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When Cal smiled, for the first time I could see how she braced herself, the effort it cost her to look so effortless. How much it hurt, clinging to the upper hand. She held out her raw arms like a carny opening the curtains, granting entry to her dusty roadside dime museum, her prized and paltry assortment of the odd and the ugly, the dangerous and the damned.

“Don’t drink the water,” she said.





LILY





“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” Lily asked, emerging from the kitchen when she heard Mickey.

“Down at the dock,” Mickey answered. “I’m just grabbing a magazine.”

“Where is your father?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was smaller than usual, more like that of a child. Which, of course, she was. Lily met her in the hallway, and they stood together at the stairs, two dry bites in one tight throat.

The day Lily gave her testimony against Philip, she had been pregnant with Sean for six months. Her mother began knitting a baby blanket months earlier, all blue and green because her first child and her mother’s first child and her grandmother’s first child had all been boys. But even back then, Lily wanted a daughter.

She wanted a girl because she wanted to do better than her mother had done with her. Lily’s mother had done a great job with her brother. He was a successful lawyer in California with a gorgeous wife and fantastic self-confidence. But she couldn’t raise a daughter. Not, at least, as a full, individual person. She would’ve been excellent if she were training Soviet spies how to be American housewives. Lily, on the other hand, wanted Mickey to grow up to be whatever she wanted. So she signed her up for sports and science camps and encouraged her short-hair phase in the fourth grade with a little too much enthusiasm for it to last. She wanted for her fiercely, in a way she didn’t want for Sean. A way that was maybe a little too close to the malnourished want in her own heart.

“Are you okay?” Lily asked, taking her daughter’s hair into her hands, long and cool like the body of a snake. The house pet kind, the kind that isn’t supposed to hurt you, but still you check the lock on the cage.

“What did Dad say this morning?” Mickey asked, her eyes down.

Lily paused. She knew enough about this parenting game to know she had a precious moment here: her daughter thought she knew something she did not. She didn’t want to blow it.

“First, how are you feeling?”

“Embarrassed. Is he still super mad?”

“That will depend.” She needed to find Silas.

Mickey sighed and started up the stairs. That’s when Lily saw the bandage.

“What happened?” she asked, forgetting the slow game of parenting an adolescent, eager to touch where her daughter hurt, eager to absorb it into her own body if that’s what it took to make it better. Mickey pulled her arm back.

“Nothing, just a scrape. From when Ruth and I raced in the woods.”

“Did you put Neosporin on it? You don’t want it to get infected.”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Seriously,” Mickey said. And then she pitched forward into Lily’s chest. “Thanks, Mom.”

Lily wrapped both arms around her daughter, holding her still for longer than she had in over a year.

“Love you,” Mickey said as she broke free, then climbed the steps two at a time and closed the door behind her. And just like that, Lily was alone again. The house silent save for the single flower on the dining room table, red as loud as screaming.

Once they found out she had taken a walk that night all those years ago, the detectives wouldn’t stop hounding Lily. They said they could get them all arrested for underage drinking. They said they could lock the whole family up and throw away the key. They saw her for what she was: a teenage girl who had her perfect life laid out in front of her, if not a little rushed. It was what she wanted: Silas, a baby. Even if it was a few years earlier than she would’ve liked, it was still exactly what she wanted. They held their adult faces straight as stone and threatened to take all of it away if she didn’t testify to what she saw.

But she was their only witness.

The only one who could say for certain she saw Philip holding Sarah’s body, limp like her bones had slipped out. Like every solid part of her had melted with the water that dripped from her hair. Even in his arms, she was already a ghost.

But she wasn’t a ghost, was she? Lily thought as she turned away from the dining room and peered out the window for a sign of Silas. Not in this house. Here, she was as real as color, as sound.

As real as silence.





PEYOTE





HUMAN’S RESOURCE FILE

Name: CALAMITY GANON

Current Location: FIFTH FLOOR


Calamity Ganon, human name redacted, was most proud of her father at night. After Cal and her brothers had bloodied both themselves and the arena and then raked up the blood the best they could, the General would build a fire and pace before it, his shadow beating against the dirt with each step like big black wings.

The Pigs didn’t lie when they said her brothers had not all joined the barracks willingly, but it was around that fire that each and every one of them became his.

Which also made them hers.

“For most warriors, death is the end of the battle,” he said. “But you have been chosen, and your worth extends beyond your death. We cannot fight on behalf of Heaven with all our boots on Earth. And that is why, although only your brother Jonah survived, we have two champions tonight.”