Wither (24 page)

“Will you quiet down?” I say, as Jenna and I gather in her doorway. The attendant looks frightened of this small pregnant fireball of a girl. But when I look at her, I can only see the bags under her eyes, the purple swollen ankles propped on pillows. “You’re going to hurt the baby if you get yourself all worked up.”

“Don’t lecture me,” she growls, gesturing wildly to the attendant. “Lecture him for being incompetent!”

“Cecily . . . ,” I begin.

“No, she’s right,” Jenna says. She has lifted the lid off one of the dishes, and she’s making a face. “This looks disgusting. What is it, pig slop?”

I look at her, shocked, and she looks right into my eyes. “I think you should go down to the kitchen and complain.”

Oh.

“I’m sorry, Lady Jenna,” the attendant begins.

“Don’t apologize,” I say. “It isn’t your fault. It’s the head cook who should be overseeing these things, and she knows we all hate mashed potatoes.” I lift another lid and crinkle my nose. “And pork. The smell alone will give Jenna hives. I’d better go down and get this straightened out.”

“Yes, of course,” the attendant says, and I think he’s shaking a little as he begins rolling the cart of lunch trays back to the elevator, with me in tow.

“Don’t mind them,” I say, and give him a reassuring smile once we’re in the elevator and the doors have closed. “It’s nothing personal. Really.”

He smiles back, glancing nervously at me in between staring at his shoes. “They said you were the nice one,” he says.

The kitchen has its usual verve, which means Vaughn isn’t nearby. “Excuse me,” the attendant says, “but Lady Rhine is here with a complaint.”

They all turn to look at me standing in the doorway, and the head cook snorts without missing a beat, and says, “This one, she doesn’t complain.”

I thank the attendant for bringing me down here, and someone takes the trays away, and I’m sad to see perfectly good food go to waste, but I came here for a more important reason. I make my way through the steam and the chatter, and I lean against the counter where the head cook is standing over her giant boiling pot. In all the commotion I know she’ll be the only one to hear me ask, “What happened to Gabriel?”

“You shouldn’t be down here asking about him. Only going to make more trouble for that boy,” she says. “The Housemaster’s had his eye on him since your botched escape.”

A fierce chill rushes up my spine. “Is he okay?”

“Haven’t seen him,” she says. And she looks at me with such a sad expression. “Not since this morning when the Housemaster called him down to the basement.

I’m sick for the rest of the afternoon. Jenna holds my hair back while I retch into the toilet, but nothing comes up.

“Maybe you had a little too much to drink,” she says gently.

But it isn’t that. I know it isn’t that. I back away from the toilet and sit on the floor, my hands dropping hopelessly into my lap. Tears are welling up behind my eyes but I don’t release them. I won’t give Vaughn the satisfaction. “I have to talk to you,” I say.

I tell her everything. About Rose’s body in the basement, and about the kiss with Gabriel, and about Linden having no idea where we came from, and the absolute control Vaughn has over our lives. I even tell her about Rose and Linden’s dead child.

Jenna kneels beside me, dabbing my forehead and the back of my neck with a damp cloth. It feels good, despite everything, and I rest my head on her shoulder and close my eyes. “This place is just a nightmare,” I say.

“Just when I think it might not be so bad, it gets worse. It gets worse and I can’t wake up. Housemaster Vaughn is a monster.”

“I don’t think the Housemaster would kill his grandchild,” Jenna says. “If what you say is true and he’s using Rose’s body to find an antidote, wouldn’t he want his grandchild to live?”

I keep my promise and don’t tell her what I learned from Deirdre—that the stillbirth was no stillbirth at all. But the thought haunts me. I want to think Jenna is right. What reason could Vaughn have for murdering his grandchild? It’s true that he’s only ever had sons—maybe he prefers them—but a granddaughter would at least be useful to him as a child bearer. The daughters of wealthy families even get to choose whom they marry sometimes, and take priority over their sister wives. And Vaughn is all about finding a use for things, people, bodies—nothing is wasted.

But I know, somehow, that Deirdre and Rose were right when they heard that baby’s cry. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that Linden was away when it happened. The thought bubbles up a new wave of nausea.

And Jenna’s voice feels so far away when she asks if I’m all right and says that I look awfully pale.

“If anything bad happens to Cecily or that baby, I am going to lose it,” I say.

Jenna rubs my arm reassuringly. “Nothing will,” she says. It’s quiet for a while after that, and I think of all the horrible things that could be happening to Gabriel in the basement. I think of him being bruised, beaten, etherized.

I can’t allow myself to think he’s already dead. I think of that noise we heard in the hallway when we kissed, and how reckless we were to leave the door open, and the atlas he stole from the library that’s still sitting on my dressing table. And I know this is all my fault. I’ve brought this on him. Before I came here, he was a happily oblivious servant who had forgotten the world. It’s an awful way to live, but it’s better than no life at all. And it’s better than Vaughn’s windowless basement of horrors.

I think of the book Linden read to me while I was recovering.
Frankenstein
. It was about a madman who constructed a human out of pieces from corpses. I think of Rose’s cold hand with its pink nail polish, and Gabriel’s blue eyes, and the stone-small heart of a dead infant, and before I even realize I’ve moved, I’m vomiting, and Jenna is holding back my hair, and the world is spinning out of control. But not the real world. Vaughn’s world.

Cecily appears in the doorway, pale and bleary-eyed.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you sick?”

“She’ll be all right,” Jenna says, smoothing my hair back. “She’s had too much to drink.”

That’s not it at all, but I say nothing. I flush the toilet, and Cecily pours water in the rinse cup and hands it to me. I take it. She sits on the edge of the tub, groaning as she bends her knees. “Sounds like it was a fun party,” she says.

“It wasn’t really a party,” I say, and swish the water in my mouth and spit. “It was just a bunch of architects displaying their designs.”

“Tell me everything,” Cecily says, a spark of excitement filling up her eyes.

“There isn’t anything to tell, really,” I say. I don’t want to tell her about the dazzling holograms or the suc-culent dessert selection or the city full of people where I considered running away. It’s better if she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

“You two never talk to me anymore,” she says, and she looks like she’s going to get worked up again. It’s like she gets more emotional with each trimester. “It’s not fair. I’m stuck in that bed all day.”

“It really was boring,” I insist. “There were all these first generations showing me their sketches and I had to pretend to be interested. And there was an architect who gave a long lecture about the importance of shopping malls, and we had to sit in these uncomfortable foldout chairs for over an hour. I got drunk just for something to do.”

Cecily looks doubtful for a moment, but then she must decide I’m telling the truth, because her unhappiness seems to fade, and she says, “Well, okay. But can’t you tell me a story, then? What about those twins you used to know.”

Jenna raises an eyebrow. I’ve never told her about my twin brother, but she’s more intuitive than Cecily and she’s probably figuring it out now.

I tell the story of the day the twins were walking home from school and there was an explosion so loud that it rattled the ground under their feet. A genetic research facility had been bombed by first generations in protest of experiments being done to prolong the life span of new children. Cries of “Enough!” and “The human race cannot be saved!” filled the streets. Dozens of scientists and engineers and technicians were killed.

That was the day the twins became orphans.

I wake up to the sound of a dinner tray being set on my night table. Cecily is curled up beside me, snoring in that nasal way she’s adopted in her third trimester. My eyes dart to the bringer of the tray hopefully, but it’s just the nervous new attendant from this morning. The disappointment on my face must be obvious, because he tries to smile as he’s turning to leave.

“Thank you,” I say, but even that sounds heartbroken.

“Look in the napkin,” he says, and then he’s gone.

I sit up slowly so as not to disturb Cecily. She mumbles into a little lake of drool on the pillow and sighs.

I unroll the cloth napkin that encompasses the silverware, and a blue June Bean falls into my hand.

I don’t see Gabriel the next day, or the next.

Outside, the snow begins to stick to the ground, and I keep Cecily company while she pouts about not being allowed to go out and make snowmen. The orphanage never let her go out in the snow either. It would be too easy for the children to get sick in the cold, and the staff members weren’t equipped to deal with an epidemic.

She only sulks for a little while, though, before she fades into one of her naps. I can’t wait for this pregnancy to be over. My fear over what’s to come when the baby is born is surpassed by my fear of what’s happening to her now. She’s always out of breath, or crying, and her finger is swollen around her wedding band.

While she sleeps, I sit on her window ledge, flipping through the atlas Gabriel brought me. I find out that while my name is a European river, Rowan is a type of small red berry that grew in the Himalayas and Asia. I’m not sure what it means or if it means anything at all. But the last thing I need is another puzzle to try and solve, and after a while I just watch the snow falling outside.

The view from Cecily’s window is nice. It’s mostly trees, and I think it could be just the normal woods out in the real world. It could be anywhere at all.

But then, of course, I see the black limousine driving a path through the snow and I’m reminded of where I am. I watch it navigate around a shrub and then drive straight into the trees.

Straight into the trees! There’s no impact. The limo simply drives straight through them as though they weren’t even there.

And then it dawns on me. Those trees
aren’t
really there. That’s why I couldn’t find my way to the gate from any of the gardens or the orange grove. The true path is hidden by some sort of illusion. A hologram, like the houses at the expo. Of course. It’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of it before? It figures that I’d learn this now, when Vaughn has made it nearly impossible for me to be outside unaccompanied.

For the rest of the day I try to figure out a plan to get outside so I can inspect the tree hologram, but all paths in my mind lead back to Gabriel. If I found a way out, I couldn’t leave without him. I told him I wouldn’t leave without him, but he was against the idea in the first place. If he’s in trouble because of me, will he completely abandon the idea of escaping?

I just need to know that he’s okay. I can’t even think about leaving until I know that much.

Dinner comes, and I don’t eat. I sit at a table in the library with my hand in my pocket turning the June Bean over and over. Jenna tries to distract me with interesting facts she’s read in the library books, and I know it’s for my benefit, because normally all she reads are romance novels, but I just can’t bring myself to pay attention. She coaxes me to try some of the homemade chocolate pudding, but it’s like paste in my mouth.

That night I have a hard time falling asleep. Deirdre draws a bath for me with chamomile soaps that leave a layer of frothy green on the water. The soapy water feels like a deep-tissue massage and smells like heaven, but I can’t relax. She braids my hair while I’m soaking, and she tells me about the new fabrics she’s ordered in from Los Angeles, and how they’ll make lovely tiered summer skirts. And it only makes me feel worse to think I’ll still be here next summer to wear them. And the less responsive I am, the more desperate her tone seems to become.

She can’t understand the cause of my unhappiness. Me.

The pampered bride of a soft-spoken Governor who will give me the world on a string. She’s my eternal little optimist, always asking how I am or if I need anything and trying to make my day better. But it occurs to me that she never talks about herself.

“Deirdre?” I say as she’s replenishing the soaps and adding more hot water to the bath. “You said your father was a painter. What did he paint?”

She pauses with her hand on the faucet, and she smiles in a sad, wistful way. “Portraits, mostly,” she says.

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

I can tell that this is a subject of great sorrow for her, but she’s got a strength and tranquility that reminds me of Rose, and I know she’s not going to break down and cry.

“Every day,” she says. Then she presses her hands together in a cross between a clap and a gesture of prayer.