But all precautions had been taken, and none of those creatures were roused tonight. When we reached the gate, Undine swung it open, and we brushed all the dirt from our shoes and the hems of our gowns. Like we were serpents shedding our skin, we swept the mustiness and sorcery of the house off of us.
While I stared down the cobblestone road that unspooled before us, my stomach knotted with fear.
“Come on, Marlinchen,” Undine said, looping our elbows and giving me a vicious tug. “We only have a quarter hour.”
We sprinted down the street, as quick as our crinolines and corsets would allow. I could feel the cobblestones through the soles of my slippers, all of their hard ridges that seemed to lurch up at me with every step. We passed the day laborers, dull-eyed men slouching toward the brothels and taverns, or back to their apartments above the shops. Whenever their gazes spun toward us, I felt another thread of panic loose in me, but Rose and Undine only pulled me along.
Kanatchikov Street bore us into the city plaza, a glorious facade of buildings that ringed the massive fountain. Dolphins leapt from the stone basin in arrested motion, water shooting from their spouts. A marble sea god sat in his chariot, thick brows drawn over his eyes, frozen and immortal. He was not a god that I recognized from my father’s codex; he had vague and hurried features, as if the man who had carved him was trying to remember something that he had seen only once, many years ago.
Oblyans were gathering in the square, women in their puff-sleeved gowns and men in their top hats, all herding toward the ballet theater like sheep trussed in satin and lace. Their mingling voices had the low tenor of rolling thunder. Pipe smoke rose in greasy clouds. All the smells and sounds pressed in on me, and a gasp came out of my throat.
My sisters had made such trysts before, but I’d never had the courage to join them. Tonight I had been yoked into their rebellion like an ox, intoxicated by the promise of something newer and brighter and better than any of us had ever seen. But now that I was here, everything was too new, too much.
“I don’t want to go,” I whispered, leaning closer to Rose than to Undine. “I think I’ve changed my mind.”
“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Rose gestured vaguely toward the theater, but her voice was not unkind. “There’s no one to walk back with you. You’ll have to stay.” She must have read the horror on my face, so she went on more gently, “Listen, it will be all right. Once we’re in our seats—”
“Oh, she’s being a baby, as usual,” Undine snapped. “She doesn’t want to come, but she doesn’t want to be left behind.”
I bit my lip on a reply; Undine was right. The last time they’d left at night without me, I’d gone paralytic with fear. Although my body had been at home in bed, my mind raced down a thousand dark alleys, wondering what awful fate my sisters were meeting, or worse, wondering what my father would do if he woke to find them gone. I would have been the only one there to answer to him, to swallow his fury like gulps of seawater and pray I didn’t spit them back up again until he had stormed out of my room and slammed the door shut behind him.
Rose had found me asleep under my bed that night, face streaked with salt, our spiny-tailed monster nibbling anxiously at my garter belt.
It was only because of Undine that they’d started leaving at all. A year ago, it had been unthinkable. Our father had barred us from setting foot outside the garden, not with his spells, but with his words and threats. Oblya was as dangerous as a viper pit, he said, and something or someone would snap you up in an instant. I believed him. The men who came to see me, my clients, were frightening even in the safety of our own sitting room.
But all of Undine’s clients were half in love with her and went weak-kneed with her every word. And one day one of them had, in lieu of rubles, offered her tickets to see an orchestra play downtown. She had refused at first—or so she said—but the man had insisted. And once the thought of leaving was in her mind, it grew and grew like reaching vines and could not be hacked down.
That first night had planted the same flowering seed in Rose’s mind. Their seats, she told me, were in the very back row, so they had to strain to see the stage over a topiary of feathered hats, and the heat of so many bodies had made them both return soaked with sweat, but there was a magic to it all; I could sense that even from a distance. A sly, coaxing magic had drawn my sisters out of their beds at night, reveling in the recklessness of it all, the thousands of possibilities that flitted around them like moths.