but the night was dark / and love was a burning fence around my house.
Before Bexley sees the stranger straight-on, she sees them in pieces.
Caught in the silver of the mirrored walls, she sees a white-stockinged leg slip by in a quick gait. Halfway to the ceiling, she sees a thin red ribbon turning over itself in the wind. There, a glimpse of tiger stripes in black and brown—an eye cast in bright blue—a sinewy shoulder rolling in and out of vision.
She watches from the corner of her eye as all these glimpses come and go, and lets them fade from view without resistance. If there is one thing Bexley was born knowing—
Pretty girls aren’t meant to chase.
Instead, she slips like water through the narrow silver chasms of the city. Mirrors crowd her overhead; with her gaze turned up toward the ceiling, Bexley sees the bright gold question of her body wind through empty rooms, stores with broken windows, churches with statues whose heads have been torn off. Birds without wings sit inside the doorways. There are skeletons here, too; but they are configured in manners that defy all laws of the natural world, and some of them look to be made out of diamonds. In a few places, she finds jewels so fine it hurts not to take them, but at certain angles the dark energy that sticks to them is visible, even palpable. Looking at them, Bexley’s heart thrills with cold fear.
Everything here is so odd. The silence, the stillness, makes Bexley’s very bones feel cold. It’s like a curtain has been drawn over what should be a bright and violent world. It muffles life’s music and the sun’s golden light; it bleaches everything of its proper color.
Except the stranger. Who, when she rounds the corner, turns out not to be a stranger at all.
Solterra’s golden girl is cracked into the past like a whip, torn through time to that night, years ago, when she had found the not-goddess in Denocte’s street and seen her reflection like an oil painting in the silver puddles on the street. Then, the sky had been a dark blue like velvet; Bexley had felt the cold snap of the wind up against her chest, but it was nothing next to the warmth that flooded through her from the heart out. Today it is nearly the same. She looks up from the mirrors at her feet, and Antiope is standing there, her head turned, at the end of the hall.
Bexley bites her lip, not quite hard enough to taste blood; the watery blue of her eyes turns to the color of the sea, wine-dark.
“You asked me,” she says calmly, “about my desires. Long ago.”
