“Silver eyes,” Rosalind finally choked out with a shudder. Now that she had started speaking, it was coming out in a tumble. Her breathing grew increasingly shallow and Juliette’s grip grew increasingly tight, fingers still clasped about Rosalind’s arms. Her cousin barely seemed to notice. “It had silver eyes. And a curved spine. And sharp ridges. And scales and claws and—I—I don’t know, Juliette. I don’t know what it was. Guài wù, maybe. A monster.”
A roar started to sound in Juliette’s ears. With careful control, she pried her hands away from her cousin, then reached into her coat, retrieving the drawing she had stolen. She unfolded the worn sheet, smoothing out the lines of ink smeared upon it.
“Rosalind,” Juliette said slowly. “Look at this drawing.”
Rosalind reached for the thin piece of paper. Her fingers tightened upon it. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Is this what you saw?” Juliette whispered.
Ever so slowly, Rosalind nodded.
Fourteen
If anyone asked Benedikt Montagov the one thing he wanted out of life, he had a very simple answer: to paint the perfect sphere.
Ask anyone else in the White Flowers and there would be an array of responses. Fortune, love, vengeance—all of these and more, Benedikt wanted too. But they faded into the background when he was painting, thinking of nothing save the movement in his wrist and the arc of his paintbrush, a task so careful, so tedious, so beautiful.
It was almost obsessive how badly he wanted to conjure the perfect sphere. It was one of those delusions that he had held since a child, a delusion that seemed to have formed fully fledged in his mind with no apparent origin, though if there was, perhaps it had been so early in his life he could simply no longer remember. It was all irrational anyway, a belief that if he achieved one impossible thing, then perhaps every other impossible element in his life would click together too, regardless of whether they truly correlated.
When Benedikt was five, he thought that if he could finish reciting the entire Bible from front to back, his father would survive his illness. His father died anyway, and then his mother too, six months later, from a stray bullet to the chest.
When Benedikt was eight, he convinced himself that he needed to run from his bedroom to the front door every morning within ten seconds, or else the day would be a bad one. This was back when he still lived within the central headquarters, in the bedroom next to Roma’s on the fourth floor. Those days were always terrible and rough—but he didn’t know how much of that was a result of his failures to run fast enough.
He was nineteen years old now and the habits hadn’t faded; they had simply winnowed down and condensed themselves into the tightest possible ball, leaving behind one single wish, which rested atop a pyramid of other impossible desires.
“Dammit,” Benedikt muttered. “Dammit, dammit.” He ripped the sheet of paper from the canvas and bunched it up, throwing it hard against the wall of his studio. The futility bore down on him, thumping at his temples and invading his dry, tired eyes. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his logic, he knew what he wanted to do wasn’t possible. What was a sphere? It was a three-dimensional circle, and circles didn’t exist. A circle had points that were all equidistant from the center, and for them to be the same they would need to match to the most exact of precisions. How far would Benedikt go to find perfection? The brushstrokes? The particles? The atoms? If a true circle didn’t exist in their very universe, how was he supposed to paint one?
Benedikt set down the paintbrush, scrubbing at his hair as he left his studio.
He paused down the hallway only when a voice floated from the adjacent room, bored and wry and low.
“The hell are you swearing about?”
Now he and Marshall shared the run-down building that sat one block away from the main Montagov dwelling, though Benedikt’s name was the only one on the papers. In technicality, Marshall was living here as an illegal tenant, but Benedikt didn’t mind. Marshall was an absolute loose cannon, but he was also an excellent cook and better than anyone at repairing a busted pipe. Perhaps it was all his practice putting together his own broken bones. Perhaps it was those early years of his life spent wandering on the streets and fending for himself before the White Flowers took him in. To this day, none of the Montagovs were aware of what exactly happened to Marshall’s family. There was only one thing that Benedikt did know: they were all dead.
Marshall strolled out of his room, moth-eaten pajama pants slung low over his hips. When he lifted his arms to fold them across his chest, his bedraggled shirt rode up and showcased a crisscross of knife wounds that had scabbed over his lower torso.
Benedikt was staring. His pulse jumped once at the terrible realization, and jumped again at the thought of getting caught.
“You have more scars.” His recovery was fast, barely stuttering even while his neck burned. This moment would probably come to him as he was trying to sleep, and then he would cringe so hard he would invert into himself, becoming an inside-out sheath of skin. Clearing his throat, Benedikt continued. “Where do they keep coming from?”
“This city is a dangerous place,” Marshall answered without answering at all, his grin deepening.
He appeared to be teasing, buffing up his own bravado, but Benedikt started to frown. There were always five thousand different thoughts bubbling for attention in Benedikt’s mind, and when one surged forward with a particular loudness, he paid attention to it. While Marshall wandered off down the hallway, disappearing into the kitchen to rummage about the cupboards, Benedikt remained there outside his studio, musing.
“Isn’t that interesting though?”
“Are you still talking to me?”
Benedikt rolled his eyes, hurrying to join Marshall in the kitchen. Marshall was getting the pots and pans out, a stick of celery in his mouth. Benedikt didn’t even want to ask why. He supposed Marshall was the type to chomp on raw celery for no good reason.
“Who else would I be talking to?” Benedikt replied, hoisting himself up onto the counter. “The city. It is becoming more dangerous, isn’t it?”
Marshall took the celery out of his mouth and waved it in Benedikt’s direction. When Benedikt only gave him a look, unwilling to open his mouth and take a bite, Marshall shrugged and threw the celery into the trash can.
“Ben, Ben, precious thing, I was only being facetious.” Marshall lit a match for the gas. It flared to life between his fingers—a hot, burning miniature star. “This city has always been dangerous. It is the core of human flaw, the pulse of—”
“But of late,” Benedikt cut in, leaning over the counter, his two hands propping him up against the hard granite, “haven’t you noticed the crowds in the cabarets? The frequency of men who leap onstage to hassle the young dancers? The screaming on the streets when there aren’t enough rickshaws for each patron to have his own? One would think that the numbers at the clubs would change, would grow lower and lower, what with the madness. But the nightlife establishments may be the only places that haven’t slacked in paying rent to my uncle.”