Fever

The black eyes of the horses fill me with pain. I want to break the spell on them, to animate the muscles in their legs and set them running free.

Madame brings me to the rainbow tent, the biggest and tallest of them all. Four of her boys are guarding it, their guns crossed at their chests like half an X. They don’t bother to look at me as Madame ushers me past, ruffling one of their heads.

She opens the tent flap, and a gust of cool air rolls in, unsettling the girls inside like wind chimes. They mutter and stir. Most of them are sleeping, piled against and atop one another.

The girls are all the same, like I’m looking into a house of mirrors. Long, bony limbs hunched against each other, and lipstick-smeared mouths full of rotted teeth. And for some girls it’s not lipstick—it’s blood. Unlit lanterns hang over their heads. The sun through the tent lights them up in oranges and greens and reds.

And farther down is the entryway to another tent that is veiled off by silk scarves trailing sickly sweet perfume, and something else. Decay and sweat. When Rose was dying, she concealed herself in powders and blush, but Jenna didn’t, and as I cared for Jenna during those final days, I could see her sallow skin beginning to bruise, and then the bruises would sink down to the bones and fester. It was a smell that haunted my dreams. My sister wife rotting from the inside out.

“I call this my greenhouse,” Madame says. “The girls sleep all day, so they can be fresh as daisies in the evening. Lazy girls.”

A few of the girls bother to look at me, blinking lazily and then returning to sleep.

She says she names the girls after colors, so she can keep track of them. Lilac is the only girl named for a color that is also a plant, because Jared, one of Madame’s best bodyguards, first found her lying unconscious in the lilac shrubs that border the vegetable gardens. “Belly about to burst,” Madame jokes, laughing maniacally. Lilac gave birth under a swinging lantern in the circus tent, surrounded by curious Reds and Blues. And the Greens, Jade and Celadon, who have since died of the virus.

“Nasty, useless little girl,” Madame Soleski says, indicating the little girl from last night with the strange eyes, who has crept out from a shadow. “One look at that shriveled leg and I knew on the day she was born that I’d never be able to get a decent price for her when she was the right age. But she can’t even be put to work! She scares the customers away. She bites them!”

Lilac, who is burrowed among the others, draws her daughter into her arms without opening her eyes. “Her name is Maddie,” she mutters, her voice slurred.

“Mad is right,” Madame Soleski says, nudging the child with her shoe. Maddie cants her head up at her with a violent stare. She snaps her little teeth at the old woman, venomous and defiant. “And she doesn’t speak!” Madame goes on. “Malformed. Horrible, horrible girl. She should be put down. Did you know that a hundred years ago when an animal was useless, they used to have a chemical that would put it to sleep forever?”

The smell of so many girls in such a small space is making me dizzy, and so are Madame’s words. One of the girls is twirling her hair, and it’s falling out in her hands.

A guard stands in the entryway. When nobody else is looking, I watch him reach into his pocket and then hold out a strawberry for Maddie. She pops it into her mouth, stem and all, a delicious secret she devours whole.

I hear a noise from the tent that’s veiled off. I think it’s a cough, or a groan. Either way, I don’t want to know. Madame is unfazed, and tightens her arm around my shoulders. I fight to keep my breathing even, but I want to cry out. I’m furious—maybe as furious as I was when I climbed out of the Gatherers’ van. I stood very still in a line with the other girls. I said nothing when I heard the first gunshot—the unwanted girls being murdered one at a time. There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn’t want us at all. It steals us, destroys us, piles us like dying cattle in circus tents and leaves us lying in filth and perfume until we’re wanted again.

I ran from that mansion because I wanted to be free. But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

And I feel something I’ve never felt before. Anger at my parents for bringing my brother and me into this world. For leaving us to fend for ourselves.

Maddie stares at me, her eyes glassy and bizarre. This is the first time I’ve really looked at her. She’s obviously malformed—not just the strange, almost colorless blue of her eyes. In addition to her shriveled leg, one of her arms, the left, is shorter and much thinner than the other; her toes are almost nonexistent, as though something kept them from growing all the way out of her feet. But her face is angular and sharp, her expression all fearlessness and ire. It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t speak. Why should she? What could she possibly have to say? She watches me, and then her eyes become distant, inaccessible, like she’s diving into waters too deep for me to follow her into.

Madame mutters something unkind and kicks the child in the shoulder, then she steers me outside.

There are plenty of other children, with stronger bodies and normal features. They work, polishing Madame’s fake jewels, doing laundry in metal basins and hanging it on wire that’s strung between dilapidated fences.

“My girls produce like jackrabbits.” Madame says the last word with malice. “Then they die and leave me to care for the mess they leave behind. But what can be done? The children make good workers at least.” Ze children.

Long ago President Guiltree did away with birth control. He’s of the pro-science mentality and thinks geneticists will fix the glitch in our DNA. In the meantime he feels it’s our responsibility to keep the human race alive. There are doctors who know how to terminate pregnancies, though they charge more than most can afford.

I wonder if my parents ever did it. For all the time they spent monitoring pregnancies, I’m sure they knew how to terminate one.

Abortions are supposed to be banned, but I’ve never heard of the president actually punishing anyone for disobeying one of his laws. I’m not entirely sure what the president even does. My brother says the presidency is a useless tradition that might have once served a purpose but has become nothing but formality—something to give us hope that order will be restored one day.

I hate President Guiltree, who has been in charge of this country longer than I’ve been alive. With his nine wives and fifteen children—all sons—he does not believe the end of humankind is near. He makes no move to stop the Gatherers from kidnapping brides, and encourages madmen like Vaughn to breed infants who will live their lives as experiments. Sometimes he’s on television, promoting new buildings or attending parties, flashing smiles, toasting his champagne glass at the TV like he expects us all to be celebrating with him. Or maybe he’s mocking us.

“He’s kind of handsome,” Cecily said once, when we were all watching TV and his face appeared in a commercial. Jenna said he looked like a child molester. We’d laughed about it then, but now that I’m in a scarlet district, Jenna’s former home, I think she must have been serious. Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide in a person.

Madame shows me her gardens, which are mostly patches of weeds and buds, encased in low wire fences. The strawberries, though, are growing under a weatherproof tarp. “You should see them in the spring sunshine,” she says giddily. “Strawberries and tomatoes and blueberries so fat they explode between your teeth.” I wonder where she gets the seeds. They’re so hard to come by in the city, where all of our fruits and vegetables seem to have taken on the city’s gray tinge.

She shows me the other tents, full of antique furniture, silk pillows piled on the dirt floors. Only the best for her customers, she says. The air in each of them is muggy with sweat. At the last tent, which is all pink, she turns to face me. She takes my hair from either side, in both hands, holding it out and watching the way it falls from her fingers. A strand gets caught on one of her rings, but I don’t flinch as it’s ripped from my scalp. “A girl like you is wasted as a bride.” She says the word like vasted. “A girl like you should have dozens of lovers.”

Her eyes are lost. She’s staring through me suddenly, and wherever she’s gone, it brings out the humanity in her. For the first time I can see her eyes under all that makeup, see that they’re brown and sad. And oddly familiar, though I’m sure I’ve never seen anyone like this woman in my life. I never even dared to peek into the shadows of scarlet districts nestled in alleyways back home.

I was never even curious.

Her lips curl into a smile, and it’s a kind smile. Her lipstick cracks, revealing a bleary pink underneath.

We’re standing by a heap of rusted scrap metal that is humming mechanically and emitting a faint yellow glow. One of Jared’s projects, I assume. Madame raves about his inventions. “Contraptions,” she calls them. “This will be a warming device for the soil. My Jared thinks it will make it easier to plant crops in the winter,” she tells me, patting one of the rusted pieces.

“So, what do you think of my carnival, chérie?” she asks. “The best in South Carolina.”

It amazes me how Madame can speak without the cigarette ever falling from the corner of her mouth. Maybe I’ve been breathing in too much of her smoke secondhand, but I’m in awe of her. Things fill with color as she moves past them. Her gardens grow. She created a strange dreamland with only the ghost of a dead society and some bits of broken machines.

She also never seems to sleep. Her girls are napping now that it’s daytime, and her bodyguards seem to alternate shifts, but she is forever weaving between tents, tilling, primping, barking orders. Even my dreams last night smelled of her.

“It’s not like any other place I’ve seen,” I admit, which is the truth. If Manhattan is reality, and the mansion a luxurious illusion, this place is a dilapidated, blurry line that divides the two places.

“You belong here,” she says. “Not with a husband. Not with a servant.” She wraps her arm around me, leading me through a patch of shriveled, snowy wildflowers. “Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound. That boy of yours,” she says, unaccented, “is a wound.”

“I never said I love him,” I say.

Madame smiles mischievously, her face flourishing with creases. It strikes me how the first generations are aging. Soon they’ll be gone. And no one will be left to know what old age looks like. Twenty-six and beyond will be a mystery.

“I’ve had many lovers,” she tells me. “But only one love. We had a child together. A beautiful little creature with hair that was every shade of yellow. Like yours.”

“What happened to them?” I ask, feeling brave. Madame has prodded and scrutinized me from the moment I arrived, and now, at last, she’s exposing her own weakness.

“Dead,” she says, picking up her accent again. The humanity vanishes from her eyes, leaving them reproachful and cold. “Murdered. Dead.”

She stops walking and tucks my hair behind my ears, tilts my chin, inspects my face. “And I am to blame for the pain. I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”

I open my mouth, but no words come. What she says is horrible and true.

And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That’s what I’ve been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers?

When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins?

Maybe he already is.

The tip of Madame’s cigarette flares red as she breathes deep. Lilac says the smoke makes her delusional, but I wonder how much of what Madame says is truth. “You are to be loved in moments. Illusions. That’s what I provide to my customers,” she says. “Your boy is greedy.”

Gabriel. When I left him, his dry lips were muttering silently. I noticed the stubble growing on his chin; he’d been re-dressed in his attendant’s shirt, which was ripped where the bodyguards had pulled at him. I was worried for the purple skin around his eyes, his raspy breaths.

“He loves you too much,” Madame says. “He loves you even in sleep.”

We walk through the strawberry patch, Madame prattling incessantly about the amazing Jared and his underground device that keeps the soil warm, simulating springtime so that her gardens can grow. “The most magical part,” she says, “is that it keeps the ground warm for the girls and for my customers.”

As she goes on, I think of what she said about Gabriel, about him loving me too much, but mostly about how he is a wound. Vaughn thought the same thing of Jenna; she served him no purpose, bore him no grandchildren, showed his son no real love, and she died for it.

It’s important to be useful in this world. The first generations seem to all agree about that.

“He’s a strong worker,” I say, interrupting her tangent about summer mosquitoes. “He can lift heavy things, and cook, and do just about anything.”

“But I cannot trust him,” Madame says. “What do I know about him? He was dropped at my feet as if from the sky.”

“But you are trusting me,” I say. “You’re telling me all of these things.”

She squeezes my shoulders, giggling like a bizarre and maniacal child. “I trust no one,” she says. “I am not trusting you. I am preparing you.”

“Preparing me?” I say.

As we walk, she rests her head on my shoulder, and her warm breath makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. The smoke from her cigarette is choking, and I suppress coughs.

“I do the best I can for my girls, but they are weary. Used up. You are perfect. I have been thinking, and I will not hand you over to my customers so they can reduce your value.”

Reduce my value. My stomach twists.

“Rather,” Madame says, “I think I could make more money off you if you remain pristine. We shall have to find a place for you. Dancing, maybe.” I can feel her smile without seeing her face. “Letting them have a taste. Letting them be hypnotized.”

I can’t follow the dark path her thoughts have taken, and I blurt out, “What about the boy I came with, then? If I’m doing all of this for your business”—the word gets caught on my tongue—“then I need to know that he’s okay. There needs to be a place for him.”

“Very well,” Madame says, suddenly bored. “It’s a small enough request. If he proves to be a spy, I will have him killed. Be sure to tell him that.”

By evening Madame sends me back to the green tent. I think it might have belonged to Jade and Celadon before the virus overtook them. She says one of her girls will be in to see me soon.

Gabriel is still out of it, and there’s a child holding his head in her lap. One of the blond twins I saw earlier.

“Please don’t be mad; I know I shouldn’t be here,” she says, not looking up. “He was making such awful noises. I didn’t want him to be alone.”

“What noises?” I ask, my voice gentle. I kneel beside him, and his skin is paler than before. There’s a rash of red across his cheeks and throat, and the skin around his bruise is fiery orange.

“Sick-person noises,” she whispers. Her hair is very blond. Her eyelashes are the same color, fluttering up and down like wisps of light. She’s running her small hands through his hair and across his face. “Did he give you that ring?” she asks me, nodding at my hand.

I don’t answer. I dip a towel into the basin, wring it out, and dab at Gabriel’s face with it. This feeling is horrible and familiar—watching someone I care for suffer, and having nothing but water to help them with.

“Someday I’ll have a ring that’s made of real gold too,” the girl says. “Someday I’ll be first wife. I know it. I have birthing hips.”

I’d laugh under less dire circumstances. “I knew a girl who grew up wanting to be a bride too,” I say.

She looks at me, and her green eyes are wide and intense. And for a second I think maybe this girl is right. She will grow up to be passionate and spirited; she will stand out in a line of dreary Gathered girls; a man will choose her, and come to her bed flushed with desire.

“Did she?” the girl asks. “Become a bride, I mean.”

“She was my sister wife,” I say. “And yes, she was given a gold ring too.”

The girl smiles, revealing a missing front tooth. Pale brown freckles dot her nose and spill into her cheeks like a blush.

“I bet she was pretty,” the girl says.

“She was. Is,” I correct myself. Cecily is gone from me, but she’s still alive. I can’t believe I almost forgot. It seems like forever ago that I left her screaming my name in a snowbank. I ran, didn’t look back, angrier with her than I’d ever been with anyone in my life.

The memory is a lifetime away from this smoky, dizzying place. I don’t even feel angry anymore. I don’t feel much of anything at all.

“How’s the patient?” Lilac says from the doorway. The girl whips to attention, and her expression turns sheepish. She’s been officially caught. She eases Gabriel’s head from her lap and hurries off, muttering apologies, calling herself a stupid girl.

“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.

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.