Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia Page A

but I do not think I could let her go.”
    “And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister’s voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.
    She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”
    “Well.” Big Sister’s voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”
    That
was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.
    Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only path to becoming a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister or even — and especially — the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.
    She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she’d gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he’d been kind.
    “I am ready.”
    “I’ll send for the fire and the knife.”
    “The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I’d prefer to have it all at once.”
    An expression flickered across Big Sister’s face — unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul’s Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister’s chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade. It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.
    Little Gray Sister would do it most painfully, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.
    Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.
    Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they’d known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she’d jumped into the violet moonlight.
    Even though it was the Quiet House, her shrieks set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.

Big Sister
    She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening’s gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.
    “You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.
    “There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or if she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was.
Never again
kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.
    “Yes, yes, that’s what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”
    “Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest