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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.
“They want a better life. They run away, come here to me. I deliver their babies, I cure their sniffles, I feed them, keep them clean, give them nice things for their hair. They come to this place asking for me. ” She grins. “Maybe you’ve heard of me too. You’ve come here for my help. ” She takes my left hand with a force that rocks our car. I tense, thinking we’ll capsize, but we don’t. We’ve stopped ascending now; we’re at the top. I look out over the side. There’s no way down, and the fear starts to set in. Madame controls this thing. If I wasn’t completely at her mercy before, I am now.
I force myself to stay calm. I won’t let her have the satisfaction of my panicking; it would only empower her.
My heart is thudding in my ears.
“That boy you came here with—he is not the one who gave you this beautiful wedding ring, is he. ” It’s not a question. She tries to slide the ring from my finger, but I make a fist and draw away.
“Both of you show up like drowned rats,” she says. Her laughter creaks like the rusty gears that hold our car together. “But under that you are all sparkles and pearls. Real pearls. ” She’s looking at my sweater. “And he is made up like a lowly attendant. ”
I can’t deny any of this. She’s managed to sum up the last several months of my life perfectly.
“Running off with your attendant, Goldenrod, behind the back of the man who made you his wife? Did your husband force himself on you? Or maybe he couldn’t satisfy you, and so you met with that boy of yours in secret—in secret, late at night, rustling in your closet among your silk dresses like a pair of savages. ”
My cheeks burn, but it’s not like the embarrassment I felt when my sister wives teased me about my lack of intimacy with Linden. This is sick and invasive. Wrong. And Madame’s smoky stench is making it hard to breathe. The height is making me dizzy. I close my eyes.
“It isn’t like that,” I say through gritted teeth.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Madame says, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I catch the whimper before it leaves my throat. “You’re a woman, after all. Women are the fairer sex. And one as lovely as you—your husband must have turned into a beast around you. It’s no wonder you found yourself a sweeter boy. And this one is sweeter, isn’t he? I can see it in his eyes. ”
“His eyes?” I splutter, furious. When I open my eyes, I focus on one of Madame’s gaudy hair gems so I don’t have to look at her or the ground. “Before your henchmen beat him half to death?”
“That’s another thing. ” Madame tenderly brushes the hair from my face. I jerk back, but she doesn’t seem to care. “My men know how to protect my girls. It’s a rough world, Goldenrod. You need protection. ”
She grabs my chin, and her fingers press against my jawbone until it hurts. She stares at my eyes. “Or maybe,” she sings, “your husband didn’t want to pass this defect of yours on to his children. Maybe he threw you out with the trash. ”
Madame is a woman who loves to talk. And the more she says, the less accurate she becomes. I realize that she couldn’t read me as easily as she thought. She’s just probing through the options, hoping to get a rise out of me. I could lie to her and she wouldn’t know.
“I’m not malformed,” I say, feeling suddenly giddy about this small power I have over her. “My husband was. ”
This makes Madame beam with intrigue. She releases my face and leans close. “Oh?”
“He might have turned into a beast around me, but it didn’t matter. Nine times out of ten, he couldn’t do anything about it. And like you said, women have needs. ”
Madame bounces a little, rocking and creaking our car. It’s clear she gets off on the idea of young lust. I hardly have to continue the lie; she’s writing the rest of the story herself.
“And you were forced into the arms of your attendant. ”
“In my closet, like you said. ”
“Right under your husband’s nose?”
“In the very next room. ”
She can have whatever deranged lie she wants. But the truth, like my wedding band, is something of mine that she can’t have.
The girls, hundreds of feet below, are a chorus of giggles. They all dance with the men for a while before disappearing into tents. And Madame’s henchmen sometimes peel the opening in the tent for a glimpse.
“Oh, Goldenrod, you are a gem. ” She takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek between the words. “A gem, a gem, an absolute gem! You and I will have great fun. ”
Great.
In a second we’re orbiting backward. The music is louder the closer we come to the ground, and the girls sadder.
Chapter 3
GABRIEL IS SLEEPING on the ground in the tent, curled up so closely to the wall of the tent that its green tinges his skin. There’s a dingy blanket under him, and his shirt is gone.
Madame told me this is where I’ll rest tonight, while she figures out what to do with me. There’s a basin of water and some towels and soaps that look like they were hand-carved.
I wet a towel and dab at the red mark on Gabriel’s cheek. Tomorrow it will be just one of many bruises. He mutters something, draws a breath.
“Did I hurt you?” I say.
He shakes his head, nuzzles his face against the ground.
“Gabriel?” I whisper. “Wake up. ” He doesn’t answer me this time, even when I turn him onto his back and wring cold water over his face. My heart is pounding with fear. “Gabriel. Look at me. ”
He does, and his pupils are two small, startled dots in all that blue, and he’s scaring me. “What did they do to you?” I say. “What happened?”
“The purple girl,” he mumbles, smacking his lips and closing his eyes. “She had a . . . something. ” He moves his arm as though in indication. And then he’s gone again. Shaking him does nothing.
“He’ll be out for a few hours. ” One of the girls is standing at the tent’s entrance, a blanket bunched in her arms. “He seemed like he was in a lot of pain. I just gave him
a little something to help. Here. ” She offers me the blanket. “It’s fresh off the laundry line. ”
She tries to help me cover him, but I shrug her away and snap, “You’ve helped enough, thanks. Whose fault is it that he was in pain to begin with?”
“Neither of you are from here,” the girl nonchalantly says, wringing a towel out over the basin. “Madame is very paranoid about spies. If I didn’t subdue him, she would have ordered the bodyguards to beat him unconscious. I was doing him a favor. ” There’s no malice in the way she speaks. She hands me the wet towel, and she keeps a polite distance.
“What spies?” I ask, and gently rub away the sand and blood from Gabriel’s face and arms. I don’t like whatever is subduing him. He’s all I have in this terrible place, and he’s so far away.
“They don’t exist,” the girl says. “Most of what that woman says is nonsense. The opiates make her so paranoid. ”
What have we stumbled into? At least this girl is not as nightmarish as the rest. Under all that makeup I can see the sympathy in her eyes that are two small dark stars in a nebula of green eyeliner. Her skin is dark. Her short hair is curled into glossy ringlets. And she, like everything here, carries that musty-sweet scent that radiates from everything Madame has touched.
“Why did he call you ‘the purple girl’?” I say.
“My name is Lilac,” she says, and indicates the light purple flowers on her faded dress, the strap of which keeps falling off her shoulder. “Ask for me if you need anything else, okay? I have to get back to work. ”
She opens the tent flap, exposing the night sky and filling the tent with cold air and laughter, and the desperate grunts of men and the giggling of girls, and the steady rhythm of brass.
“This is my fault,” I whisper. I trace the line between Gabriel’s lips. “I’ll get us out of here. I promise. ”
There’s salt crusted in my hair, and I feel so grimy that it’s tempting to climb into the basin to wash everything away. But whenever the bodyguards hear the water sloshing as I dip towels into it, they peer through the slit in the tent. Privacy is a lost practice in scarlet districts, I suppose. I settle for rolling up my sleeves and the legs of my jeans to wash as much as I can. Someone has laid out a silk dress for me—as green as this tent, with an orange dragon running up the side—but I don’t wear it.
I curl up beside Gabriel, fitting my arm around him. The soaps have left me with Madame’s strange scent, but he still smells of the ocean. I feel his skin moving under my fingers as he breathes, his muscles in constant, steady motion over his ribs. I close my eyes, pretend his is an ordinary sleep and that saying his name would bring him right back to me.