Fever (3 page)

The men are holding Gabriel up by his arms, and he’s struggling to stay on his feet, when another man hits him. A boy, really; he can’t be any older than Cecily.

“Nobody sent us,” Gabriel says. I can see in his eyes that he’s not entirely here right now. He took the worst from our assailants, and I’m worried he might have a concussion. He takes another punch, this one to the ribs, and it sends him to his knees. My stomach lurches.

One of the men has got me by the throat, and two others by the arms, and all of them are smaller than me. It’s so difficult to see them as boys, even though that’s what they are.

Gabriel’s eyes are closing and then jolting open; his breath escapes in fluttery astonished gasps. My heart is pounding in my ears; I want to go to him, but the only thing that reaches him is my frustrated whimper. This is all my fault. I was supposed to be able to protect him; this is my world. I should have had a plan. I mutter something indignant and snap, “He’s telling the truth; we’re not spies.” Who would spy on a place like this?

Filthy girls are peeking out from a slit in the rainbow-striped tent, blinking like bugs. And I know immediately that this must be a scarlet district—a prostitution den of unwanted girls that Gatherers couldn’t sell to House Governors, or who simply had nowhere else to go.

“You shut up,” one of the men—boys—says into my ear. The old woman cackles and clatters with fake jewels that are like big glass insects and infectious boils on her fingers and wrists.

“Bring her into the light,” the old woman says. They drag me into the rainbow-striped tent below a ceiling of swaying lanterns, and the bug-girls scatter. The old woman grabs my jaw and tilts my head for a better look. Then she hocks spit onto my cheek and smears it, clearing away some of the blood and sand. Her black, horrible eyes light up with joy, and she says, “Goldenrod. Yes, I think that’s what I’ll call you.” The smoke makes my eyes water. I want to spit back at her.

The girls in the tent moan their protest, and one of them raises her head. “Madame,” she says. Her eyes are languid and filmy. “It’s after sunset. It’s time.”

The old woman backhands her, and in that same calm voice she says, as she examines her jeweled fingers, “You do not tell me.
I
tell
you.
”

The girl sinks in with the others and disappears.

Gabriel spits a mouthful of blood. The boys tug him to his feet.

“Bring her into the red tent,” the old woman says. It doesn’t matter that I’ve slumped to a dead weight and refuse to move my legs; two of the boys have no trouble dragging me away.

This is it
, I think.
Gabriel is going to die, and this old woman intends to make me one of her prostitutes.
I can only assume that’s what those girls in the rainbow tent are. All that trouble to escape, all Jenna’s efforts to help me, for less than one day of freedom before a new hell emerged.

The red tent is lit up by lanterns that hang from the low ceiling. One of the lanterns hits my head, and when the boys let go of me, I drop to the cold earth. “Don’t go anywhere,” one of the boys, who is about a foot shorter than me, says. He pulls back his moth-eaten coat to show me a gun holstered in the waist of his pants. The other boy laughs, and they leave. I can see their silhouettes taking shape outside the zippered doorway, hear their sneering laughter.

I scan the tent for another opening I can wriggle through, but it’s rooted into the ground, and much of it is bordered by furniture. Polished, ancient-looking bureaus and trunks with things like hissing dragons painted across the drawers, cherry blossoms, gazebos, black-haired women staring sullenly into the water.

Antiques from some Eastern country that’s long gone. Rose would like these things. She would have stories for what’s saddening the black-haired women, could chart a path among the cherry blossoms that would take her where she wanted to go. For a moment I think I see what she would—an infinite world.

“Now, then,” the old woman says, appearing from nowhere and pulling me into one of two chairs on either side of a table. “Let’s take a look at you.”

Smoke ribbons up from a long cigarette held in the old woman’s wrinkled fingers. She brings it to her lips for a breath, and smoke rolls through her mouth and nostrils when she speaks again. “You are not from this place. I would have noticed you.” Her eyes, made up to match her jewels, are on mine. I look away.

“Those eyes,” she says, leaning closer. “Are you malformed?”

“No,” I say, forcing myself not to sound angry, because there’s a boy with a gun outside, and Gabriel is still at this woman’s mercy. “And we’re not spies. I keep trying to tell you. We just took a wrong turn.”

“This whole place is a wrong turn, Goldenrod,” she says. “But tonight’s your lucky night. If you’re looking for a fancier district to do business in”—she flits her fingers dramatically, letting ashes fly—“you won’t find any for miles. I’ll take good care of you.”

My stomach turns. I don’t say a word, because if I open my mouth, I’m sure I’ll vomit all over this beautiful antique table.

“I am Madame Soleski,” the woman says. “But you call me Madame. Let me see that hand.” She reaches across for my wrist and then slaps my bleeding left hand onto the table. The seaweed bandage is still holding on, though it’s bunched from my fist and dripping with blood.

She raises my hand toward the lantern and gasps when she sees my wedding band. She’s probably never seen real jewelry before. She sets her cigarette on the edge of the table and takes my hand in both of hers, examining the vines etched into my wedding band, the blossoms that Linden often copied along his building designs when he was thinking of me. They were fictional, he said. No such flower blooms in this world.

I clench my fist again, worried she’ll try to steal the ring. Even if that marriage was a sham, this small piece of it belongs to me.

Madame Soleski admires it for a moment longer, then lets go of my hand. She rummages through one of her drawers and returns with gauze that looks like it’s been used, and a bottle of clear liquid. The liquid burns when she clears away the seaweed and pours it onto my wound. It bubbles and hisses angrily. She’s watching me for a reaction, but I won’t give her one. She dresses my palm with gauze expertly.

“You’ve messed up one of my boys,” she says. “He’ll have a black eye tomorrow.”

Not good enough. I still lost the fight.

Madame Soleski fingers the sleeve of my sweater, and I resist, but she digs her fingers into my bandaged wound. I don’t want her touching me. Not my wedding band, and not this sweater. I think of Deirdre’s small, capable hands making it for me; they were etched with bright blue veins—her soft skin the only indication of her youth. Those hands could turn bathwater to magic, or thread diamonds into her knitting. Precision was in everything she created. I think of her wide hazel eyes, the soft melody of her voice. I think of how I will never see her again.

“Leave the bandage put,” she says, picking up her cigarette and tapping away some ash. “Wouldn’t want to get an infection and lose that hand. You have such exquisite fingers.”

I can no longer see the outlines of the boys standing guard outside, but I hear them talking. The gun was much smaller than the shotgun my brother and I kept in the basement, but if I could get my hands on it, I could figure it out. But how quick would I be? Some of the others might have weapons too. And I can’t leave without Gabriel. It’s my fault that he’s even here.

“Don’t speak unless spoken to, huh, Goldenrod? I like that. This isn’t exactly a talking business.”

“I’m not a part of your business,” I say.

“No?” The old woman raises her penciled eyebrows. “You look as though you have been running from some other kind of business. I can offer you protection. This is my territory.”

Protection? I could laugh. I have sore ribs and a throbbing forehead that suggest otherwise right now. What I say is, “We got a little lost, but we’ll be on our way if you’d let us go. We have family waiting for us in North Carolina.”

The woman laughs and takes a languid breath through her cigarette, her bloodshot eyes never leaving mine.

“Nobody with a family finds their way here. Come, let me show you the pièce de résistance.” She says those last words with a practiced accent. Her cigarette has run out, and she stomps it with her high-heeled shoe, which appears to be a size too small.

She leads me outside, and the boys standing guard immediately stop their laughing as she passes. One of them tries to trip me with his foot, and I step around it.

“This is my kingdom, Goldenrod,” Madame says. “My carnival of
amour.
You wouldn’t know what ‘
amour
’ is, of course.”

“It’s ‘love,’” I answer, gratified when her eyebrows raise in surprise. Foreign languages are something of a lost art, but my brother and I had the rare advantage of parents who valued education. Even if we could never use it, even if we could never grow to be linguists or explorers, the knowledge filled our minds, brightened our daydreams. Sometimes we ran through the house, pretending we were parasailing high over the Aleutians, that later we’d sip green tea under the plum blossoms in Kyoto, and at night we squinted at the starry darkness and pretended we could see our neighboring planets. “Do you see Venus?” my brother said. “It’s a woman’s face, and her hair is on fire.” We were crammed in the open window, and I answered, “Yes, yes, I see it! And Mars is crawling with worms.”

Madame wraps her arm around my shoulders and squeezes. She smells like decay and smoke. “Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it. And that’s what draws the men to my girls. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Which?” I say. “Love, or illusion?”

Madame chuckles, squeezes me again. I am reminded of the long walk I took with Vaughn through the golf course that one chilly afternoon, how his presence seemed to erase all the good in the world, how it felt like an anaconda was coiling around my chest. And all the while, Madame brings me to her spinning circle of light. What is it with first generations and their collection of breathtaking things? I hate myself for being intrigued.

“You know your
français,
” Madame says pertly. “But here is a word I bet you haven’t heard.” Her eyes widen with intensity. “Carnival.”

I know the word. My father tried to describe carnivals to my brother and me. Celebrations for when there was nothing to celebrate, he’d say. I could understand, but Rowan couldn’t, so the next day when we woke up, there were ribbons draped all over our bedroom, and a cake was waiting on our dresser with forks and cranberry seltzer, which was my favorite, but we almost never had any because it was so hard to find. And we didn’t go to school that day. My father played strange music on the piano, and we spent the day celebrating nothing at all, except maybe that we were all alive.

“This is what carnivals were all about,” Madame says. “They called it a Ferris wheel.”

Ferris wheel. The only thing in this whole wasteland of abandoned rides that isn’t rotting or rusted.

Now that I’m close enough to really look at it, I can see that the wheel is full of seats, and there’s a little staircase leading up to the lowest point. The chipped paint reads:
ENTER HERE
.

“It didn’t work when I found it, of course,” Madame goes on. “But my Jared is something of a genius with electrical things.”

I say nothing, but tilt my head to watch the seats spinning against the night sky. The wheel makes a rusted creaking groan as it goes, and for just a moment, I hear laughter in that eerie brass music.

My parents have looked up at Ferris wheels. They were a part of this lost world.

One of the boys is leaning on the railing surrounding the thing, and he eyes me warily. “Madame?” he says.

“Bring it to a stop,” she says.

A cold breeze swirls around me, and it’s ripe with antique melodies and the smell of rust and all of Madame’s strange foreign perfumes. An empty seat comes to a stop before the staircase where I stand. Madame’s bracelets clack and clatter as she lays her hand on my spine and presses me forward, saying, “Go on, go on.”

I don’t think I can stop myself. I climb the stairs, and the metal shudders beneath my feet and sends tremors up my legs. The seat rocks a little as I settle into it. Madame sits beside me and pulls the overhead bar down so that it locks us in. We start to move, and I’m breathless for an instant as we ascend forward and into the sky.

The earth gets farther and farther away. The tents look like bright round candies. The girls move about them, shadows.

I can’t help myself; I lean forward, astounded. This wheel is five, ten, fifteen times taller than the lighthouse I climbed in the hurricane. Higher even than the fence that kept me trapped as Linden’s bride.

“This is the tallest place in the world,” Madame says. “Taller than spy towers.”

I’ve never heard of a spy tower, but I doubt they’re taller than the factories and skyscrapers in Manhattan. Even this wheel couldn’t claim as much. Maybe, though, it’s the tallest place in Madame’s world. I could believe that.

And as we make our way toward stars that feel frighteningly attainable, I feel myself missing my twin. He was never one for whimsical things. Since our parents’ death, he’s stopped believing in things more fantastic than bricks and mortar, less horrific than ominous alleyways where girls become soulless and men pay for five minutes with their bodies. His every moment is consumed with survival—his and mine. But even my brother, who is all practicality, would have his breath taken away by this height, these lights, the clarity of this night sky.

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.