Tai opens her mouth to answer, but I stiffly shake my head. Dad told us never to share details with strangers. Aunt Marion and Uncle Teddy, too.
“I see her clearest in a hidden tower, extending into the sky,” Madame Morency rasps, when we don’t reply, and even though this means nothing to me, Tai stifles a squeak. She reaches for my free hand with hers, and her bones crunch into mine as Madame Morency speaks. “Otherwise, so many men contaminate her space. How is one supposed to keep a clear head with so many men and their opinions?” She exhales slowly. “Does a red handbag mean anything to you? Cut from the skin of a creature that crawls?”
My stomach falls, but I feel weightless and chilled. I hear the news report in my head: She took with her a red crocodile handbag with a pearl clasp—
But anyone could know that.
“I need as much information as you can provide,” Madame Morency continues in a strange purr. “Don’t be afraid, girls. This is all part of the process.”
Tai’s eyes beg me to let her spill the truth. But I’m already wrenching my hand from the psychic and standing up. In my mind, halfway out the door. This woman is a trickster, a liar, a fraud. My blood rings in my ears. I’m the big sister, and I should’ve known better. I’m trembling with barely contained hurt, tears bubbling into my eyes. I take Tai’s wrist, and she gapes at me.
“Where are you going in your brown wig, little one?” Madame Morency says, a wicked smile coming to her face, eyes still closed. “You can’t hide the truth from me.”
“We’re going.” I pull Tai toward the curtain. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Fine. Run off. But you will find no answers until you go back there,” Madame Morency calls after us. “To the place where you both saw her last.”
But we’re already disappearing down the street, both of us crying for different reasons, Tai ripping the wig off her head with starry-hot eyes and whispering, She’s alive, I knew she’s alive; she’s alive, I knew she’s alive, and my throat burning with fury that I could be so foolish, that I could think anyone would give us answers without trying to use us, that I could be so desperate to believe any voice but the one that feels like it comes from my gut, the frightened one repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.
I will avoid the block with that psychic’s shop, taking meandering detours that add minutes to my walk, for the next four years.
But as it turns out, the psychic was right.
* * *
My little sister Tai and I will find our mama, the woman once known as Mireille Foix Hammick, a decade after she disappeared. After ten years—ten long years spent wandering that purgatory of uncertain loss—it will take only one week to solve our mystery. One week of madness, brilliance, deception, trust, weakness, strength, abandonment, love, and sacrifice in the belly of our birth town, Limatra, and the fringing forest of delirium to its west.
Not everyone will survive this week.
But just as every story comes to an end, it must also start at the beginning.…
NONI
NEW YORK, 2018
“But I’m Mireille Foix’s daughter,” I speak into the cold air, watching my breath cloud and vanish.
My cheeks flush as the words stick in my throat. This is the worst kind of introduction. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used this excuse—but I’m her daughter—to get my way. I’m not Tai. My sister breathes I’m her daughter. Not me.
The hulking god of a man—bare forearms rivered with veins, even in the cold—stares down at me, shivering in my too-small leather jacket and Mama’s old patched Jordache jeans. We’re standing in front of a bar; specifically, its ivy-draped underground entrance in a West Village town house, blocks from where I’ve lived with Tai and Aunt Marion since I was eight years old. Right next to the psychic’s shop, her storefront even more run-down and overgrown than before.
The bouncer shakes his bald head, egg-shiny in the amber streetlamp light. “And I’m telling you right now, you’re not Mireille Foix’s daughter.”
I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt, being told I’m not her daughter, but I deserve it. I deserve to feel uncomfortable for trying so hard to fit in with the too-cool girls at my school for the first time, months before graduation. You’re seriously coming out with us? they said, smiling with matte maroon lips, slinging their moms’ beat-up black Hermès Kelly bags over their own forearms, snappable freckled twigs.
I finger my real ID in my pocket. Manon Foix Hammick, it reads. Five foot five—maybe not the aesthetic opposite of Tai’s lithe five foot seven, but it feels that way. Brown eyes that could’ve been pulled from Dad’s skull, nothing like my mother’s and Tai’s blue ones.
Age eighteen.
I deserve to feel uncomfortable for trying so hard to sneak into this stupid bar.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I rummage for it, sweaty-palmed. The bouncer snaps his fingers. “Hey,” he says, shooing me down the garbage-filled street with a gesture. “Move along, superstar. No ID, no entry.”
Are you still coming, M? We just ordered a pitcher of elderflower sangria, reads the message from Kelly.
Kell, not Kelly, she said to me, green eyes narrowing when we were making these plans the last day of fall semester. Seriously, Manon? We’ve gone to school together for ten years. You know it’s Kell.
My cheeks burn again thinking about it. It’s impossible to forget how she and her friends treated me when I had just arrived at their fancy prep school. The brightness in their eyes dimmed when they realized I wasn’t exceptional in the flesh, like my parents, like Tai. That I had no more juicy stories about Mama and Dad than the tabloids did. Okay, but what about Viloxin? What’s it like? they would ask. And even though Viloxin—this Eden so closely tied to my parents’ legacy, this foggy island that radiated mystery—was the closest thing I had to an identity … I didn’t remember it. Not well. My Viloki childhood was just a collection of genuine yet elusive feelings, tied to bursts of colors and smells, borrowed from photographs and stories later seen and heard.
So I avoided everyone by hiding in the library during schooldays, and I spent weekends thrift-shopping and visiting botanical gardens with Aunt Marion, my father’s spinster sister and the closest thing to a parent. I trawled the internet and made friends there, anonymously, while Tai thrived in the richly colored limelight of the real world. I hid from the city’s overwhelming stimulation in the church garden twenty steps from this bar, reading book after book (high fantasy, gothic romance, you name it), while everyone else … lived, in this sprawling city that contains millions of lives.
I was afraid of that reality. I’ll admit it now.
But this is the second-to-last semester of senior year. It feels like my last chance to really live, to make up for lost time, to figure out what the cool kids know about the glitzy underbelly of this city loved the world over.
Almost there, I type back, all chapped knuckles and numb fingers.
My phone buzzes immediately. But it’s not a reply from Kell; it’s my sister, calling me for the first time in months.