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She repeated the process after the next meal, imagining what pumped from her mouth in such a hurry wasn’t so very different from what she had so reluctantly swallowed shortly before. With only water from the rain barrel to fill her, hunger became starvation more quickly than she had imagined it might. By the seventh day she had raided wardrobes in the grandest bedrooms to add three scarves and a mouldering shirt to her ragged clothes, all to disguise her emaciation. She could see the bones beneath the skin now, but she couldn’t let Day-Father see them too.

Her weakness began to draw notice. Lip-Scar cut her in the knife lesson and rejoiced in his triumph. Shrill began to watch her closely, the sly-eyed girl at least two years younger but always precocious in her ambitions.

The nights became harder, though she could still hide herself from Night-Father better than the rest of them could. The eighth night of her fast was one of those rare occasions when unknown duties kept Night-Father from the hunt. As ever, the children gravitated to Eldest, asking to hear stories. This time she told them fantasies of a world outside the mansion’s walls and of lives where Mother and Father were not their parents but had been replaced by others. For each child she imagined a new father and a new mother, ones who fed them food that made the mouth water and the stomach sing. Eldest struggled to name specific meals, though her mouth could almost taste the wonders she conjured.

“Potatoes, and salt, and grain, wheat, butter, milk. Tune’s father would be a big man with a beard, and he would pick her up in his arms”—Tune whimpered in fright—“not to hurt her but to…cuddle…that’s the word, soft holding.”

Perhaps it was starvation that had infected her imagination, but Eldest’s mind bubbled with ideas, half-seen images, half-felt emotions. She carried on, spinning tales for her entranced audience, stories so full of colour and kindness that even Lip-Scar and Grumble made no murmur of dissent.

In the depth of her hunger she found a story about Strong falling from her tongue, each line a mystery to her until she spoke it aloud and turned it into revelation. She understood, as she held the other children captive with her tale, that this was memory, not invention.

“We had a brother called Strong. And a sister before him called Pierce who set that name upon him.” She told it like the storybook in the parlour told its stories, the book without a cover, now divided into a dozen cherished pieces, hidden from Day-Father. She changed the type of language she used, even her voice. It was easier to tell it as a story. To keep it at arm’s length where it might hurt her less.

“Strength, children, is often misunderstood because it is found in so many kinds. Every strong thing, if you turn it this way and that, will look like weakness from the right angle. And some things that are weak will show their strength in surprising circumstances. You might think that I am becoming weak, but there’s a different kind of strength growing inside me.”

Lip-Scar made the gentlest of snorts at that but said nothing. Eldest pressed on, needing to speak this story in order to drag it from the depths of her forgetting.

“On the day that we all forgot there had ever been a Pierce, Strong promised to lead us and to protect us. If we swore to obey him, he would swear to be our king. A king in times of war had hard decisions to make, there would be sacrifices, the enemy had many advantages, but in the end we would triumph. Strong would take Day-Father’s chair and rule the night without terror.

“We all agreed to it. Strong had many kinds of strength, not least the swiftness and power in his arms, but where none could equal him was how he talked, how he made you see a great future, however impossible that might seem, a future where everything had changed and one that had a place for you within it. When he spoke, it seemed that anything was possible. He lit a fire inside all of us and called it hope.”

“I don’t remember any of this,” Milk-Eye whispered, her need for it to be true clear in her voice and warring with the facts as she knew them.

“Father poisons us. He found something—the Ingredient—years ago. In a mine, I think. I can’t remember properly. But I’m sure I was told or I overheard or I spied on them, him and Mother. He was digging somewhere very, very deep. Somewhere he was put. The Ingredient gave both him and Mother power, enough for him to leave that place and claim this one. But it changed them both. Too much to live among other people—I don’t believe them about the outside, this place is not all there is. It changed them because they couldn’t grow around it and instead the Ingredient twisted them around itself.

“Mother was the one to understand first. It was her idea to feed it to children. They’ve been experimenting on us. Finding out just how much we can take. They gave Pierce too much and the world forgot her. Maybe there were others before Pierce too, erased from everyone’s thinking. Each time they tried a lower dose, but though Strong was strong and had promised to keep us safe, he couldn’t keep himself safe.

“I almost remember his face. I remember the feeling of his arms when I was hurt. Like a brother. Like a father should be. But they took him from us. He fell out of memory. Out of mine at least, out of ours. And he’s gone. Just his name scratched on an attic rafter to say he was ever here—and now on me, etched with his memory, lost in the blackness but returned by the hunger.

“They gave me less than they gave Strong, and if I had failed, they would have chosen another of you and reduced the amount again. They’re breeding us, changing us, trying to make us into a weapon, but I don’t know who they want to use us against. I think it’s whoever put Father in that mine in the first place. Whoever chained him in the dark. Only he’s changed now and whatever his vengeance was back then, now it’s worse, darker, more cruel, and all of us are caught up in it.”

Tune’s wavering voice spoke into the pause. Eldest would think her the last to speak up, but when a tale has its teeth in us it can draw out questions past all of our inhibitions. “You won’t ever leave us, though? Not like Strong did?”

Guilt tightened the already tight knot of Eldest’s stomach. “Would you forget me?”

“No!” Tune gasped at the idea. Her “No” found echoes in others among the gathered siblings.

“If you remember me then I will always be here.” Eldest hated herself for her dissembling, but she offered more. “If you are ever able to escape, though, sister, run.” And with that she set them to various tasks to stall any further questions.

On the tenth day something in Eldest’s foundations began to shift. Whether it was the collapse of her body announcing itself or something becoming unhinged in her mind she couldn’t tell.

Another meal, another regurgitation. But this time, holding there on all fours, trembling, too weak to attempt to stand, she saw flashes of something more colourful than her life. There at the back of her mind, a tiny garden, glimpsed through shutters. Sunlight burning on flowers too vivid to be believed.

With a gasp she fell to her side, hands clutching at her heart, mind grasping for the warmth of that fading memory.

“Memory…” When she hid from Night-Father she erased herself, not from her own mind but from his while she clung to the memory that she existed. The poison’s gift, if you survived it, wasn’t forgetting but remembering.

Even with the poison precipitating into the back of each child’s mind the process of erasing themselves was still nearly impossible. It was as if the hiding place lay beyond a doorway too small to pass through, and like Alice in that ancient story, they were reaching an arm through towards salvation, unable to squeeze any smaller. And perhaps, Eldest thought, that was why Night-Father put such effort into breaking them all. Only in pieces could a person fit through the portal and reach that place forbidden to mortals. He broke them with pain and fear, and in the darkness of forgetting they were intended to reconstruct themselves into something new.

Gathering all her strength, Eldest stood and returned to the others on faltering feet. Only the power of her voice compelled obedience now. Her siblings were a pack that would soon turn. With harsh words and dark threats she set them to their labours. In the blindness of the mansion she couldn’t see the rebellion on their faces, but she knew it was there. When the others left, Lip-Scar lingered. She could smell him. Shrill was there too, the slight rasp each time she inhaled giving her away.

“Scar! Shrill! Come on.” Milk-Eye had returned. “Now. Or I’ll be doing the cutting next time he gives us knives.”

They went with her, their reluctance silent but heard.

In the hours that followed, while the others laboured on the traps and barricades that they hoped would keep them safe, Eldest sat by the great hearth in the main hall, holding out her trembling hands to catch the faintest strains of the day’s light in the place where fire once danced.

There had been a before. She had experienced years that were now lost to her. She wanted them back. There had been a before and she sought to sift it from the nothing just as the spread of her fingers sought to catch each particle of the light that dared its way down the chimney. And as the soft light slowly and faintly began to trace the width of her palms, hard-angled somethings started to rise from the blackness of her misplaced past.