Page 8 of The City of Stardust

Ambrose sighs. “Oh Vi, if only it was that easy.”

It’s the middle of the night, but Violet is wide awake. Night settles around her in a hush of anticipation—the witching hour, luminous with possibility. She sits cross-legged on her bed and sets her hands in the same position as Aleksander’s had been. A marble, plucked fromthe dusty games drawer, rests in her palm. She frowns, trying to concentrate. She mimics his movements: the precise way he’d lifted with his fingertips, how he had pinched and pulled. She holds her breath, so full of wanting.

And for a second, she thinks she catches that same charge in the air.

For a second, her thoughts whispermagic.

But the marble stubbornly remains a marble. No galaxies, no otherworldly stars. Just her and the shadows in her room, closing in.

CHAPTER

Four

AWHISPER IS CHASINGacross the world.

A woman in Italy hears it, and that night, she locks up her house. She bundles her children into the car, along with as many belongings as she can pack. When they ask where they’re going, she only accelerates down the twisting countryside roads, grim determination reflecting back at her frightened children in the rear-view mirror.

The whisper reaches a jeweller in Seattle, who promptly faints after scanning the letter. He keeps trading—what else can he do?—but buys a gun, storing it carefully underneath the till point. Six months later, he’s discovered dead in his back office, slumped over his desk with the gun still in his hand. The police assume suicide and close the case, even though his wife insists they were being watched by a woman who could vanish into thin air.

In Osaka, Gabriel Everly overhears the whisper as he sits alone in a café, dusk falling across the horizon. He closes his eyes, holding on to it for a painful moment, before releasing it back into the world. The next evening, he’s in a different city, in a different country, and only then does he feel the tension in his shoulders give way.

The whisper gathers pace like a boulder careening downhill. It passes through telephones and hidden letters burned after reading, encrypted emails and clandestine meetings by candlelight. Andsomewhere in between, it crosses to a different world, carried on a breeze to a city of snow and starlight, where it has already been circling for quite some time.

Where is Marianne Everly?

CHAPTER

Five

MUCH AGAINST HERwishes, Violet grows up, rocketing from a short, half-feral child to a taller, half-feral teenager. She reads every book in the library twice over. She explores the length of the attic, traversing the narrow beams with an overconfidence that leads her to one day plunge a foot through the ceiling. She ventures outside to their overgrown garden, where she builds—and later on, tears down—a complicated fort of frayed ribbon and twigs. But she never leaves the confines of the Everly house. Not to go to school—“Why bother when I’m such a good teacher?” Ambrose says with an unconvincing smile—not to see friends, family, or the world that seems forever pressed up against the border of their garden wall.

Instead, every year, first with furious hope and then simply with fury, Violet waits for her mother to walk through the door. A letter, a phone call, semaphore flags on the roof—something to let her know that she hasn’t been left behind to gather dust with the rest of the house.

On her fifteenth birthday, Ambrose finds her outside shredding the leaves of their enormous wild mint bush, her jaw set and her face red with the effort of not crying. Her hands are stained green, her eyes shimmering with unspent tears.

“I’m making tea,” she says stubbornly, even though with the amount she’s plucked, they’ll be drinking it for weeks.

Gently, Ambrose pulls her away from the plant. “Violet—”

“She’s not coming back, is she?” She tears out another handful of leaves. “And you won’t tell me where she is, or evenwhyshe left. This is the curse, isn’t it?”

Violet’s not so young anymore that she fully believes in the curse the way she once did. Once she thought it was literal, and spent weeks waiting for her own shadow to rise up and claim its place next to her. Now she knows the spectre for what it really is: death. The afflicted Everlys are forever youthful in their portraits. But whatever the curse truly is, it takes one Everly per generation. And her uncles are still here; Marianne Everly is not.

Ambrose blinks, startled. “Violet, why would you say that?”

“Is it?” she asks insistently.

He sighs and rubs his forehead, a sign that Violet recognises as him working up to a lie. “I don’t know where she is. Truly. Or why she left”—and there’s the lie, right there—“but she’ll come back, I promise.”

Somehow, this promise feels worse than the lie. And he does not, she notices, refute the curse.

Every so often, Gabriel drops in on the house, and though he never stays for long, his visits are always memorable. He teaches her how to punch—“Thumboverfist, kiddo!”—how to move like a shadow, how to play darts like a pro. One birthday, the lesson is accompanied by a set of lock picks, despite Ambrose’s protests.

Violet’s not sure these qualify as gifts, exactly, but there’s a kind of thrill from prying open her first lock, or walking down creaking floorboards without making a sound. Yet there are also times when her uncles hole themselves up in the library, leaving Violet to amuse herself. Days when she’s certain she hears her name muffled behind its closed doors—or that of her mother. She suspects Ambrose is afraid that if he answers her questions, she’ll disappear like Marianne—on a black, starless night with rain sheeting down the windows, never to return.

Sometimes, she thinks he’s right to worry. Because adventure, it turns out, is a dangerously seductive word. It reaches underneath Violet’s ribcage and pulls, like a cosmic string attuned to a compasspoint elsewhere. She spends hours cloistered in the library, poring over a map in its appropriately sized atlas folio splendour, until her vision bleeds faint blue latitude and longitude lines. She collects city names like other people collect spare change, letting the words linger in unfamiliar satisfaction.

She imagines, too, what it would be like to be that person heaving the bag over her shoulder, her diary stuffed with tales of the delights and dangers on the road. The stories she would bring back, wonder itself captured in her scrawled handwriting. A dozen languages on her lips, a hundred histories at her fingertips, every sight unforgettable.

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