Papa stood in the threshold, one hand shading his eyes against the sun. “What are you doing, Marlinchen? Get back inside.”
“What in the world has gotten her so distressed?” Dr. Bakay asked bemusedly, adjusting his spectacles.
I did not hear Papa’s answer. I was already running toward the gate. It towered in front of me, so tall that it sliced the sky up into long, thin segments, like wedges of blue-seamed cheese. I fumbled with the lock for a moment before managing to get it open.
“Marlinchen!” Papa shouted.
There was magic in his cry, and it shook white petals down from the flowering pear tree. Even from such a distance, his magic was strong and it chilled in my veins and it made me pause and look back. Papa’s hand was outstretched, and his pale, narrow fingers were curling.
But then something happened, and the spell broke. Mama’s compact started to sing in my clenched fist, black sand rattling inside, a reminder of the secret I had never given up and the lie that I had stuck to unwaveringly, until the very end. There was power in that, a magic of my own, and it cleaved through Papa’s spell like shears through silk.
I pushed through the gate and ran as fast as I could toward Kanatchikov Street.
I paced Oblya’s streets aimlessly until evening, sick with unspent adrenaline. Once I would have been petrified to find myself out in the city alone, but no one except slack-jawed beggars even tried to speak to me. The day laborers who had once terrified me were now, I knew, toothless dogs like Sobaka. The brokers and merchants were busy with their work and I looked like just another unlucky drifter, perhaps a factory worker who had injured her hand and could no longer work a machine, or maybe a woman pregnant with the child of a sailor who had left her for more promising waters.
Night robed the city in a gown of opulent black, storefront windows glittering like sequins. That was when the men and women of the upper curia began to trickle in from their beachfront dachas, from their cream-colored townhouses. They trailed down Kanatchikov Street like a spill of good wine, jewel-toned dresses flashing. I pressed myself against the side of a Yehuli grocery, mouth going dry as I watched. Their laughter feathered the air with pale smoke.
All this time I had not considered what I might do. I hadn’t allowed myself to sift through my meager prospects, or to think of Papa at all. But as the sky darkened and the air grew pitilessly cold, panic started to turn in my stomach like swallowed poison. I had no money, nowhere to go, and without the heady, blood-warming thrill of my previous outings, my dress felt paper-thin. Already my skin prickled and my breath clouded when I exhaled.
My first instinct was to think of my cleverer sisters, and what they might do. But Rose and Undine would never have found themselves in such a predicament. They would have no wisdom to speak to me. And how could they? They had never been made to bleed from their breasts.
The men and women kept moving past me, smiling their pearl-bright smiles. I did not know my way around the city very well, but I knew Kanatchikov Street like a vein on the back of my hand. They were going toward the ballet theater. Possibility pricked in me.
Without considering it further, I fell into step beside them. Certainly I would be singled out at once, with my mussed hair and my torn dress, and of course I didn’t have a ticket. But I followed the busy thoroughfare anyway, until it bore us into the plaza with its great golden fountain, and the theater like a bright, shining bracelet made out of bone.
I stopped then, chest tightening. The stream of men and women continued past me, river water splitting around a rock. I watched them file in, one after the next, women in fox-fur stoles and men with greased mustaches, until all were gone and the double doors were closed behind them. I stood there for so long that my fingers went numb with cold and the wound on my knuckle cracked open again, blood leaking onto the cobblestones. I stood there for so long that certainly the show was almost over, and then with a rush of feckless courage I strode down the half-lit alleyway.
I paused at the door, clenching and unclenching my freezing fingers. Perhaps it would be locked this time. Perhaps there would be an usher waiting to hurl me back out. But what had been my life was in a ruin behind me and Dr. Bakay was perched on the chaise longue in the sitting room, laughing so loudly with Papa that all of their teeth gleamed in their mouths.
I turned the knob and pushed through the door, into the ballet theater.
By the swell of music I could tell at once that the show had reached its climax. The inside of the theater was as bright and gold as a honeycomb, and the violins were pricking with alarm. I crept forward, still hidden in the shadow of the cold white pillar, until I could see the stage.