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Seated on the blanket, I listened to footsteps and the beeping of more locked doors as the rest of my friends were marched and stored. The sun sank slowly outside my window, labeling the directions for me, but ignorance of the exact time and my own location ate at my thoughts like an infection. I’d only been imprisoned in the menagerie for about a month before our coup, and since then, I’d lost focus on the reality of captivity. I remembered pain and hunger and humiliation. But I’d forgotten about ignorance and dependence, and how they preyed on the mind rather than the body.
For hours, I sat in an impenetrable concrete cell, deprived of both food and information, and with each passing second, my anger grew until it overwhelmed my fear. The Spectacle was using ignorance as a weapon, keeping us in the dark to leave us disoriented and pliable.
At some point, immeasurable hours after I’d been locked up, a folded stack of material was slid through the opening at the bottom of the door. A food tray followed the clothing, and on it was an empty paper cup lying on its side, a boiled chicken leg, a slice of white bread and half an apple.
Before I could pick up the tray, Bowman’s face appeared outside the door window. “Change clothes and slide your old ones through the slot.” He disappeared without waiting to see if his instructions would be followed.
Still dressed in my grubby Metzger’s uniform, I filled the paper cup with water and ate every bite of food on my tray. Then I changed clothes not because I’d been told to, but because my Metzger’s polo and jeans were covered in grime from a trip I couldn’t remember.
The new uniform was a set of gray scrubs, a wireless sports bra and a drab but clean pair of underwear. The message sent by the prison-like clothing came through loud and clear.
I spread my blanket out on the concrete floor and curled up with my hands beneath my head, and soon I realized that the intermittent traffic past my door was now headed in the opposite direction. My fellow captives were being removed from their cells one at a time.
None of them came back.
Despite having just awoken from sedation, I fell asleep on the floor and when I woke to the scrape of metal as my door was opened, I found a beautiful starlit night shining through the window in my cell.
I sat up to find Bowman staring down at me from the doorway. He’d changed from his puffy bite suit into tactical gear and he was holding a pair of steel handcuffs. “Orientation. Let’s go.”
Still weak from exhaustion, I stood. He spun me around by one arm and secured my wrists at my lower back, then led me into the hall, where one of his coworkers took possession of my other arm.
“How many cryptids did Vandekamp buy?” I asked as we walked. “Is there a big guy named Gallagher?”
They said nothing as they led me through the door at the end of the hall, then down two more passageways and into a cold, lab-like room several times the size of my cell, equipped with a sink and countertop along the back wall.
Woodrow—the gamekeeper—sat on one side of a small square table with a file open in front of him. Bowman pushed me into a folding chair opposite the gamekeeper, then stood guard on my left while the man who’d had my other arm headed for the cabinets at the back of the room. I twisted to see what he was doing, but then the gamekeeper cleared his throat to capture my attention.
“Delilah Marlow.” He tapped the page in front of him with the tip of a ballpoint pen, and his focus never left my file. “Also known as Drea.”
“No one knows me as Drea. What are we doing here? Did Vandekamp buy all of us?”
“You’re twenty-five?” he said, and I nodded. “It says here that you grew up believing you were human until you were exposed at Metzger’s. Which you were attending as a customer. Huh.” His brows rose, but his gaze stayed glued to the file. “Is this information accurate?”
“Yes.” A cabinet door squealed open behind me and I turned to find the third handler lining up a syringe and two blood-sample vials on a stainless-steel tray. “But it’s incomplete.”
“So I see,” the gamekeeper said as I turned back to him. “They still don’t know what species you are. Do you?”
“I’m human.”
Woodrow’s gaze finally met mine. “You might as well tell us the truth. We have literally dozens of witnesses who’ve seen you transform into a monster. We have internet photos and video.”
“And I have a blood test performed by the state of Oklahoma that says I’m human. It’s in my camper, in the front pocket of a black backpack on the floor at the end of the couch.”
He glanced at his wristwatch. His foot began to bounce beneath the table. “We’ll run our own tests. Shaw?” Woodrow glanced over my shoulder, and the third handler’s boots clomped toward us. “Let’s get going.”
Shaw set the stainless-steel tray on the table. Bowman cuffed my left wrist to the chair beneath me, then tilted my chin up so that I had to look at him, and at the butt of the rifle he held inches from my nose. “If you even look like you’re going to try anything, you’ll wake up two days from now naked and concussed in a hole in the ground. Do you understand?”
Clearly my reputation preceded me.
Bowman stepped back, but remained within blunt trauma range.
“Make a fist,” Shaw said, and when I complied, he tied a rubber strap around my right arm, above my elbow. He didn’t smile or chat as he cleaned the puncture site, but he hit my vein on the first try, so I made no objection to the two vials he filled, then labeled with my name and a number I couldn’t quite read.
“What happened to the cryptids Vandekamp didn’t buy?” I hadn’t seen Raul and Renata, or Nalah, the ifrit. Or Zyanya’s toddler kittens. Or Gallagher.
But they were pointedly ignoring my questions.
“So...what do we do with her?” Bowman said as Shaw untied the rubber strap and took the full vials to a mini fridge beneath the cabinets at the back of the room.
“Store her in the dormitory with the others,” Woodrow said, as Shaw’s boots clomped across the floor toward us again. “But keep a special eye on her until her test results come back. The boss says she’s seditious.”
Shaw returned to the table carrying a square gray box made of thick, textured plastic, like an expensive tool kit. It was about the length of my hand. He set the box on the table in front of Woodrow, who unlatched it and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of laser-cut black foam, was a polished steel ring just a few inches in diameter, about the thickness of my smallest finger.
“Basic settings only, for now,” Woodrow said. “We’ll adjust when we have more information.”
Chills crawled over my skin as the gamekeeper pulled a thin but rugged-looking device from his pocket. It vaguely resembled the cell phone I’d had until the state of Oklahoma had stripped my right to own property. Woodrow tilted the device’s screen toward himself, then scrolled and tapped his way through a series of options I couldn’t see. A red light flashed on the front of the steel ring, then it flashed three more times in rapid succession, as if confirming whatever settings he’d programmed.
My heart thumped so hard I could actually hear it.
“Okay.” Woodrow set the remote on the table, but the screen had already gone dark. “Let’s get it done.”
Shaw lifted the steel ring from its formfitting padding, and I frowned when I got a better look at it. The blinking red light had come from a tiny LED bulb that sat flush with the surface of the steel. The ring was designed to swing open on a set of tiny interior hinges, which wouldn’t be accessible once the device was closed around...
Around what? The circumference looked about right for my upper arm, or my...
My neck.
Terror pooled in my stomach, like fuel set ablaze. That ring was a collar.
I instinctively tried to scoot my chair away from the shiny, high-tech device, but Bowman’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. Vandekamp’s collar was much lighter, sleeker and cleaner than the thick iron rings Metzger had fitted around resistant centaurs and satyrs, but even diamond-encrusted collars are for pets.
Woodrow picked up the control device and used it to point at the collar Shaw still held. “I’m going to explain this to you once. That is an electronic restraint collar, which can be controlled by any of the remotes carried by the Spectacle’s staff. Those tiny spines will slide through the back of your neck and into your vertebrae, where they can deliver specialized electric signals with the press of a button.”
Shaw tilted the collar to show me that the inner curve of one half of the collar held a vertical line of three very thin needles.
I stared at the steel ring, trying to control panic as it clawed at my throat. “It’s a shock collar?”
“It’s much more than that.” Woodrow clipped the remote back onto his belt and met my gaze for what he obviously considered the most important part of my orientation briefing. “This collar can deliver a painful shock or temporarily paralyze the beast wearing it from the neck down. The settings prevent cryptids from using their monstrous abilities until those settings are changed, which only happens during scheduled engagements. Which means the sirens can’t sing, the succubi can’t seduce, the shifters can’t shift and the beasts can’t lift a hand in aggression. Until we want them to. So consider this fair warning.”
“The collar’s receptors also receive signals from every single door in the compound,” Shaw added. “Restricting you to any room or wing we choose.”
I could only stare, stunned. I’d never seen or heard of anything like it. “How can that possibly work?”
Shaw’s eyes lit up. “Vandekamp designed it himself. Receptors in the spines respond instantly to the spike in adrenaline and in species-specific hormones that—”
“Shaw,” Woodrow growled, and the handler’s mouth snapped shut.
But I’d heard enough to understand.
Woodrow stood. “Get on with it.”
“Okay, now, hold still.” Shaw came toward me with the collar, and panic lit a fire in my lungs.
“No.” I stood, and the folding chair scraped the floor then fell over, hanging from the cuff attached to my left wrist.
I can’t wear a collar.
“Sit down,” Woodrow demanded, while Bowman aimed his tranquilizer rifle at my leg. “That’s the only warning you’ll get.”
“Please don’t do this.” I backed away from them both, dragging the chair, though I had nowhere to go. “I’ll be reasonable if you will. There has to be another—”
Woodrow glanced at Bowman. “Do it. And don’t forget to write a report and log the spent dart.”
I turned to Bowman just as he fired. Pain bit into my left thigh. The tiny vial emptied its load into my leg before I could pull it out with my free hand.
As I backed farther away from them, my focus flitting warily from face to face, the edges of the room began to darken. The scrape of the metal chair against the floor sounded suddenly distant. My central vision began to blur. “Stay back.”
My legs felt weak half a second before they folded beneath me, and I didn’t even feel my knees slam into the tile. The ceiling spun around me as I fell onto my back. The chair clattered to the floor, and Woodrow’s weathered face leaned over me.
“Gallagher’s going to kill you...” I warned, but my words sounded stretched and distorted.
“Do it now, before the bitch wakes up again,” Woodrow said, as the world faded to black around me. “Looks like she’s going to have to learn everything the hard w—”
(#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)
“Culminating in a narrow Senate victory, Congress has passed the Cryptid Containment Act, which will allow cryptids to be housed and studied in both public and private labs, for the purpose of scientific advancement.”
—from the February 4, 1990, edition of the Boston Herald
Delilah (#u80d6457e-5754-592d-9551-55b238c164dc)
“Wake up, Delilah.”
The surface beneath me felt hard and rough, but neither cool nor warm. Light glared through my closed eyelids, and something snug was wrapped around my neck.
My eyes flew open, but the world remained hazy. The three women bending over me had blurry faces, and their grayish clothing was shapeless and unfamiliar.
“She’s waking up,” one of the blurry forms said, and I recognized Lenore’s voice even without the mental tug of her siren’s lure. I exhaled slowly. I was among friends.
“What happened?” Blinking to clear my vision, I pushed myself upright on a rough concrete floor and reached for my neck, but someone grabbed my hand.
“No, don’t touch it!” Lala cried.
The faces were finally starting to come into focus.
Lenore. Lala. And Zyanya, the cheetah shifter. A few feet away, Mirela sat next to Rommily, who was curled up asleep on the floor with one thin arm tucked beneath her head. In addition to those stupid gray scrubs, they all wore—
My hands flew to my neck, and my fingers brushed smooth, warm steel that had taken on the temperature of my skin. I felt along the curve of the high-tech collar until I got to the hidden hinge at one side, distinguishable only by a tiny crack where the two sections were joined. “How can they—”
“Don’t!” Lenore cried as I slid my finger beneath the front of the collar. Excruciating pain shot through my entire body, lighting every nerve ending on fire. My jaw spasmed, trapping a terrified cry of pain inside, and the jolt didn’t end until someone knocked my hand away from the collar.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded when my jaw finally unclenched, as painful aftershocks coursed through me, far outlasting the initial pain. I leaned back against the concrete wall to keep from falling over. I felt like a human lightning rod.
“You can touch the collar, but if you pull on it or put your finger under it...that happens.” Lala’s gaze was full of sympathy. “We’ve all tried it. They really don’t want us taking these things off.”
“As if we could,” Zyanya snapped. “The damn joints locked the second they snapped it closed, so this shock treatment’s overkill. These things aren’t coming off until someone cuts them off.”
“They’re not afraid we’re going to take the collars off,” I said, as my gaze roamed the large concrete room, where we sat among at least two dozen other women of various humanoid and hybrid species, each of whom wore the same uniform and collar. “They don’t want you to pull on the collar because the needles will damage your spine.”
“Like they care,” Lala said.
“They care about the money Vandekamp has invested in us. Just like Metzger did. If you give yourself nerve damage, you’re worth less to them. Which gives them less incentive to keep you alive.”
“On the bright side,” Mahsa said, and I turned to find the leopard shifter curled up in a nearby corner. “I haven’t seen anyone beaten yet.”
“Give it time,” Zarah said, as she and Trista padded toward us on bare feet. “Only paying customers get to cause damage.”
“What does that mean?” Mahsa crawled closer, and we formed a protective ring of former menagerie captives.
“Exactly what that gamekeeper said. This isn’t a circus, ladies,” Trista explained, pushing long pale hair over her shoulder. “The rumors about the Savage Spectacle seem to be true. They rent cryptids to their customers with no bars and cages to stand between them.”
I’d heard no rumors. But then, I hadn’t spent my entire life in captivity, piecing together an understanding of the outside world through stories traded with new prisoners.
“We wondered how they did that.” Zarah ran one finger over the outside of her collar. “Now we know.”
Mahsa blinked wide leopard eyes. “Rent us for what?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” Finola’s voice was full of bitter resentment. Like Lenore’s, it now held none of the calming effect she’d once used to help her friends through the transition from captives to masters of their own fate in the liberated menagerie. The collar had robbed her of her purpose in a way no cage ever could have.
“Why is your shirt inside out?” Lala asked.
I followed her focus to the shallow V-shaped neckline of my scrubs top, where the back side of the seam showed. My jaw clenched. They’d stripped me while I was unconscious, then put my clothes back on inside out. Was that intentional, so I’d know...
Know what?
“They were looking for your tell,” a soft voice said from my left, and I turned to see a young dryad sitting against the wall, braiding a long length of hair, among which grew thin woody vines blooming with small white flowers. “To figure out what you are.”
She held one hand out to us, palm down, and I saw that her veins appeared bright green beneath her skin, rather than the normal blue or blue green. Her feet looked much the same. If she were ever allowed back into the woods—the forest nymph’s natural habitat—she would be able to bury her feet in the dirt and draw sustenance from the earth’s nutrients, like a plant.
But I could tell from her pale skin and the dark circles beneath her eyes that nothing more yielding than concrete had been beneath her feet in a long, long time.
“They couldn’t have done anything more than examine you unless they paid the rental fee. There are cameras everywhere. No one gets away with anything here—neither the jailed nor the jailers.” She returned to her woody braid. “I’m Magnolia, by the way.”
Without waiting for us to return the introduction, she stood and wandered across the room toward a small cluster of captives gathered against the opposite wall.
My focus followed her, taking in the large, mostly empty room. “Where are we?” The walls held a series of tall, narrow windows. I couldn’t tell which direction the sun was coming from, but the weak daylight felt like early morning. Equidistant apart on the ceiling were two dark security camera domes, like the kind used at any department store for 360-degree surveillance.
“At first I thought it was a holding cell.” Lenore tucked her knees up to her chest with her arms wrapped around them. “But there’s a bathroom through there.” She nodded toward an open doorway on the opposite wall. “And I think those mats and blankets are to be slept on.”
