Daughter of Smoke & Bone

7





BLACK HANDPRINTS



Around the world, over a space of days, black handprints appeared on many doors, each scorched deep into wood or metal. Nairobi, Delhi, St. Petersburg, a handful of other cities. It was a phenomenon. In Cairo, the owner of a shisha den painted over the mark on his back door only to find, hours later, that the handprint had smoldered through the paint and showed just as black as when he’d discovered it.

There were some witnesses to the acts of vandalism, but no one believed what they claimed to have seen.

“With his bare hand,” a child in New York told his mother, pointing out the window. “He just put his hand there, and it glowed and smoked.”

His mother sighed and went back to bed. The boy was an established fibber, worse luck for him, because this time he was not lying. He had seen a tall man lay his hand on the door and scorch the mark into it. “His shadow was wrong,” he told his mother’s retreating back. “It didn’t match.”

A drunken tourist in Bangkok witnessed a similar scene, though this time the handprint was made by a woman of such impossible beauty that he followed her, spellbound, only to see her—as he claimed—fly away.

“She didn’t have wings,” he told his friends, “but her shadow did.”

“His eyes were like fire,” said an old man who caught sight of one of the strangers from his rooftop pigeon coop. “Sparks rained down when he flew away.”

So it was in slum alleys and dark courtyards in Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, San Francisco, Paris. Beautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground. In Delhi, a Sister of Mercy reached out and caught one on her palm like a raindrop, but unlike a raindrop it burned, and left the perfect outline of a feather seared into her flesh.

“Angel,” she whispered, relishing the pain.

She was not exactly wrong.