Page 41 of All Her Ghosts

“He willfully endangered your life, prevented me from reaching you in an emergency, preventedmedical aidfrom reaching you in said emergency—”

“Which you agreed I didn’t need!”

“I couldn’t know that at the time,” she insists.

“You can’t know itnow, either. You dragged me out of that parking lot before anyone even saw me. Cain is right, youarerunning from something.” I punch the car door, voice rising. “Does it have something to do with Bas? You hated him before you even knew for sure he existed.”

“It… does. And it doesn’t. I… know more about him than I can say.” Mom hesitates. She chews the inside of her cheek, adds, “Legally.”

“So break the law. Tell me illegally. What, you think the feds are listening?” I demand, whirling around in my seat to stare at her. “Did they bug the car, Mom? What am I that they would care so much?”

Color flares high in her cheeks. “You are my daughter. You have never been anythingotherthan my daughter.”

“So why did Cain call me a weapon?”

“Because he’s an irresponsible ass!” Mom breaks, finally shouting. It’s a warning, a line in the sand. I know better than to press. I won’t get more than this. But I’m so close, I can’t leave it alone. Sharks smell blood and teenagers smell weakness—there’s blood in the water and I can’t help but hunt it down.

“AmI a weapon?” I demand. “Is that what you designed me to be?”

“I did notdesignyou to be anything. You are my daughter, Persephone. I gave birth to you, I carried you home, I raised you—”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t believe you anymore! If Cain is lying, if I’m not a weapon, if I’m not some ‘Pet Sematarybullshit,’ then what was your lab for?”

Mom’s shoulders seize, rigid. She stomps the brakes, the car behind us howling on the horn as it swerves around. Face deathly pale, hands shaking, she pushes a strand of hair out of her eyes, slowly inching the car forward again as if nothing happened.

“You mean my office in the basement?” she asks, her strained voice almost silent.

“No. I don’t,” I say, flat. “You know the lab I mean.”

We stop at a red light in silence. Mom stares dead ahead, barely breathing, chewing her lip until lipstick stains her teeth, a pinprick of blood welling from the broken skin beneath.

At last, she decides on: “I don’t want there to be secrets between us.”

I force myself to keep breathing, swallowing down the fire rising in my throat, the anger rattling my rib cage. “You are literally the only one of us with secrets.”

“I know,” she admits and God, even that is a hard-won victory. “And I want you to be able to come to me if… if you need to. If you’re worried. If anything…” She hesitates, swallowing. Her eyes dart across the road, barely seeing, swapping words out before she even speaks them. “If something out of the ordinary should happen,” she decides on. “Something bigger than you that you find you need help with. If you get in trouble.”

Something about the way she says it itches at me like a double meaning and I can’t see underneath.

Can’t stop hearing the echo of that strange, distant voice in my head, protesting with the surety of a coffin closing:You can’t make me something less than what I am.

But I don’t know how to ask that. Don’t know how to begin to find the words for the suspicious unease swelling in my empty chest.

“AmI in trouble?” I press, instead.

“No! No, you’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But you’re afraid that I could. That something about me makes me dangerous, a weapon—”

“You are not a weapon!” she shouts, too loud.

“Okay, but am I aperson?” I blurt, drowning her protests under mine, voice rising. “How am I walking around without a heartbeat?”

Mom bares her teeth, snarling. “Persephone.Don’teverlet me hear you say that again.”

No.I won’t let her make me smaller. I’m not a teenager she can ground. I held a man’s life in my hands today. I gathered ghosts up in my arms—I kissed them on their half-remembered foreheads—and Ilived. I am something bigger thanPersephone.

I’m Jenny with her green ribbon, alive and dead, balanced on a silk-bound precipice.