Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(75)

Especially if it meant Malina would live.

It had to be me.

Tears welled hot, pooling in my lashes. I dashed them angrily away, taking deep, slow breaths as Shimora lingered in the doorway of our room. “Is there anything else I can get you?” she said, stroking the sculpted fall of copper curls over her shoulder, her nude nails sparkling in the chandelier’s light. “Anything you need? Anything we can—”

“What is it like?” I broke in. “What happens to the sacrifice?”

Shimora drew her glossed lip between her teeth, shaking her head. “I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know. None of us do. The chosen leave their bodies behind in the cave, fall into a deep sleep from which they never wake. When their service is over, they simply stop breathing. And during the sleep, though they don’t age, their bodies change. Their hair and nails grow, their muscles even strengthen. We cut their hair for them sometimes, when it grows too long.”

“Their muscles strengthen? Wouldn’t they atrophy? Isn’t that what happens in a coma?”

She gave me a wistful smile. “It’s not a coma, dear heart. The chosen’s mind and soul are elsewhere, and wherever they are—whatever the essence of her is doing—it changes the clay of her body. That’s all that I can tell you. It’s all that we know.”

We fell quiet. With a little nod to us, Shimora slipped out and gently clicked the door shut behind her, leaving us alone. Malina and I sat silently together. Everything felt impossibly vivid, and just as impossibly slow. If we’d had an hourglass, I thought that we’d be able to track each grain’s descent, and that each would take an hour to fall.

And then I said, “It’s going to be me,” at the same time as Malina said, “I’m not letting you do it.”

She whipped her head over her shoulder, and we stared at each other. Her lips tightened, a muscle in her jaw twitching, and then she sprang up, fists clenched. “I knew it,” she spat. “It’s just like you to go ahead and decide for the both of us, as if it doesn’t even matter what I say.”

“That’s not fair,” I protested. “You’re making it sound like I want to do this.”

“You do want to do it,” she accused, “because it means you can keep on being Iris the Martyr. Because, what, you think you know everything? You think maybe you deserve this somehow? I think you bought into all of . . . all of Mama’s bullshit over the years. I think you really believe you’re worth less than me.”

“That’s not—I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.” My entire face was tingling. “I just want to protect you—”

“I never asked you to protect me!” She stalked to the center of the room, turning in a furious little circle. I’d never seen her so frantic before, like a doll wound up too tight. “We’re twins, Iris! You’re not even my older sister. I’m the older one. And I’m the one who . . .” She took a shuddering breath, wringing her curls with one hand. “I’m the one who got to have everything I wanted. I’m the one who always let you take every fall.”

I bit down to keep the tears back, but I couldn’t stop my lips from quivering. “What do you mean?”

She turned her back to me. “I thought it was my fault,” she said, muffled. “My fault that my gleam didn’t go when yours went, even after Mama stopped teaching us. Because I fell in love, Riss. I fell in love, and Mama never even punished me for not fading like you did. She never tried to break me down, to make me hate myself. To make me feel unworthy of anybody’s love. I think she thought she didn’t need to, not like she did with you.” She huffed out a bitter half laugh. “She thought I was the safe one.”

“I . . .” Something like a firestorm began boiling inside me. “What? You fell in love? Was it—” I clenched my fist against my mouth, thinking of all the stolen glances between Luka and Lina, the way she’d stepped effortlessly into his arms to hug or dance, the way he’d kissed the gleaming top of her head. My insides quivered like they might cave in. “Was it Luka?” I finished, in a dry whisper.

She whirled around to face me. “Of course it wasn’t Luka! Luka loves you, he has since we were little.”

Love.

Luka loved me.

It felt like I’d spent years trying to remember a word that was always poised on the tip of my tongue, yet just the slightest bit out of mental reach. It had been the secret center of everything he’d given me—every gift of an exotic flower, every math lesson that allowed me to translate a fractal notion into glassblown life, every warm imprint of his hand on the back of my neck—and I’d always averted my gaze, let it settle in my blind spot, dubbed it best-friendship. I had known it, but I couldn’t let myself know. Because I’d sworn to my mother and sister that I wouldn’t. So I’d let myself live in that gray with him, in the shaky middle ground from which I wasn’t technically betraying anyone. But gray was gray. He’d been offering me color all that time, and I’d spent all that time turning it away.

How could I have done that to him, along with everything else? How could one person hurt another in such a full, wide spectrum of ways?

Lina’s face softened at the look on mine. “I know, Riss. I know you wanted to love him back, so bad—I could see it every day. It made me want to die, how much it hurt you. But you listened to Mama, you actually did what she wanted. Even while you fought her about all the things that didn’t matter, you did exactly what you were told. You wouldn’t let yourself love him, or anyone. You were always alone, except for me.”