Fever

Rowan. Even his name feels far away from me now.

“Look, look.” Madame points eagerly. Her girls are milling below in their dingy, exotic clothes. One of them twirls, and her skirt fills up with air, and her laughter echoes like hiccups. A man grabs her pale arm, and still she laughs, tripping and flailing as he drags her into a tent.

“You’ve never seen girls as beautiful as mine,” Madame says. But she’s wrong—I have. There was Jenna, with her gray eyes that always caught the light, her grace; she would swirl and hum through the hallways, her nose buried in a romance novel the whole time. The attendants blushed and averted their eyes, she so intimidated them with her confidence, her coy smiles. In a place like this she would have been a queen.

“They want a better life. They run away, come here to me. I deliver their babies, I cure their sniffles, I feed them, keep them clean, give them nice things for their hair. They come to this place asking for me.” She grins. “Maybe you’ve heard of me too. You’ve come here for my help.” She takes my left hand with a force that rocks our car. I tense, thinking we’ll capsize, but we don’t. We’ve stopped ascending now; we’re at the top. I look out over the side. There’s no way down, and the fear starts to set in. Madame controls this thing. If I wasn’t completely at her mercy before, I am now.

I force myself to stay calm. I won’t let her have the satisfaction of my panicking; it would only empower her.

My heart is thudding in my ears.

“That boy you came here with—he is not the one who gave you this beautiful wedding ring, is he.” It’s not a question. She tries to slide the ring from my finger, but I make a fist and draw away.

“Both of you show up like drowned rats,” she says. Her laughter creaks like the rusty gears that hold our car together. “But under that you are all sparkles and pearls. Real pearls.” She’s looking at my sweater. “And he is made up like a lowly attendant.”

I can’t deny any of this. She’s managed to sum up the last several months of my life perfectly.

“Running off with your attendant, Goldenrod, behind the back of the man who made you his wife? Did your husband force himself on you? Or maybe he couldn’t satisfy you, and so you met with that boy of yours in secret—in secret, late at night, rustling in your closet among your silk dresses like a pair of savages.”

My cheeks burn, but it’s not like the embarrassment I felt when my sister wives teased me about my lack of intimacy with Linden. This is sick and invasive. Wrong. And Madame’s smoky stench is making it hard to breathe. The height is making me dizzy. I close my eyes.

“It isn’t like that,” I say through gritted teeth.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Madame says, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I catch the whimper before it leaves my throat. “You’re a woman, after all. Women are the fairer sex. And one as lovely as you—your husband must have turned into a beast around you. It’s no wonder you found yourself a sweeter boy. And this one is sweeter, isn’t he? I can see it in his eyes.”

“His eyes?” I splutter, furious. When I open my eyes, I focus on one of Madame’s gaudy hair gems so I don’t have to look at her or the ground. “Before your henchmen beat him half to death?”

“That’s another thing.” Madame tenderly brushes the hair from my face. I jerk back, but she doesn’t seem to care. “My men know how to protect my girls. It’s a rough world, Goldenrod. You need protection.”

She grabs my chin, and her fingers press against my jawbone until it hurts. She stares at my eyes. “Or maybe,” she sings, “your husband didn’t want to pass this defect of yours on to his children. Maybe he threw you out with the trash.”

Madame is a woman who loves to talk. And the more she says, the less accurate she becomes. I realize that she couldn’t read me as easily as she thought. She’s just probing through the options, hoping to get a rise out of me. I could lie to her and she wouldn’t know.

“I’m not malformed,” I say, feeling suddenly giddy about this small power I have over her. “My husband was.”

This makes Madame beam with intrigue. She releases my face and leans close. “Oh?”

“He might have turned into a beast around me, but it didn’t matter. Nine times out of ten, he couldn’t do anything about it. And like you said, women have needs.”

Madame bounces a little, rocking and creaking our car. It’s clear she gets off on the idea of young lust. I hardly have to continue the lie; she’s writing the rest of the story herself.

“And you were forced into the arms of your attendant.”

“In my closet, like you said.”

“Right under your husband’s nose?”

“In the very next room.”

She can have whatever deranged lie she wants. But the truth, like my wedding band, is something of mine that she can’t have.

The girls, hundreds of feet below, are a chorus of giggles. They all dance with the men for a while before disappearing into tents. And Madame’s henchmen sometimes peel the opening in the tent for a glimpse.

“Oh, Goldenrod, you are a gem.” She takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek between the words. “A gem, a gem, an absolute gem! You and I will have great fun.”

Great.

In a second we’re orbiting backward. The music is louder the closer we come to the ground, and the girls sadder.

the tent, curled up so closely to the wall of the tent that its green tinges his skin. There’s a dingy blanket under him, and his shirt is gone.

Madame told me this is where I’ll rest tonight, while she figures out what to do with me. There’s a basin of water and some towels and soaps that look like they were hand-carved.

I wet a towel and dab at the red mark on Gabriel’s cheek. Tomorrow it will be just one of many bruises. He mutters something, draws a breath.

“Did I hurt you?” I say.

He shakes his head, nuzzles his face against the ground.

“Gabriel?” I whisper. “Wake up.” He doesn’t answer me this time, even when I turn him onto his back and wring cold water over his face. My heart is pounding with fear. “Gabriel. Look at me.”

He does, and his pupils are two small, startled dots in all that blue, and he’s scaring me. “What did they do to you?” I say. “What happened?”

“The purple girl,” he mumbles, smacking his lips and closing his eyes. “She had a … something.” He moves his arm as though in indication. And then he’s gone again. Shaking him does nothing.

“He’ll be out for a few hours.” One of the girls is standing at the tent’s entrance, a blanket bunched in her arms. “He seemed like he was in a lot of pain. I just gave him a little something to help. Here.” She offers me the blanket. “It’s fresh off the laundry line.”

She tries to help me cover him, but I shrug her away and snap, “You’ve helped enough, thanks. Whose fault is it that he was in pain to begin with?”

“Neither of you are from here,” the girl nonchalantly says, wringing a towel out over the basin. “Madame is very paranoid about spies. If I didn’t subdue him, she would have ordered the bodyguards to beat him unconscious. I was doing him a favor.” There’s no malice in the way she speaks. She hands me the wet towel, and she keeps a polite distance.

“What spies?” I ask, and gently rub away the sand and blood from Gabriel’s face and arms. I don’t like whatever is subduing him. He’s all I have in this terrible place, and he’s so far away.

“They don’t exist,” the girl says. “Most of what that woman says is nonsense. The opiates make her so paranoid.”

What have we stumbled into? At least this girl is not as nightmarish as the rest. Under all that makeup I can see the sympathy in her eyes that are two small dark stars in a nebula of green eyeliner. Her skin is dark. Her short hair is curled into glossy ringlets. And she, like everything here, carries that musty-sweet scent that radiates from everything Madame has touched.

“Why did he call you ‘the purple girl’?” I say.

“My name is Lilac,” she says, and indicates the light purple flowers on her faded dress, the strap of which keeps falling off her shoulder. “Ask for me if you need anything else, okay? I have to get back to work.”

She opens the tent flap, exposing the night sky and filling the tent with cold air and laughter, and the desperate grunts of men and the giggling of girls, and the steady rhythm of brass.

“This is my fault,” I whisper. I trace the line between Gabriel’s lips. “I’ll get us out of here. I promise.”

There’s salt crusted in my hair, and I feel so grimy that it’s tempting to climb into the basin to wash everything away. But whenever the bodyguards hear the water sloshing as I dip towels into it, they peer through the slit in the tent. Privacy is a lost practice in scarlet districts, I suppose. I settle for rolling up my sleeves and the legs of my jeans to wash as much as I can. Someone has laid out a silk dress for me—as green as this tent, with an orange dragon running up the side—but I don’t wear it.

I curl up beside Gabriel, fitting my arm around him. The soaps have left me with Madame’s strange scent, but he still smells of the ocean. I feel his skin moving under my fingers as he breathes, his muscles in constant, steady motion over his ribs. I close my eyes, pretend his is an ordinary sleep and that saying his name would bring him right back to me.

Time passes. Girls come and go. I pretend I am asleep and strain to hear what they’re whispering to each other. They say things I don’t understand. Angel’s blood. The new yellow. Dead greens. Men yell at them from a distance, and they go, their jewelry clattering like plastic shackles.

I feel myself falling asleep and try to fight it. But one minute I’m here, and the next I’m rocking on the glittering waves. One minute Gabriel is beside me, and then in the next, Linden is wrapping himself around me the way he did in sleep. He sobs in my ear and says his dead wife’s name, and I open my eyes. The hard dirt and thin blanket is an unwelcome change from the fluffy white comforter I was just hallucinating, and for a moment Gabriel seems strange. His bright brown hair nothing like Linden’s dark curls; his body thicker and less pale. I try rousing him again. No response.

I close my eyes, and this time I dream of snakes. Their hissing heads erupt from the dirt, and they coil around my ankles. They try to take off my shoes.

I wake in a panic. Lilac is kneeling at my feet, easing my socks off. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. I feel like hours have passed, but I can see through the slit in the tent that it’s still nighttime.

“What are you doing?” My voice is hoarse. It’s so cold in this tent that I can see my own breath. I don’t know how these girls haven’t frozen to death in their flimsy dresses.

“These are soaked. You have to keep extremities warm, you know. You could get pneumonia.”

She’s right, I am freezing. She wraps my bare feet in towels. I watch her as she rummages through a small suitcase. Her curls are disheveled, her dress more rumpled. When she kneels by Gabriel this time, she’s got an array of things in a black handkerchief. She mixes powder and water in a spoon and takes a lighter to it until it bubbles, then draws it up into a syringe. Then she starts tying a strip of cloth around Gabriel’s arm above the elbow—which is something my parents used to do before administering emergency sedatives to hysterical lab patients—and that’s when I push her away. “Don’t.”

“It’s going to help him,” she says. “Keep him calm, keep you both out of trouble.”

I think of the warm toxins flowing through my blood after I was injured in the hurricane, how Vaughn threatened me and I couldn’t even muster the strength to open my eyes. How helpless and numb and terrified I was. I would rather have suffered the pain of my injuries, the broken bones, sprained limbs, stitched skin, than have been paralyzed.

“I don’t care,” I say. “You’re not giving him anything.”

She frowns. “Then, it’s going to be a rough night.”

I could laugh. “It already is.”

Lilac opens her mouth to say something else, but a noise at the tent’s entrance makes her turn her head. There’s a moment of fear in her eyes; maybe she thought it would be a man, but then she relaxes. “You know you’re supposed to stay hidden,” she says. “You want to piss Madame off?”

She’s talking to the child who has just crawled into the tent, not through the guarded entrance but through a small opening along the ground. Dark, stringy hair is covering her face. She moves more into the light, tilts her head to me, and her eyes are like marbled glass, so light they’re barely even the color blue—a startling contrast to her dark skin.

Lilac sets down the spoon and pushes the child back in the direction she came from, saying, “Hurry up. Get lost before we both get hell for it.”

The child goes, but not before pushing back and huffing indignantly through her nose.

Gabriel stirs, and I snap to attention. Lilac offers up the syringe again, gnawing her lip. I ignore it. “Gabriel?” My voice is very soft. I brush some hair from his face, and I realize how damp and clammy his forehead is. His face is splotchy with fever. His eyelashes flutter, but it’s like he can’t quite raise them.

Out in the night someone yelps in pain or maybe just aggravation, and Madame’s shrill voice cries, “Useless, filthy child!”

Lilac is on her feet the next instant, but she has left the syringe on the ground for me. “He’ll want it,” she tells me as she hurries for the exit. “He’ll need it.”

“Rhine?” Gabriel whispers. He’s the only one in this broken carnival who knows my name. He screamed it in the gale, pieces of Vaughn’s fake world whipping around us. He whispered it within the mansion’s walls, leaning close to me. He’s lured me from sleep that way, while my husband and sister wives slept before dawn. Always with such purpose, like it matters, like my name—like all of me—is a precious secret.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m right here.”

He doesn’t answer, and I think he’s lost consciousness again. I feel stranded, start to panic about him going back to that dark, unreachable place. But then he sucks in a hard breath and opens his eyes. His pupils are back to normal, no longer losing themselves in all that blue.

His teeth are chattering, and he’s stuttering and slurring when he asks, “What is this place?”

Not where, but what. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, blotting some sweat from his face with my sleeve. “I’m going to get us out of here.” We’re both lost here, but of the two of us I have a better understanding of the outside world. Surely I can figure something out.

He stares at me for a long while, shuddering from the cold and the aftereffects of whatever was in that first syringe. And then he says, “The guards were trying to take you away.”

“They took me,” I say. “They took both of us.”

I can see him fighting to stay awake. There’s a dark bruise forming on his cheek; his mouth is chapped and bleeding; he’s shaking so hard, I can feel it without touching him.

I wrap the blanket around him more snugly, trying to imitate the cocooning technique Cecily swaddled the baby with on a cold night. It was one of the few times she looked sure of what she was doing. “Rest,” I whisper. “I’ll be right here.”

He watches me for a long time, his eyes darting up and down the length of my face. I think he’s going to speak. I hope he will, even if it’s just to say this is all my fault, that he told me the world was dangerous. I don’t care. I just want him here with me. I want to hear his voice. But all he does is close his eyes, and then he’s gone again.

I manage a fitful sleep beside him, shivering, covered with only a damp towel so Gabriel can have all the covers. I dream of crisp bed linens; of sparkling gold champagne that warms my throat and stomach as it goes down; of category-three winds rattling the edges, revealing bits of darkness behind a shiny perfect world.

I’m ripped from sleep by a gurgling, retching sound that at first makes me think I’m at my oldest sister wife’s deathbed. But when I open my eyes, I see Gabriel doubled over in a far corner of our tent. The smell of vomit is not quite as overwhelming as all the smoke and perfume that keeps this place in a perpetual smog.

I hurry to his side, all earnest, heart pounding. And now that I’m close to him, I can smell and see the coppery blood coming from a gash between his shoulder blades; the skin tears as he tenses his muscles. I don’t remember there being any knives in the struggle, but we were ambushed so fast.

“Gabriel?” I touch his shoulder but can’t bring myself to look at the stuff he’s coughing up. When he’s finished, I offer him a rag, and he takes it, slumping back on his heels.

It seems stupid to ask if he’s all right, so I’m trying to get a good look at his eyes. Shades of purple are tiered under them, from dark to light. The cold is making clouds of his breath.

In the light of the swinging lantern, his own shadows dance behind his still form.

He says, “Where is this place?”

“We’re in a scarlet district along the coastline. They gave you something; I think it’s called angel’s blood.”

“It’s a sedative,” he says; his voice is slurred. He crawls back for the blanket and collapses facedown. “Housemaster Vaughn kept it in stock. Hospitals used to carry it, but they stopped because of the side effects.” He doesn’t resist as I position him onto his side and draw the blanket over him. He’s shivering. “Side effects?” I say.

“Hallucinations. Nightmares.”

I think of the warmth that spread through my veins after the hurricane, think of being unable to move; Vaughn only kept me conscious long enough to threaten me. And though I don’t remember it, Linden claimed I muttered horrible things while I dreamt.

“Can I do anything?” I say, tucking the blankets around his shoulders. “Are you thirsty?”

He reaches for me, and I let him draw me to his side. “I dreamt you’d drowned,” he says. “Our boat was burning and there was no shore.”

“Not possible,” I say. His lips are chapped and bloody against my forehead. “I’m an excellent swimmer.”

“It was dark,” he says. “All I could see was your hair, going under. I dove after you and realized I was chasing a jellyfish. You were nowhere.”

“I’ve been here,” I say. “You’re the one who’s been nowhere. I couldn’t wake you up.”

He raises the blanket like a wing, wrapping me inside with him. It’s warmer than I thought it would be, and I realize at once how much I’ve missed him while he’s been under. I close my eyes, breathe deep. But the smell of the ocean is gone from his skin. He smells like blood and Madame’s perfume, which lingers in the white soapy film that floats in all the water basins.

“Don’t leave me again,” I whisper. He doesn’t answer. I reposition myself in his arms and draw back to look at his face. His eyes are closed. “Gabriel?” I say.

“You’re dead,” he mumbles sleepily. “I watched you die”—his voice hitches with a yawn—“watched you die all those horrible deaths.”

“Wake up,” I tell him, and sit up, and pull the blankets away, hoping the sudden cold will shock him awake.

He opens his eyes, glossy like Jenna’s when she was dying. “They were cutting your throat,” he says. “You tried to scream, but you had no voice.”

“It’s not real,” I say. My heart is pounding with fear. My blood is cold. “You’re delirious. Look; I’m right here.” My fingers brush his neck, which is flush and warm. I remember when we kissed, Linden’s atlas between us; I remember the warm air of his little breaths on my tongue and chin and neck, the sudden draftiness when he drew back. Everything dissolved from around us in that moment, and I’d never felt so safe.

Now I worry that we’ll never be safe again. If we ever were.

The rest of the night is miserable. Gabriel succumbs to an unreachable sleep, and I fight to stay awake so I can keep watch against the dangers that lurk beyond our green tent.

When I sleep, I dream of smoke. Curling, twisting, weaving paths that lead nowhere.

“—up!” someone is saying. “Rise and shine, little love-bird! Réveille-toi!”

An arm tightens around me. I snap to attention. Madame is speaking in that phony accent again, her consonants flourishing like the smoke from her lips.

Daylight is a blinding force behind her, filling the silk outline of her scarves like rainbow lizard crests, making her face a shadow. And the whole tent is full of green, reflecting on my skin.

Sometime in the night Gabriel pulled me back into the blanket with him, and his arm is encircling my ribs. He buries his face in my hair, and I can feel the clamminess of his forehead. When I sit up, the movement doesn’t rouse him. He doesn’t regain consciousness at all.

The syringe. The syringe is no longer where Lilac left it.

Madame takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. She cups my face in her papery hands and smiles. “Even lovelier in the daylight, my Goldenrod.”

I’m not her Goldenrod. I’m not her anything. But she seems to have claimed me as one of her possessions, her antiques, her plastic gems.

I will Gabriel not to mutter my name again. I don’t want Madame to have it, rolling it off her tongue the way she fondled the flowers of my wedding band.

She pouts. “You do not want to wear the beautiful dress I laid out for you?” It hangs over her arm now like a deflated corpse, like the bloodless body of the girl who wore it last.

“Your sweater is so beautiful. How can you stand to wear it while it’s filthy?” she says sadly. I think her frown could melt right off her face. “One of the little ones will wash it for you.” Her accent has morphed to something else now. All of her THs come out like Zs, and her Ws like Vs. One of ze little ones vill vash it for you.

She thrusts the dress at me, and unwinds a fur stole from her shoulders and drapes it around my neck. “Change. I’ll wait for you outside. It’s a beautiful day!”

I’ll vait for you.

When she’s gone, I change quickly, figuring it’s my only way out of this tent. And I admit that the silk feels nice against my skin, and the stole, despite the choking must, is so warm I could get lost in it. Wearing these things may be the only way Madame lets me out of the tent, but what about Gabriel? Gabriel, who is still trapped in a haze. I kneel beside him and touch his forehead. I’m expecting it to be feverish, but it’s cold.

“I’ll get us out of here,” I say again. No matter that he can’t hear me; the words aren’t entirely for him.

Madame peels back the tent flap and tsk-tsks, snagging my wrist and tugging so hard, I think of the time my arm was dislocated and my brother had to snap it back into place. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. My bare feet are dragging, and I realize I’m not really trying to keep pace with her.

As we leave the tent, two small girls sweep past us and gather my rumpled clothes. Their heads are down, mouths tight. I only get a glimpse of them, but I think they’re twins. I’m pulled out into the cold sunshine, and the sky is a light candied blue, like I’m looking up through a sheet of ice. Madame fusses with my hair, which smells like a combination of salt water and a scarlet district. It feels heavy and tangled; her expression is distant, maybe disapproving, and I’m sure she’s going to criticize it, but she only says, “Don’t you worry about the boy.” She grins, and I swear I can see my outline repeated in each of her too-white teeth. “He’ll wake up when he can learn to be reasonable about sharing you.”

In the daylight, without the commotion or the light of the Ferris wheel, I can see what a wasteland this place is. Long stretches of just dirt, or a rusty piece of machinery erupting from the ground like it’s growing from a seed. There’s another ride off in the distance, and at first I think it’s a smaller Ferris wheel turned onto its side, but as we get closer, I can see metal horses inside of it, impaled by poles, their legs poised as though they were trying to escape before they were immobilized. Madame catches me staring and tells me it’s called a merry-go-round.