21
Agnes
AGNES DID NOT FULLY COMPREHEND WHAT WAS HAPPENING.
She wasn’t sure what she expected when Sera held out her fingertip, glowing with a bluish-silver light. It reminded her a bit of the medulla she’d seen in Sera’s hair, but bigger and brighter—it pulsed and twinkled like starlight. It was fascinating and beautiful and more than a little scary.
She hadn’t really considered what she was doing until their fingers touched and Agnes felt a rush of heat enter her body through the point of contact. It was shocking and disorienting—she found she had no sense of where she was, if she was standing or sitting or if she even had legs at all. She felt like an empty vessel, more spirit than flesh. The heat that crawled up her arm was a tangible thing, wrapping itself around veins and bone and muscle, crackling and spitting like a fire. It raced to her elbow, then up into her shoulder, growing stronger in intensity, and Agnes wanted to shout, Stop! but she could not find her mouth.
The heat curled around her heart like a fist, squeezing it with every beat. She felt another heartbeat fall in line with hers, a secondary pulse in her chest that was both comforting and unfamiliar, and she thought she said, Sera? but she had no mouth so she could not have spoken aloud.
Yes, a new voice replied, and it was everywhere, it was echoing in her ears and wrapping around her knees and beating alongside her two hearts, and all of a sudden Agnes felt herself pulled in a thousand different directions. There was a hard jerk in the place where her stomach used to be; her eyes were squeezed shut but she could not stop the images and feelings that rose up with shocking clarity.
She was seven, snooping in her father’s study for some evidence of her mother, when Leo caught her and pulled her hair, telling her she was going to be in trouble.
She was a child in a massive, circular room with moons and stars and a sun painted on its vaulted ceiling. A silver-skinned woman with an orange ribbon tied around her neck was chastising her for asking an impertinent question.
She was sixteen, at Miss Elderberry’s, helping Susan Bruckner lace up her corset, her heart bursting with desire.
She was in a bed in a room made of opaque glass. A mobile of glittering stars hung above her, and a young woman with a purple ribbon around her neck was telling her she would love her as long as the stars burned in the sky.
It was her twelfth birthday and she was standing in front of her father, hoping that maybe this year, her Grandmother Byrne had sent a present. He handed her a small box wrapped in pink foil with a yellow bow, and she unwrapped it to find a Solit triangle necklace from Grandmother McLellan. Tears of disappointment pricked her eyes.
She was running along the banks of a large river of crystal-clear water, dodging low-hanging boughs of trees with golden leaves as another girl, silver-skinned but her own age, called out from behind her, “Sera, wait up!”
Sera must have pulled her hand away, because Agnes came back to the present abruptly, falling against the vanity and knocking over a bottle of talcum powder. She gaped at her arms, silvery blue sparks bursting underneath her skin, then fading away, leaving the brown color she had always known. She could still feel them though, faintly, a tingle in her veins.
Sera was watching her finger, the glow dimming until it disappeared completely. Agnes could not think of a single thing to say. She did not know if she would ever be able to speak again. The memories had been so sharp, so precise; some of them she’d nearly forgotten, like Leo catching her in the study. But others were definitely not hers at all—who were the women with the ribbons around their necks, and the girl she had been racing? They had silver skin and blue hair just like Sera. Had Agnes managed to see into Sera’s memories too?
“Mother Sun, what was that?”
Agnes’s head whipped up at the sound of the Yes she had heard in her heart before the memories took her.
“What did you say?” she gasped.
“Can—can you understand me?” Sera choked on the words.
Agnes nodded, her mouth open, her face dazed. “I need to sit down,” she croaked, collapsing onto the vanity’s bench and putting her head between her knees. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. It was too much, too bizarre, too impossible.
“My name is Sera Lighthaven,” Sera said. Her voice was so much lower and richer than it had been before. “I am a Cerulean. My blood is magic. And you can understand me now!”
She looked ecstatic, but Agnes could not share her mood, not yet.
“What . . . this is . . . it can’t be . . . magic, you said? You . . . have magic? In your blood?”
“Yes,” Sera said triumphantly, like she had passed some test. She held up her finger and Agnes froze—she was not certain she wanted to experience whatever that was again. But the finger did not glow this time. “We just blood bonded. I think.” Sera frowned. “It was not quite like real blood bonding, though—I have never shared memories during a blood bond before. Your brother does not seem to have been any nicer when he was a child than he is now.” Agnes let out a bewildered sigh that may have been intended as a laugh. Or a cry. She had not realized Sera had been seeing the memories too, and she wasn’t sure she liked that fact now that she knew. “But maybe that is how blood bonding works on planets,” Sera mused. “I think I may have given you a little bit of my magic. And we can talk now!” She knelt before Agnes, looking up at her with pleading eyes. “I need to get someplace where I can see, someplace very, very tall. Do you have dwellings like that here, or a temple I could climb? I must find the tether. I must know if the City Above the Sky is still out there.”
This was all rather more information than Agnes found herself able to process. Sera seemed to realize this—she sat back and scratched her neck, her face pensive.
“Hmm,” she mused. “This is a lot to explain.”
“Yes,” Agnes agreed. She tried to organize her thoughts, but they remained stubbornly scattered. “Who were those women with the ribbons around their necks?”
Sera’s expression grew mournful. “Those are my mothers. Two of them, at least.”
“How many do you have?” she asked incredulously.
“Three. Purple, orange, and green. For the three Moon Daughters. But that’s not how it works here, right? Here you have a mother and a father.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Agnes said, feeling faint. Three mothers? What were moon daughters?
“My City is tethered to this planet, you see,” Sera continued. “And I was chosen to be sacrificed to break the tether so it could move to a new planet, but . . . I didn’t do it right and I fell into that hole that you and Leo found me in. So now I need to know if the tether is still there or if another Cerulean has been chosen, and the sacrifice worked, and the City is lost to me forever, traveling through the vast expanse of space to find a new home.” Her tone shifted throughout this speech and ended on a melancholy note.
“You were sacrificed?” Agnes cried.
“I was chosen,” Sera said, “by Mother Sun, to throw myself from the dais in the Night Gardens.”
“And you did?” Agnes knew the answer to that, of course, but still . . . she saw this sweet, slender girl in a whole new light.
Sera nodded. “But I was meant to die, to spill my blood and break the tether, and clearly that did not happen.” She put her hands on Agnes’s knees. “It is such a joy to be able to speak to you. You have no idea how hard it is to not be understood.”