Chapter 7 The Idea
Night pressed in tight. The apartment shrank with every hour, the air growing heavier and stickier as bodies settled into sleep. The youngest siblings went first, huddled on the sagging pallet like kittens in a cardboard box, their faces soft with the surrender of exhaustion. The room held its breath for a while, Maribel asleep, Delia catnapping in the rickety chair, Daisy alone by the last stub of candle, counting coins by the flicker.
She added and subtracted, shuffled the coppers, rearranged them as if a new pattern might conjure another week from the air. It never did. It wasn’t enough, it never was.
Maribel woke and slept in fits, shivering under the blanket, voice raspy with fever. She talked to people not present. Sometimes she spoke to the ceiling, sometimes to Daisy’s dead father. Sometimes to one of her patrons. One of her siblings’ fathers or some other random man who had abandoned her. Once she called out to the spiral, whatever that was, and then giggled, a high, desperate sound, before slipping back into dreams.
When the candle burned down to nothing, Daisy rose and checked the windows, then pulled the ratty curtain over the door. The city had gone quiet except for the distant clang of the watch bells and the occasional scream. Daisy crossed to her mother’s side to check for fever, but her hand brushed something else, a lump beneath the blanket, pressed tight to Maribel’s chest.
Daisy hesitated. She’d never known her mother to hide things, not from her. She waited until Maribel’s grip went slack, then gently pried the object free.
It was a journal, small and leather-bound, corners gnawed by time. Daisy held it up to the window, letting what little light there was illuminate the cover. She’d seen her mother write before, scratching notes and names with the stub of a pencil. But this was something else. The journal felt heavier than it should.
Daisy turned the pages. Most were covered in scrawled glyphs and jagged lines, more pictogram than language. Even illiterate, Daisy recognized the repetition of a specific mark: a spiral, tight and deliberate, drawn again and again in the margins. Some pages were stained brown-red, and the paper was stiff where the liquid had dried.
She touched the spiral, not sure why. Under her finger, the page was slick, almost oily, as if the mark had only just been drawn. A memory, half-formed and sharp, bit at her: the first time she’d seen her own wrist, the pale birthmark curled like a snail shell.
Something moved behind her. Daisy spun, knife out, before she realized it was just her mother, sitting up with eyes wide and too clear.
Maribel seized Daisy’s wrist, right where the spiral mark was, and squeezed with impossible strength. “Blood remembers what the mind forgets,” she whispered, then coughed so hard her whole body spasmed.
Daisy nodded, not trusting her voice. She eased her mother back to the cot, then sat cross-legged at the foot, the journal pressed between her knees.
She spent the rest of the night counting coins, then counting days. If she bought no medicine and they rationed food, Maribel might last another ten, twelve days at most if the fever worsens.
Daisy needed a new plan; the menagerie kept telling her its story, and she knew she had to make her way there. It was dangerous, stupid, and desperate. She would try, even if it were beyond her; she could get into any place. And magic was waiting to be rescued.