“They don’t.” Ligeia lets her hair go. When it falls, it becomes plumage, black-blue like a bruise. The air is breakfast smells: pancakes and rye-cut goat butter sizzling on the pan, alcohol cooking to caramel, bacon burnt the way I like them, Chemex coffee like only our sister can make them, sweet and oilless and golden. If I wait too long, I’ll never go. “None of them ever want answers. They just want you to tell them they’re right.”

“Nonetheless—”

A crooking of a rueful smile. Ligeia’s teeth gleam barbed and bright. “—she persisted. Fucking go. Maybe, you’ll make it back in time for brunch.”

“Is this where you eat me?” the woman demands. She’s so small, the siren thinks. Like some downy, broken-backed thing that’d staggered out of its nest and fallen out of the boughs, still shrilling like it had the deed to the sea and the sky. But at least there’s wonder there in the shine of her sclera, held like a key, like this is the moment when the world unlocks and her happy ending spills free.

The siren regards her petitioner, heavy-lidded, still coked-up on miracle. “You wish.”

It must have cost them everything. Russo doesn’t rent out Gallo Lunge for cheap.

I step out into the dusk and onto an outcropping, bend down, fingers wefted over a knee, my chin on my knuckles, and watch as the little group exits their boat. They don’t look like they belong here, don’t look like they’ve ever belonged anywhere, their voices jouncing along the cliffside, screeching and stupid.

They run their fingers over whatever they can reach. All of them except for her, the one who’d collared me, cornered me, corralled me here with her prayer, her impassioned plea for him to be better, for her to matter, for this to not be true, please, just please. She holds herself like a dime-store empress, regal and brittle and sick with need.

She looks up.

I always wonder what they see. Whether it is a girl of about twenty, indeterminate height, indeterminate ethnicity, hair so wild it traps sediments of starlight, or something primordial, plumed and only precariously human. Maybe, they just see the help, someone to hold their hand as they itemize Li Galli’s trousseau of wonders, theirs for a night and the price of the world.

I never ask.

Like them, it doesn’t matter.

“Then tell me what I need to know.”

“You won’t like it.” If the woman had asked, she’d have told her that the dust isn’t dust, but destiny shaken up like a snow globe, particulates of possibility free-floating in a soup of maybe. “You humans never like it.”

“I don’t care.” She grabs the siren, fistfuls of feathers crushed in each hand. “Tell me what I need to know!”