Aveline (3 page)

Aveline attempted to lift her hand next,
then her foot, then her head. Not even her lips would form a word
or part for a sigh.

She was paralyzed, with the exception of her
eyes.

Panic surged through her. She strained
against her wooden body, unable to make sense of what was going on
around her. Gradually, she realized she was not staring at the
ceiling but at a wall, and her back was to the activity. She
smelled nothing, and her skin was numb to the roughness of the wood
beneath her.

“Bring the mixed one next!” one of the women
shouted.

Seconds later, hands gripped her ankles and
yanked her onto her back while another woman bent over her and
lifted her upper body beneath the shoulders. They jostled her; she
felt none of it. Her head fell helplessly back against someone’s
torso, and she was relieved to see she was not missing any limbs or
wounded.

But she was completely naked.

The person supporting her torso dropped her.
She heard her head smack hard against the ground without feeling
anything. The woman cast a quick, worried look towards someone
before hastily lifting her again.

Aveline struggled to contain her panic. She
was a prisoner of her body and could not scream for help or fight
off these people as much as she wanted to. She was all but flung
onto a table on her side long enough to see a row of four other
young women lying helplessly on tables. The girl beside her was
little more than thirteen, and a woman was at the bottom of the
table. The girl’s legs were apart, the woman sticking something
into the sacred pocket between them that only women possessed.

“Virgin. Clean her up and put her in the
pile,” the woman ordered two others standing by. She rose and moved
towards Aveline.

Brothels. She was in the processing line to
be assigned to a brothel. Aveline knew the brothel ward as well as
any other ward in the inner city. She had seen the creepy displays
of beautiful girls and boys at the front of each prostitution house
meant to entice clients into the brothels. They appeared more like
living dolls, and she had wondered in passing how these kids
managed to stay so still. There had always been a chance she would
have been sold to a brothel to work as a whore in order to repay
her father’s debts, but she had taken comfort in the smug knowledge
she could kill anyone who tried to touch her.

Realization sent a streak of fear through
her. She could not defend herself, or escape, if she could not
move.

She was shoved onto her back and stared at
the ceiling before wildly trying to look around at what she could
with the only part of her that worked. Whatever was done to her,
Aveline felt and saw none of it until the woman in charge rose and
towered over her.

“Virgin. But mixed,” she said, peering down
critically at Aveline. “How’d the other mixed girl do?”

“Forty ounces,” someone else answered.

“Decent,” the woman said. “Clean her up. Put
her in the pile.”

What the hell was going on? Aveline screamed
the question at the people who could not hear her. She was hefted
and half dragged across the floor, through a doorway into a bathing
room consisting of six wooden tubs filled with murky water.

She was shoved into one.

Water closed over her head, and she started
to panic as water entered her lungs. Unable to breathe or move,
Aveline strained against the prison of her body once again. This
time, she lifted a finger. But one finger was not going to save
her.

A blurry form reached into the tub and
hauled her up. Her upper body was pushed over the edge, and the
sound of her bather slapping her back was followed by the
involuntary expulsion of water. Able to breathe again, Aveline
sucked in as much air as she could.

Her bather went to work scrubbing her with
movement born of routine. Had she been able to, she would have
grimaced at the amount of force the older woman put into scouring
every inch of her skin. Aveline’s skin blazed red from the harsh
scrubbing. Instead of spiraling into panic, she closed her eyes to
block the surreal world and focused instead on moving her body.

Two fingers lifted when she ordered them
to.

Burn me, burn me, burn
me!
she chanted mentally, frustrated by the
weak progress.

“Lori!” a man bellowed.

Aveline’s eyes cracked open to see a large
man missing most his teeth standing in the doorway.

“Yes!” Lori, the woman in charge of the
other room, entered.

“Which are these?” he gestured to the
floor.

“Rejects. Send them to the butcher!”

He grunted and bent. When he straightened,
he had both fists wrapped in the hair of two girls around the ages
of ten.

Aveline stared at them, horrified to witness
the circling of their eyes as they struggled to take in what was
happening to them. Her bather dragged her out of the bath, severing
her view of the girls being dragged away to be slaughtered. Aveline
was dropped onto a pile on top of several other women stacked like
logs and dripping from baths.

Faced with another truth, Aveline was not
certain what to think.

Food in Lost Vegas was heavily rationed,
with the outer city receiving the fresh meat and the inner city
left to fight over rotten scraps. It was an unwritten rule that no
one in the inner city ever asked where fresh meat came from,
whenever it was available. She had always hoped only the worst
criminals were put down to feed the rest of the inner city.

Residents of the inner city
would starve without a steady supply of fresh meat, but those girls
were too young for such a fate. Aveline had met too many dishonest
grown men and women for
children
to be sacrificed to feed the rest of the criminals
in the inner city.

Caught in her own perilous position, all of
her training and skills were not going to help the girls when she
could not move.

Frustration mixed with anger and fear, and
Aveline continued to fight her body.

Four fingers.

The activity around her remained at the same
level as more immobilized young women and men were bathed and then
stacked by the wall. Every once in a while, she heard one of those
around her moan or utter some other kind of panicked squeak, but no
one could speak.

The longer she struggled to move, the more
disappointed she became with her slow progress. When she had
managed to lift all five fingers on one hand, another body was
stacked on top of hers, pinning her hand between them.

While discouraged, Aveline was not ready to
accept her involuntary fate as a whore. How much time passed, she
had no way of knowing. She used the mental discipline her father
had instilled into her to prevent her panic from consuming her and
instead, channeled all her focus on moving the fingers on her free
hand.

She watched the shadows on the wall, unable
to track the movement of the bathing room any other way. Only when
the mound of shadows began to decrease did she start to become
unsettled once more. The boys and girls stacked around her were
being removed, one by one. The sounds of bathing soon quieted as
well, signaling a change in her environment.

Enough time had passed for her to coax all
five fingers on her free hand back to life and even to straighten
her palm. Her wrist was still frozen by the incapacitating drug
they had given her, and she concentrated on moving it next. Aveline
doubted she would have a chance to do anything without at least one
arm and her legs in working order. Her toes and feet had yet to
respond to her mental orders. With one arm free, she would feel
slightly less vulnerable. If anyone armed came within reach, she
could snatch their weapon and …

This part of her plan, she had not yet
figured out. One arm free could stab as many people as she could
see, assuming they remained directly in her line of vision. The
thought of spilling blood stirred her Devil’s curse but provided
her no real means of escape. The devil was not interested in
anything but blood. Once she attacked, she would be easy to subdue,
and the element of surprise would be completely gone. They might
even inject more of the numbing drug into her.

Wrestling with what to do, Aveline fought
back the urge to act without reason, to kill – or try to – without
caring how she was going to escape. Fleeing this place was more
important than revenge. When her body was itself again, she would
find this place and mete out the kind of revenge that made the
devil in her gleeful.

Determined, she urged her body to free more
of itself as her eyes stayed trained on the diminishing shadows on
the wall. The body atop hers was lifted, the one beside her, and
finally, it was her turn to be picked up and slung over someone’s
shoulder. She hung helplessly and watched the flooring. Her captor
left the room and walked down a narrow hallway flanked by several
open doors before he descended a set of stairs at a jog and left
the building. He walked down a short alleyway and to what she
judged to be the rear entrance of the neighboring building by the
muddied stairs and flooring.

The scent of cooking meat reached her nose,
and a thrill went through her. She could smell again, and her wrist
was cooperating.

When her captor all but dropped her onto the
floor of another room, she was almost grateful she was unable to
feel anything. She would be in pain from the rough treatment
otherwise. Her gaze fixed to the ceiling, she tested her wrist to
ensure it had not been trapped beneath her body before looking
around.

To her delight, her neck moved several
inches. It was small progress, but she was able to see more.

Several other boys and girls were propped up
on benches, slumping and held upright by large pieces of wood. Two
middle aged woman and a man were going down the line, very
carefully applying makeup to the lifeless bodies of the new whores.
The process took a solid ten minutes per child, and then another
toothless, large man armed with a bone machete and a small knife
hefted the human dolls and took them to the neighboring room.

Aveline’s fingers twitched instinctively
with the need to hold a weapon. She glimpsed vast piles of clothing
in the second room. The armed man moved back and forth between the
rooms, carrying one at a time.

Her neck did not cooperate enough to let her
see directly into the adjacent room, so she shifted her attention
to the ceiling and returned to manipulating her free hands. The
first hand whose fingers moved before being pinned between her body
and that of someone else had regained feeling up to her elbow, her
other hand just past the wrist.

Her legs remained useless. Fortunately,
there were ten people ahead of her waiting to have their makeup
done, and the process was slow.

By the time only four bodies remained
between her and the next station, her arms were both free to the
shoulder. The brothel workers did not seem concerned with looking
after those who were paralyzed.

Aveline tested her arms. She tried to lift
her small frame off the floor. The awkward angle prevented her from
succeeding. She waited, thinking furiously of any way to leverage
her weight and what strength and mobility she possessed. Finally,
she reached out and gripped the arm of the person next to her with
her right hand and pulled herself towards him. With her left arm,
she shoved away from the floor.

With little grace and no control over the
rest of her body, she managed to maneuver onto her side. She rested
for a moment, cursing herself for putting her back to the people
she needed to keep an eye on. She gripped the arm of the boy once
more, this time with both her hands, and pulled.

She landed on her belly, half on top of him,
with her nose planted in his cheek. His eyes were wide and
terrified as he tried to look at her through his peripheral. As
much as she pitied those around her, her first priority was to
escape.

Aveline tugged the arm pinned beneath her
body free, braced both, then pushed her torso off the ground to
test her strength. Her arms were feeling almost back to normal, and
the sensation was spreading slowly through her shoulders and down
her back.

But not her legs. She blew out a breath in
frustration and lowered her body to the ground once more. Resting,
she was debating whether rolling out of the room was a valid option
when someone snatched her off the ground. It took every ounce of
control not to fight back, and she went limp as the thug in charge
of moving bodies dropped her onto the bench between another teen
girl and a log.

Aveline pretended she was numb and tried
once more to work on her stubborn legs. Too soon, her face was
covered in makeup and the man transferring her to the next station
on her journey to becoming a whore.

The clothing room contained only four
would-be whores at a time and a team of three dressing each. She
was placed on the ground. The three workers clothed her in a blue
dress with lace edging and then braided her hair and tied it into a
topknot. Aveline forced herself to ignore the person applying
lotion to her hands and painting her nails.

Another man picked her up when she was
deemed finished and carried her more carefully out of the dressing
room and down a hallway.

“Mixed girl goes there,” someone else
directed. “Someone already paid for her.”

Another dose of anger, mixed with
apprehension, tore through Aveline. She resisted the urge to fight
the man carrying her. She needed more time for her legs to
work.

The man deposited her into a cramped room
and on a bed that smelled of sweat and then bent over her to smooth
out her dress and arrange her body. A small window overhead
brightened up the space, and she calculated it was almost dawn.