Excerpt from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I'd like to," Esther said, "but not right now. We need to get a move on."

Pearl glanced at her watch and jumped. "Shit! You're right."

They'd been holed up in this hole of a bedroom since dinner a few hours ago, and Esther stood to stretch before jamming her socked feet into her boots.

"God, I'm so glad you agreed to stay on," Pearl said. "I can't imagine facing this without you."

Esther wanted to answer but found she couldn't quite look at the woman in front of her, this person she liked more than she'd liked anyone else in a very long time. She felt a tight longing spread through her chest; not desire, but something even more familiar, something that was always with her. It was that she missed Pearl despite her presence. An anticipation of missing, like her emotions hadn't yet caught up to the idea that this time was different, this time she was staying.

Her father's paranoia had begun to hiss again in her ear, telling her to go, telling her she was making an abominable, selfish mistake; that she was putting Pearl in danger, and Pearl was still looking at her, face open and affectionate but starting to shutter a little at Esther's lack of response.

"I'm glad, too," Esther said. She had practice around Pearl now and could trust her own face not to betray any of her sudden, melancholy mood, and she watched Pearl relax beneath her smile. "Come get me when you're dressed," she added. "We can fortify with a shot."

Pearl raised her hand, those long fingers wrapped around the stem of an imaginary glass. "Here's to the crowd. May they love us."



The crowd loved them. All four members of the band took their practice sessions very seriously and had even managed to come up with passable eighties hair band costumes: black jeans, leather jackets. Esther and Pearl had both teased their hair to great heights, though it would've been more convincing with hairspray, which no one on base had. They looked good and they sounded good, and they were aided by the fact that by the time they plugged in their amps and started playing, everyone was well on their way to wasted and willing to cheer.

Esther was the backup singer and bassist, and her throat was raw, fingers sore by the time they finished "Hell Is for Children" and ended their set. The party was in the galley, which by day resembled a high school cafeteria, complete with the long gray plastic tables that had been pushed up against the walls to free up floor space, and even without the overhead fluorescents and a set of flashing red and purple party lights turned on, there was a distinct middle school vibe that made Esther feel young and silly in a pleasantly immature kind of way. The band had played at the front of the room beneath a web of white fairy lights, and once their set was over, pop music started piping through the new speakers Esther herself had rigged in the corners of the room some months ago.

The large, tiled floor was packed with people milling around, most of them unfamiliar to both Esther and to one another, and more sat in the row of chairs that blocked off the swinging gates leading behind the buffet-style hot bar to the darkened, stainless-steel kitchen. Esther noticed that the new summer crew looked amazingly sunned and healthy compared to their Antarctically pale colleagues. The new smells, too, were overwhelming in their variation. When you lived with the same people, eating the same foods, breathing the same recycled air, you started to smell the same, too—even to a nose as keen as Esther's. These people were, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.

And a breath of something else.

Esther was midconversation with a new carpenter from Colorado named Trev, a man Pearl had described as "eager to please," when suddenly she raised her head like a hunting dog, nostrils flaring.

"Are you wearing cologne?" she asked. She'd caught something under the booze-and-plastic smell of the party, something that made her think, jarringly, of home.

Excerpted from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs. Copyright © 2023 by Emma Torzs. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.