Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 16 of 22

The floor stayed quiet, but Thorn stood over it with every eye fixed on Daisy. "Show me how you did it," they said again. Not a request. Daisy wiped flour on her overalls. She had bound one cake right, by feel, in a panic. Now she had to turn feeling into steps a sibling could follow. If she taught it wrong, Thorn would carry a broken cake to their twin and answer that faint call with crumbs. Daisy set a fresh cake on the counter. "You anchor the flavor," she said. "To something the waking world keeps. A day. A name. A grudge." Thorn nodded and pressed both hands to the batter. Every eye clenched shut. When they lifted the cake and dropped it into the seam, it sank and dissolved into gray. Nothing. The floor didn't even breathe. "You anchored it to the twin," Daisy realized. "To the person you're reaching for." Thorn's petals curled tight. "That's the target. Not the anchor. Your twin's fading. There's nothing left for the flavor to hold to." She had explained it as she understood it, and the gap in her own method showed. An anchor needed something solid. A vanishing person was the opposite of solid. Daisy paced past a tray of shortbread cooling by the window, rose petals pressed into the buttery tops. She stopped. "What do you and your twin share that the world still remembers?" Thorn was silent. Then, plain: "The place we started. Wooden pillars, carved with world marks. Travelers meet there. It stands whether we do or not." Daisy had seen such pillars once, tall and cherished, every crest of every world burned into the grain. "That's your anchor," Daisy said. "Not the twin. The place that outlasts them." She mixed a new batter and pushed the bowl to Thorn. "Bind the ache to the pillars. To the marks that stay put. The world remembers those. It can carry the cake to a fading person, because it's tied to something that won't fade." Thorn worked the batter slow. This time their eyes stayed open, all of them, watching the flavor take. When they baked it on the star-flecked stove, the cake held its shape. It did not gray or slump. Daisy touched it and felt the pull inside, steady, aimed at a place instead of a person. Thorn wrapped the cake in a cloth. For once they didn't rub it in. "It'll cross," they said. "It'll find them." A flat line, but their petals had loosened. Daisy's throat tightened. "Come back and tell me if it worked." Thorn only turned for the door. She had taught her method right, made it teachable, made it travel. And in doing that she'd learned her own binding could reach a person, not just a day or a craving. A dream a customer forgot was a fading thing too. Now she knew how to anchor even that.