Page 3 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

She fetched them two glasses and Esther sat up on her elbows so she didn’t spill it all over herself as she gulped it. This was the driest placeshe’d ever been, every last bit of moisture in the air frozen into ice. It was easy to get dehydrated.

“Do you think the scientists drink so much because they’re making up for all the years they spent studying?” Esther said.

“No,” said Pearl without hesitation. She herself worked with the carpenters. “Nerds are always absolute party freaks. I used to go to these kink nights in Sydney and it was all surgeons, engineers, orthodontists. Did you know that people who’re into BDSM have notably higher IQs than their vanilla counterparts?”

“I don’t think that’s a testable hypothesis.”

Pearl grinned. She had unusually sharp canine teeth in an otherwise soft mouth, an incongruity that did funny things to Esther’s blood flow. “Can you imagine the variables?”

“I’d like to,” Esther said, “but not right now. We need to get a move on.”

Pearl glanced at her watch and jumped. “Shit! You’re right.”

They’d been holed up in this hole of a bedroom since dinner a few hours ago, and Esther stood to stretch before jamming her socked feet into her boots.

“God, I’m so glad you agreed to stay on,” Pearl said. “I can’t imagine facing this without you.”

Esther wanted to answer but found she couldn’t quite look at the woman in front of her, this person she liked more than she’d liked anyone else in a very long time. She felt a tight longing spread through her chest; not desire, but something even more familiar, something that was always with her. It was that shemissedPearl despite her presence. An anticipation of missing, like her emotions hadn’t yet caught up to the idea that this time was different, this time she was staying.

Her father’s paranoia had begun to hiss again in her ear, telling her to go, telling her she was making an abominable, selfish mistake; that she was putting Pearl in danger, and Pearl was still looking at her, face open and affectionate but starting to shutter a little at Esther’s lack of response.

“I’m glad, too,” Esther said. She had practice around Pearl now andcould trust her own face not to betray any of her sudden, melancholy mood, and she watched Pearl relax beneath her smile. “Come get me when you’re dressed,” she added. “We can fortify with a shot.”

Pearl raised her hand, those long fingers wrapped around the stem of an imaginary glass. “Here’s to the crowd. May they love us.”

The crowd loved them. All four members of the band took their practice sessions very seriously and had even managed to come up with passable eighties hair band costumes: black jeans, leather jackets. Esther and Pearl had both teased their hair to great heights, though it would’ve been more convincing with hairspray, which no one on base had. They looked good and they sounded good, and they were aided by the fact that by the time they plugged in their amps and started playing, everyone was well on their way to wasted and willing to cheer.

Esther was the backup singer and bassist, and her throat was raw, fingers sore by the time they finished “Hell Is for Children”and ended their set. The party was in the galley, which by day resembled a high school cafeteria, complete with the long gray plastic tables that had been pushed up against the walls to free up floor space, and even without the overhead fluorescents and a set of flashing red and purple party lights turned on, there was a distinct middle school vibe that made Esther feel young and silly in a pleasantly immature kind of way. The band had played at the front of the room beneath a web of white fairy lights, and once their set was over, pop music started piping through the new speakers Esther herself had rigged in the corners of the room some months ago.

The large, tiled floor was packed with people milling around, most of them unfamiliar to both Esther and to one another, and more sat in the row of chairs that blocked off the swinging gates leading behind the buffet-style hot bar to the darkened, stainless-steel kitchen. Esther noticed that the new summer crew looked amazingly sunned and healthy compared to their Antarctically pale colleagues. The new smells, too,were overwhelming in their variation. When you lived with the same people, eating the same foods, breathing the same recycled air, you started to smell the same, too—even to a nose as keen as Esther’s. These people were, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.

And a breath of something else.

Esther was midconversation with a new carpenter from Colorado named Trev, a man Pearl had described as “eager to please,” when suddenly she raised her head like a hunting dog, nostrils flaring.

“Are you wearing cologne?” she asked. She’d caught something under the booze-and-plastic smell of the party, something that made her think, jarringly, of home.

“No,” Trev said, smiling in amusement as she leaned over shamelessly and sniffed his neck.

“Hmm,” she said.

“Maybe it’s my deodorant,” he said. “Cedar. Manly.”

“It does smell nice,” she said. “But no, I thought—well, never mind.” They were closer now than they had been, and Trev’s friendly eyes had become openly flirtatious, clearly taking her neck-sniffing as a declaration of interest. Esther took a step back. Even if she weren’t taken, he looked like the kind of man who probably owned a lot of recreational outdoor equipment and wanted to teach her how to use it. However, she admired the controlled way he moved his body; it reminded her of the trainers she’d met at the martial arts gyms she’d been frequenting for years.

She opened her mouth to say something flirty, because she didn’t want to rust, after all, but then her sensitive nose caught that other scent, the one that had distracted her a moment ago. God, whatwasit? It put her right back in her childhood kitchen; she could see the bulbous green inefficient fridge, the dents and dings of the maple cabinets, the feel of warped linoleum beneath her feet. Vegetable but not a vegetable, almost spicy, and it smelledfresh,which wasn’t common around these parts. Rosemary? Chrysanthemum? Cabbage?

Yarrow.

The answer came to her, words tumbling back to her throat from where they had been perched on the tip of her tongue. Yarrow, achillea, milfoil, plumajillo.

“Excuse me,” Esther said, eschewing social decorum, and turned away from the confused carpenter. She pushed past a cluster of people comparing tattoos by the cereal nook and ducked through the hanging blue streamers someone had taped, seemingly at random, to the ceiling, taking short breaths through her nose. She was tracking the unmistakable scent of the herb, the smell of her childhood, but she knew it was pointless even as she strained for it. It was already a memory again, supplanted by the aroma of pizza and beer and bodies.

She stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by music and chattering strangers, stunned by how strongly the fragrance had hit her heart. Was someone wearing it as a perfume? If so she wanted to put her arms around them and bury her face in their skin. Usually, Esther kept loss at arm’s length; she didn’t think about all the people she’d left behind over the years, she didn’t think about any of the places she’d called home, and aside from the postcards she sent her sister and stepmother once a month, she didn’t think about her family. It was a constant, tiring action, this not-thinking, like keeping a muscle flexed at all times. But the scent of yarrow had unflexed that stern muscle and with its relaxation came a cousin to the same sadness that had poured over her in Pearl’s doorway earlier.

Pearl herself was across the room, face flushed, her teased hair tangled like she’d just stepped off the back of someone’s motorcycle or out of someone’s bed. She was wearing a dark purple lipstick that made her eyes look berry-bright and talking to a woman who was nearly as tall as she was. Esther charged toward them, intent on pulling herself out of this mood as quickly as she’d fallen into it.

“Tequila,” she said to Pearl.

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