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I

The bottle shatters into stardust.

Catty is thirteen, and Alice is ten, and they’re in the gravel lot behind their granddad’s pub, the baseball bat resting on Catty’s shoulder as she sets another empty on the wooden stump that no one could be bothered to haul up when they made the parking lot.

(Not that it stopped them from cutting down the rest of the tree, and Alice has never understood why they didn’t finish the job, or leave it alone. It makes her sad every time she sees it.)

Alice sits cross-legged on the hood of someone’s car and watches as her sister winds up again.

She swings, and the bottle shatters on impact, the sound as high and bright as bells, and Alice winces, even though she saw it coming, a kind of automatic flinch, because it’s one of those sounds that means trouble.

It’s a rock pitched through a kitchen window, a pint knocked off a counter, a pair of glasses crunched under a clumsy foot, a girl taking out her heartbreak with a bat.

Catty lines up another bottle on the wooden stump.

A swing. A crack. For one brief, beautiful second, the glass dust hangs suspended in the glow from the streetlight, glittering like mist before it falls. Alice looks back over her shoulder, ready for the door to swing open, for someone to come out and tell them off, but the game is on—

( which game doesn’t matter, it’s usually rugby or football, but she’s seen snooker, darts, cricket, just so long as it’s tuned to something that gives them an excuse to lift a pint in the general direction of the screen and shout cheers or mutter disapproval)

—so no one shows.

Catty fetches up another bottle from the crate by the pub’s back door.

And even if they were doing something wrong, no one would stop them because they’re “Harry’s girls”—Harry being short for Harold Moore, who owns the Port of Call.

(She’s always thought it’s a silly name for a pub, seeing as Hoxburn is nowhere near the sea, and the only vessels rolling in, their granddad likes to say, are the men who stay docked at the bar, and the tourists floating by.

Even though tourist is a pretty generous word, since Hoxburn is the kind of place people drive through on the way to somewhere else. Somewhere better.)

Before their gran up and left, Alice heard her saying that towns could die as sure as people. Only sometimes people die fast, and places usually die slow. But Alice figures that if Hoxburn does die, the pubs will be the last to go.

Pubs, plural, because there’s two.

(Funny, how Hoxburn has only one petrol station, and one grocery, and one laundromat, but two pubs, the Port and the Maudlin.

They have the decency to be at opposite ends of the main street, not facing down like duelers, and on days when one is closed, you’ll find the owner drinking in the other, to show there’s no bad blood.)

Catty winds up again, curses sliding through her teeth like steam.

“Fucking numpty eejit bawbag, ” she seethes, a string of words collected like fine stones, her accent going thicker, the way Granddad’s does whenever the tourists in the pub are English.

She swings, and the bottle shatters into light.

Alice is honestly surprised Catty and her first boyfriend made it a month, let alone three.

Will was two years older, fifteen to her thirteen, which carried its own glow, but otherwise he was .

. . dull. A weak candlelight against her sister’s glaring torch, so she just kind of assumed Catty would be the one to break his heart—but then he went and kissed some fifth year and word got back, it always does, and here they are, her sister furiously shattering bottles while Alice stares at the glitter they leave in the gravel.

Catty lines up another bottle. Alice’s butt is falling asleep, so she hops down from the car’s hood, the lot crunching beneath her shoes, and Catty mistakes the motion for a want and offers up the bat.

“Go on,” she says. “Give it a go.”

Alice’s hand responds before her brain, reaching to take the thing just because Catty held it toward her. Because that is the power of big sisters, the urge to take anything they offer.

The bottle stands waiting on the stump, a finger of backwashed beer at the bottom. She flexes her fingers on the wooden bat, tries to summon a shadow of her sister’s passion, but feels no urge to swing.

“Picture someone you hate,” offers Catty, and Alice can see her pulling up the mental list, from the girls at school to poor dumb Will to Eloise, always Eloise—

(Eloise, who finally moved in six months ago, who didn’t change a single thing about the house for weeks, and even then, made sure to ask them both about each and every item to see if it held meaning, and Catty stood there saying yes, yes, yes , about the potholders and the pillows and the kitchen plates out of spite.)

But the truth is, Alice has never felt an anger strong enough to be called hate.

Oh, she feels plenty of other emotions—worry, and panic, sadness, and fear—but they make her want to hold on to things as tight as she can, keep them together.

She doesn’t understand the urge Catty has to break them instead.

Her sister watches, arms crossed, and waiting, and even though she seems more annoyed than wounded now, Alice remembers the look on her face when she first got home, before Catty realized Alice was there, on the couch, before she knew she was being watched, before she saw Alice, and wrestled the pain into anger.

When she thought she was alone, she just sat there, looking small, and sad, and hurt, and the thought of Catty hurting—of someone hurting her— that makes Alice angry.

It lights a fire in her heart, a burning heat that spreads across her ribs, over her shoulders, and down her limbs and she winds up, and swings at the bottle, the impact sending a jolt through her wrists as the glass explodes.

Her heart skips, a thrill when it breaks, a rush when it shatters, a nervous laugh escaping like steam from the kettle.

Shards rain down onto the gravel, and Catty whoops, and grabs her shoulders.

“Sláinte!” she says, her anger dissolving into pride. They are in this together now. The distance between them collapsed, lives folded like paper.

And Alice wants to go again.

She reaches down into the crate, hand closing around another bottle, realizes too late the lip is broken, sharp.

Pain flashes, shallow and bright, and she gasps, recoils as if bitten, the blood welling up across her palm.

A sound escapes, part yelp, part cry, and she knows the cut isn’t deep, knows that hands and heads bleed badly, but she can feel her pulse in the meat of her palm, and the spreading ache and the sight of the blood still make tears spring to her eyes.

And then Catty is there, grabbing her wrist, twisting the cut to the light the way Eloise does when studying a splinter, and Alice knows she’s looking for glass. There isn’t any—no glint, no glitter.

Catty pulls her hand right up to her face.

And runs her tongue through the blood.

And just like that, the pain’s forgotten, replaced in an instant by disgust.

“Ewwww!” shrieks Alice.

But Catty only laughs and licks her lips. “Yum.”

Alice shakes her head. “Disgusting.”

Catty shrugs. “It’s just you,” she says. “And whatever’s in you is in me. We’re made of the same stuff.”

She passes Alice’s hand back the way she passed the bat, as if it is an offering, a secret, something to be shared, and Alice stares down at it, watching as a fresh line wells from the cut.

The blood is smooth and black as oil in the dark.

She can smell the iron in it as she lifts her palm to her face, that rusted penny tang.

And this is a memory, so Alice knows what happens next.

Knows that, for just a second, she thinks of licking her hand but doesn’t, scrunches up her nose and wipes the blood on her jeans instead, and Catty leans the bat on the stump and tugs the headband from her hair and ties it round the cut, and they go home.

That’s how it happened.

But that’s not how it happens now.

Now, Alice doesn’t move. She just stands there, hand halfway to her mouth, as Catty watches, her eyes dark and lips stained red, and the night around them sharpens and blurs at the same time, till the pub is nothing but a smudge, but the blood on her hand is so vivid she can see the light from the streetlamp bouncing off.

The bead becomes a ribbon that rolls down her wrist, glitters like the glass on the gravel, and the sight of it doesn’t repulse her anymore.

It looks wonderful, candy bright.

She wants to know what it tastes like.

And Catty says, “Go on,” and her mouth begins to water, and her teeth begin to ache, and there is a hungry coil in her stomach, and Alice wants to bring it to her lips,

But she can’t—

It’s like the air has turned to stone, or she has—

And she can’t move—

Can’t close the small distance between her hand and her mouth—

Tries so hard her whole body shakes—

And feels like it will shatter until—

“Son of a bitch!”

Rachel’s voice tears her out of sleep.

And just like that, Catty’s gone, and the pub and the lot and the bat and the blood are gone, and all that’s left is the hunger, Alice’s whole jaw hurting, and her stomach clenched tight.

Rachel swears again, so loud Alice thinks she must be standing right beside her head, only she’s not, she’s at the other end of the suite. And yet, somehow, Alice can hear her ripping the sheets from the bed two rooms away, shoving them into the laundry bag and bitching to herself.

Alice puts a pillow over her head, pushes down as hard as she can to block out the sound, would worry about accidentally smothering herself but that doesn’t seem to be a problem right now.