Page 41 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Who are you working for?” Esther said, still very quietly.

Pearl’s eyes went wide. “You’re not making sense.”

Esther wasn’t going to get anywhere, she could already tell. This interaction had spun so far beyond her control she didn’t know how she’d ever rein it back in line. It was a brilliant tactic on Pearl’s part, to throw Esther so off-guard she’d be on the defensive instead of the attack, but she wasn’t going to play into it. Defensiveness made a person say things they’d regret.

“We’re done here,” she said.

Pearl was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks, and it was harder than Esther had expected to keep the sight from affecting her.You don’t want to make Pearl cry!bleated her stupid, soft heart.Apologize!

“Fine,” Pearl said. “I’m going skiing with Trev, so you have a few hours to decide if you want to talk to me like a human being. If you do, I’ll give you one more chance to explain yourself, because I love you. But only one chance. I don’t deserve this.”

Because I love you.

Esther hated her for saying that. Slowly but firmly she stepped back into her room and closed the door in Pearl’s tearstained face.

“Fuck you!” Pearl said, and there was a thud as if she’d kicked the wall, but Esther stood still, her entire body at alert, inches from the door she’d just closed. After a long minute she heard Pearl walk away, footstepsfading down the empty hall. She didn’t move for a long while afterward, and when she finally did turn away, it was to sit on her bed and resume staring at the door.

Pearl had specifically told her she was going skiing with eager, flirty Trev, a fact that seemed unnecessary to share unless she thought Esther would be jealous, but that would be the hurt pettiness of a spurned lover, which wasn’t really who Pearl was. She would know that the first thing Esther would want to do would be to search her room looking for the Gil, and this declaration of her intent to be absent all day had to be nothing less than an invitation.

Which meant, probably, that the book wasnotin Pearl’s room at all—but something else was. A trap.

Pearl had a mirror above her sink, same as Esther did. This must be a trick to get Esther to go into Pearl’s room where she could be observed, where whoever was on the other side could verify that she was on to them.

She gripped her head, which felt like it might split in two. This paranoia, these cyclical thoughts, this was how her father must have felt most days of his life. She was still so angry at him, but for the first time she understood viscerally the fear he had lived with and understood, too, that it was a fear she had always trusted, deep down—until she had decided to stop trusting it and called this chaos down upon herself.

I’m sorry,she told her father, tears welling in her eyes despite herself. She would’ve given anything to be able to call him, to hear his voice, deep and attentive. He used to go into town and use the public library computers to Skype her, and she’d talked to Joanna like that sometimes, too. Cecily, who’d gotten a cell phone the week she’d moved out of Abe’s house, had often called and texted her, and twice flown across the country to see her for the weekend, against Abe’s nervous wishes. She’d been in contact with her family until she’d decided that contact was too difficult. Until it had become easier to cut ties on purpose instead of struggling to maintain thinning threads that would someday break and her heart along with them.

Esther stood up, frustrated with herself for sinking into maudlin tears at precisely the time they were least helpful. She might be paranoid, like her father, and for good reason, like her father—but she wasnotAbe. She couldn’t operate on supposition and inklings. She had toknow.

She waited, pacing, for another thirty minutes, enough time for Pearl and Trev to bundle up and be on their way, and then she went by the equipment room to see if Pearl had checked out skis and walkie talkies yet. She had, which meant they were out of the station.

Esther had been in Pearl’s room countless times and had no trouble imagining the layout. She would be able to open the door, crouch low, and enter without any fear of being reflected in the mirror on the dresser, and if she positioned herself at the correct angle, she thought she’d be able to see the mirror’s surface well enough to know if there were any telltale blood marks on it. She’d see the marks, but the mirror wouldn’t see her.

Esther crawled through the door as quietly as she could and closed it behind her with a barely audible click. She was kneeling on the floor in the darkness of Pearl’s bedroom, the overhead off, no window. She could just make out the looming form of Pearl’s dresser and the glint of the mirror atop it, but it wasn’t bright enough to see what might be on the glass. She reached up and opened the door again, only an inch, letting more light spill in. It wasn’t enough.

So she stood up, dusted off her knees, closed the door, and turned on the light. Let them see her. It wouldn’t make a difference. Whatever they were planning to do to her, they planned to do it regardless.

And, despite the evidence, despite all her suspicion and paranoia, she realized there was still a part of her that trusted Pearl; a part of her that trusted, when she turned to face the mirror, that she would find nothing except clean, absolving glass. She’d crossed her fingers without realizing she was doing it and her breath caught high in her chest, unmoving as she scanned the glass. Empty, empty, empty. A sweet, melting relief began to spread through her limbs—and then she saw it.

The rusty smear of blood, at all four corners.

Her breath came out in an explosive curse and she staggered backward onto Pearl’s bed, a place she’d been many times before, a place she’d so recently been happy. She had not truly believed in Pearl’s betrayal until she’d seen the blood. She hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the evidence was there, clear as anything.

Well, if those assholes were watching, whoever they were, let them watch. Esther began tearing Pearl’s room apart with no regard for order or stealth, looking not only for her own book but for the book Pearl must have used to activate the mirror spell. She searched the bed, the pillowcase, beneath the mattress, upturned all of Pearl’s drawers. She pulled the meager furniture away from the walls, looked behind the mirror, went from corner to corner in that little white box, searching... and found nothing.

Afterward, she sat on the floor in the middle of a heap of sweaters and underwear, flushed and nearly shaking with frustration. Of course Pearl wouldn’t leave the books here,of course,or she wouldn’t have given Esther an express hint to look in her room while she was out. Esther had known this was a trap and had stepped directly into it, telling herself all the time that it was her decision, that she was in control.

She rose from the detritus of her frantic search, delivered a vicious kick to the dresser, then picked up one of Pearl’s discarded boots and smashed it into the mirror. The crack and crash of broken glass was only briefly satisfying, and the silvery shards clung to the frame like teeth in a mangled jaw. She slammed the door on her way out.

She’d barely eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, so she went to the kitchen, still shaking, and begged a plate of breakfast leftovers from a disgruntled cook. Alone at a table in the empty mess hall, she barely tasted the food, her eyes fixed on nothing. She felt as if the station walls were dissolving around her and the ice creeping in.

As she chewed the last bite, the double doors banged open, and Trev burst through them. He had a wool hat balled in one hand and snow goggles hanging around his neck, his bunny suit unzipped and hanging around his waist with his legs still encased in insulated fabric. Hisexpression was anxious, though it relaxed somewhat when he saw Esther, and she found herself rising even as he hurried over to her.

“What is it?” she said.

“The medic says she’ll be okay,” Trev said first, which raised her alarm instead of calming it as he’d probably intended, “but Pearl fell while we were skiing and really messed up her arm. Broke her wrist and hit her head pretty hard, too.”

“Oh god,” Esther said, forgetting for a moment that she shouldn’t care—should even, perhaps, be relieved. “But she—you said she’ll be all right?”

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