Masks (10 page)

Like the cell, the wagon was lined with straw. Unlike the cell, it didn’t have a bucket, only a small hole in the center of the floor. The interior stank of mold and sweat and urine, and Mara shuddered at the touch of the rotting straw under her hands and bare knees as she crawled in.

The other four girls had huddled together in a corner. Mara instinctively joined them, so that they were shoulder to shoulder when the Watchers came back with Grute. He jumped easily into the wagon, which rocked under his weight. His head barely cleared the ceiling as he stood looking down at them, hands on his hips. “Well, well,” he said, face twisted into the leering grin Mara had already come to hate. “This could be fun.”

The doors closed, plunging them into darkness. Mara felt the brown-skinned girl, who had been sitting to her right, get up. The wagon jerked on its springs. Grute gave a high-pitched, almost girlish shriek, and the wagon jerked again as something heavy thudded to the floor. The next moment Mara’s neighbor was back at her side. The sound of moaning filled the wagon.

As her eyes adjusted to the faint gray light seeping through the tiny barred windows, Mara could just make out Grute lying curled on the floor, hands between his legs. Tears glistened on his cheeks.

Mara felt a smile turn up the corners of her mouth for the first time since her Masking. She turned to the girl. “My name’s Mara,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Alita,” said the girl. She put her arm around the smaller girl. “And this is Prella.”

“I’m Simona,” said the buxom girl.

“Kirika,” said the tough-looking one.

The wagon shifted again as, presumably, the Watchers climbed back aboard. And then they were rolling, the light brightening as they trundled out of the warehouse into sunshine.

They drove for hours without stopping. As the sun rose higher and higher, so did the heat and stench inside the wagon. Grute, once he had recovered enough to quit moaning, crawled away to the far corner of the wagon, where he sat, silently glaring, his eyes all Mara could see clearly in the semidarkness. They gave her a creepy feeling, but she kept watching them all the same. She wanted to know
exactly
where Grute was
all
the time. She doubted even Alita’s . . .
forceful
 . . . action would keep him at bay indefinitely. The boy was bad, and it was no wonder the Mask had rejected him . . .

...just like it rejected me.

She talked a little with the others. Alita and Prella, she learned, were—or had been—Gifted; Simona and Kirika were not. Alita had been destined for apprenticeship to a Healer and Prella to a Horsemaster. Simona had expected to go to work in her father’s bakery. Kirika said nothing about what her plans had been.

But all of their plans and expectations had come crashing down in the same way: the writhing of the Mask, the pain, the blood, the screams of horrified Witnesses, the Watchers hauling them away down the long tunnel.

At both Alita and Prella’s Maskings, the Autarch himself had been present. “Not that I saw him,” Prella said. “He was behind a golden screen. But I saw the Child Guards.” Her voice trembled. “I was so ashamed when the Mask failed. Failing like that in front of the Autarch!”

“The Autarch comes to the Maskings of the Gifted?” Simona said, sounding awed.

“He didn’t come to mine,” Mara said. “The Palace Healer, Ethelda, was there instead. I don’t know why.”

“Lucky you,” Alita muttered, and Mara felt a pang of guilt.
Every time they see my unmarked face they’ll know how lucky I was
, she thought.
I hope they don’t resent me for it. It’s not like I had anything to do with it!

But then she remembered what Grute had said about how “popular” she might be among the men where they were going, and the pang of guilt turned to a worm of nausea that made her swallow hard. “Maybe not,” she whispered, but she doubted the others heard her over the noise of the wagon.

Of the four, Kirika said the least, and nothing at all about her background. Alita was slightly more forthcoming. Mara found out she was the daughter of a blacksmith, that she came not from Tamita but from one of the outlying villages, and that she was the first of her family to be Gifted. All Gifted were sent to Tamita to be Masked, since only the Master Maskmaker—
Father
, Mara thought—could make their special Masks.

“The week before my fifteenth birthday, the whole village feasted for three days. And when I rode out onto the road to Tamita with my parents, they showered us with flower petals . . .” She fell silent after that, and would say nothing more.

Simona said her father’s bakery was located on the far side of Tamita from Maskmakers’ Way, which explained why Mara had never seen it. Simona had been working in the bakery several hours a day, with her mother and only sibling, an older brother, since she was eight. The Masking had seemed a mere formality, just an annoying interruption in a well-established routine. “They’ll miss me in the bakery,” she said. “And there was . . . a boy . . .” She fell as silent as Kirika and Alita had become.

Prella, on the other hand, prattled. Her father was a tailor and her mother a dressmaker. She was the youngest of eight children. Her eldest brother was also Gifted, and currently working in the Corps of Engineers, building the city’s new aqueduct from the eastern mountains. All of her siblings had been Masked without a problem, she couldn’t understand what had happened, wasn’t that warehouse an awful place, being drawn by the fat jailer, she’d never been so embarrassed, where did they think they were being taken . . . She talked enough for all the rest put together.

That suited Mara. She said only that her father was a Gifted craftsman—nothing about him being a Maskmaker—and that she was an only child.

“Your poor parents,” Prella breathed when she heard that. “I mean, my parents will miss me, but at least they’ve got seven more. What will
your
parents do?”

“I don’t know,” Mara said, against the lump rising in her throat. She swallowed and pressed her lips together.
I’m through crying
, she told herself fiercely.
Crying won’t change anything. It just makes me look weak. And I can’t afford to look weak. Not in front of Grute.

But despite her resolve, more than a few tears found their way down her cheeks during that long ride.

A few hours after setting out, they stopped briefly and were let out of the wagon to stretch. Given hard bread, harder cheese, and carrots that were anything
but
, along with tin mugs of rather funny-smelling water, they sat with their backs to the wheels on the shady side of the wagon and ate their meager fare while gazing out over a wheat field. Smoke rose from the chimneys of a village in the distance, but no villagers were to be seen.
Know enough to stay away
, Mara thought.

She shot a glance at Grute, sitting well apart from the girls.
Are all unMasked boys like
him?

No
, she answered herself firmly. She thought back to her encounter with the boy calling himself Keltan.
He
certainly wasn’t like Grute, or she would never have escaped that coal room.
But he wasn’t rejected by the Mask,
she reminded herself. He
rejected
it.

Even though she was half-convinced her failure to turn him in was one of the reasons she was where she was, she hoped fiercely that he’d escaped. She wished, even more fiercely, that she had accepted his offer to run away with him.

The Watchers soon ordered them back into the wagon. “Where are we going?” Mara dared to ask as she climbed in.

“You’ll find out when we get there,” one Watcher growled, and slammed the door.

After more hours of rumbling darkness, they stopped again. This time, emerging into early twilight, Mara saw that the landscape had changed: there were more hills, more trees, and no sign of human habitation except for a squat brick building with tiny barred windows. The Watchers chivvied all of them into it and slammed the thick black door behind them. Mara heard the rusty bolt slide shut and the heavy clank of a padlock.

As one, the five girls turned to see Grute leaning against the far wall, watching them. He leered. Alita clenched her fists and took a step toward him. He straightened, leer fading. “You won’t do that again,” he growled. “Caught me by surprise, is all.”

“You’re big,” Alita said softly. “But there are five of us. You gonna try anything?”

Grute gave her a long, hard stare, then very deliberately turned his head and spat on the ground. “Don’t flatter yourself.” He grabbed one of the dirty blankets rolled up and stacked in one corner of the cell and spread it out on the stone floor. “I hope you all have sweet dreams tonight, ladies,” he said as he sat down on it. “Nothing but nightmares ahead for you where we’re going.”

“Where is that?” Prella asked, her voice trembling a little. “Where are they taking us?”

Grute bared his teeth. “A mine,” he said. “A deep, dark mine. Full of men. A whole lot of men . . . like me.” He pursed his lips and made a loud smacking noise. “Like I said, sweet dreams.” Then he lay down, rolled over, and ignored them.

“I can’t work in a mine,” Simona said, a hint of panic her voice.

“Work or die,” Alita said. “Me, I’ll work.”

“Me, too,” Kirika said. Her voice held a strange hoarseness. She had sat down on the floor with her back to the wall and her bony knees pulled up to her chest. She was staring at the dark lump of Grute in his blanket.

“I’m scared,” Prella said in a barely audible voice.

Alita put an arm around the smaller girl’s shoulders, her movements and expression fierce as a hawk’s. “I’ll be with you,” she said. “We can help each other.”

“We can all help each other,” Mara said, putting her arm around Prella’s shoulders, too, over top of Alita’s. Simona joined them, taking Mara’s free hand in hers.

Only Kirika stayed where she was. “The camp will be full of men like
him
,” she said, still staring at Grute. Her voice dripped loathing. “Like . . .” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Like my uncle.”

Mara blinked, puzzled; then suddenly understood and felt sick inside.

“I miss
my
uncle,” Prella said, oblivious, and Alita and Mara exchanged a half-horrified look of exasperation.

They broke apart so they could get blankets and spread them out in a line along the wall on the far side of the room from Grute. Then they sat in silence as the room grew darker, each lost in her own thoughts. It was almost pitch-black before Mara heard the bolt slide open. One of the Watchers came in with a lantern, which he hung on a hook by the door. The other followed, carrying a tray of food—hard black bread, thin gruel with stringy bits of beef in it, a pitcher of water. Then they went out again.

They ate by the lantern’s dim light, Grute rousing himself to take his share—and more than his share—gobbling it down noisily before belching, peeing noisily into the filthy bucket in one corner, and then, giving them all a leer, settling down again on his blanket.

Mara hated to even touch the stiff, grim-caked wool, but it was better than the greasy black floor . . . though not by much. She lay down, staring at the lantern, which promptly sputtered out.

So far from home
, Mara thought in the sudden darkness.
In so many ways
. Tears, hot in the chill air, rolled down her cheeks. She heard a muffled sob from elsewhere in the room and knew she wasn’t alone in her grief.
How much farther? And what’s waiting at the end?

She didn’t find out the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Four nights they spent in prisons just like the first, obviously built to house unMasked on their way to . . . wherever. She learned a little bit more about all the girls except Kirika, who simply would not talk about herself, and far too much about Grute: his father a drunk, his mother a prostitute, his older sister following in her mother’s footsteps. In the middle of the second night Simona woke to find Grute standing over her. Her scream brought the Watchers running, and they shoved Grute to the ground, cursing and kicking him; but when they’d left, Grute sat up, contemptuous. “I’ve been beaten bloody by better ’n them and never made a sound,” he bragged, but he didn’t bother any of them again that night, and after that they took to sleeping in shifts, one of them awake at all times.

On the fifth day, the road, which had never exactly been smooth, began tossing them around inside the wagon like seeds in a rattle. At one point Mara’s head smacked the side of the wagon so hard she saw stars. Gingerly exploring her skull with her fingers a few minutes later, after the ride smoothed a bit, she winced as she touched a good-sized lump. Then the wagon lurched and she promptly smacked her head again.

The lunch break came as a blessed relief. This time, when they emerged into daylight, high, wooded slopes surrounded them, the rough track winding along the bottom of a valley. The air had a chilly bite. “We’ve climbed,” Alita said, looking around. “We must be getting close to the mountains.”

“Shut up,” one of the Watchers ordered.

They ate, and clambered back aboard the wagon for more bone-shaking travel. Mara had no way to tell the passage of time, but she thought at least two hours must have gone by since lunchtime when she heard frantic, furious shouting. The horses screamed, the wagon jerked sharply right . . . and then, almost in slow motion, tipped over onto its side.

Simona yelled as she slid down on top of Grute, kicking all the way. He threw up his hands to protect himself. “Stop it!” he shouted, just before she sprawled across him.

Kirika and Alita slid down beside Mara in a tangle of arms and legs, and then the shrieking Prella landed right on top of her, knocking the breath from both of them. As they lay there, helpless, mouths agape like landed fish, the doors of the wagon were flung wide. Figures, black silhouettes against the sunlight, lurched forward, grabbed all of them by the arms, and pulled them out into the cool air.

Mara, doubled over, unable to straighten, supported by gloved hands on each arm, saw nothing but booted feet and rutted dirt. Her new captors dragged her off the road and propped her against a tree. As her breathing slowly returned to normal, she held the ribs bruised by Prella’s fall and stared around, trying to figure out what had happened.