“I saw them too,” she said. “And her city made of glass.”
“How do they even make babies? I mean, there didn’t seem to be any men.”
“I know. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She lay down again. “A city with no men.”
“Thanks,” Leo said.
“Parthenogenesis,” Agnes said, sitting back up abruptly.
“Um . . . bless you?”
She frowned at him. It took her eyes a second to focus. “Parthenogenesis,” she said. “It’s the process by which an embryo can develop from an unfertilized egg. I think Sera’s people, the Cerulean, must procreate using some form of parthenogenesis. I’ve only ever heard of it happening in bees and lizards and sometimes birds. But they are magic, I suppose. . . .” She cocked her head. “What were you doing there anyway? Why did you go see her?”
“Because I wanted some answers. I tried to talk to you, didn’t I? But you had more important things to do, like get drunk with Pelagan sailors.”
Agnes giggled again. “I had very important things to do,” she clarified.
“I can see that.” Leo scratched the back of his neck. “And I wanted to apologize to her. For, you know, the net and . . . everything else.”
She stared at him, then threw back her head and laughed.
“Shh!” he hissed. “You’ll wake the whole house!”
Agnes pressed her face into her pillow, her body shaking with laughter. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, coming up for air. “You went to apologize? Oh, I wish I could have seen that. Have you ever apologized before? For anything? What did you even say?”
There is nothing that is keeping you from choosing to be the right kind of person.
Leo hesitated. It was different confessing to Agnes than it had been to Sera. She might have seen a few of his memories, but he had known Agnes his whole life, and he had spent much of that life obsequiously following his father and trying to make her miserable. He wasn’t sure she would believe what he told her now. But he supposed he had to start somewhere. He picked a piece of lint off his trousers and stared at his knee when he spoke.
“I don’t want to be like Father anymore. Whatever this new business is, this . . . selling of Pelagan creatures, of Sera and her blood, I don’t like it. I wish I’d never gotten involved in it. I wish I’d never brought her to him. And when all those memories came back, it was like seeing my life clearly. I don’t think he’s ever cared about me at all. I think he would rather I’d never been born.”
Agnes was quiet for so long Leo thought she might have fallen asleep.
“He doesn’t love me either, you know,” she said. “He told me to my face he wished I had been born a boy. Yet I still wish he would show me some . . . some modicum of affection. It’s pathetic. But he’s our father. He’s the only parent we have.” She hesitated, then leaned over the edge of her bed. For a second Leo worried she was going to get sick, but then she was back with an old, worn photograph in her hands.
“Here,” she said. “I know you always say you don’t care about her, or don’t want to talk about her, but she existed, Leo. She was real. And I have to believe she would have loved us no matter what.”
Leo stared down at the picture of a woman with his face. All the times Eneas had told him he was her spitting image came back to him in a rush, all the times he’d rolled his eyes and reassured himself that he couldn’t look that much like her.
But he’d been wrong. The woman in the photograph had a nose just like his, and the same-shaped eyes, and an identical chin. His curls were caught up, windswept, around her face. His smile curved on her lips. She had a bicycle and was wearing pants and a thick sweater. His own mother, wearing pants. And she looked so happy. On the rare occasion that he’d thought about her at all, he pictured her on her deathbed after giving birth. He’d imagined her sweaty and exhausted, with circles under her eyes. He’d imagined someone weak, someone who refused to stay alive for her children, who didn’t care enough.
It hit Leo then that he blamed his mother for dying.
A tear fell onto the photograph, blurring her face. He wiped it away and held the picture out to Agnes, embarrassed.
“Look at the back,” she said. He turned it over and saw, in delicate cursive, the words: Taken by X, March 12. Runcible Cottage, the Edge of the World.
“He took this?” Leo could not imagine a scenario in which Xavier would be in the same company as a woman wearing this sort of outfit, much less making said woman laugh the way his mother was laughing.
“I know,” Agnes said.
“What’s Runcible Cottage?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. And I’m not about to ask.”
They both stared down at their mother.
“You won’t tell him I have it, right?” she said.
“No. Never. He’d probably make you burn it.” He handed the photograph back to her. “Will you tell me what this tether is?”
She leaned against her pillows and yawned. “I’m not sure I entirely understand it. It’s part of her city, a city in space. The tether attaches the city to our planet, and she thinks if she can get to the tether, she can get back home.”
Leo took his time processing her words. In the end he decided that a city of only women that floated around in space was no crazier to believe than magical healing blood.
“I’ve got to help her, Leo,” Agnes said, her eyes fluttering closed. “She can’t . . . Father is stealing her . . . it’s all wrong. She shouldn’t be here and we did that, me and you together. I was there, I was responsible too. I should have let her go, could have, but I was scared and I don’t want to be scared anymore. And I don’t want to live in Old Port and I don’t want to marry Ebenezer Grange.” Her head sank deeper into her pillow. “He’s nice, though,” she added sleepily. “Very nice. Very helpful. But not for me. No, not for me.”
“I’m going to help her too,” Leo said. “I promised I would, and I’m going to keep that promise.” He smiled. “What do you know, we’re on the same team for the first time since . . . well, ever.”
But Agnes was already drifting off, her breathing slow and steady. He went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water, took two aspirin out of the medicine cabinet, and crept back to her room.
“Agnes,” he said, shaking her gently. “Sit up and take these.”
She took the aspirin obediently, then lay back again.
“You’re being very nice,” she murmured. “It’s suspicious.”
“Get used to it, little sister.”
She growled with all the ferocity of a kitten. “Three minutes, Leo. Three lousy minutes.”
“And I get to lord it over you until the end of our days.”
She let out a drowsy laugh. He put the glass down on her nightstand as his sister slipped into unconsciousness, then unpinned the silly hat from her bun and left it on her dresser. The photograph of their mother was still clutched in her hand, and he placed it next to the glass of water. Alethea Byrne looked so alive. Leo had always been irritated by Agnes’s curiosity about her, but now he was beginning to understand. There was a whole side to the two of them that they knew nothing about. Maybe if Leo had cared more about his mother, he wouldn’t have been so desperate to be like his father.