“I’ve been looking for you all night.”
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I say, before I can stop myself.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say as he turns me to face him. “I just forgot you have a weakness for blondes.”
“Oh, her?” he says. “Her husband’s father is a contractor I’ve been working with. I thought it would benefit me to stay on his good side.”
“Okay,” I say, watching as a giant screen on the wall counts down the seconds to midnight.
Twenty. . . nineteen. . .
“Don’t be mad,” Linden says, squeezing my hands.
They’re sweating in the black gloves. “I didn’t like watching you dance with him, either. In fact I wanted to apologize the moment the music stopped, but you’d disappeared.”
Ten. . . nine. . .
He tilts my chin, forcing me to look at him. Of all the Governors and Housemasters here, he’s the only one I would allow to touch me in this way. He’s familiar, like it or not. The closest thing I have to home this far down the coast.
“You’re the only blonde I have a weakness for,” he promises. And it’s so pathetic that I have to laugh, and he laughs too, and takes my face in his hands. “I love you,” he says.
Three . . . two . . . one.
He kisses me, amidst a sea of fake fireworks and fake stars. And we ring in this fake New Year together. And it only seems fitting that, in this moment of illusion, the words just come out of me. “I love you, too.”
Chapter 24
We return from the New Year’s party in the early hours of morning, and my bedroom window lets in a smoggy blue light. Across the hall from my bedroom, Cecily’s door is open, and I can hear her breathing, the rustle of her body moving in the satin blankets. Next to her door there’s an empty bedroom, and no sound at all.
And somehow that silence is what makes it impossible for me to sleep. I toss and turn for a while, and then I cross the hall to Jenna’s bedroom.
Her door creaks open. In the morning light I can see that her bed has been made. One of her paperback romances remains on the nightstand. It’s the only bit of her that lingers. From here I can see the candy wrapper marking the last page she ever read.
Even her smell is gone. That light, airy collaboration of perfumes and lotions that made attendants blush.
In her final days it was overpowered by the heavy salve Adair rubbed on her chest to help her breathe, but that medicinal smell is gone as well. The vacuum has been swept over her footsteps, erased the gurney marks from when her body was taken away.
I wait. To be haunted by her, to hear her voice. When Rose died, I could still, for months, feel her presence in the orange groves. Even if it was just my imagination, it was something. But if Jenna’s spirit still exists on earth, it isn’t here. There’s not even a shadow in her mirror.
I peeled back the blankets, climb into her bed. The sheets smell brand new, and maybe they are, because I don’t recognize them—white with little purple flowers.
This isn’t her satin comforter, either, which had a cherry juice stain in the corner. She’s gone. Not a trace, aside from the paperback. I’ll never know what happened to her that afternoon when she disappeared into Vaughn’s basement. She’ll never run away with me and see the ocean. She’ll never dance or breathe again.
I bury my face in the mattress, the spot where she died, and I pretend her fingers are brushing through my hair. It takes a lot of effort before I’m able to conjure up a clear memory of her voice.
You’re getting out of here, and it’s going to be amazing.
“Okay,” I tell her.
After a while I fall into a mercifully dreamless sleep.
It is my last dreamless night. After that, Gabriel is always on my mind, alone somewhere in that awful place beneath my feet. I think of his skin made gray by those flickering lights, his breath coming out in clouds. I close my eyes at night and begin dreaming of him lying on a cot to sleep, with my dead sister wives in a freezer beside him.
I worry about Vaughn discovering our plan and harming him. Killing him. Vaughn says he began working on his antidote the day Linden was born, and even if I don’t believe that he means to do good things, I do believe that much. I also believe that Linden’s is the only life he cares about saving. And Bowen is Vaughn’s backup if he can’t cure his son in time.
I have a horrible dream one night. Bowen, tall and willowy like his father, pressing his lips to the mouth of some hesitant bride who lives in what was once his mother’s bedroom. He tells her that he loves her, and she holds a knife behind her back, spiteful and beautiful, waiting for the right moment to end him. There is nobody to warn him. No mother to love him. All he has ever known is Vaughn, who pries Linden’s body apart in the basement, frantic for a cure. And me? I am long dead, frozen and perfectly preserved with my sister wives, our eyes open in stunned expressions, our hands not quite touching. In a row of four, icicles on our eyelashes.
Something touches me, and I scream before I can stop myself. My heart is hammering in my chest, and immediately I struggle to break away from my sister wives’ corpses, desperate to be out of Vaughn’s basement.