Chapter Text
It was Alma’s twelfth birthday, and she couldn’t be more bothered.
She had been looking forward to one of Miss Avocet’s strawberry cakes for months, and even offered to help her bake it. But now the girl stood speechless as Jack ruined something for her for the third time that day. Her cake, assembled with precision, was now smushed against the floorboards after Jack had ’accidentally’ pushed Miss Avocet while she’d been carrying it. Alma could only watch in despair as the sliced strawberries and homemade cream slowly slid onto the ground. As if to add salt to the wound, a passing rat snatched a piece and scurried off.
Alma felt hot tears pricking her eyes. She felt like the immature girl her mother told her she was, bawling before her mentors and peers. Without thinking, Alma turned and buried her face in Myron’s jacket before anyone could get a better look at her. Her eldest brother didn’t mind it. He wrapped his arms around her and rubbed circles on her back, shushing her gently.
She heard Jack apologizing dramatically to Miss Avocet and could only imagine the feigned pity on his face: The pout, the batted eyelashes, the puppy-dog eyes. As expected, the older woman nodded and let him off the hook. Despite Jack’s wrongdoings in broad daylight, the ymbrynes believed he might redeem himself. His siblings knew better. They had already noticed his growing fascination with the ymbrynes’ power and control over the rest of peculiardom, and it was bordering on obsessive.
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Whenever Alma practiced her shape-shifting, Jack had a poor habit of chasing her through the halls of the academy and, once he caught her (physical education was not her strong suit at the time), plucking her feathers one-by-one with a roughness that no longer surprised her. Only when a fellow ymbryne heard a falcon’s pained screeches did Jack let her go.
It was often written off as horseplay or sibling rivalry. To say that Alma was frustrated was an understatement. She was beginning to believe her teachers were blind. In fact, on days when she simmered with rage, she found herself staring daggers at her mentors from across the classroom, the hall, or even the courtyard.
Sometimes, she frightened herself.
She wouldn’t allow herself to be anything like her parents. Jack reminded her too much of them.
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“Myron,” she asked one day, leaning over his shoulder as his pen drifted across the pages of his journal. She was fifteen, then. “What are you doing?”
They were sheltered in far corner of the library, sitting at a table beside a single gas lamp that flickered every now and then. He chuckled, tapping his drawing with the nib of his pencil. It was a sketch of an open door, revealing a vast landscape of snow and evergreens. Ice crept over the threshold and froze through the wood. Alma almost mistook her brother’s drawing for a photograph.
“I had an idea, Alma. You know all those loops out there? What if, instead of having to wander around to different loops, the loops were gathered in one place? Just imagine: An endless expanse of doors, all to different locations. You could be in 1842 Bombay one minute, and 1886 Peking the next.”
“Sounds brilliant. Where would you put it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some old building, I suppose. I’ll figure it out, someday.”
“You always do.” She leaned on her forearms, watching his ideas spill out over the pages for a moment longer. Alma spoke up again. “Myron, once you build this place, what are you going to name it?”
“I’ve actually been thinking about it. How does,” he paused dramatically. Myron squinted his eyes and waved his hands in a broad arc, “‘‘the Panloopticon’ sound?”
“That sounds absolutely stupid!” Alma gasped, though her lips tugged upward in a smile she failed to suppress.
“Wait and see, Alma. It’ll be the most popular place there is.”