Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(26)
Only two of the girls were allowed to be seen at the same time. Twins were understandable. Triplets a little more novel. Quadruplets, quintuplets—any number above three became increasingly noteworthy.
Hennessy’s life was shit-complicated enough. She had no desire to be extorted further by someone who knew the real truth about her.
“This place was landscaped by a drunk Italian Tim Burton fanboy,” Hennessy said, looking down at the intricately hardscaped backyard. It had not been kept up, but the geometry of it had not yet been lost to untamed growth. Frantically intricate planters and boxwood labyrinths and moss growing between delicately tiled paths. Then, to hide that she couldn’t tell which copy the girl beside her was, she asked, “What do you want, bitch?”
“Madox, asshole,” said Madox; she could tell Hennessy’s tricks right off because she was Hennessy. “The vodka. Where did it get to?”
“It’s not in the Porsche?”
Madox shook her head.
“Which devils got into it, one wonders?” Hennessy said lightly. “You go spin and spoil in these mortal pleasures on my behalf and I’ll look. Which rooms are already overflowing with me?”
“Only the kitchen,” Madox said. “I think June and Trinity are in there.”
Hennessy stepped off the ledge and rejoined her own party. As she glittered through the house, people she’d forged for and people she’d gotten cash from and people she’d hidden bodies with and people she’d slept with nodded at her or touched her elbow or kissed her on the mouth. She was not looking for the vodka. Madox didn’t care about the vodka. It probably was still in the Porsche. Madox had gone up there to get her off the ledge. Been sent, more likely.
Hennessy stalked into one of the side hallways, stepping over broken glass and blood from Breck’s break-in until she got to the room Jordan used for most of her forgery. Jordan, like Hennessy, liked to work after dark, which meant she didn’t need a room with windows; she needed a room with power outlets so she could sit close to the canvas with her OttLites as brilliant as stage lights. She always double-checked her colors by natural light later. Hennessy wasn’t sure why they both preferred to work at night; it was bad art practice, surely. But the sun had never felt like a friend.
“I wasn’t going to,” Hennessy said as she walked into the windowless studio.
Sure enough, Jordan was installed there among the big, dark canvases and the turpentine and the rags and the brushes stored bristle side up with paint dripping in rich luxurious colors down their handles. She was working on their invite for the Fairy Market. Beneath the microscope on the desk was Breck’s original invitation, a delicate, peculiar square of linen, like an arcane handkerchief. Several discarded drafts were strewn about it. Jordan currently had her fingers gripped round a very small Copic marker as she tested yet another spare textile.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jordan said, not looking up from her work.
Hennessy stepped up on a chair to view the desk from above. “Well, that looks like absolute horseshit.”
Jordan used a handheld microscope to assess the bleed of the mark she had just made. “I’ve nearly got it.”
Jordan had been the first of the copies Jordan Hennessy had dreamt into being many years before. She kept Hennessy for herself. She gave away Jordan to this new girl. Because she was the first copy, and the oldest, Jordan was the most complex of all of the copies—even if Hennessy had dreamt the other girls with as much complexity as she had dreamt her, Jordan had over a decade of her own memories and experience.
Sometimes Hennessy forgot that Jordan was actually her.
Sometimes she thought Jordan forgot, too.
“Your undying optimism should be bronzed,” Hennessy said. “It should be displayed in a museum someplace where schoolchildren can see it, read the plaque, and learn from it. It should be cut into smaller pieces and placed in rich soil with plenty of sunlight so that each piece might grow into new optimism ready to be harvested by—”
Jordan turned her linen and made a mark with a different pen. “How long do you think we have?”
Once upon a time, Hennessy had wondered if she’d share this face—this life—with two dozen girls. Fifty. One hundred. One thousand. Now she knew that would never happen. Every time Hennessy dreamt a copy of herself into being, it physically cost her something, and it was getting worse.
But she couldn’t stop. Neither dreaming, nor dreaming herself.
Every night was divided into twenty-minute segments, her alarm jolting her out of sleep before she could begin to dream. Every day was spent waiting for the black blood to signal that she couldn’t put off dreaming forever.
She knew it would kill her soon.
Unless Jordan’s Fairy Market plan worked.
Instead of answering Jordan’s question, Hennessy said, “You should stretch that linen.”
If you stared at puzzles long enough, you started solving them even when you hadn’t set your brain on them. This whole time, she’d been looking at that Fairy Market invite and looking at Jordan’s efforts and trying to reconcile the difference. Pull that linen taut, ink it, release it, and the ink would have the same amount of bleed as Breck’s original.
“Of course,” Jordan said. She shook her head at herself, already rising to find the equipment she’d need. “This is why you should’ve been doing this.”