[0: THE REFLECTION LIES]

ANNE STANDS ON THE RAILING of the Hanover Street Bridge and looks down at the night sky reflected in the choppy, slow-moving waters of the Patapsco River. At three in the morning, there are only a few small stars and a last faint sliver of moon to change the rippled black sheet into a thing of black glass and glimmering light. She likes it better by daylight, by sunrise, when the sky is pastel blue and gold and pink and that strange glowing shade all in between, luminous and indefinable.

But it has to be now.

It has to be now, when there is no one here to stop her from doing it right. She has to do it right.

She has to do it right, or she won’t be worthy.

“What is your name?” whispers at her back. Sibilant, toneless, yet the words slip down her spine like oiled satin, caressing against her skin, and she straightens her shoulders.

He touches her, then—touches her and her skin sings, as he strokes her hair back with fingers that have no texture, no temperature, yet they vibrate against her skin as he tucks cool petals against her hair. A daisy. A daisy, white for purity and innocence, its cool stem scratching behind her ear.

“What is your name?” he whispers again.

“E—” Her throat closes, and she has to start over. Everything tastes and smells briny, salt and sour and brittle, and she doesn’t know if that is the air off the river or the tears welling in the back of her throat, the corners of her eyes. “Eve.”

“Is it?”

She nods quickly, flexing her fingers, breathing deep. Her balance is wavering, the railing of the bridge cutting into her bare feet, and she curls her toes against the gritty metal and holds on fast so the wind won’t blow her over. It cuts through her hair, cold and wintry through her thin linen shift, ice and spray against her bare thighs, her calves.

“I am,” she breathes, spreading her arms. “I am Eve.”

“And what must Eve do?”

“Fly.” She lifts her chin. Breathe slow. Breathe slow, she’s practiced this so many times, and the water looks so shallow but it will catch her, he will catch her, this creature of the dark divine standing at her back and whispering shadow into her ear. “Eve must fly.”

And she is Eve.

She will be Eve, if only she can pass this test.

“I’m ready,” she whispers. “I’m ready.”

“Then why do you hesitate?”

That question. That question, like all his questions, is simple and yet pierces to the heart of her fear. Something is holding her back. Something weak and frail and human, some doubt that perches on her other shoulder and tugs at her earlobe and nitters, high and protesting.

Don’t.

But if she doesn’t, all of this will mean nothing.

And she desperately, desperately needs to mean something.

She remembers sitting on this same bridge, looking out and watching those sunrise clouds, the way they made soft little scudding puffs across the sky. She remembers thinking he was human, when he sat on the railing next to her and covered her hand with his own. She hadn’t known, then. Hadn’t known who and what had come to her, hadn’t known anything but that the morning was so cold and his hand was so warm, and when he smiled at her she didn’t feel quite so alone.

She misses those mornings. Before he’d started calling her Eve; before it became hard to remember that her name was Anne, Anne, Anne of Green Gables, Anne with an E, Church of Saint Anne, Anne of a Thousand Tears. Anne means mother of the Virgin Mary, means she who has the favor of God—but she has to be more than that, more than Anne could ever be. Anne isn’t someone he could love. Anne isn’t someone who could fly, fall, get up, fly again. Anne has no wings, no life, no love, no hope.

She has to kill Anne, so that Eve can live.

Still that tiny voice pulls at her leash, holding her back, telling her no, wrong, stop, wake up—wake up, wake up, wake up. At her back he is silent, the only awareness of his presence the way she can feel him, this seething thing like a soundless swarm of wasps full of portent and fury and the promise of pain. When she glances over her shoulder, he is only an amorphous shadow, the human face he adopted shed to leave the beautiful, writhing darkness at his core. Still she wants to see that boyish face again, that smile. She can’t read him, like this. She doesn’t have the eyes, the soul. As long as she is Anne she is blinkered and blindfolded to the truth of his essence, and it is that lonely, aching sense of separation that makes up her mind.

Turning forward once more, she squares her shoulders, then pulls her shift over her head and flings it out across the water. The late October breeze captures it in greedy hands and tosses and tears it out across the river, a white banner fluttering against the dark, its reflection in the water as pale as the moon, its flow and swirl like a pure white lily, drifting down to float on the river’s glossy surface. The cold embraces her body, her nipples peaked, and she feels electric, alive, ready, prickling everywhere as the fine hairs from head to toe stand up in sweet anticipation and the back of her neck tingles. Her next breath tastes not like salt and tears and brine and water, but like blood.

Like the blood of birth.

“I am Eve,” she breathes—an affirmation, a vow, a promise. “I am Eve.”

The words are joy. The words are truth. The words are a transformation, uplifting, surging through her until she feels Eve possess her from the tips of her eyelashes to the points of her toes, from the flutter of her racing pulse to the tight needy pulse between her thighs, hot and wanting and ready to become the first, the one, the only, mother to all. In this moment she is pure; broken and battered and scarred and marred and burned as she is, she is pure, and her body is a beautiful benediction, a monument to what she will become. She looks up at the moon, the only true mother she will ever claim, and smiles as she once more spreads her arms to embrace all within herself.

“I am E—”

A hand presses to her back, a cold swarming insubstantial thing, and pushes.

She feels it like maggots on her skin, like squirming worming things crawling over her, burrowing into her, infecting her.

Then she feels only the rush of wind, the pull of gravity, the twist and plummet and tumble and turn as her body races downward and her stomach tries to keep pace. She hadn’t been ready. She hadn’t been ready, and exhilaration becomes fear, and fear becomes the taste of sweat and the flavor of tears and the rising thickness of a scream on her lips.

I am Eve, she tries to say, but all that comes is a cry of terror and loss and anguish and regret. Wake up wake up wake up that inner voice shouts once more, a dream dissolving away, ripped from her sight by the wind’s shredding, cruel fingers, by the onrushing dark that slams up toward her as if leaping to meet her fall.

Just before she strikes, she sees the moon.

Then her eyes are water, streaming with tears.

And as the tears become the river, closing over her like iced silk, crashing into her hard enough to knock her breath from her lungs and her heart from its warmth and her soul from her body, she looks up at the moon through the rippling depths and thinks how very many tears must have fallen to pull her down this deep, this low, into a dark that tastes of nothing at all.

I am Anne, she thinks, as the pain rushes down her throat and closes her lungs and makes her convulse as if her entire body is a laboring, dying heart; as she becomes heavy with blood made of lead and fear and sorrow and loss; as the moon slips away and she is the only pale thing in an endless night.

I am Anne…and I never will be again.