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.
The curtain swishes, clattering the beads that frame the entrance, and I snap to attention.
Gabriel is here, clear-eyed and standing on solid feet, dressed in a heavy black turtleneck and jeans and knit socks. The type of clothes Madame’s guards wear.
For a long moment we just stare at each other as if we’ve been apart for ages, which maybe we have. He has been beyond reach with angel’s blood since our arrival, and I have been whisked away by Madame at her every free moment.
I ask, “How are you feeling?” at the same time he says, “You look—”
I sit up in the sea of throw pillows, and he sits beside me, and the lanterns show me the deep bags under his eyes. When I left him this morning, Madame gave Lilac strict instructions to stop the angel’s blood, but he was sleeping, his mouth moving to make words I couldn’t understand. Now, at least, there’s color in his cheeks. His cheeks are flushed, actually. It’s especially warm in this tent, with all the incense sticks Lilac ignited, and the hot, sugary-sweet smell of the candles in the lanterns.
“How are you feeling?” I ask again.
“All right,” he says. “For a few minutes I was seeing strange things, but that’s passed now.” His hands are trembling slightly, and I put my hands over them. His skin is a little clammy, but nothing like it was as he lay comatose and shivering beside me. Just the memory makes me cling to him.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I haven’t come up with a plan to get us out yet, but I’ve bought us some time, I think. Madame wants me to perform.”
“Perform?” Gabriel says.
“I don’t know—something about dancing, maybe. It could be worse.”
He says nothing to that. We both know the type of performances the other girls put on.
“There has to be a way through the gate,” Gabriel whispers. “Or—”
“Shh. I think I heard something outside.”
We strain to listen for it, but the rustling I thought I heard doesn’t repeat itself. It could be the wind, or any of Madame’s girls flitting about.
Just in case, I move on to a safer topic. “How did you know I’d be