Paper Confines

ix. All Things Housed In Her Silence

PAPER CONFINES.
09. / All Things Housed In Her Silence

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Something was whispering. A litany. A poem. It wasn't her mother's voice now. Not her father's or her sisters' either. This was her own. God, how long had it been since anything was her own? In the fading light, the world resurfaced, and she was alone with herself. It was slow, slathering with foam, blood that might have been her own, the shore at the edge of the sea tinted tangerine. Her father's boat must have been swaying on the docks somewhere. But the light kept slipping, and Amoret stumbled. She was in the dark. There was the smell of salt and stationary and sky: a riddle with no answer, the words gone with the tide.

She opened her eyes.

Something about her was amiss, a shift in the marrow of her bones that was almost imperceptible. It was in the air. In everything. Amoret had studied molecules—and it was in that too; all of it a bit too thick, a bit too stifling.

When Amoret assessed her surroundings, she was in the lavatory still, only it was clean. Morning light glimmered on the circlet of sinks and twinkled atypically on the polished lip of the bathtub. There was no flood, no debris, no ghost wailing over her new corpse. Amoret wondered if she had dreamed it all, but there were red dashes on her arms, bruises on her cheek, slits in her dress where the cold air found her thighs.

She coughed and a single thread of blood spilled from her mouth onto the white tiles. Amoret spat, eyes wide, wobbling on her hands and knees to stand. The blood was bitter. Ballast in appearance like a narrow cable.

Whatever magic had been triggered when she and Tom touched that book had taken her strength and torn it away. It was as if there was a hole punctured in a great well of power. Her power. She couldn't stop it from teeming over. She couldn't collect it all.

She balanced herself on a pillar, took a deep breath, and was so relieved to find her wand intact on the floor that she nearly collapsed all over again.

Myrtle Warren was dead.

The grief was as oppressive as it could be for someone Amoret had only known in her periphery, dimmed perhaps by the fact that she was already so unmoored by Ruby's death it was hard to even find the ground of Myrtle's. The revelation of it being Tom all this time was so suffocating that if Amoret let the noose tighten any more it might have killed her too. She thought nonetheless of the way Myrtle's ghost had gone through her when her hands were in such tight fists they should have bruised, how desperately she had clawed for the comfort of a girl who had only ever been unkind to her.

Amoret clutched the pillar until her fingers hurt. This death was without a hospital bed to mourn in. Colette was not there to fix her pillow. Nadya was not squeezing her hand. Any grief, in this case, would have to wait.

But Amoret looked around to assess her surroundings and it wasn't just that the lavatory was suddenly clean; it was untouched. Pristine in places it should not have been, there was no sign that anyone had ever been here at all. The silhouette of dust she'd come to was the only difference.

She leaned down and swiped a finger through it. Muddy clouds tethered to her skin, and the dust did nothing at first, but then flickered into small spheres of light and fluttered overhead.

It was like no magic she'd seen before.

She reached to clasp them in her hand but they stopped, flickered like faulty lightbulbs, and dissipated into nothing. Into less than nothing. She felt their absence on her wet, wiry palms.

This was all wrong.

She inched for the door, intact despite her previous spells, and forced it open with all the strength she had left. It knocked her off her feet. She coughed, teetering back up where she caught a glimpse of herself in the gold-rimmed mirror. The sight of her reflection startled her more than she'd like to admit. Her hair was in damp, unbound curls, a particularly large gash in her shift exposed a stretch of red at her ribcage, and her skin looked like whittled jade under the morning creeping in through the windows. Her favourite white slippers seemed to have been swept up in the debris as well. Vanished with the rest of it. Amoret forced herself away.