Fever

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 here?”

“There was a little girl waiting for me to wake up. She handed me these clothes and told me to look for the red tent.”

I can’t help it. I wrap my arms around him and crush myself against him. “I was so worried.”

The response is a soft kiss against the hollow of my neck, his hands sweeping the hair over my shoulders. It has been too much to lie beside him every night, feeling a rag doll’s emptiness, to have the fragmented dreams of June Beans on silver trays and winding mansion hallways and hedge maze paths that took me no nearer to his presence.

Now I feel the full weight of him. And it’s making me greedy, making me tilt my head so that his kisses to my neck reach my lips, and making me take him with me as I lean back into the pillows that clatter with beads. A gemstone button is pressing into my back.

The smoke of the incense is alive. It traces the length of us. The heady perfume of it makes my eyes water, and I feel strange. Weary and flushed.

“Wait,” I say when Gabriel slides the strap of my slip down my shoulder. “Doesn’t this feel weird to you?”

“Weird?” He kisses me.

I swear the smoke has doubled.

There’s a rustling sound on the other side of the tent, and I bolt upright, startled. Gabriel blinks, his arm coiled around mine, sweat trickling from his dampened hair. Something has happened. Some kind of spell. Some supernatural pull. I’m certain this can be the only explanation. There’s the feeling of returning from someplace far.

Then I hear Madame’s unmistakable cackling. She pushes into the tent, clapping, her white smile floating in the smog. She’s saying something in broken-sounding French as she stomps on the incense sticks to extinguish them. “Merveilleux!” she cries. “Lilac, how many was that?”

Lilac slips into the tent, sorting through a wad of dollar bills. “Ten, Madame,” she says. “The rest complained they couldn’t see through the slit.”

Horrified, I hear male voices grumbling their disappointment on the other side of the tent. Amid a curtain of beads I can see a deliberate slit in the tent. I swallow a scream, cover myself by hugging a pink silk pillow to my chest.

Gabriel’s jaw tenses, and I put my hand on his knee, hoping it will quiet him. Whatever Madame was planning, we must play along.

“Aphrodisiacs are quite potent, aren’t they?” Madame says, reaching into a lantern and snuffing the flame with her finger and thumb. “Yes, you put on quite a show.” She’s looking at me when she adds, “Men will pay great money to see what they can’t touch.”

is painted in red cursive on a broken plank from an old fence. She is building a cage from bits of rusted wire and coat hangers. She has Gabriel bend the lengths of wire into curves and paint them with a coating I’ve spent the morning mixing from gold eye shadow, water, and paste. The girls are not happy to forfeit their gold makeup. They shove me as they pass; their lifeless eyes bore into me; they mutter words I can’t hear, spitting on the ground. “They’re jealous,” Lilac says, a pin in her lips as she sews ruffles onto a white shirt. “New blood and whatnot.”

We’re huddled in the red tent, and I’m dunking gray feathers onto a galvanized bucket of blue dye and then fastening them with clothespins to a makeshift clothesline to dry. I wonder what type of bird had to die for this cause. A pigeon or seagull, I’d guess.

The dye stains my fingers, lands in fat drops on the threadbare oversize shirt that makes up my entire outfit. Madame will not have dye spilling onto her good clothes.

“No, no, no!” Madame cries, bursting into the tent and shaking all its walls. “You’re making a mess of those feathers, girl.”

“I told you I didn’t know what I was doing,” I mumble.

“No matter.” Madame grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet. “I wanted to speak to you anyway. Lilac will finish your gown.”

Lilac mutters something I can’t hear, and Madame kicks a clod of dirt at her, making her cough onto the ruffled shirt.

“There’s a washbasin and a dress laid out for you in the green tent,” Madame says. “Make yourself presentable and meet me by the wheel.”

With effort I’m able to scrub most of the dye from my fingers. Some of it is trapped along my cuticles, outlining my nails in blue, making my hands look like sketches of themselves.

When I meet up with Madame, the Ferris wheel is slowly turning. “The gears have to warm up in this chill,” Madame says, wrapping a knitted shawl around my shoulders. “But we have things to discuss,” she goes on. “Things that would be overheard on the ground.”

Jared pulls a lever, and the wheel comes to a stop with a car waiting for us.

Madame ushers me ahead and then climbs in after me. The car rocks and creaks as we ascend.

“You have remarkable shoulder blades,” Madame says. I can’t tell what type of accent she’s trying for today. “And your back shows just the right amount of spine. Not too knotted. Subtle.”

“You were watching me change,” I say. It’s not a question.

She doesn’t bother denying it. “I need to know what I’m selling.”

“What are you selling?” I say, daring to look away from my clenched fist and at her smoke-shrouded face. Embers flit on the wind, and I feel their tiny pinches on my bare knee. Up high, away from the device Jared uses to warm the earth, it’s blustery cold. My nose is starting to drip. I hug the shawl around my shoulders.

“I’ve told you,” she says. “An illusion.”

She smiles, her eyes dark and faraway as she traces her finger down the slope of my cheek. Her voice is low and sweet. “Soon you’ll crumple into yourself. The flesh will melt from your bones. You’ll scream and cry until it’s done. You have less than a handful of years.”

I ignore the imagery. It is easiest to overlook the truth sometimes.

“Will you charge admission for that?” I say.

“No,” she sighs, and tosses her spent cigarette over the edge. She looks small and incomplete without it. “I intend to make my customers forget these ugly things. No one will look at you and think about your expiration date. They will see youth stretching out like a canyon.”

I can’t help it. I look down. Most of the girls are sleeping through the day, but a few of them are up and about, bossing the children, tending the weedy gardens, flaunting themselves before the bodyguards for a bit of attention. Anything they can do to feel that they’re alive. All of them hating me for being so high over their heads.

“You’ll put on a good show for me, won’t you?” Madame says. “There is only one rule. You and your boy must behave as if you are alone. My customers will not want to be seen. They are not behind the walls but are the walls themselves.”

The idea of performing for “the walls” gives me no comfort. But I only need to play along until I find an escape, and there are worse things than being trapped in a makeshift birdcage with Gabriel, pretending we’re alone. Right? My throat feels dry and swollen.

Madame reaches into the infinite bright scarves draped over her chest and pulls out a small silver compact. She opens it, revealing a single pink pill.

I eye it warily.

“It’s to prevent pregnancy,” she says. “There are lots of fake pills going around since the birth control ban, but I have a reliable seller. Manufactures them himself.”

As though to mock us, a child screeches as one of the Reds drags her past the Ferris wheel by the hair.

“I can’t waste them on all my girls, of course,” Madame says. “Only the useful ones. I shudder to think what other horrors would fall from Lilac’s womb if I let her reproduce again.”

Lilac. Cynical and lovely and intelligent. She’s a good mother, I think. As good as one can be in this place, and to a child like Maddie. But she hides this fact when the customers come in the evenings. She is one of the most sought after, and only offered to men who pay the highest price—first generations with the best-paying jobs, mostly. Madame told me this with pride. And yet, Lilac has not had a child since Maddie. I suppose the pink pill could be to thank for that.

Still, I don’t want to take it. How can I trust anything in this place? Even the scents in the air can make me behave strangely.

Madame forces it into my mouth. “Swallow,” she says, her sharp painted fingernail gagging the back of my throat. I struggle and jerk my head back, and the pill has been swallowed before I can register what’s just happened. It hurts going down.

Madame cackles at my sour expression. “You’ll thank me later,” she says, and wraps her arm around my shoulder. “Look.” Her murmur tickles my ear. “Look how the clouds have braided, like a little girl’s hair.”

The cold and the smoke and the pill have all caused tears to well in my eyes, and when I finally blink them away, the clouds have begun taking on a different shape entirely. But the wistfulness on Madame’s face remains. Braided, like a little girl’s hair. I think she misses her dead daughter more than she cares to admit. I take bizarre comfort in this. The pain proves she is human after all.

The loose dirt is warm under my bare feet, humming with the life of Jared’s machine. I’m loathe to admit that it feels inviting; my mind keeps going into a daydream about lying in it and falling asleep.

Gabriel and I are trying to force the spikes of our giant cage into the dirt. A few yards away Jared and a few of the bodyguards are setting spikes into the ground, preparing to raise a tent around it for tonight’s show.

It’s the first chance Gabriel and I have had to be alone all day, and even still, the guards are close enough to overhear our words at any given time. But I catch his glances at me, his chapped lips pushed together like there’s something he wants to say.

“Here,” I say, pressing myself against his back and reaching around him, helping him force a bar into the ground. “What is it?” I whisper.

“We’re really going through with it, then?” he whispers back. “This show?”

I move on to the next bar, forcing it down. “I don’t see how we have a choice.”

“I thought we might try to run for it,” he says. “But there’s a fence.”

“There’s something off about it,” I say. “Haven’t you noticed the noise it makes? Like it’s buzzing?”

“I thought that noise was coming from the incinerator,” he says. “It couldn’t hurt to check it out.”

I shake my head. “If anyone saw us, we’d be trapped.”

“Then, we’ll have to be sure nobody is watching.”

“Someone is always watching.”

I steal a glance at Jared, who has been watching me but now looks away.

“I think we can stop now,” I say, dusting the shimmering gold residue from my palms. “This cage is as rooted as it’s going to get.”

LES TOURTEREAUX. The sign, elegant in its crudeness, has been posted outside of the new peach-colored tent.

We’re standing beside our cage while reluctant girls light incense and lanterns around us, making our shadows dance. Madame wanted a yellow tent originally, but decided the peach tarp would be most flattering on our skin. She says I’m as pale as death. Gabriel has just whispered something, but through all this smoke and my heart pounding in my ears, I didn’t catch it. He’s wearing the ruffled shirt Lilac spent the afternoon sewing. I am positively covered in feathers; they’re in my hair, and arranged like giant angel wings at my back. The dye hasn’t quite set, and watery streaks of color stain my arms.

He takes my face in his hands. “We still could run,” he whispers.

I find that my arms are trembling. I shake my head. At this moment I’d like nothing more than to run, but we’d only be brought back. Madame, in her fairyland of opiates, would accuse Gabriel of being a spy and have him killed. And who knows what she’d do to me. It’s to my advantage that I look like her dead daughter. It makes her like me in a way that’s unfair to the other girls. I can feel a tentative trust growing between us. If I can build on that trust, maybe it will grant me more freedom. It worked with Linden, but I’m not quite as hopeful here. Lilac is Madame’s most trusted girl. She’s trusted with the money, with the training, with the oversight of dresses and performances. But I’ve never seen Lilac any closer to freedom than the rest of them.

Still, it can’t work against me to be on Madame’s good side.

“Just kiss me,” I say, raising the latch of our cage and backing in.

green tent. The air is not so smoky here, though I’ve grown used to the constant haze of Madame’s opiates and all the perfumes worn by the girls.

Gabriel sits beside me, freeing the dyed feathers clipped around my hair like a crown. He stacks them neatly in the dirt and stares at them.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. It’s late. When we left our cage, I saw the periwinkle sky giving way to dawn.

“Those men were staring at you,” he says.

I push the thought away. I didn’t let myself look outside of my cage. Rather than the rustles and the murmurs, I focused on the brass music playing in the distance. After a while it all blurred together. There were scarves hanging on the bars, brushing our skin. Gabriel kissed me, and I parted my lips, closed my eyes. It felt like one short, murky dream. Several times he whispered for me to wake up, and I opened my eyes to see the dark concern in his. I remember saying, It’s okay.

The words come out of me now. “It’s okay.” A mantra.

“Rhine,” he whispers, “I don’t like anything about this.”

“Shh,” I say. My eyelids are too heavy. “Just lie down beside me for a while.”

He doesn’t. I feel a light pressure on my back, and I realize he’s unpinning the feathers from my dress, one by one.

Days flutter by, in purples and greens and crumbling golds, spilling from the gilded bars like empires collapsing. And all around me is blackness. I am in a kind of tunnel, sleepwalking through the time between sleep and performances.

Somewhere far away Gabriel’s worried voice is saying that it is time to go, that this must end. But in the next moment he’s kissing me, and his hands are under my arms, and I’m falling into him.

Ferris wheels spin, leaving streaks of light in the sky. Girls cackle and vomit. Children skitter like roaches. The guards keep their guns in sight like a warning.

Cold water hits me in the face, white and loud. I splutter.

“Are you listening?” Gabriel whispers harshly.

I cough, swipe my wrist across my eyes. “What?” I say.

We’re in our green tent. There are feathers all around us.

“We have to leave. It has to be now,” he says. I try to focus on his face. “You’re becoming one of them.”

I blink several times, trying to wake up. Our blankets are drenched. “One of who?”

“One of those awful girls,” he says. “Don’t you see? Come on.”

He’s pulling me to my feet, but I resist. “We can’t,” I say. “She’ll catch us. She’ll kill you.”

“She’s right, you know,” Lilac says. She’s standing in the entranceway, arms folded. The early morning light shines behind her, making her an elegant black ribbon of a girl. “Best not to do anything stupid. She’s got eyes everywhere.”

Gabriel looks at her and says nothing. When she leaves, he hands me a rag to dry off my face.

“It has to be soon,” he insists.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Soon.”

I force myself to stay awake despite the heavy pull that’s weighing me down. Gabriel and I whisper about our options, which are dishearteningly bleak. All of our ideas lead back to the fence. Ways to climb it. Ways to dig under it. He tells me that he and some of the bodyguards are going to be repainting the merry-go-round, and he will try to get a better look around then.

We sleep, eventually, when the sun is high and being in our tent is like being in the heart of an emerald. Just before I drift off, I feel his kiss on my lips. It’s certain, sincere, and I return it in kind. Something stirs in my chest, and I want more, but I force those feelings away. I cannot rid myself of the sense that we’re being watched.

In my dream I follow the pink pill that Madame forced down my throat. I slide down the tongue that stretches into a dark cavern. I land with a loud splash, liquefied and startled.

Lilac tugs my hair, startling me awake with the pain. “Napping on the job?” she says. I open my eyes. All I can smell, once again, is the charred air and Madame’s many perfumes. Lilac had been curling my hair. I must have drifted off.

Now she is grabbing my wrists and yanking me to my feet, fluffing my curls. “Madame wants to see you,” she says.

“Now?”

“No, tomorrow, when she’s hungover and all the customers have gone. Put this on.” She hands me a wad of sunny yellow fabric that I guess is supposed to be a dress, and doesn’t bother turning the other way while I change into it.

The dress is so long that it drags across the ground, and Lilac has to help me figure out how to wrap it over my shoulder. “It’s called a sari,” Lilac says. “They feel a little weird at first, but trust me, Madame only lets a girl wear one when she wants to show her off.”

“Show me off to who, exactly?”

Lilac just smiles, straightens the fabric hanging over my shoulder, and takes my hand to lead me out.

She drags me out into the night, and the air is so cold, it’s like a slap. Snow is whirling around in wisps that never accumulate on the ground. It’s fitting that snow doesn’t settle—nothing else does either. The girls are forever in motion, everything like cogs in a machine, gears in a giant wristwatch.