We walk all the way to the chain-link fence, through which Gabriel and I were once dragged against our wills. From the corner of my eye I see Maddie parting the weeds with her hands. In the darkness her eyes are like sparks. She drags her index finger through the air in the shape of letters, but I can’t quite make out what they spell.
Jared opens the fence, and he watches me the whole time, like he’s taunting me. Like he’s saying, Go ahead and try it.
But, just like the first time Linden took me outside of the mansion for that expo, I don’t run. Something in me argues against it. Maddie writes furiously in the shadows.
I can hear the tide turning out in that darkness, can smell the ocean. My stomach lurches with longing and dread. I can hear something else out there. Something approaching us.
“You’re going to meet someone special,” Madame says, her breath hot in my ear. Her smoke coils around my throat like a hissing serpent.
I think I’ve stopped breathing, because the color emerging from the darkness, in the shape of a man much bigger than me, is all gray.
Nobody is sure exactly why the Gatherers chose the color gray for their jackets and vans. Sometimes the vans are poorly repainted, the windows globbed over with dribbling gray, the tires splashed with it. The jackets are not all uniform—I know that much. They are also hand-dyed, all different cuts and styles. The Gatherers are their own underground group, and while some say they work for the government, one thing that’s certain is that they travel in packs; they find one another, form a shelter somewhere, and wait for opportunities. Maybe they split the money they make off us, and use it to fuel their vans, load their guns, indulge themselves in liquor and whatever else they want.
I think this man’s smell hits me before the color of his coat. Like mold and liquor and sweat. It must be laborious for them, stealing so many girls. Must make them perspire. Especially those of us who fight, scratch, make them bleed any way we can.
His smile emerges next, his teeth rotten like the broken smiles of Madame’s girls.
I take a half step back out of instinct, but Madame wraps her arm around mine, and her nails and cheap jewels are clawing into my skin until I’m sure I must be bleeding from it.
The man cups my face in his hand, and Madame gestures to Jared, who holds the lantern up over my head. And I realize what’s happening. This man, this Gatherer, is looking at my eyes, the way my brother and I would look through apples in the marketplace for the best pick. Something flashes in his eyes like delight. I struggle, though the realization of what’s happening still hasn’t quite reached me. Not until Madame names her price.
And finally, finally, I understand the word Maddie was writing for me.
Run.
Her hands are still moving, screaming.
Runrunrunrunrun.
The Gatherer is arguing, saying he can get girls much cheaper on the street. He looks so angry that he could spit. And Madame is laughing, smoke bursting out of her mouth, saying, “Not like this one, you won’t.”
Run.
I can’t! Gabriel is still a prisoner here. Madame will kill him; I’m sure of it. Kill him when she realizes she can’t turn him into one of her bodyguards. He doesn’t have it in him to hold a girl against her will—to carry a gun, much less shoot one.
And even if I were to run, how far could I get? Jared is standing right beside me, shining the lantern on me, ready to grab me at a moment’s notice. My breath hitches. My mind is in a fury.
Runrunrun.
Run where? Run how?
The Gatherer is indignant, but he isn’t leaving. Madame knows that, one way or another, she will sell me. She’s smug about it. And I should have seen it coming, really. What use does she have for yet another girl? All the girls in this place are wilted, dried out, used up. There’s a whole tent just for the ones that are in all stages of the virus, and she offers them to her customers at a discount. The men leave them, wiping the blood of the dying girls’ kisses from their stubbly mouths. Everything has a price. How long has it been since she had a healthy girl, whole and fully conscious, with clean teeth and all?
She told me I reminded her of her daughter.
The daughter she loved too much. The daughter whose death left a permanent scar on her soul. She will never, never love again.
I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long.
The Gatherer offers a lower price.
You children are flies.
Madame doubles hers.
You are roses.
“Robbery,” he spits out.
You multiply and die.
Madame triples it. “This one is a goldenrod,” she cries, like that should mean anything to him. “She is a gem. She will make you a fortune in return.”
“Eyes are eyes,” the Gatherer says. “There’s other girls with eyes out there.”
“Not. Like. These.” Madame is red with fury. She wraps her arms around me like she’s protecting me. “Her ring alone is worth what I’m asking! If you won’t buy her, someone else will.”
For one dangerous moment I allow myself a glimmer of hope. Hope that he will not buy me and Madame will send me back to a tent, and I can grab Gabriel and steal away.
But the Gatherer reaches for his hip, and in the next second I’m staring down the barrel of a handgun. And the lantern lights the rage in the Gatherer’s eyes, more maddened even than Madame’s, and he’s shouting that he has changed his mind, he wants me for free, or he’ll make sure no one else can buy me. And Jared has a gun too, pointed at the Gatherer, and the Gatherer points his gun at Jared.
I hear a wind in the tall grass like the whole world is gasping. But it’s Maddie, launching out from the weeds. In a moment she’s shrieking in that horrible way of hers, and then clinging like a leech to the man and biting into his leg. The Gatherer is clearly surprised by this. He tries to shake her off, but she has coiled herself around his leg and is biting and clawing and screaming.
The Gatherer is swearing and spitting, and I don’t think he means to fire his gun—I see the surprise on his face when it goes off—but how can he concentrate with all this commotion? He gets Jared in the arm. There’s a small explosion of blood.
Then another shot, this time from Jared’s gun.
For the second time in my life, I watch as a Gatherer crumples and falls down dead in front of me. Maddie whimpers and coils herself around Jared’s leg like a cat. He crouches down to console her, petting her hair with one hand and still aiming the gun at the Gatherer’s corpse with the other.
“Bastard.” Madame spits on the gray coat. The Gatherer’s eyes are open and staring at her bare feet as she stamps out her cigarette. “One of the best customers. I give him all my best girls,” Madame says. One of ze best customers. “This is the thanks I get?” She spits again.
Jared is whispering soft things to Maddie. Many of the women and bodyguards have a fondness for Maddie; they treat her as a sort of pet. But Jared is her favorite, and seeing a gun pointed at him clearly upset her.
“And you.” Madame directs her anger to Jared. She paces toward him, dragging me tripping after her. “Look at the mess you’ve left me to clean up! How will I explain his death to his pack? He would not have shot her. It was a bluff.”
Jared stands to full height, easily a whole head taller than me, and much taller than Madame, and still he looks small in the line of Madame’s rage.
“I—” he begins, his fists clenching. Madame slaps him, first in the face but then again on the arm where he’s bleeding and his skin has been ripped by the bullet.
“You’ve cost me too much business! You’ve cost me the sale of a lifetime!”
She’s so furious that her accent is gone. She starts raving about there being spies, that she’ll never be able to do business with the Gatherers again if they find out about this. She hits him again and again, the way I think Vaughn must have hit Gabriel the day he let me out of my room, which left him bruised and limping. But Jared is much bigger than Gabriel, and much stronger. He could rip Madame in two, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t because she is his only home, his only shelter. He’s her technological genius, her favorite, and Madame is so broken from losing her child that even for him she hates where she should love. Hates brutally.
Jared takes it, doesn’t cower, doesn’t flinch. It’s Maddie who is fuming. When she can take it no longer, she screams and throws herself at Madame with such a force that they both hit the ground. Fake rubies and emeralds scatter around them.
And then Madame is ripping Maddie away from her, standing over her, kicking her. And the girls have gathered around us and are all laughing or screaming—it’s impossible to know which—and Lilac is running toward us, her skirt billowing out around her in slow motion, and Jared is grabbing Madame’s arms, trying to pull her back. He’s strong, but Madame is a woman possessed. He’s yelling, “You’re going to kill her.” And she’s yelling back, “I know.”
Maddie folds in on herself, hugging her knees to her chest, her face hidden by her tangled dark hair. If she’s making any more noise, it’s drowned out by all the girls, and by Madame’s cursing and hissing.
Jared pulls Madame back by the arms, her feet still kicking at the air. Lilac and I kneel by Maddie, who I think for a second is dead, she’s so still.
“Get her out of here,” Jared is yelling over Madame’s screaming. “Go! I’ll hold her as long as I can.”
Lilac, trembling with fear or rage, scoops her daughter’s tiny body easily. I grab the lantern from where Jared left it on the ground, and I follow her, running to keep up. But as I turn in the direction of the green tent, Lilac says, “Not there. Madame will find her there.”
She leads us, running, past the incinerator, which hums so loudly, it shakes my bones. Madame is so proud of that grotesque thing; it’s welded together by street signs and bits of metal that advertise prices for popcorn and something called cotton candy. It makes popping sounds as though something is alive in there, hurling itself against the metal walls.
Makes ze messes easier to clean, Madame said. She was petting my hair, and her teeth were unnaturally white as she smiled. Nothing but dust.
What was going through that madwoman’s head when she said those words? Was she thinking that she’d like to throw Maddie inside that machine’s gaping mouth, listen as the child’s screams became nothing but the mechanical popping and humming?
Her venom might even be worse than Vaughn’s. My father-in-law was cold-blooded. He murdered my sister wife. But his approach was sinister and scheming, an approaching fin in murky water that you wouldn’t see coming until the water had turned red around you. I never saw a fire in his eyes like there was in Madame’s as she pummeled and kicked that little girl. She was enjoying herself. She wanted Maddie dead.