Fever (8 page)

Lilac slips into the tent, sorting through a wad of dollar bills. “Ten, Madame,” she says. “The rest complained they couldn’t see through the slit.”

Horrified, I hear male voices grumbling their disappointment on the other side of the tent. Amid a curtain of beads I can see a deliberate slit in the tent. I swallow a scream, cover myself by hugging a pink silk pillow to my chest.

Gabriel’s jaw tenses, and I put my hand on his knee, hoping it will quiet him. Whatever Madame was planning, we must play along.

“Aphrodisiacs are quite potent, aren’t they?” Madame says, reaching into a lantern and snuffing the flame with her finger and thumb. “Yes, you put on quite a show.” She’s looking at me when she adds, “Men will pay great money to see what they can’t touch.”

T
HE
L
OVEBIRDS,
she calls us.
LES TOURTEREAUX
is painted in red cursive on a broken plank from an old fence. She is building a cage from bits of rusted wire and coat hangers. She has Gabriel bend the lengths of wire into curves and paint them with a coating I’ve spent the morning mixing from gold eye shadow, water, and paste. The girls are not happy to forfeit their gold makeup. They shove me as they pass; their lifeless eyes bore into me; they mutter words I can’t hear, spitting on the ground.

“They’re jealous,” Lilac says, a pin in her lips as she sews ruffles onto a white shirt. “New blood and whatnot.”

We’re huddled in the red tent, and I’m dunking gray feathers onto a galvanized bucket of blue dye and then fastening them with clothespins to a makeshift clothesline to dry. I wonder what type of bird had to die for this cause. A pigeon or seagull, I’d guess.

The dye stains my fingers, lands in fat drops on the threadbare oversize shirt that makes up my entire outfit. Madame will not have dye spilling onto her good clothes.

“No, no, no!” Madame cries, bursting into the tent and shaking all its walls. “You’re making a mess of those feathers, girl.”

“I told you I didn’t know what I was doing,” I mumble.

“No matter.” Madame grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet. “I wanted to speak to you anyway. Lilac will finish your gown.”

Lilac mutters something I can’t hear, and Madame kicks a clod of dirt at her, making her cough onto the ruffled shirt.

“There’s a washbasin and a dress laid out for you in the green tent,” Madame says. “Make yourself presentable and meet me by the wheel.”

With effort I’m able to scrub most of the dye from my fingers. Some of it is trapped along my cuticles, outlining my nails in blue, making my hands look like sketches of themselves.

When I meet up with Madame, the Ferris wheel is slowly turning. “The gears have to warm up in this chill,” Madame says, wrapping a knitted shawl around my shoulders. “But we have things to discuss,” she goes on. “Things that would be overheard on the ground.”

Jared pulls a lever, and the wheel comes to a stop with a car waiting for us.

Madame ushers me ahead and then climbs in after me. The car rocks and creaks as we ascend.

“You have remarkable shoulder blades,” Madame says. I can’t tell what type of accent she’s trying for today. “And your back shows just the right amount of spine. Not too knotted. Subtle.”

“You were watching me change,” I say. It’s not a question.

She doesn’t bother denying it. “I need to know what I’m selling.”

“What
are
you selling?” I say, daring to look away from my clenched fist and at her smoke-shrouded face. Embers flit on the wind, and I feel their tiny pinches on my bare knee. Up high, away from the device Jared uses to warm the earth, it’s blustery cold. My nose is starting to drip. I hug the shawl around my shoulders.

“I’ve told you,” she says. “An illusion.”

She smiles, her eyes dark and faraway as she traces her finger down the slope of my cheek. Her voice is low and sweet. “Soon you’ll crumple into yourself. The flesh will melt from your bones. You’ll scream and cry until it’s done. You have less than a handful of years.”

I ignore the imagery. It is easiest to overlook the truth sometimes.

“Will you charge admission for that?” I say.

“No,” she sighs, and tosses her spent cigarette over the edge. She looks small and incomplete without it. “I intend to make my customers forget these ugly things. No one will look at you and think about your expiration date. They will see youth stretching out like a canyon.”

I can’t help it. I look down. Most of the girls are sleeping through the day, but a few of them are up and about, bossing the children, tending the weedy gardens, flaunting themselves before the bodyguards for a bit of attention. Anything they can do to feel that they’re alive. All of them hating me for being so high over their heads.

“You’ll put on a good show for me, won’t you?” Madame says. “There is only one rule. You and your boy must behave as if you are alone. My customers will not want to be seen. They are not behind the walls but are the walls themselves.”

The idea of performing for “the walls” gives me no comfort. But I only need to play along until I find an escape, and there are worse things than being trapped in a makeshift birdcage with Gabriel, pretending we’re alone. Right? My throat feels dry and swollen.

Madame reaches into the infinite bright scarves draped over her chest and pulls out a small silver compact. She opens it, revealing a single pink pill.

I eye it warily.

“It’s to prevent pregnancy,” she says. “There are lots of fake pills going around since the birth control ban, but I have a reliable seller. Manufactures them himself.”

As though to mock us, a child screeches as one of the Reds drags her past the Ferris wheel by the hair.

“I can’t waste them on all my girls, of course,” Madame says. “Only the useful ones. I shudder to think what other horrors would fall from Lilac’s womb if I let her reproduce again.”

Lilac. Cynical and lovely and intelligent. She’s a good mother, I think. As good as one can be in this place, and to a child like Maddie. But she hides this fact when the customers come in the evenings. She is one of the most sought after, and only offered to men who pay the highest price—first generations with the best-paying jobs, mostly. Madame told me this with pride. And yet, Lilac has not had a child since Maddie. I suppose the pink pill could be to thank for that.

Still, I don’t want to take it. How can I trust anything in this place? Even the scents in the air can make me behave strangely.

Madame forces it into my mouth. “Swallow,” she says, her sharp painted fingernail gagging the back of my throat. I struggle and jerk my head back, and the pill has been swallowed before I can register what’s just happened. It hurts going down.

Madame cackles at my sour expression. “You’ll thank me later,” she says, and wraps her arm around my shoulder. “Look.” Her murmur tickles my ear. “Look how the clouds have braided, like a little girl’s hair.”

The cold and the smoke and the pill have all caused tears to well in my eyes, and when I finally blink them away, the clouds have begun taking on a different shape entirely. But the wistfulness on Madame’s face remains.
Braided, like a little girl’s hair.
I think she misses her dead daughter more than she cares to admit. I take bizarre comfort in this. The pain proves she is human after all.

The loose dirt is warm under my bare feet, humming with the life of Jared’s machine. I’m loathe to admit that it feels inviting; my mind keeps going into a daydream about lying in it and falling asleep.

Gabriel and I are trying to force the spikes of our giant cage into the dirt. A few yards away Jared and a few of the bodyguards are setting spikes into the ground, preparing to raise a tent around it for tonight’s show.

It’s the first chance Gabriel and I have had to be alone all day, and even still, the guards are close enough to overhear our words at any given time. But I catch his glances at me, his chapped lips pushed together like there’s something he wants to say.

“Here,” I say, pressing myself against his back and reaching around him, helping him force a bar into the ground. “What is it?” I whisper.

“We’re really going through with it, then?” he whispers back. “This show?”

I move on to the next bar, forcing it down. “I don’t see how we have a choice.”

“I thought we might try to run for it,” he says. “But there’s a fence.”

“There’s something off about it,” I say. “Haven’t you noticed the noise it makes? Like it’s buzzing?”

“I thought that noise was coming from the incinerator,” he says. “It couldn’t hurt to check it out.”

I shake my head. “If anyone saw us, we’d be trapped.”

“Then, we’ll have to be sure nobody is watching.”

“Someone is always watching.”

I steal a glance at Jared, who has been watching me but now looks away.

“I think we can stop now,” I say, dusting the shimmering gold residue from my palms. “This cage is as rooted as it’s going to get.”

LES TOURTEREAUX
. The sign, elegant in its crudeness, has been posted outside of the new peach-colored tent.

We’re standing beside our cage while reluctant girls light incense and lanterns around us, making our shadows dance. Madame wanted a yellow tent originally, but decided the peach tarp would be most flattering on our skin. She says I’m as pale as death. Gabriel has just whispered something, but through all this smoke and my heart pounding in my ears, I didn’t catch it. He’s wearing the ruffled shirt Lilac spent the afternoon sewing. I am positively covered in feathers; they’re in my hair, and arranged like giant angel wings at my back. The dye hasn’t quite set, and watery streaks of color stain my arms.

He takes my face in his hands. “We still could run,” he whispers.

I find that my arms are trembling. I shake my head. At this moment I’d like nothing more than to run, but we’d only be brought back. Madame, in her fairyland of opiates, would accuse Gabriel of being a spy and have him killed. And who knows what she’d do to me. It’s to my advantage that I look like her dead daughter. It makes her like me in a way that’s unfair to the other girls. I can feel a tentative trust growing between us. If I can build on that trust, maybe it will grant me more freedom. It worked with Linden, but I’m not quite as hopeful here. Lilac is Madame’s most trusted girl. She’s trusted with the money, with the training, with the oversight of dresses and performances. But I’ve never seen Lilac any closer to freedom than the rest of them.

Still, it can’t work against me to be on Madame’s good side.

“Just kiss me,” I say, raising the latch of our cage and backing in.

E
XHAUSTED,
I slide under the blankets in our green tent. The air is not so smoky here, though I’ve grown used to the constant haze of Madame’s opiates and all the perfumes worn by the girls.

Gabriel sits beside me, freeing the dyed feathers clipped around my hair like a crown. He stacks them neatly in the dirt and stares at them.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. It’s late. When we left our cage, I saw the periwinkle sky giving way to dawn.

“Those men were staring at you,” he says.

I push the thought away. I didn’t let myself look outside of my cage. Rather than the rustles and the murmurs, I focused on the brass music playing in the distance. After a while it all blurred together. There were scarves hanging on the bars, brushing our skin. Gabriel kissed me, and I parted my lips, closed my eyes. It felt like one short, murky dream. Several times he whispered for me to wake up, and I opened my eyes to see the dark concern in his. I remember saying,
It’s okay
.

The words come out of me now. “It’s okay.” A mantra.

“Rhine,” he whispers, “I don’t like anything about this.”

“Shh,” I say. My eyelids are too heavy. “Just lie down beside me for a while.”

He doesn’t. I feel a light pressure on my back, and I realize he’s unpinning the feathers from my dress, one by one.

Days flutter by, in purples and greens and crumbling golds, spilling from the gilded bars like empires collapsing. And all around me is blackness. I am in a kind of tunnel, sleepwalking through the time between sleep and performances.