The Scapegracers (Scapegracers, #1)

by H.A. Clarke

Don’t ever say you’re not beautiful, not ever, okay? Girls are just beautiful. That’s the way they are.”

The trees broke, and the honeyed glare of a streetlamp flooded the path before me. I could’ve cried. Sweet civilization gave me a damned streetlamp, and I was in love with it. The streetlamp wasn’t going to give me a holy water enema, or whatever else was on the Chantry agenda.

Babies have gills when they’re purple in the womb-dark. They’re like little fantastical mercreatures, not quite human, far from finished. They exist suspended in liminal water space, so they need gills to breathe. I picture my own as having been the angriest pink little jaggedy slits, bright as gooey papercuts on either side of my neck. We cannot keep our gills, though. The world outside is colder, thinner. Breathing there requires sputtering. Mouths gasping, flared nostrils, that sort of thing. Babies are stripped of their primordial gills and learn to survive without. The papercuts zip themselves up and vanish, and the babies turn into people who forget they ever had them in the first place. This forgetting is normal. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Everybody who has ever had a body has done it. It’s just part of a human life.

it didn’t read like a smile. It was malicious and dimpled; promising something unspecified but unquestionably mean. No doubt, she was a crow in a past life.

Do you want gum? I lifted it from the gas station. Tastes like victory.”

Breathe like a prizefighter. Broken ribs, but standing.