her. “But you’re the most secretive too.”
“I don’t see we have another option,” I say. “If we don’t try, he’ll kill us anyway—so what do we have to lose?”
I think of Leo and how he’ll have no choice but to fight for his life. I’d have a challenging time explaining Leo and who he really is, so I’m hoping he’ll arrive any moment and explain himself. He’s taking a degree at Cambridge, after all; he has more of a way with words than I do. Hardly surprising that Bea’s studying there too. She’d shoehorned that fact into the conversation pretty quick. But even though she still irritates me, I know I’d defend her to the death. She’s my sister, my blood, my spirit. Dare I say, even more so than my brother. I adore Teddy far more than Bea, but it’s . . . different. I can’t explain how, but it is.
“We have another option,” Bea says. “We can go dark.”
Her words hang in the air, like the white leaves, except they don’t fall.
“Oh, come on.” She stands to face Liyana, who glares at her. “Don’t tell me you’re not tempted. Aren’t you fed up with being so . . . weak, so pathetic, so—”
“Speak for yourself.” Scarlet expels sparks from her fingertips that singe the moss at Bea’s feet.
“Careful, sis.” Bea steps back. “Killing a soldier is one thing, it gives you a taste for the dark. But killing your sister . . . Now, that’ll send you right over the edge.”