Page 40 of We Are the Match

Helen

I wake to find Paris with a blade at Erin’s throat, red appearing. A droplet. Then two.

I scramble to my feet, heart thudding.

Paris’s eyes are locked on Erin’s. “Was it you?” she asks. “Do not play games with me. Was it you? ”

“Paris,” I say. “Paris, what are you talking about?”

There was shock in Erin’s eyes before she managed to erase it. Who is she, to put fear so firmly in its place even when death reaches out its hand and touches her?

“The queen,” Erin answers. “The queen asked, and I answered.”

“You could have been free,” Paris says. “When you left. And you could have warned us. We could all have been free. You didn’t have to be a piece in their games. We just wanted to live. ”

This is a different rage, sister to sister.

“Paris,” I attempt again. “Paris, please. Tell me what’s going on.”

Erin’s lip curls. “We are not just playthings,” she snarls, wilder than I have ever seen her.

Paris brings that out in many of us, it seems.

“ I chose the role I played,” Erin says finally. “And I would do it again.”

Something flashes in Paris’s eyes. “We are not little girls anymore, taken in by pretty gifts and hopeful lies,” she says. “How could your loyalty be to them, and not to us ?”

I want to take them each by the shoulders and shake them, demand they tell me what the hell they are talking about.

“I was not a little girl,” Erin says. “And every choice I made, I made gladly.”

“You were the bomber,” Paris says breathlessly. “At the party.”

Erin smiles. “From the queen,” she says. “She wanted him to know that no new alliance, no new blood, would ever matter. She wanted him to know she was coming for him, because she could never be replaced. I made the bomb, and the girl—the girl he killed. She helped me set it.”

“ Who? ” I ask again. “Erin, who are you talking about?”

But no one answers me.

Instead, Paris leans closer, blade pressing in. “But I don’t care about that bomb.” Paris’s voice is deadly, sharper than the blade at Erin’s throat. “I care about the ones before. The ones at home . Were they yours ?”

I open my mouth to ask, again, how . Why a bomb-maker is my attendant. Why Erin would have laid explosives that killed Paris’s sisters. How Paris knows all of this just from meeting Erin.

“She needed a place,” Erin tells Paris. “To rebuild.”

“The bombs,” Paris repeats. She surges closer, a trickle of blood appearing on Erin’s throat. “ Were they yours? ”

Erin’s eyes flash, and she nods.

Paris’s eyes are as empty as the night sky.

“ En morte libertas , ” she murmurs.

And then she draws the blade across Erin’s throat.

Time slows down, and then does not exist, and Erin falls.

Backward.

Slowly.

Erin, gentle Erin. Erin, who has cared for me for years. My Erin.

The sound her body makes as it strikes the sea reverberates through me, and I lurch backward, my body slamming into the wood rail of the boat. We tilt in the water for one wild, unsalvageable moment—

And then the boat capsizes and we are all in the sea, Paris and I and the knife and the body that used to be my friend.

Erin and Mama and Tommy are all around me, beautiful, broken, bleeding.

The sea is blood, thick and choking, and ten years ago is today and everyone I love is dying around me and it will never never never stop.

Never.

Not until I join them.