Then she stood and turned to Sera’s mothers. “For devotion,” she said, kissing her orange mother on the cheek. “For wisdom,” she said, kissing her green mother. “And for love,” she finished, planting the lightest of kisses on her purple mother’s forehead.
Sera’s legs were trembling like a newborn seresheep as she climbed the steps of the dais behind the High Priestess.
“Today is a momentous day!” the High Priestess cried. “The beginning of a new chapter for our beloved City, at long last. This ceremony will free us from the bonds to this planet as Mother Sun will guide us to our new home. All praise her everlasting light!”
“Praise her!” the crowd cried back. Sera searched for Leela and found her off to the right, near a cluster of silvery white moonflowers. She touched the place where the star hung beneath her dress and Leela nodded, tears falling thick and fast down her cheeks.
As the High Priestess continued, Sera wondered why she herself wasn’t crying. Perhaps because right now, this moment did not seem real to her. She felt as though she were inside another’s skin, as if she were watching this ceremony happen but was not a part of it.
The High Priestess anointed Sera’s wrists and temples with dots of lilac perfume. Then she drew an ancient iron knife from her belt. Sera tried to consider how Wyllin had felt in this moment, when the knife was drawn. But Wyllin held no comfort now. She was long dead, and Sera was very much alive and afraid.
The echoing wail of a horn filled the air; sad, like a dying star, like the emptiness of space. Tears were falling freely down the faces of all three of her mothers as the High Priestess’s knife bit into Sera’s skin, just below the elbow, releasing brilliant blue blood.
Pain. Sera had never truly felt it before. Her skin burned where it had been cut. The pain seemed to sharpen everything around her. Suddenly her fear was everywhere. It was climbing her rib cage, it was crushing her shoulders, it was choking her, strangling her. She could not do this.
The cut did not heal itself instantly, as all other cuts had throughout her life. The knife was imbued with a magic to keep her blood flowing. Sera felt nauseous as she watched the blood trickle down her arm. Her tongue felt swollen, making it hard to breathe. Her head swam, and when the High Priestess spoke again, she sounded very far away.
“For our City,” she said, making the same mark on the other elbow. “May Mother Sun embrace you and cherish you for all time.”
Then she waved a hand and Sera could sense the barrier part behind her, letting in a gust of air colder than anything she had ever felt in her life, a cold that gnawed at her skin and ate right through to her bones.
The Night Gardens were silent. Sera knew what she had to do, but she didn’t know how to do it. Her hummingbird heart was throwing itself against her chest as though trying to fly away. Everyone was watching her. It felt like an eternity passed before she could even form the intent to move her legs to step out onto the jutting glass.
Beyond the barrier, the cold enveloped her and everything felt impossibly still. How strange that only a few steps could make such an overwhelming difference. The trickle of blood was hot as it made a slow path down her arms. She gazed up at the stars for the last time and prayed for strength. She could not look back, not even for one last glimpse of her mothers or Leela. If she looked back, she would never look away again.
Sera opened her arms wide, squeezed her eyes shut, and fell from the balcony, so that her blood could help her people.
Part Two
Old Port City, Kaolin
7
Leo
LEO WAS SICK OF OLD PORT CITY.
No, not sick. Bored. Bored to death.
No, even death would be less boring.
The air was thick with heat and humidity, so thick you could put it in a bowl and serve it up as soup. Sweat soup. Kaolin’s finest delicacy.
Maybe there was a place far to the north, in the Crag Mountains, where it was breezy and cool and some goatherd was enjoying a glass of lemonade and savoring the smell of goat crap. Though if what the papers were saying was true, it wasn’t cool anywhere in Kaolin at the moment. The heat wave was setting records, with reports of droughts in the Knottle Plains and wildfires raging in the forests around Lake Looten.
Leo could hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves mixed with the puttering of car engines as they passed by on the street outside. The curtains in the library were closed. The curtains in the entire house were closed. It was supposed to keep out the heat, but all it did was make the air more stifling. Leo’s thick black curls were plastered to his forehead, and his shirt stuck to his chest in places. Even lounging on his favorite leather sofa was uncomfortable, the material sucking at his exposed skin. So instead he was sprawled across an overstuffed armchair, tossing a squash ball against the floor so that it bounced off the wall and back into his hand.
Thud, thump, smack. Thud, thump, smack.
He should be in his family’s summerhouse in the south, near Pearl Beach, having parties with his friends, swimming in the cool waters of the Adronic Ocean, and convincing the local girls to show him what was under their skirts. Not stuck in the brownstone on Creekwater Row, dying of heat and bored to tears. When his father announced that they would not be vacationing this summer, he had hoped it was because at long last, Xavier McLellan was going to bestow upon his only son the one thing Leo had wanted since he was a child—a place in the family business. But the days had stretched into weeks. August was nearly over, and Xavier showed no signs of including Leo in anything, business decisions or otherwise. Perhaps Leo should have expressed a desire to go to college, like Robert and his other friends. But he’d always thought—or maybe assumed—that Xavier was simply waiting until he was old enough, and now that Leo was eighteen, shouldn’t he be learning the ins and outs of the McLellan empire?
The ball ricocheted off a piece of molding and bounced out of Leo’s reach. It rolled under the couch, and he was too hot to get up and look for it. There was an open book on the table beside him—A Complete History of the Wars of the Islands, by Edward G. Bates. Leo skimmed a few pages. It was all politics, the trade deals that fell through and prices on imported goods from Pelago being jacked up as demand spiked—there had been droughts in Kaolin back then too, like there were now, and famine in the south, where overfishing had depleted the food supply from the Gulf of Windsor. Pelago had never suffered from the weather like Kaolin did; their waters were always plentiful, their soil always fruitful. Threats had been tossed back and forth between the president of Kaolin and the Triumvirate of Pelago until the inevitable breaking point, when Kaolin sent its fleet to attack the Pelagan armada. But it was the Pelagans who had won in the end.
Agnes had probably left the book out. It seemed like the boring sort of thing his sister would enjoy reading. And she was far more interested in the Pelagan side of their family than he was—too interested, if you asked him. It was almost as if she didn’t notice that their father, in addition to his famous freak shows, ran a chain of the most successful anti-Talman theaters in the country, producing plays that railed against the goddesses of Pelago. Xavier McLellan had only married their Pelagan mother for her money, and since she had died in childbirth, Leo felt that he was barely Pelagan at all. Even though, according to their Pelagan chauffeur, Eneas, he was her “spitting image,” with his fair skin and turquoise eyes. Well, Leo didn’t want to be her spitting image. The only comfort he got out of it was how much it clearly rankled Agnes, who looked like a female version of their father—brown skin, chestnut hair, eyes the color of cinnamon. For twins, they didn’t seem to have anything in common, from appearance to sensibility.