Fever (27 page)

I make my way back to the house, still trying to reason out a plan. I take comfort in the chores, menial and repetitive. Gabriel helps me fold towels and tells me I don’t look as pale anymore. I can’t tell if he’s only trying to be kind, because I still feel as lousy as ever. But I manage to keep my dinner down.

“How do you feel?” Silas asks, drying the wet dishes as I hand them over.

“Much better,” I say.

“Well, you still look like crap,” he says. “I’m taking the couch again. I don’t much care to be woken by your midnight cough-a-thons.”

“Because you have such pressing engagements that demand a good night’s sleep,” I say.

But I’m glad that Gabriel and I will have the room to ourselves nonetheless. When I climb onto the mattress beside him, he reaches overhead to turn off the lamp.

“You seem better,” he says, with so much relief that I don’t dare tell him that I’m still miserable.

I sigh, tilt my head toward his, and just nod.

I don’t want to talk about how I feel. I don’t want to talk about how long we’ll be in this place, or how long it will take to find my brother, or if I ever even will. I don’t want to talk about anything that relates to time at all, so I only say, “It’s been so long since you’ve smiled.”

There’s a pause in the darkness, and then a soft laugh from him. “Where did that come from?”

I strain to see him in the flimsy glow of Silas’s clock. “Just saying.”

“This hasn’t been a smiling sort of time,” he says.

I stretch my arms up over my head, yawn. “It has been fabulous. What, you don’t agree?”

We both give small, halfhearted laughs. He traces his finger across my chin, feels the smile filling up my cheeks. “You are exhausting,” he says, not without affection. “You never stop moving.”

“I’m not moving right now,” I say. I’m so tired of chasing things that are forever eluding me.

There’s something Jenna said to me late one afternoon. The sun was going down, turning everything pink and yellow, which meant that soon we’d be called in for dinner. We were lying on the trampoline, sweaty, exhausted. We’d jumped for what I’m certain was an hour, laughing at first, but then just gasping, forcing ourselves higher and higher, taking turns propelling each other up, up, up like dying birds with just enough will to try to take flight.

Then, in the stillness, she’d reached for my hand as she sometimes did. Her fingers always carried the ghosts of her little sisters. She never mentioned them, and I never knew their names, but still I could sense that when Jenna was quelling one of Cecily’s tantrums or dabbing at my tears, she was remembering how she’d cared for them.

“Do you know why we’re married to House Governors?” she said. “It would be one thing if we were penned like horses and let out for breeding, but it isn’t like that. We aren’t pets—we’re wives, which is worse.”

I’d thought about what it would mean to be penned for breeding, and then I raised my eyes and watched a cloud that looked like a broken octopus. “How is it worse?” I said.

“Because if we weren’t wives, it would just be what it is—stealing girls and making them obey. But people used to get married to spend their lives together. There’s intimacy. It implies it was consensual. It’s not just our freedom that was taken, it was our right to be unhappy, too.”

At first I couldn’t rationalize it. Being a bride was something I wanted to escape, but surely it was better than being a prostitute or a faceless baby machine. “We still have a right to be unhappy,” I told her. “We just have to pretend with Linden, that’s all.”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, Rhine,” she said. She rolled on top of me and took my face in her hands and smiled so sadly. “None of us are pretending.”

I think about that now, and Gabriel watches me with his head tilted. His eyes are so full of life and curiosity. He’s been caged up too. And now, suddenly, I understand what Jenna was saying.

When I was married to Linden in the gazebo, my hand was limp in his. My eyes bored through him. I didn’t hear the vows being spoken. And when he talked to me, much later, my smiles were lies. My kisses were for the higher purpose of escape.

“What are you thinking?” Gabriel asks. He demands nothing of me, and there’s only one thing keeping me beside him:

“Choice,” I say softly. “I’m thinking about choice.” And I lean forward and kiss him.

He kisses back, readily. We’re fast learning the ways of one another.

I’ve made the right choice, haven’t I? A life outside of Linden’s mansion isn’t a pretty life, or an easy one. And the small annoyances of life on the wives’ floor are the things I miss now: Cecily sneaking into my bed when she couldn’t sleep. My sister wives shrieking with laughter as they played games when I craved silence. And Linden, who was present even when he was not. Every second of every day held the promise of him. Even when he was nowhere to be found, before the day was over he would come by to say good night.

I push the thought of him away as soon as it comes. I have no business missing Linden Ashby. He spent his days doing as he pleased while his wives were made to wait in their cage. I was right to run away. Even Cecily, ever content to be his prisoner, had enough sense to recognize that. Life without those safe little walls isn’t easy, but it’s mine.

I close my eyes, feel Gabriel’s breath on my face as he repositions himself beside me. He whispers my name like it’s the most important thing in the world. “Yes?” I reply, but our lips are already touching, spurring all my nerves and muscles and my bloodstream to a strange, wonderful upward motion. Everything alert, buzzing.

It’s the first time we’ve kissed without the stigma of my marriage, my sister wives looming in the hall, or one of Madame’s perverse displays. I make a noise, and then he does, faraway and unrecognizable.

This delirium is not to be confused with that brought on by my fever. This is happiness, so sudden and unexpected. This is the world disappearing around us.

There is only a wisp of a memory of that man’s hand on my thigh, erased in a second when Gabriel brushes his fingers over the spot, bringing flutters of warmth and light. Everything that happened before feels like a million years ago now. This is the freedom I craved throughout my marriage. To share a bed not because of a wedding ring or a one-sided promise that was made for me, but because of desire. Inexplicable yet undeniable. I have never craved closeness like this for anyone else.

His hand reaches under my shirt, palm flat against my stomach, and then his head draws back a little and he goes still.

“What’s wrong?” I say.

“Your skin is burning up,” he says.

“I’m all right.”

“Can’t you just be honest with me?” He sounds angry now, and I feel as though I’m shrinking under him. I open my mouth, but I can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make matters worse.

“Something is wrong, isn’t it?” he says. “And you’ve been trying to keep it from me.”

When I don’t answer, he pushes himself upright, away from me.

“Gabriel . . .”

He turns on the light, looks at me, his hair a mess, eyes dark with worry and something else—affection? Pain?

“Don’t try to take this on yourself,” he says, with more force than I’m used to hearing from him.

That’s fair. He has given up everything to follow me. I owe him the truth, seeing as it’s the only thing I have left to give him.

“Okay,” I say, pushing myself upright. “Okay, yes. I feel terrible all the time, and I don’t know what’s happening, and I’m scared. Okay?”

I fall back against the mattress, gather up the blankets, and turn away from him.

“Rhine . . .” He touches my shoulder, but the way I tense up makes him withdraw. He’s so quiet that I think he must have left the room, so frustrated with my secrecy and lack of answers that he had to be away from me.

Then I hear him say, very softly, “Vaughn.”

“Maybe,” I admit. “But I can’t imagine how.”

Gabriel touches my shoulder again, settles behind me on the mattress. “I won’t let him hurt you,” he says.

“How will you stop him?” I say, more wryly than I mean to.

He kisses the back of my neck, and a surge of electricity runs up my spine.

“You let me worry about that,” he says. He reaches overhead and turns off the light again.

As I lie there, trying to fall asleep, I think of Gabriel’s words after he fought Greg off me.

I won’t let anyone touch you like that ever again.

But if he’s right, and Vaughn is somehow the cause of this, what can be done? How can he protect me from something that is already deep within my tissues and blood, ruining me from the inside?

Still, as exhaustion clouds my reason, I begin to feel something bizarrely like peace.

I won’t,
he promised, enveloping me in his warmth, much like he does now.
Not ever again.

The following morning I’m awoken by a thud. I open my eyes, grumbling unkind things as the stack of books comes into focus. My head feels full of shattered glass, and all I can manage to get out is “What?”

“Medical journals,” Gabriel says, sitting on the edge of my mattress.

“We found them in a box in the shed,” Silas says. He’s leaning against the door frame, holding a pancake like it’s a sandwich and taking a bite that reduces it by half. “Claire used to be a nurse.”

With effort I sit upright, my hair spilling into my face. Gabriel hands me the glass of water that’s gone warm sitting beside me all night. I take a painful sip and ask, “What are we going to do with them?”

“We’re going to figure this out,” Gabriel says.

“Well, have fun, kids,” Silas says around the last mouthful of pancake. He stretches his arms over his head, hitting the top of the door frame as he goes. “Some of us have real chores to do.”

Gabriel and I spend a good hour going through the books, looking up everything from influenza to scurvy. There are so many ailments. Things I never could have imagined. Tumors that can more than double a person’s bodyweight. Diseases that cause gums to bleed, and toenails to turn yellow. Nervous disorders that can produce auditory hallucinations.

As for my symptoms, every source seems to agree that what I have is the flu. Coughing, fever, light-headedness. There’s no category for the feeling of dread, the sense that something is amiss. There are no chapters about sinister fathers-in-law or what types of things might be done in a labyrinthine basement.

The pages are spread out between us on the blanket, and I can feel Gabriel’s desperation the further we get from finding an answer. His eyes are still on the page when he speaks, and at first I think he’s going to read a passage aloud, but he says, “We have to confront him. We have to go back to the mansion.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Have you lost your mind?”

“He followed you to Madame’s, didn’t he? Maybe there was some truth to the things he was saying. Maybe he wanted to tell you about what’s happening to you.”

“Or maybe he was trying to lure me back to him so that he could split me in half and devote a chapter of his sick experiments to the vital organs of a subject with two different-color eyes and a defiance toward his son,” I snap. “I’m not going back there, and neither are you. He’ll kill us both.”

Gabriel looks up from the page. The ferocity in his eyes startles me. “Take a look at yourself,” he says. “He
is
killing you. I think that when he followed you to the scarlet district, he meant to undo whatever this is that’s happening to you.”

“That makes absolutely no sense,” I say, ignoring the small bit of me that agrees.

“Who’s to say?” Gabriel says. “Maybe when you ran away it interrupted an experiment.”

“Well, I think that if I go back, he’ll kill me for sure,” I say.

Gabriel looks back into the book, muttering something about Jenna being right.

“What was that about my sister wife?” I say.

“She knew you so well. She was right—you don’t get it. Vaughn doesn’t want you dead. What use would you be to him dead? He wants to see what makes you breathe, and why your eyes are that way. There’s something in you that gives him hope.”

I think of how eager Jenna was to help me escape. How she disappeared that one afternoon to the basement and slammed the door on me when I asked what it was all about. It wounds me that she would share these things with Gabriel. I held her head in my lap as she died, and she never trusted me with a word of her secrets, though it seems a lot of them had to do with me.

“Don’t talk to me about Jenna,” I spit back. “You’re so sure she knew everything. Do you know where she is now? Dead. Under a sheet on a gurney, just like Rose. And even if Vaughn’s plans don’t involve killing me, I won’t go back to that place to find out what they are.”

The page is shaking between my fingers, and I slam the book just in time to see it drown in the blur of fresh tears. “I won’t go back,” I repeat.

My head is pounding. I hear whispers in my blood, and I know—I
know
—that there is something lethal inside of me that cannot be explained by these books. When Gabriel crawls across the mattress to be next to me, I lean my head against his shoulder even though I’m furious with him. I crave the safety he provides, even if it’s temporary.

“Okay,” he says into my ear. “Okay. We’ll find another way to fix this.”

I don’t believe it, but I nod. The nausea turns a tide, becoming something more profound. My nerves come alive, raising their heads like flowers come to bloom. I look at him, and his thumb is just swiping a tear from my cheek when I push forward and kiss him.

He kisses back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worst. I’ll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I’d sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

I sink back against the mattress, and when he moves his mouth from mine, I find that I’m trembling, flushed, my hands going hot, cold, hot. But I pull him back down to me before the concern can overtake him.