But when Proserpina arrives she finds no villains, no cold and haughty packs: just girls, nervous and homesick and trying to scrape together a little armor. The first night, she stays up sewing little button bunnies out of her socks and stuffing them with paper. She leaves them on bedfeet, and notices that not a few girls keep them, and cry less. She and a girl named Iala laugh at whoever was silly enough to use up all her socks that way. She has a friend.
She borrows one sock from each of her dormmates; nobody ever notices that they’re mismatched.
The Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd is the fourth-oldest living thing in the world, which is obvious from his shoes. They’re whatever color gray becomes after brown turns into gray, when that brown was once polished black. They personally ground out the grooves on his apartment steps.
The Owl lets crackers fall from a sleeve as he climbs. He’s courting mice. He doesn’t eat them, not anymore; he just likes to stand at his doorstep, at the very top of the switchback staircase, and watch. Age has taken his beak, his shoes, and his silent feathers, but never yet his sight.
Thisbe crosses her fingers and the world goes time-lapse, so they flicker through the driving and stop at every red light. At the red lights they kiss. Kissing at red lights never ceases to startle the heart, even when you do so forty-three times on the way home.
Pyr doesn’t want to be home yet, though, so he slaps down a narration box and they’re at the park the next day: sunlight, and water, and the long weekend still ahead. They whisper pale pink words and lie back on the grass, grinning, to watch the speech balloons float away.
Lon’s editor is a small black bulldog with a thick tail where its hind legs should be.
“Gimme that one,” it snaps, and jerks its head at a word on the page. “And that one. Next paragraph, too.”
Lon obliges, and it gnashes them greedily down. He reads it again: it really is better.
“Whole page,” the editor belches. “An’ another. A chapter. More!”
The story’s as good as it’s ever been, but Lon’s out of paper. The editor fills the room.
“You know what’s next,” it growls, looking down, eyes beady.
Lon nods with relief, and holds out his hands.
Proserpina’s father provided for her education, and at thirteen she stands on a platform, waiting for the train to boarding school. Her mother, who attended the same school, runs the fob chain of her late husband’s watch through her hands again and again. She wishes he hadn’t wanted this.
Proserpina is typically stoic. She’s read enough about boarding school to understand that it is a kind of doom; that bright girls, and those not naturally cruel, are sausage filling. She is bright and kind. But she won’t be scrap meat.
Her mother shivers when they kiss goodbye: Proserpina’s lips are cold.
The Justin rides atop a slow boxcar, transposing a Buddy Holly song to E minor. His Martin leaves notes like tissues in the moonlit wind.
Then there are ninjas.
“Did you really think it was over?” asks their kunoichi. “That you were free?”
“Lord Riaa is dead,” he says gravely.
Does she smile beneath the mask? “Perhaps. But he was only one of a Cartel–none of whom have any interest in seeing you as ronin. Come with us or die.”
The Justin nods. Then he draws the neck of the Martin from its body, and slices them all in half.
“Just like the fish,” whispers the boy, crackling over the golden wire between the hyporvrychio above his father’s wheezing. Fins are so much work! Perhaps in the next design a pump, or a finned wheel–
The wire’s taut. “Careful,” he warns into the speaking-tube. “Even fish go only so deep.”
“They go wherever they wish!” So fast, laughing, young legs finally free of their cell. “They swim deeper than any net!”
“No!” He pants. “The plating won’t hold, child–”
Pinging on the line; gushing; a cry silenced as the wire finally snaps. The copper fish vanishes into the hungry dark.