Fever

Page 7

“It’s her job to tend to the sickroom,” Lilac says. “She can’t resist a Prince Charming in distress.”
In the daylight, without makeup, Lilac is still a creature of beauty. Her eyes are sultry and sad, her smile languid, her hair messy and stiff on one side. Her skin, as dark as her eyes, is cloaked in gauzy blue scarves. Snow is flurrying around behind her.
She says, “Don’t worry. Your prince will be fine. Just a little sedated is all.”
“What have you given him?” I say, not hiding my anger.
“It’s just a little angel’s blood. The same stuff we take to help us sleep.”
“Sleep?” I growl. “He’s comatose.”
“Madame is wary of new boys,” Lilac says, not without compassion. She kneels beside me and presses her fingers to Gabriel’s throat. She’s silent as she monitors his pulse. Then she says, “She thinks they’re spies coming to take away her girls.”
“Yet she lets anyone with money come in and have their way with them.”
“Under strict supervision,” Lilac says pointedly. “If anyone tries something funny—and sometimes they do . . .” She makes a gun shape with her hands, points at me, shoots. “There’s a big incinerator behind the Ferris wheel where she burns the bodies. Jared rigged it from some old machinery.”
It’s not surprising. Cremation is the most popular way to dispose of bodies. We’re dropping off so quickly, there’s not even room to bury all of us, and there are some rumors that the virus contaminates the soil. And just as there are Gatherers to steal girls, there are cleaning crews who scoop up the discarded bodies from the side of the road and haul them to the city incinerators.
The thought makes me ache. I can feel Rowan, for just a moment actually feel him, looking for my body, worrying that I’ve already withered to ash. When the dust is heavy as he passes the incineration facilities, does he fear it’s me he’s breathing in? Bone or brain, or my eyes that are identical to his?
“You’re looking a little pale,” Lilac says. How can she tell? Everything in this tent is tinted green. “Don’t worry; we won’t be doing anything strenuous tonight.”
I don’t want to do anything but sit here with Gabriel, to protect him from another debilitating injection. But I know I have to play by the rules of Madame’s world if I hope to escape it. I’ve done it all before, I tell myself, and I can do it again. Trust is the strongest weapon.
Lilac smiles at me. It is a tired, pretty smile. “We’ll start with your hair, I think. It could stand to be washed. Then we’ll figure out a color scheme for your makeup. Your face makes a nice canvas. Has anyone ever told you that? You should see the messes I’ve had to work with before. The noses on some of these girls.”
I think of Deirdre, my little domestic, who called my face a canvas too. She was a wonder with colors; sometimes I would let her do my makeup if I was bored. Sensible earth tones for dinners with my husband; wild pinks and reds and whites when the roses were in bloom; blue and green and frosty silver when my hair was drenched with pool water and I sat in my bathrobe, reeking of chlorine.
“What is my makeup for?” I ask, though my stomach is twisting with dread.
“It’s just practice for now,” Lilac says. “We’ll do a few trials, show them to Her Highness.” She says the last two words without affection. “And whenever she approves a color scheme, we can begin training you.”
“Training me?”
Lilac straightens her back, pushing out her chest and mock-primping her hair; it pools between her fingers like liquid chocolate. She mimics Madame’s fake accent. “In the art of seduction, darling.” Ze art of zeduction.
Madame wants me to be one of her girls. She still wants to sell me to her customers, even if it’s not in the traditional sense.
I look at Gabriel. His lips have tightened. Can he hear what’s happening? Wake up! I want him to rescue me, the way he did in the hurricane. I want him to carry us both away. But I know he can’t. I’ve caused all of this, and now I’m on my own.
Chapter 4
THIS TENT IS RED, like the strings of beads that droop down from the ceiling, so low our heads almost touch it as we stand before the mirror. The air is heavy with smoke; I’ve been exposed to it for so long now that my senses are not as offended. Lilac twists my hair into dozens of little braids and douses them with water, “to bring out the curls.”
Outside, the brass music has begun. Maddie is sitting at the entrance, peeking out into the night. I follow her gaze and catch the smooth white of a thigh, wisp of a dress. There are desperate, shuddering grunts and gasps. Lilac giggles as she smears lipstick onto my mouth. “That’s one of the Reds,” she says, “probably Scarlet. She wants the whole world to know she’s a whore.” She straightens her back, yells the word “Whore!” out into the night; it flies over Maddie, who is stuffing her mouth full of semi-rotten strawberries and watching. The girl outside yips and howls with laughter.
I want to ask why Lilac is okay with her daughter watching what’s going on out there, but I remember the teasing I got from my sister wives. They would undress while I was in the room, run into the hallway in their underwear and ask to borrow each other’s things. Late in her pregnancy Cecily didn’t even bother with the buttons of her nightgown, and her stomach floated in front of her everywhere. I guess being raised in such close quarters with so many other girls leaves no room for shyness.
And here, I am supposed to blend in. I can’t be shy. If Madame finds out that I lied about my torrid affairs, she won’t believe anything else about me. And so I act unfazed as Lilac explains Madame’s color-sorting system for her girls.
The Reds are Madame’s favorites: Scarlet and Coral have been with her since they were babies, and she lets them borrow her costume jewels. She lets them take hot baths and gives them the ripest strawberries from another little garden she grows behind the tent, because their bright eyes and long hair fetch the highest prices.
The Blues are her mysterious ones: Iris and Indigo and Sapphire and Sky. They cling to one another when they sleep, and they giggle at the things they whisper among themselves. But their teeth are murky and mostly missing, and they only get chosen by the men unwilling to pay for more, and they’re never in the back room for long. Men take them hurriedly, sometimes standing up, against trees, or even in the tent with all the others there to see.
There are more girls. More colors that blend together into one muddy mess as Lilac talks about them, pausing to ask Maddie to hand her the peroxide. Maddie, fingers and mouth stained red with strawberry juice, crawls (she hardly walks, I’ve noticed) to the assortment of jars and bottles and vials. She finds the one that’s labeled peroxide and offers it up.
“How did she know which bottle was the right one?” I say.
“She read it.” Lilac tilts the bottle onto a cloth, wipes some of the blush from my cheeks. “She’s very smart. ’Course, Her Highness”—again, said with malice—“likes to keep her hidden, thinks she’s just a useless malfie.”
“Malfie” is an unkind term for the genetically malformed. Sometimes women would give birth to malformed babies in the lab where my parents worked—children born blind, or deaf, or with any of an array of disfigurements. But more common were the children with strange eyes, who never spoke or reached the milestones the other children did, and whose behavior never synced with any genetic research. My mother once told me about a malformed boy who spent the nights wailing in terror over imaginary ghosts. And before my brother and I were born, our parents had a set of malformed twins; they had the same heterochromatic eyes—brown and blue—but they were blind, and they never spoke, and despite my parents’ best efforts they didn’t live past five years.
Malformed children are put to death in orphanages, because they’re considered leeches with no hope of ever caring for themselves. That’s if they don’t die on their own. But in labs they’re the perfect candidates for genetic analysis because nobody really knows what makes them tick.
“Madame said she bites the customers,” I say.
Lilac, holding an eyeliner pencil close to my face, throws her head back and laughs. The laugh mingles with the grunts and the brass and Madame shouting an order to one of her boys.
“Good,” she says.
In the distance Madame starts bellowing for Lilac, who rolls her eyes and grunts. “Drunk,” she mumbles, and licks her thumb and uses it to smudge the eyeliner on my eyelids. “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”
As if I could. I can hear the gun rattling in the guard’s holster just outside the entrance.
“Lilac!” Madame’s accented voice is slurred. “Where are you? Stupid girl.”
Lilac hurries off, muttering obscenities. Maddie follows her out, taking the bucket of semi-rotted strawberries with her.
I lie back on the bubblegum pink sheet that’s covering the ground and rest my head on one of the many throw pillows. This one is framed with orange beads. I think the smoke is to blame for my fatigue. I’m so tired here. My arms and legs feel so heavy. The colors, though, are twice as bright. The music twice as loud. The giggling, moaning, gasping girls are a music of their own. And I think there’s something magical about it all. Something that lures Madame’s customers in like fishermen to a lighthouse gleam. But it’s terrifying, too. Terrifying to be a girl in this place. Terrifying to be a girl in this world.
My eyes close. I wrap my arms around the pillow. I’m dressed in only a gold satin slip (gold has become Madame’s official color for her Goldenrod), but despite the winds outside, it’s warm in the tent. I suppose this is from the lingering smoke, and Jared’s underground heating system, and all the candles in the lanterns. Madame has truly thought of everything. To have her girls bundled in winter gear would hardly make them appealing to customers.
I’m eerily comfortable in this warmth. A nap seems incredibly inviting.
Don’t forget how you got here. Jenna’s voice. Don’t forget.
She and I are lying beside each other, surrounded by canopy netting. She’s not dead. Not while she’s tucked safely in my dreams.
Don’t forget.
I squeeze my eyelids down tight. I don’t want to think about the horrible way my oldest sister wife died. Her skin bruising and decaying. Her eyes glossing over. I just want to pretend she’s okay—just for a little longer.
But I can’t stave off the feeling that Jenna is trying to warn me to not be so comfortable in this dangerous place. I can smell the medicine and the decay of her deathbed. It gets stronger the more I feel myself fading to sleep.