I held on to my mother’s elbow, unwilling to lose the physical contact. In the main chapel, the darkness expanded and changed shape, huge and cool compared to the prison. My mother stumbled at the doorway, like she wasn’t accustomed to even this much space. I caught her, silently counting the days since she’d vanished. Three weeks of captivity.
With my free hand, I held up the candle in its glass shell, throwing a wavering wedge of radiance along the empty pews. Out here, the chaos swelled louder, the shouts and screams cutting more sharply. I imagined that trail of flame slowly eating its way up the walls of the shed. The anticipation of the explosion was a hard bubble in the pit of my stomach, rising and rising. I started toward the front of the chapel. “We need to get to—”
Something was wrong. The guard. The guard was gone. I’d told him to stay right here.
Before I could fully react to the implications of this, the room was illuminated in a swoop: all the candles that ringed the edges of the room flickered to life, one by one by one, a glittering wave. It only took a few seconds, barely the space of a blink. A part of my brain stood back and recognized the simple magic of all these flames springing to life without a source. Beautiful.
The chapel was blazing with brightness now, my own candle useless in my palm. I kept clutching it anyway, as if it could anchor me to something familiar. A shout crested above the noise outside. Too close.
Beside me, my mother tensed. “You’re here,” she said, and she didn’t sound surprised. Her voice was stretched with a resigned fear, well worn.
Bellanger stood at the back of the chapel, a half smile on his face, staring right at me. His gaze was so pointed, cutting right through everything, through the heat and the haze, that I almost didn’t notice Fiona standing right beside him.
50
“Dr. Bellanger.” Instinctively, I stepped in front of my mother. “We’re leaving.”
He moved forward, unhurried and almost friendly. “That little trick out there—is that you and your friends? You want to take everything away from me, is that it?”
“Only fair,” I said. “You’ve burned down two of my homes now, by my count.”
He smiled without warmth. “Other people live here. You’re taking their home too.”
Sudden, hollow echoes of gunfire: bullets cooking in the heat. “Shouldn’t you be with them, Dr. Bellanger?” I asked. “Maybe you should help your faithful followers instead of wasting your time with us. We can let ourselves out.”
Fiona watched us.
“But where will you go?” he asked, as if he really wanted to know. “Margaret, will you return to your life of TV dinners and shelving books? Josephine, will you keep playacting as a great scientist, clinging to my coattails?” I didn’t even flinch. “Or perhaps both of you will run off and tattle, like spiteful children. You’ll come charging back with a self-righteous cavalry and attempt to take what’s left of my work. Throw me into a prison cell. Have your grand trial and your tawdry headlines. Revenge at last.”
My mother and I were both quiet. I could feel both of us trying to calculate how to get out of here as quickly as possible. Fiona’s eyes on us were so intense that they seemed to be the source of the heat growing in the chapel.
“Neither of you will spare a thought for me, but think what this is doing to Fiona,” Bellanger said. “You already took one refuge from her, Margaret.”
“What did I take from her?” my mother asked.
Bellanger laughed, swift and pitying. I watched Fiona gauging his reaction, molding her heart to his. “Don’t downplay your own hand in destroying the Homestead. You girls were more interested in fighting each other than in letting your vision unfold. Women will always blame their troubles on men. You can’t take responsibility for the ways you hate each other too. Maybe if you hadn’t fostered such bitterness between your so-called sisters, Josephine could have grown up with the Homestead instead of merely reading about it. We could’ve been together.”
“Together,” my mother repeated. “As long as we did exactly what you wanted, handed all nine Girls over to you eventually—”
“Even before the fire, you girls were scattering far and wide. You’ve avoided each other for years. What’s kept you from your little utopia? All these years that I’ve been gone.”
My mother was silent. The triumph in his voice stung me too. He was right. I’d only been thinking about Dr. Joseph Bellanger when I set out to unlock parthenogenesis; I’d forgotten the other women involved. I’d been blind to my own arrogance, or—worse—I’d looked right at it and mistaken it for virtue. Now it seemed impossible I could’ve even lasted these past seventeen years without knowing the other Girls. But what mattered was what we did now.