The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (14 page)

I was in the middle of slipping into my shirt when she came in and started shaking her head at me.

"That's never going to work—it's a good thing that I brought other options."

Lexis was a middle-aged woman with red hair and more energy than any two people should have had so early in the morning. The 'other options' she'd referenced turned out to be a cart full of clothes that exceeded anything I'd ever had back home—in quantity if not quality.

It was odd. For years I'd been told that I was living an existence that only the Society could provide, that I just needed to work hard enough to get my franchise and then I'd have everything I'd ever wanted, but my life back home hadn't been especially remarkable compared to what I'd seen so far in Brennan's compound.

The non-franchised citizens indeed lived better than the average grubber, but only the franchised citizens with their crazy parties lived better than Brennan's top people. If he could create a pocket of civilization at the very heart of this desolate city, maybe there was hope that he could eventually come around to following the precepts.

That thought sent a little thrill through me. Our Society had preached for more than a century that the point of everything we were doing was to bring those outside of the barrier to an understanding of the precepts. If Brennan was actually on the cusp of that kind of enlightenment then maybe I wouldn't have to destroy his invention after all. Maybe I could bring him and his entire compound back and join it to the Society.

I sternly told myself to focus on the matter at hand as Lexis handed me a length of fabric. "What's this for?"

"Brennan said that you're supposed to look like a member of the guard, but like a member who didn't really belong. He said to dress you up as fetchingly as possible given the constraints of the uniform Jax designed. A couple of centuries ago, our ancestors had special underclothes to accent their chests.

"Brennan has helped us make incredible strides when it comes to producing fabric, but for now this is the best I can do for you. Don't be bashful, the door is closed and you don't have anything I haven't seen a hundred times or more fitting up some girl or another for one of the gang leaders."

I tried not to blush as I started unbuttoning my shirt again. She was right, a couple hundred years ago nearly everyone who wanted one had owned half a dozen bras. Now only the Society still had those kinds of luxuries.

Even as an unfranchised juvenile, I'd had several—all functional garments designed to provide support for a range of different activities—but this was the first time I'd ever put on something with the sole intent of drawing attention to my body.

Franchised citizens—the most flighty at least—went about nearly naked when that was the style, but all of the shops for those kinds of apparel had been down in the middle of the social desirability index. Many of my dorm mates had spent some of their earnings on one or two pieces of seductive clothing, but for the most part everyone had desperately been saving all of their resource allotments in order to earn their franchises as quickly as possible.

Lexis wrapped the length of cloth around my back, up over my chest and then crossed it and tied it off behind my neck where it would likely show above my shirt collar once I was fully dressed.

"That's going to incense Jax, but that's okay, it's perfectly in keeping with what Brennan said the two of you are after. Let's try on some shirts."

"You seem like you've been doing this for a long time."

Lexis nodded as she held a shirt up to me and then went back to her cart for a different one. "Since I was a child. My mother was a seamstress, and hers before her—all the way back to the Desolation. The stories my nana told me said that this was just a hobby for the woman that survived the Desolation, but after the ants rained fire and destruction down on us, she managed to attach herself to one of the first warlords. Back then there was still lots of clothing to be looted, but even looted clothing looks better after it's been tailored to fit."

I shouldn't have been surprised that the grubbers thought that we had been the ones to cause the Desolation, but I was. It only made sense that they would blame us rather than each other, but that didn't stop me from having to suppress a flash of anger.

"Were you here before Brennan took over?"

Lexis frowned at a succession of three more shirts before finding one that passed muster. "No. I was in the territory to the east of here. The warlord I worked for kept a very tight lid on information flowing across the border—still does, I expect—but I was always working on clothes for him or his men or whatever girls had caught their fancy. They got so that they didn't even notice that I was there in the room with them. I heard all of the stories they told each other, stories about a crazy warlord who appeared out of nowhere with weapons and the know-how to make more.

"I listened to the stories for more than a month and then I reached out to someone I knew who specialized in smuggling people across the border and offered him everything I owned to get me through to Brennan's territory."

Once I'd finished buttoning the shirt, Lexis pulled out a small metal container full of safety pins and started pinning the fabric across the back, taking out what little slack there was around my waist.

"It's not as good as I could have done with a day or two of advance notice, but this isn't the first time that Brennan showed up in my office with some crazy idea and a timeline that's half of what any normal person would expect. I was up half the night altering these shirts in the hope that one of them would fit you."

I suddenly felt guilty. "I'm sorry—I had no idea…"

"Don't you fret—Skye, was it? If it had been up to me I would have made Brennan let me measure you last night so that I could turn out something that I knew would fit you, but he was right to insist that you get your sleep. He said that you saved his life last night—for that I'd give up a whole week of sleep and never utter a word of complaint. You did a good thing yesterday."

The blush that came over me then was even deeper than the one sparked by being shirtless around another person.

"I just did what anyone would have."

Lexis shook her head. "Humility is a good thing—it keeps the worst of the gang leaders and warlords from feeling threatened, but you'll be wanting not to take it too far here. Brennan isn't the kind to resent the worth of another, and you'll want to make sure that he values you like he should. Even the smartest man needs help sometimes seeing what's right in front of his face. There are lots of us who would have tried to save him—I dare say Beth did her best—but most of us would have failed miserably. Now, let's get you into some better-fitting pants."

This time Lexis turned her back to me while I pulled off my pants. It was a good thing too. The crude underwear I'd been provided back home had seemed like it wouldn't stand out in the city, but if anyone was going to know that it didn't fit with my backstory, it would be Lexis.

I pulled on the pants she passed back to me, and they were pronounced satisfactory, after which she started pulling black tactical vests out of her cart. I paused midway into one of them.

"What made you decide to leave home, Lexis? What about the stories made you think that you'd be better off here—penniless—than back where you'd started? It sounds like you had an okay thing going for you back there."

"There were a few weeks of violence shortly after Brennan made himself known. By and large, Jax's people wiped the floor with any of the enforcers they encountered, but one of the enforcers I tailored for managed to get the drop on a small, three-man squad and he and a few others killed all three. They were ecstatic about the weapons they captured—despite the fact that they were going to be nothing more than awkwardly-weighted clubs once the ammunition ran out—but it was the clothes the guardsmen had been wearing that convinced me to come here."

"The clothes?"

"Yes, the clothes. I'd never seen anything so fine. Most of what I dealt with back then was tailoring salvaged cloth from back before the Desolation, that or stuff that had been handwoven by someone who'd grown up learning to weave from their mother. This stuff was nothing like that. Even weaves, thread that was impossibly thin, and a uniformity that I knew wasn't humanly possible."

"It was manufactured."

"Indeed it was. I knew that I wanted to be a part of that."

I went to buckle up the last pair of straps, but she gently slapped my hands away.

"Leave that one undone—it makes you look like you're pretending at being a soldier. Jax would never stand for something like that in one of his actual guardsmen."

She reached back and started tightening straps working from the bottom up, and within a couple of seconds I could see why Jax wouldn't have approved. It felt like the vest had been designed with the sole purpose of framing my chest. If I actually ended up needing to fight I was going to have to remember to unbuckle a couple of straps or I wouldn't be able to breathe deeply enough to avoid getting winded.

"You're glad you came then?"

"Most definitely. Even the newest, most unskilled worker here gets paid better than most of our fellows out in the rest of the city. We don't all think of it that way, but having a warm place to sleep and steady meals is the most important pay there is."

"There has to be more to it than that though, right? I mean, people aren't going to work to improve themselves if there isn't a prospect of something more than just the same food and housing that they started out with, are they?"

Lexis tapped my vest. "You're wearing the reward. Brennan started the textile plant early on because it was a necessity if he was going to be able to give his people a shared identity and create identifiable uniforms so people knew who they were supposed to take orders from. These days, we aren't taking people in anywhere near quickly enough to strain our production abilities. That means that there are plenty of resources left over for us to make clothing other than just the work clothes that everyone is issued on their first day here. We have our little luxuries here, and with each month that passes they get a little better."

She finished adjusting the straps on my vest, and then pulled a long, slender stainless-steel spike out of one of her bags as she steered me over to the room's single metal chair.

"Speaking of luxuries, let's do your hair."

Lexis pulled my hair back, twisted it into a messy bun, and then slid the sliver of metal into place so that it wouldn't come undone. I'd been able to see everything else she'd done up to that point without a mirror, but I had no idea how I looked now. There was a mirror in the bathroom, but when I tried to turn that way, she gently pushed me back into my chair.

"We don't have time for that right now. Jax and Brennan both told me at least half a dozen times to make sure that you weren't late. We have just enough time to do your makeup, and not a minute extra."

"Makeup?"

Maybe my early existence had prepared me better than I'd realized for this life. I was quickly realizing just how much my acting skills left to be desired, but in this instance, my reaction was exactly right for my presumed backstory.

A girl raised inside of the city—someone who hadn't caught the eye of the gang leader in charge of the territory where she lived—would never have worn makeup. Actually, the grubbers didn't really have anything we would have termed back home as being makeup, but as Lexis pulled out a thin piece of charcoal, I realized that didn't mean they didn't have ways of changing their appearance.

"Yes, dear, makeup. I know this is something that you aren't accustomed to, but Piter is never going to believe that you are some kind of…escort…if you go there without doing anything to make yourself more fetching."

"I thought that was what the clothes and the hair were for."

The truth was that in the last ten minutes she'd done more to enhance my sex appeal than I'd ever attempted back home. Franchised citizens had no more limits when it came to makeup—for either gender—than they had in their choice of clothing, but that was another thing that I'd never experimented with.

"They are, Skye, but no woman in the role you're playing would forgo any possible weapon to wrap a man like Brennan more tightly around her finger. Now hold still while I darken your eyelids."

Remaining motionless while she'd approached me with the metal stake had been difficult. Having weathered that, I'd thought it was all going to be downhill from there. I hadn't counted on the fact that this time the pointy object was going to be headed towards my eye. My nanites were perfectly capable of regenerating muscular, skeletal, and vascular damage, but I wasn't so sure that they could do the same for a destroyed eye.

"Are you sure that's—"

"Skye, if you don't hold still I'm going to poke you by accident. You're going to have to trust me. I've done this hundreds of times when someone brought me some poor girl who needed a new set of clothes so they could be displayed on the arm of some top enforcer. There wasn't much I could do for those poor things, but I could at least teach them how to look their very best so that they didn't get cast aside a moment sooner than necessary."

I gritted my teeth and a few seconds later she set the charcoal back down and pulled out a small brush and a red mixture.

"It's just berries. The city has hundreds of times more space than we could possibly fill. In most territories the top floors of the buildings are converted into gardens to supplement the flow of food in from the border territories, but Brennan is the first warlord to throw his full weight behind those projects."

"How—" Even as I started to ask the question, I realized the answer. "Dirt. He's moving the dirt from the excavation up into the buildings inside of the compound and using that to grow crops. It solves two problems at once. If he didn't do that, he'd have piles of dirt inside the compound forty feet high."

Lexis gave me a smile. "Smart girl. That's exactly right. He's also built a system for collecting rainwater and then sending it down into floors that need water. When times get really rough I expect he'll dedicate some of the power being generated towards pumping additional water up to the cisterns, but so far it hasn't been a problem."