“Fuck,” she shades her eyes with a hand, debris like confetti still raining from the firmament, reality paper-shredded into pulsating glitter. No one else notices except the woman on the opposite end, mouth opened in shock.

“Fuck,” she says again, softer this time, because sometimes—most times, if she is going to be honest about it—at the end of a world, nothing else is half-enough.

I check my reflection in the oval, man-sized mirror at the foot of the long hallway that marries our rooms to the apartment. The noon-light spills onto the carpet at a slant and it is colder than it has any right to be, blued by the dusty church glass. A single bristle feather, the same shade of black as my hair, points from my throat like a signpost, the little barbs gold-glossed. I pluck it out.

“Are you going out?” Ligeia slumps against her doorway, eyes still heavy with sleep, sockets smudged with liner. She yawns. “It’s too early.”

“Already evening in the archipelago.” I point out, putting on hoop earrings. Starlings in miniature, bronze and beautifully detailed, clench each loop with tiny, gleaming claws. Some decades ago, they used to sing whenever I sat by the sea but lately, they’ve gone quiet. Like a lot of things, I think they’re tired, husked of love for what was once home. This isn’t a country for magic any longer, no place for old ghosts or brass-boned birds.

“So?”

“There are supposed to be punters.” The velvet jacket might have been too much. I slough the garment and stretch, stare at where the wing stubs protrude from the cheap fabric. It is a man’s tank top, loose along the breasts and the hips. A bad fit. But I like the damask, indigo over faded eggshell-white, and how it distracts from the cigarette-burns constellating my collarbones, and how it walks the eye to the tattoos bangling my forearms: manta rays, sphinxes, feathers by the thousands.

“Like I said: so fucking what?” Ligeia is tall and thin as a coyote’s warning, the pile-up of her curly black hair barely tethered by a tortoiseshell comb. Tendrils spill over an eye as she cocks her head. “There are enough birds on the island that they’d lie to each other about having seen sirens. If they really wanted prophecy, they’d go to Delphi. Are you really trading pancakes for tourists?”

“There’s one—” I begin to say, an image between my lips, the taste of it like roasted marrow, the shape of it like a jag of chewed-down bone. I don’t love them the way Parthenope does. I don’t loathe them either. But sometimes, they hum like a hope I’d forgotten and their longing becomes a hurt, a fishhook dug deep, a noose around my neck pulling me onward, forward to whatever comes next. “She’s hurting.”

“They’re always hurting.”

“She wants answers so bad.”