Chapter 10 The Sister

Tamsin looked exactly as Clary remembered her — same dark hair, same fierce eyes, same stubborn set to her jaw — but there was something different about her. She was thinner. Paler. Her clothes were simpler, rougher, as if she had been living in a place where luxury was not possible and survival was not guaranteed. But she was alive. She was real. She was here. "Clary," she said, and her voice was the same — warm, familiar, the voice of a sister who had always been there and who Clary had assumed would always be there, and the assumption had been wrong and the realization was a physical pain. Up close there were changes the distance had hidden. Tamsin smelled of graphite dust and struck matches and something cold and mineral, like the inside of a cave; her wrists were thinner; a fine silver stain ran up the index finger of her right hand, very nearly the color of the ink drying on Clary's own fingertips. None of it mattered. Her sister's chin still fit into the groove of Clary's shoulder where it had fitted through every crying spell and every fever and every bad night of seventeen shared years, and some fittings are more eloquent than language. Clary crossed the river. The water was warm and slightly luminous, and it did not wet her clothes. It passed through her, through her shoes, through her legs, as if she were made of something that water could not penetrate. On the far bank, Tamsin embraced her, and Clary held her sister as if she were the only real thing in the world, which, she realized with a start, she might be. "I thought you were gone," Clary said into her sister's shoulder. "I'm not gone," Tamsin said. "I'm here. I've been here. I've been trying to find a way to tell you, but I couldn't — I didn't know if you could hear me. I didn't know if you could find me." "You left me a message. In your sketchbook. In the field." Tamsin pulled back and looked at her. Her eyes were sad. "I knew you would find it. I knew you would draw the map. You're the cartographer, Clary. You're the one who can see the places that aren't there. I've always known. I've always watched you draw, and I've always known that one day you would find your way here." "I almost didn't," Clary said, and heard how untrue it was even as she said it. She had almost done nothing a hundred times — the morning after the field, every parents' evening since September, the afternoon she had stood in a police station corridor listening to a sergeant explain the word dormant. Tamsin knew her too well to accept the lie. "You drew in the third week," she said. "You always draw in the third week. I built the message around your stubbornness." It was such a precisely sisterly thing to say — an insult shaped exactly like faith — that Clary laughed, and the laugh came out sadder than either of them expected. "Elara Voss was here too," Clary said. "She disappeared twenty years ago. She was a mapmaker. She left a journal. She wrote about this place." Tamsin's expression darkened. "Elara. Yes. She came here before me. She tried to stay. She couldn't. The place — Lumen — it doesn't let you stay forever. It takes something from you. Every time you enter, it takes a little piece of you. Eventually, you become part of the city. You become one of the figures. You become a map." Clary felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. "What happened to her?" "She stayed too long," Tamsin said. "She became part of the city. I found her. She's — she's in the archive. She's in the library. She's in the walls. She's everywhere and she's nowhere. She's a map now." Clary thought of the maps in her father's basement, the maps that moved, the maps that contained words and symbols and places that did not exist. She thought of Elara Voss standing in front of her wall of maps, looking at the camera with that knowing expression. She had not been posing. She had been recording herself. She had been leaving a message for someone who would come after her. "For me," Clary said. "For you," Tamsin agreed. "She knew you would come. She drew the map that led you here. The map you drew three weeks after I disappeared — that was her map, Clary. She put the coordinates in your head. She guided your hand. She wanted you to find your way here." Anger arrived late but it arrived: three months of funerals that weren't funerals, of a father shrinking at breakfast, of a town rehearsing pity. You let me think— she began inside her own head, and got no further, because Tamsin's face said she was hearing all of it anyway, and because the silver-stained hand gripping hers was trembling with an effort that had nothing to do with cold. The anger looked around for somewhere to go and found nowhere. It lay back down like a dog whose work was over. Later, Clary promised herself. We will do later later. "Why?" "Because I need you to take me home," Tamsin said. "I've been here for three months. I've been surviving, but I'm fading. Every day I spend in Lumen, I become less real. Less me. I need to go back. I need to come home." Clary looked at her sister. She looked at the city around them — the shifting buildings, the luminous river, the paper trees, the figures moving through the streets like shadows through water. She looked at the sky that had no sun and no moon and no stars, only a pale, enduring light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. "How do I take you home?" she asked. Tamsin took her hand. "You draw a map. A map of the way out."