Three

We stomped on dead blond ferns along the railroad going south. A murmuration of cranes flew above us. Their song was throaty, discordant. The forest was thick, the trunks broad as I was tall, and moss fuzzed the undergrowth, barbed flowers opened, crinoline mushrooms fruited in rings. The air was crisp and delicious. It felt alien on my exposed skin. I savored every lungful. It’s better to be grateful than get wretched over sores. The excitement was leaving my body and exhaustion felt close. I tried to outpace it. I sped ahead of Uthste and the dead girl, kept pace with the woman who’d saved me.

I did not yet know that I belonged with them. I didn’t know that they would be mothers to me. That I’d be their heir and squire, then come of age, that I’d be the Whip Spider and that the gentle and monied would weep to hear my name.

Dirt crunched under my heels. Pines swung low and touched my hair. It occurred to me how filthy I was, and that I hadn’t taken out my braids since it had happened. My braids had stayed pinned in a wreath above my brow, revealed to heaven, gathering violence’s grime, and I feared what they’d feel like when I finally took them down. I imagined finding a piece of someone tucked inside a curl. I felt faint. Wild dogs yelped out of sight.

None of us spoke, but Uthste whistled. Pretty name. Oo-thess-tea, it should be said, but in my mouth I felt it slur into uh-thez-dee. Damn a Tullian drawl. My teeth chattered. I scratched the gooseflesh on my arms. I didn’t know how to ask the other women their names or offer mine without potential rudeness. What did I know about bandit propriety?

Uthste was Veltuni, she had the name and the lip piercing to show for it, and the weeping woman who hadn’t ever been weeping was clearly Stellarine, made obvious in her pearls and her posture. In Stellarine temple school, they made you walk with books on your head. Women from the smelt line told me that. I couldn’t begin to guess about my savior’s faith. Religious heritage was important in Ignavia but she wore none of its markers. I tried to focus on nothing. Peered into the vivid tangle and searched for enforcers that weren’t there.

The ground dipped, and we diverged from the rails and edged down the slope, which opened to an expanse of fast black water. Stringy algae clung to the bank. Smashed glass sparkled green between small flat stones. The water teemed with thumb-sized fish and broke into bubbles over jutting rocks, and I watched the churn and thought abstractly about lace skirts. A wooden bridge comprised of splintered and grayish and seemingly structurally dubious planks skated above the water. Could scarcely be fit for freight. The bandits trudged down beneath the tunnel bridge into a shady muddy crevice, and I kept close behind them. I put my stinging hands under my arms.

The weeping woman strolled up to a misshapen lump of sediment, and she hooked a nail under some hidden edge. With a rattle, it became the corner of a tarp. She yanked it free, sent dirt and debris scattering, and revealed a set of four lurchers. I’d never seen one up close. Their metal frames looked dull, gunmetal matte. Leather cushions on the saddles looked finely made, and I traced the treads on the big rubber wheels, the horn curve of the dark notched handles. They were expensive and skeletal. I recoiled from them. I couldn’t reconcile what I saw with my company. Bile tickled in my throat, and I scanned the creek, expecting enforcer bodies to surface and bob along like apples.

“They’re ours,” said the big woman. She took off her hat, pulled a comb from her twist, and let down thick waves of black hair. She had dark, proud features, wore long mink lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. She looked me over. “When’s the last time you’ve eaten?”

“When you fed me,” I said.

A smile twitched on the weeping woman’s mouth.

The big woman squared her shoulders. Her height was incredible. She must’ve had inches on my father. I wanted to shrink from her but I couldn’t make myself move. She said in her smooth voice, “You’ve come into the custody of the Highwayman’s Choir. I’m Mors Brandegor. I ride with Uthste thu Calaina and Mallory Valor Moore, and lately Tita zel Priumna, our sweet undone girl.”

“She wasn’t sweet,” Uthste said. She had knelt beside the creek bed and pulled the dead woman across her lap, and she took her head between her palms, rubbed her thumbs in the hinges of Tita’s jaw. The tenderness made my belly ache. Tita’s eyelids looked bluish. I saw little veins inside them. Uthste smoothed the little whisps along her hairline and said, “Don’t you soften her now.”

Mallory Valor Moore looked at the water. Her smile was still there. It looked waxy, frozen.

Mors Brandegor stiffened. Her name was inscrutable to me, revealed nothing of her origin, but I had some implacable sense that I had heard that lilt in her accent before. She twisted her heavy-looking rings, then jabbed a long nail at the corpse on Uthste’s thighs. The corpse looked less like Edna from this angle. She hardly looked like Edna at all. Mors Brandegor flashed her teeth. “If you come with us, you’ll end up like this. The Choir courts death, kid. Misery will hound you. You can part with us here and be rid of the risk. You aided our stunt, so some portion of this loot is yours, it’ll help you on your way if you barter right. Follow the tracks south for Ignavia City and north for Kimball or Montrose. You can have a fresh life for yourself.”

“No matter.” I smiled back. It felt deranged and it made my face hurt, but I couldn’t stop, and it kept the screaming at bay. I dimpled. I felt my chapped lip split. “Where are we going?”

“Is that blood on your shirt?” Mallory Valor kicked a rock into the water. Under her delicate ruffle-edged dress, she wore work boots with round steel toes. The current swallowed the ripples.

I couldn’t blink. “Yes’m.”

She kicked another rock. Feigned interest in the insects that squirmed beneath it. Long leggy pale things. “How’s a girl your age wear that much blood?” Then, sharply: “Explain that door trick.”

“Valor,” Uthste warned.

“Those are factory-issue double-knee canvas trousers she’s wearing,” Valor said, uncowed. “She’s not a common urchin. She was under someone’s employ recently enough to look strong, and if she’s old enough to labor, she can speak on her own. Talk to me, girl. Explain to me what you’ve done.”

I panted. I looked to Mors Brandegor, who was looking down at Tita. I looked at Uthste, whose eyes had shut. I looked at the useless sky.

“Be prompt,” Valor said.

I opened my mouth and tried to say the foundry’s name. It caught in my throat. I wrapped my hands around my neck and kneaded but I tasted sour, I opened my eyes until my lashes brushed my skin. I was going to sob. I was going to hurl up my own ghost. I tried again and worked my lips but sound didn’t come. I managed a thin moan. My vision freckled. Something twinged funny in my knees.

“She’ll talk in time.” Mors Brandegor folded her arms. “Tita’d have company if the kid didn’t do whatever that was. Now. Are we bringing her body back bluffways?”

“No,” Uthste said. She covered Tita’s empty ears, then covered her shut eyes, her still nose. “She’s with her hand in ancestry. The body’s becoming ground again, and she’d hate her remains to be hauled around like cargo. Let’s bury her here. Regroup at Beauty and Prumathe’s and go home when morning comes. Girl?”

I slid my hands from my throat to my collar.

Uthste said, “What do we call you?”

“Marney Honeycutt.” My voice was coarse and small.

“What Virtue?”

“None,” I said. “I’m Tullian.”

Uthste furrowed her brow. “Are you well enough to help us dig?”

I nodded vigorously.

Uthste laid Tita’s head on the ground. Her yellow hair fell across her face. Uthste turned Tita’s cheek, spared her the sight of this work, then set to digging without ceremony, found a flat stone with a sharp edge and carved open the ground. Valor joined her after a moment, tied her lovely skirts high on her hips and stood in the mud in her boots and pale stockings. I crouched beside Valor. I used my hands first, but the open ground stung with frost, so I scraped up dirt like Uthste, with slippery creek bed rocks. Mors Brandegor stood over us. I heard a lighter click, and a sigh. She blew perfumed smoke above our heads. I liked the smell. Then she knelt, her cigar dangling from her long teeth, and dug alongside us, and the four of us in tandem bore a hole into the ground, made it long and deep, then deeper. I jumped in the hole and emptied it with my hands again, I had worked my body warm and relished the chill against my knuckles.

I could not bear the questions that were always squirming under the next fistful of dirt. What had been done with my family? Where are you? Is the place marked? Did they bury you or burn you? Did they toss you in the Flip River? Did they hang you by the ankles for display like murderers in the spring? Tullians are meant to be given to the ground. I asked you once and you told me you’d never die, so what’s the use in planning.

I handed a rock up to Uthste and she did not ask why I was crying. The hole was deep enough that standing, my eyes hovered just above the grass. Snails slimed between wildflower petals. I traced their spiral shells. I reached up, and Mors Brandegor and Valor grabbed me and pulled me out.

Uthste stripped Tita of her jacket and her boots. She pulled off her trousers, untied her shirt. It fell translucent to her thighs. She took off her jewelry, unhooked the golden ring from her bottom lip, a mark of Veltuni adulthood, a vow to join the ranks of watchful ancestors. She put the lip ring under her tongue and closed her mouth. Tita’s body glowed with tattoos. I’d never seen tattoos like this, whenever I passed the executioner’s garden, I’d always hid my eyes. Drawings of chains and ships and girls and knives covered her hard arms and the curves of her legs and her unmoving concave belly, dark lines on her hip bones and on her ribs, I saw fish bones down her sternum, wilting lilies where her clavicle met her throat, her whole body done up in art. Tita had been beautiful. Her body was beautiful. Her chest had upside-down writing above the swell of her breast, I could count the letters through her shirt. Big square letters for simple eyes like mine. TITA ZEL PRIUMNA, they spelled. I must’ve stared too hard, because Mors Brandegor’s purpled smoke curled across my cheek, and above my ear she purred, “So they know our names if we dangle.”

I folded my hand over the toe of Tita’s hollow boot. I felt a sudden surety. It pulsed through my body, quicker than blood. I looked up at Mors Brandegor’s broad face. “When will I be tattooed like this?”

Her brows shot high and her smile hooked huge, too stark for life, like it’d been illustrated. “You want it?”

“When I’m got, nobody will mistake me.” I fought an insane urge to embrace her. I rubbed the boot lacing with my thumb. “I want my name marked plainly and unremovably across me. When can I have it done?”

Still smiling, Mors Brandegor flicked cinders in the hole. I watched the cherry smolder in the dirt. “Before you go on your first run alone. Depends on you.”

Uthste gathered Tita up. She leapt in the grave with Tita in her arms and arranged her in the dirt, arranged her hair around her shoulders, arranged her hands across her chest. Valor handed down her things, and Uthste placed them folded at her feet. Tita looked like a doll from this distance. Again, I allowed myself to mistake her for Edna. Edna, unpregnant and older. Uthste crawled out of the grave, and together we pushed the ground back over Edna Honeycutt. We hid her from heaven. You did not cross my mind. You’re in my head unburied. We pushed the soil flat, laid speckled stones across her plot, and Mors Brandegor plucked the cigar from her lips and threaded it through one of her thick gold rings. She lay the gilded cigar down, said something in that language I didn’t know, then something in Cisran that I recognized but only half understood.

“Sleep well, sister,” Valor said.

“Sleep forever,” Mors Brandegor said.

“Keep at my heel,” said Uthste.

I rubbed my eyes. “Work no longer.”

Mors Brandegor put an arm around Uthste’s body. She caressed the nape of her neck. “Past midday,” she said. “We ought to be off to Beauty’s.”

“Prumathe will be heartbroken,” Valor said. “We ought to pick up a bottle of rye.”

“Looking like we do? No side trips,” Uthste said. “Straight there.”

“Decided,” said Mors Brandegor. She took up a lurcher, mounted it. A flick of her wrist and the engine purred to life. She was a sight on the lurcher’s back. Enforcers rode so stiffly. Mors Brandegor leaned into the machine like it was some beast she’d tamed from the woods. Like it knew her touch and would obey it. She jerked her head. “Marney. Come.”

I started walking, but Uthste caught my shoulder. She draped black suede over me, guided my arms into sleeves. It smelled like cigars and lilac perfume. Tita’s, I understood. I looked back at Uthste, who pointedly looked elsewhere, but said to me, “Riding gets cold. Go to.”

The jacket moved with the breeze. I buttoned it, hallucinated a pulse in the soft leather. I stood beside Mors Brandegor, and at her prompting climbed on behind her, wrapped my arms around her middle. She was a broad, fat woman. My fingertips didn’t touch. I held her coat, and I pressed my cheek against her back, and I let my body fall into the machine that held me upright. I watched Uthste start her engine. I watched Valor throw the spare lurcher into the creek. Mors Brandegor didn’t wait for her to join us. She kicked off, the tires whirled, and we shot ahead along the creek’s edge.

I imagined something running beastlike beside us. A boar or a dog. A lynx. A girl. As the dirt became a road I imagined the chimeric Tita Honeycutt bounding along the pavement, leaping between pines, flickering half moth half revenant. I pictured her face turned toward me, her eyes keeping pace with mine, her veiny blue eyelids drooping low over her irises, which were sightless and as black as Edna’s were in life. She said nothing, she was not a thing that could speak, but I knew what’d slake her, and that it was my new purpose to fetch it for her when I could. My knife glittered through my shirt against my skin. Keep at my heel, low creature! Let me not forgive nor forget.

The day was late when we reached town. Fallowlin, I learned later. Thatched straw roofs crowned long white buildings. There was a mill of some kind, an enormous dark wood waterwheel turning beside it, and a Stellarine temple to a Virtue whose painted likeness wore a bird’s-foot garland and a translucent bluish dress. We drove along side streets, avoided the square, but still I caught glimpses of the fountains, which sported some fantastical mixed-up animals that’d been carved out of veiny marble. The jets weren’t intricate but fell neatly without sound. We kept going. I had no idea where we’d found ourselves, but the bandits seemed sure of it. I had nothing to do except trust them.

We pulled beside a stable. Oxen slept there. Someone had tied bells and silk ribbons around their horns. I got off Mors Brandegor’s lurcher and staggered, my legs had jellied during the ride, and I swayed toward the stalls with a palm outstretched. I touched an ox’s soft black nose. It allowed this, assuming it noticed. The bandits spoke to each other in terse Cisran. Cisran was almost like Ignavian, when Cisra and Ignavia were one nation, that short-lived Rasenna, they’d shared the same post-Bellonan bastard tongue, once. Two hundred years ago Ignavian revolutionaries had decided it was unjust to have a class-based truth tense and hearsay tense, that is, it was a moral injury for the poor not to be taught truth’s grammar, for everything a working man said to be assumed to be half figment, for the privileged to be the authority on all things. So they stopped teaching the truth tense entirely in Ignavia, and then the languages drifted apart, and the barons regained dominion and cordoned the senate from the rest of the populace by requiring aristocratic merit for entry and anyway, I knew maybe half of the words the bandits said. Something about sharing and paying. I pulled an ox’s big spoon of an ear. What long lashes it had!

“Girl,” called Mors Brandegor.

I snapped my head back.

The bandits had leaned their lurchers in a line. They lingered outside a red door, and Mors Brandegor beckoned me over, so quickly I came with my hands in Tita’s jacket’s pockets. Valor opened the red door, and Uthste shouldered inside, Mors Brandegor just behind her. I slipped in after them. I wondered if I should’ve offered to hold the door, but my wondering cut short.

The room fell over me. There were purple damask walls strung with loosely painted portraits and fearsome bearskins, deep green plush velvet couches beside mahogany tables strewn with wine glasses, clamshell ashtrays and ceramic hands from which prayer beads dangled, trays of rouge and perfume bottles, atomizers sparkling, an open book with illustrations that made me dizzy, legs over shoulders, long hair in fists, a brass bowl where cinnamon and myrrh and rosebuds burned, knucklebone throwing lots, lemon peel curls, purpling azurine rinds.

I looked up to exclaim to the sky but saw myself. The high ceiling was mirrored. Upside-down Marney was a horror. I pulled my gaze back down. The lanterns wore colored glass. Dim light flickered pink and crimson. It was like a fit without the fit, the overwhelming splendor without the accompanying loss of my edges. I stood transfixed. I forgot for a moment what had happened to me.

A gramophone leaned in the gallery’s corner; it played low brass music. Melodic but wandering, harsh and soft. Who made this place? Whose work was it, painting paradise? I felt a deep ache, something more selfish and sharper than grief. I coveted. I wanted to keep this room. I wanted to trap it in a locket and carry it with me, I wanted to dwell here in secret, I wanted to have it to myself. I wanted to feel every gorgeous texture with my hands and my lips and flip through all the unmarked books, I wanted to memorize the lines of that illustration, the way they traced the screaming girl’s braid. Palaces must be like this. This must be the lair of some lost princess. I held my jacket close to me, felt suddenly sure that it was mine, and I marveled at my heartbeat under my fingertips. Some panic feels so good.

A tapestry moved, and from behind the woven manticore came a woman. She wore a long cream slip. It rippled in the light as she walked, hid and revealed the shape of her thighs with every forward step. The woman’s hair fell to her waist, it rippled like her dress did, and dragging my eyes up I saw the rouge blurred on her bowed lips and the peaks of her high cheeks, across the bridge of her bony nose, over the darkness on her top and bottom eyelids. Her brows were penciled black. She wore pearls in her ears and around her neck, they vanished beneath the cream silk’s low neckline. I saw the shape of pearls down to her belly, saw the little shadows they cast as they nudged against the fabric. I blinked. I looked her in her face. She wore thin black paint around her eyes that swept sharply toward her temples. Her bottom eyelashes joined in angled points. She was so artfully painted that it looked natural, as a songbird’s colors are their birthright, but what a slight it’d be to deny such craft!

The woman walked toward me. She outstretched her hands, her bracelets danced and glittered madly in the candy-tinted lights, and her face contorted, her brows lifted, her dark eyes went suddenly glassy, her mouth curved into the saddest smile I’d ever seen. She took my face in her hands (touched me!) and tilted my chin upwards, left then right, examined me with an intensity that frightened me. Then she tossed an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. My cheek pressed her chest. I felt her prayer pearls roll against my ear. I heard her heartbeat through the silk. Her perfume was implacable, it smelled warm like blood or sugar. “Poor little fawn,” she said. “No child should have eyes like yours. You look at me like you’ve known the end. Brandegor, did you hear about the massacre? What a heinous week we’ve had, a stain on our shared morality.”

I couldn’t think. Little fawn, she’d said. That’s me.

“The work riots?” Uthste’s voice, maybe. Or perhaps it was Valor’s. Who’s to say. My tension was such that I couldn’t even muster a scalding hatred for the word riot signifying the action my community had planned for near six months. I listened to this woman’s breathing. I never wanted to be anywhere else ever again.

“Prumathe’s boy Svutaf union salts for steel mills, he was hanging around the Chauncey scene for organization intel I understand, there’s been whispers of a serious movement among the ichorite workers, and the story he’s told Prumathe doesn’t match the papers a lick! There was no violence at all from the foundrymen, and even if there had been, I cannot fathom what violence could be done to the side of a brick building that’d warrant even one single drop of blood on the pavement, much less the outright annihilation of an entire labor cohort. Industry Chauncey is a blight. Not that he deserves a Virtue so high as that! Yann. I’d poison him myself if I had the man in reach. Trust of course that Baron Ramtha took the given story as an excuse to furnish her enforcement with new little uniforms. May her beating brigade be spiffy! I feared for all your lives! Knowing you four rode in Ignavia City while the security theater thrashed the streets, having no sure way to telegram you or send word, oh I worried myself into a fever! I denied clients for days. Shame on you all, not fleeing at once. Oh, Tita. What a good woman she was.” The woman pulled me a little tighter. She muffled the sob I loosened. “Little fawn wears her jacket. What’s happened to you three? What happened to Tita zel Priumna?”

“Hello, Beauty.” Mors Brandegor took a seat on one of the green couches. Valor and Uthste leaned against opposing walls, ready to take flight, but Mors Brandegor leaned back, wrapped her great arms along the couch’s sculpted backboard. “The conductor betrayed us. Etule. He’s young, but his family’s cooperated with the Choir for years. The train was crawling with enforcers.” Mors Brandegor’s voice rang off the walls. “We let Tita alone in a carriage. I’ll take full fall for that. She’d wanted to scout, and I didn’t think better of it. We didn’t see the violence that took her, but we got her killer good. We buried her under a covered bridge down south. I’ll show you where if it’d please you.”

Valor coughed. Uthste worried her hands together.

“Little fawn,” Mors Brandegor said, “is called Marney Honeycutt. Etule didn’t slow the train at our designated stop. He locked the way to the engine room, trapped us with the advancing enforcers, and Miss Honeycutt dove under my arm and ripped the door off its hinges. It was the damndest thing. She bounced over to help Valor, sealed the far door, made it impenetrable. If I wasn’t wiser, I’d say it looked like she’d welded it shut. Or smeared it with the walls. She helped us bury Tita. She earned the jacket, I’d say.”

Beauty took my face in her hands again. She held me at arm’s length, re-examined me. My body pulsed where it’d been against hers. She looked at my mouth, tugged down a lip to glance at my gums, then slid her thumb up my left cheek and nudged down my bottom eyelid, scrutinized the undercurve of my eye. She folded her hand over my hair. Said gently, “Marney, are you lustertouched?”

I sniffed. My tongue felt gluey, my blood all taffy thick. Tears fell in random bursts. I bit my big lip and I nodded, looked up at Beauty, at the mirror above our heads. “Yes’m,” I managed. How funny we looked together.

Beauty covered her mouth. She pulled me back against her. I was happy to think about nothing but the nearness. She said to one of the women around me, whose silence made clear a certain understanding, “Will you be taking her back to the Fingerbluffs?”

“Unless she tells us otherwise,” Mors Brandegor said. “She’ll make a fine Choir girl.”

“Let’s draw you a bath,” Beauty said to me. She drummed her nails on the part of my hair. “We’ll all have supper, and you can stay in the attic. I’ve got a full night ahead of me, I might be sparse, but you’ll be well met.” Over my head, she said, “This is not an inn.”

“We’ll make it up to you,” Valor said. “You’ve always been too good to us.”

“That’s true.” Beauty made a thin throaty sound. “Prumathe’s out. When she gets in, she’ll coordinate something for you in Tita’s memory. She always liked Tita. Sunny?”

“Yes miss?” Smaller voice, youngish. A girl peeked from behind the manticore tapestry. She wore her hair in two braids and a pleated pinafore, cheek rouge in unblended circles. She looked eager to impress Beauty, which seemed only natural, but little impressed by myself and the bandits behind me. She flickered between earnest sweetness and sour scrutiny. She reminded me a little bit of you. Prettier than you, but just as pokey.

“Take Marney upstairs. She needs a hot bath and fresh clothes. If you give her something of yours, I’ll buy you something new next near gibbous. She’s had the worst week in the world. Be kind to her.” Beauty gave Sunny a smile that told me kindness was not always Sunny’s style. “Now, please.”

“Yes, miss!” Sunny bowed her head. She did not walk, but skipped beside me, and reached past my hand, took my sleeve. She held onto me hard. Curtseyed to the bandits, then dragged me toward the unicorn tapestry, pulled me beneath it without ceremony. The light was cherry red here. There was a stairwell and a set of doors that I did not have time to look over, because Sunny hauled me up the stairs with a strength that made no sense for her shrimpy little frame. Surely, she was younger than me. Sunny was absolutely eleven.

We reached a landing, Sunny unlocked a door, and I was shoved into a cozy little room. The walls were painted with tall vivid flowers. The bed was frilly and neatly made. There was a doll arranged on a mint feather pillow, and a little rag rabbit. “You’re filthy. Touch nothing,” Sunny said. She opened a door that led to a little washroom, and I heard her pump water for the bath.

“I can help,” I called after her. “You don’t have to do that for me.”

“You can’t help. Take off your boots! Leave them by my door. You’re covered in muck.” Sunny looked over her shoulder at me, whipped her braids around. They were tied with little ribbons. Now I knew who’d decorated the oxen outside. “Okay, come here. Carefully!”

Unlacing my boots sapped whatever animal survival strength I had in me. My fingers hurt, my feet hurt, I didn’t want to think about what I’d look like underneath my clothes. I didn’t rib Sunny for being prissy. She was right. I was vile. I peeled my boots down, and my open blisters screamed in my stockings, and once again I felt so bad. Aching and disgusting. I took off Tita’s nice suede jacket, I draped it on the back of Sunny’s doily-covered chair. I tiptoed across her bedroom. I’d never had a room this nice. I’d shared my room with both my sisters, and it was half this size. No painted flowers, certainly. Frilly had not been Edna’s style, even as Poesy would’ve loved it, and what’s the youngest girl to do? I smiled a little, despite myself. I’d never been in another girl’s room before. You never let me visit you at the sanatorium. I wondered vaguely what Beauty’s room looked like.

Sunny climbed up on the sink. She faced the claw-foot bathtub, pointed at the steamy swirling water. “Get in!”

I frowned. “Are you going to sit there the whole time?”

Sunny smiled.

I had no energy left to feel prohibitively shy. I turned my back to her, pulled down my suspenders. I took out my knife. I balanced it on the tub’s edge. Sunny breathed in sharply, but she didn’t ask about it. I wondered what she’d seen living in a place like this. I peeled off the stiff clothes, cringed when they crinkled, stripped to my skin. My clothes retained my shape on the floor. I felt along my head and pulled the pins. Each pin was long as my middle finger, wicked sharp and hooked on the end. I found seven of the eight. One must’ve dropped at some point. I put the pins in a little pile, took down my braids. They knocked the back of my knees. My scalp howled. I kneaded my fingers against it. I had no crying left in me, but my lip trembled once.

I stepped into the bath. Too hot, I thought, or maybe I was too cold. It hurt. I sat anyway. I pulled my knees to my chest, glanced over my shoulder at Sunny. Sunny looked stricken. I cleared my throat and said, “Have you got a rag?”

She threw one at me. I caught it, barely. Soaped it and started scrubbing. The water turned reddish. I fought a wave of nausea, thought helplessly that I’d been carrying my family for days. Random stretches of pinkish skin looked greenish, though I had no memory of acquiring half the bruises. I looked heinous. I tried unraveling one of my braids and found, with horror, that blood or mud or heaven knows what had clumped it inseparably together. I yanked hard. Something ripped.

“Stop,” said Sunny. She hopped off the sink and rummaged through a little basket, withdrew a pair of scissors. “Don’t pull on it, that’ll hurt too much. Want me to cut them?”

I’d grown them all my life. It’s what Tullian girls did. We only cut our hair when we got married. I felt a flutter of fear, but I mashed it down, physically pressed on my breastbone until it felt like I’d pop my heart with my blunt little nails like an overripe fruit. “Yes,” I said. “You may.”

She crouched beside the tub. Took my left braid in her hand, pulled it taut. The snipping sound made me dizzy. She cut until the braid gave, then she took the second, cut from my ear to my nape. She pulled the wet braids out of the bath and draped them over the sink. They looked like snake skins. She ruffled my hair, then snipped some more, pinched it between her fingers and clipped along the seam of her knuckles. I didn’t watch. It was off my neck, and my head had never felt so light.

“Get out of the bath,” she said. “We should give you a second scrub up here. I think the heat loosened everything up. Needs another go.” I felt numb and bendable, I let her guide me upright, swayed against her when I saw gnarly black splotches in thin air. She drained the tub, pumped fresh water, soaped up a clean rag. I didn’t look at the one I’d used. She took my wrist and held it away from my body, swept the rag in little circles up and down my arm. She scrubbed down my back, down my legs. I lifted my foot for her when she wanted to get at my heels. I didn’t complain about the blisters. When the fresh water was drawn, I let her guide me down into it, let her pour water over my head and wash my shorn hair. Her hands on my skull felt nice. I wasn’t sure if I was crying. She poured more water over my head and I guess it wouldn’t matter either way.

When she got me out of the bath, Sunny toweled me off rigorously. I wondered if she’d ever had little pets. She shut the door on the washroom’s horror scene, and she took me back into her room, arranged me on the foot of her bed. She opened her wardrobe and leafed through it. She had no less than four dresses, which to my mind was luxury’s height, each a different taffy shade. She didn’t pick any of them. She found a white button shirt and tall white stockings, grayish button suspenders, and a pair of pleated wool trousers. I wonder if she’d picked the closest thing to what I’d been wearing. Sweet of her. I didn’t need help getting dressed, but Sunny didn’t ask and I didn’t protest, was pliable when she moved my arms and my legs and repositioned me, buttoned the shirt up to my throat, adjusted the suspenders over my shoulders, smoothed the well-pressed pleats. I glanced at the doll on her pillow, smiled a little. She thrust Tita’s jacket, my jacket, back at me. I caught it and donned it.

“These were Prumathe’s clothes. I never wear them. What happened to you?” Sunny sat on the edge of the bed beside me. She fiddled with my cufflinks. “The welts.”

I shrugged one shoulder. “Is Beauty your mother?”

“No. My older sister is Beauty’s partner. They own this place together. I help with chores.” She gave me a warning look. “Housekeeping chores. Nothing else until I’m older. Are you going with the Choir girls?”

“Yes.” I pawed my short wet hair. It felt alien. I tugged a stray strand, wrapped it around my finger. The ringlets would be crazy when they dried. There’d be no weight to force them flat. I wondered if I should ask about the Choir. I didn’t know why they called it that, or anything beyond the fact that they stole from strangers. Thing was, I didn’t care just then. They could do whatever, and I’d be theirs. I had nothing else. I already had Marney written upside down on my chest in my mind. I’d see it realized. “Sunny? Could you show me your doll?”

“Why?” She pulled one knee to her chest, scowled at me, or maybe her face was just like that. “If you make fun of it I’ll pinch your cuts in your sleep.”

“I want to play with it,” I said. I wanted to pretend I was still little. Little fawn, Beauty’d said. I would never feel little again.

Sunny gave me a long look. “Fine,” she said eventually. “Her name is Velma, but you’re not playing with her. I am. You can be the rag rabbit.”

I lay back on her bed, lifted her toys as gently as I could, like they were alive. I didn’t want to bruise them. I set them on my chest, smoothed the little frilly skirt and the stiff felt ears. I tried to smile at Sunny. I said, “I’m more like a rag rabbit anyway.”

Sunny lay down beside me. She reached out and touched my hair.