Tarnished (15 page)

There was no turning back now.

The doors swung shut behind us with a
whoosh
, and we followed after the girl still clutching each other’s hands. Now that she wasn’t sitting behind the desk, I could see just how tall she was. She towered over us, balancing on high red heels that made her legs look like they went on forever. I’d been around men that were taller than her, but she made me feel smaller than I’d ever felt before, staring down at me impatiently as she waited for us to catch up. At the end of the hall, she opened the door to a small room and ushered us inside.

“You won’t be needing those dresses anymore,” she said, opening a small cabinet next to the door. She grabbed two white jumpers and shoved them into our hands. “Put these on. You can toss your old clothes in the bin in the corner.”

My head spun. This felt wrong. So wrong.

Maybe it was the feel of the fabric between my fingers, so familiar it made me weak. It was the same fabric that had covered my body for almost as long as I could remember.

Maybe it was the smell of bleach mixed with the flowery scent of soap. One whiff of that smell and a thousand memories washed over me. I felt the tepid water of our nightly baths, tasted the grainy oatmeal that they served us every morning at the narrow metal tables in the dining hall, heard the lonely squeak of my mattress as I curled up alone in my cot each night.

And even though I wanted to push it away, wanted to bury it deep underneath every other memory that I’d ever had, I saw the bright red door looming at the end of the hallway, waiting to swallow me.

“Did you hear what I said?” the girl asked, clearly annoyed.

I shook my head, trying to get my head to surface above so many memories.

She sighed. “Someone will be here shortly to check you in.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She didn’t bother with a good-bye, simply rolled her eyes and left, shutting us in the room alone.

Missy clutched the jumper, staring down at it with an expression that must have mirrored mine.

“I never thought I’d see one of these again,” she murmured. “God, when we’re done with this, I’m going to burn this thing.”

I imagined what it would be like to see one of these jumpers go up in flames. My arms and legs, which had felt weak and tingly, surged with a bit of new energy. “Come on, we need to get dressed. Or do you want them to send you straight through the red door?”

Her back straightened. “You know about the door? I…I thought maybe they only had one at the kennel where I was from,” she said in a breathy whisper. “I didn’t want to think about it, but…” She rubbed her hands over her eyes as if she was trying to wipe away the vision.

“I know,” I said, turning her around so that I could unzip her dress. “But it’s impossible, isn’t it?”

She let me pull off her gown and I wriggled the new jumper over her head.

“It’s just…I feel like a child again. Small and weak,” she said, shaking her head.

“It’s not just you,” I told her, slipping out of my gown. “That door was painted red for a reason. They didn’t want it to look like every other door. They wanted us to remember it. They wanted us to fear it, didn’t they?”

The door rattled and I quickly pulled the new jumper over my head and sat down next to Missy. The man who entered the room looked up from his clipboard. A skinny man in a long white coat followed behind him.

“Ah, there are two. Wonderful!” the thin man said. “Maybe we’ll have enough for the new trials.”

He didn’t bother to introduce himself. Just pulled me to my feet and began examining me, calling out notes for the other man to jot down as he looked into my eyes and ears. He pressed his fingers along my throat and ran a hand up my spine.

“Good. Good.” He couldn’t contain his smile. “Mark this one down for phase one. We’ll get started right away with the HGC injections,” he said before he moved on to Missy.

I lowered myself back down into the chair, trying to settle my shaking legs. I’d never been afraid of our yearly vaccinations, but this was different. Phase one? HGC? These weren’t phrases I’d ever heard before.

“This one looks to be a few years past her prime, but she’s strong. I think we’ll use her anyway.”

“The mortality rate is almost ninety percent in the first trimester for ones we’ve had at a comparable age,” the man with the clipboard said. “You sure you don’t want to move her to one of the other trials?”

“No. Leaver promised me two-dozen new subjects and she’s way behind this month. We have to make do with what we’ve got. It’ll still give us some useful data, regardless,” he said dismissively. “Move them to the dormitory and we’ll finish the paperwork in the morning.”

The man in the white coat nodded once, satisfied, and left without another word.

Alone with us, the man with the clipboard looked at his watch and sighed. “I don’t want to be here all night. Let’s get going.”

We left the room behind, padding barefoot down the tiled hall. I’d never spent any time in this part of the kennel. Growing up, I’d never dreamed that it was so expansive, but the building seemed to go on forever, a never-ending stretch of hallways. Most of the doors were closed, but every once in a while we passed an open office or supply room.

I glanced over at Missy, hoping that between the two of us, we might be able to plot out at least a general map of the building. Getting hopelessly lost while searching for what we needed wasn’t going to help our plan.

We took one final turn and the hallway ended at a large metal door that separated this wing of the building. The man with the clipboard lifted a small hatch on the wall beside the door, revealing a keypad, and I stood up ever so slightly on my tiptoes, trying to peer past his shoulder without seeming too obvious. Fortunately, he didn’t even bother to check whether we were spying before he typed in his code. The lock clicked and released with a small puff of air.

The hallway we entered looked exactly like I remembered. It couldn’t have been one of the ones from my childhood. There were no little girls here. But it didn’t matter. It was an exact duplicate. To the right, we passed the empty bathing room where dozens of wide basins sat empty. They looked exactly as I remembered. Even the bottles of shampoo that rested on the porcelain edge looked as if they’d been plucked directly out of my memory.

We passed the empty dining hall and turned left into what I had expected would be another hallway lined with doors leading into the small bedroom units, but instead, we came to another door. The man with the clipboard pushed it open and Missy and I froze behind him.

The room that we’d just entered was gigantic. Instead of a couple dozen individual rooms it was one giant dorm, lined with cots and interspersed with medical equipment. In the beds nearest to us, a dozen girls—
pets
—lay staring up at the ceiling, their eyes empty, their faces slack. Long, clear tubes stretched from their arms to the machines sitting next to them. Beyond them, several girls reclined in their beds, looking just as ashen, but slightly more alert.

Missy clutched the back of my jumper. “What the hell,” she hissed in my ear.

Zombies
, I thought, remembering Ruby’s fairytales.

But these girls weren’t zombies. And we certainly weren’t in a fairytale.

Forget the cryptic phone calls that Penn had overheard, forget any of the hints or hunches. I’d expected NuPet was up to something, but we never could have imagined…whatever
this
was.

The door clicked shut behind us.

Next to us, a machine beeped and the girl attached to it grimaced, clutching her stomach.

“Don’t stop there,” the man with the clipboard said, motioning for us to follow him, but neither of us budged.

Across the room, an attendant waved him over and he shook his head, giving up on us. He handed over our papers, motioning in our direction as he spoke. Another attendant scooted past us, pushing a red button on the machine. The beeping stopped, but the girl’s grimace didn’t fade.

Missy grabbed my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Just stay calm.”

“If they hook us up to one of those things, we’re never getting out.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke, instead, her eyes were trained on the four square pieces of rubber that were suction cupped to the girl’s stomach out of which a tangle of wires connected to the machine.

When I looked back up for the man with the clipboard, he was disappearing behind a curtain that ran the length of the room. The attendant he’d been speaking to strode over to us, taking us in head to toe in one long glance.

“All right, let’s get you two situated,” he said, leading us down the row of beds toward some empty cots. “Someone will be down shortly to take your vitals.”

Missy and I eased down on the edge of the beds facing each other, barely scooting back enough to wrinkle the stiff, white sheets. Across the aisle, the reclining girls stared at us.

I raised one hand in an awkward wave. “Hi, I’m Ella.”

The girls frowned, shaking their heads ever so slightly.

“What’s the matter with them?” Missy whispered. “Do you think they can talk?”

From behind me came a weak, “Shhh.”

I turned around. Unlike some of the girls across from us, her skin looked like it still had a little bit of color and her eyes weren’t framed with dark circles. Other than the plastic tube that ran from her arm to a container of clear liquid that dangled on a metal rod next to her bed, she looked normal. Almost exactly the way I remembered her.

“Carlie?”

She lay curled on her side. The sound of her name made her grimace and she glanced back at the attendant who was digging through a drawer on the other side of the room before she turned back to me.

“They don’t like us to speak to one another,” she whispered. “And don’t let them catch you using names. You’ll be reassigned a number. If you have to speak, use that.”

I nodded. “Why don’t they—” I started to say, but her eyes widened and I turned around to see the attendant wheeling a cart in our direction.

“What?” Missy hissed on the other side of me. “Did she just say that we weren’t going to be able—”

“Quiet,” the attendant snapped, stopping his cart at the end of the beds. “Unless you’d like to have your vocal cords numbed, I’d suggest keeping your speaking to a minimum. This is a room of science, not socializing. As you’ll soon find out, your bodies will need to reserve every ounce of strength for much more important tasks than talking.”

He pulled out a marker and grabbed a whiteboard off of the end of the bed, scribbling a large number twenty-two in the middle of it. Missy’s bed was next. Twenty-three.

“These are your new numbers. Remember them,” he said.

So that was it. With a quick swipe of his marker he’d erased our names, and with them, he’d taken the one bit of humanity that our masters had given to us.

A cold chill spread over my limbs as the attendant moved briskly between Missy and me, taking our temperature and measuring our blood pressure. I recognized the way he looked at me, like I was a chore that needed to be completed.

He hummed quietly to himself as he moved down our charts, checking boxes and scribbling numbers in the columns. Finally, he opened a small plastic container and pulled out two syringes. He grabbed my arm, pulling me closer to him and a whiff of garlic on his breath made my stomach turn. I twisted away, but he only clamped his hand harder around my upper arm.

“Wait! What is that?” I asked.

He frowned. “It’s none of your concern.”

“But the man before…the one with the white coat… He said to start the injections tomorrow. I don’t think you’re supposed to—”

He yanked my arm and I winced from the pain.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

“At least tell me what you’re doing.”

“I’m trying to do my
job
,” he grumbled. “Now, stop moving.” He jerked my arm forward and jabbed in the needle, releasing the fluid with a quick press of his thumb. “You’re not someone’s pet anymore. You belong to the kennel now and if they want to poke you with needles all day, that’s what’s going to happen.”

He pulled out the needle, but the spot felt cold, the chill spreading down my arm like ice water.

My head spun.

Was this what had caused the numbed look in all the girls’ eyes? Or were they simply filled with a flood of panic so overwhelming it smothered them?

I tried to steady my breathing but it felt like a heavy weight was being lowered down on my rib cage. It was crushing, not just the heaviness in my chest, but the fear, the feeling that I was trapped again. Caged. And this time, I wasn’t getting out. Missy was right. This was a mistake.

I opened my mouth to talk, but my lips only trembled, useless.

I thought I would be smart enough to get away. I thought I could outwit them, but I’d only been inside their walls for an hour and already they had won.

For a moment I had the audacity to dream that I had any control over my own life, my own body, my own future. But that had been a reckless hope. Foolish. How many times would I make that same mistake?

The cage doors clanged shut.

“Ell…a?” Missy’s voice. Slurred, but familiar.

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t do anything but droop across the bed while the room grew dark around the edges until only a pinprick of light remained.

Chapter Fifteen

W
hen I next opened my eyes, the room was dark, except for a few lights that glowed underneath a stretch of cabinets on the far side of the room, lighting the rows of doctor’s tools, neatly packaged and stacked on shelves.

My head still felt strange, foggy and loose, like it might float off my head and up onto the ceiling tiles like one of Ruby’s balloons. I sat up, holding my forehead to keep it from flying away.

Next to me Missy groaned, opening her eyes.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

“I wouldn’t get up.” In the dark, I could just make out Carlie’s face. She lifted her head from her pillow. “They’ll be upset if they find out. They’ll punish you.”

“Who will?” I whispered.

“The orderlies,” she said. Slowly she propped herself up on one elbow and glanced cautiously around the room.

“Where are they?”

“There’s an office down the hall,” she said.

“Will they be coming back soon?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. If someone presses their button.”

I shuffled around the bed and knelt down in front of her. “You have to help me.” I rubbed my arm. It was sore, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the injection or from the attendant’s rough grip. “What’s that stuff they gave me?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. They gave it to us all when we got here.”

“Have you heard any of the doctors say anything about it?”

She shook her head again.

“Do you have any idea what they’re doing here?” I asked. “What are these tubes? Are they drugs?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t even remember what’s happening half the time.”

“What about these other girls?” I asked. “Some of them have been here longer than you. They must know.”

She shrugged. “They won’t speak. It’s too dangerous.”

“Why?”

“I shouldn’t be talking either,” she said.

“Why? Please, Carlie, you’ve got to help me.”

She gave her head another small shake before she lay back down, closing her eyes.

“No, you don’t know? Or no, you won’t tell me?” I asked, but she didn’t move. “Please.” I shook her gently.

“I can’t…” she whispered, keeping her eyes shut tight.

I tried one last time. “Please. I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I’m trying to help.”

Her lips barely moved. “Be careful,” she whispered.

I scanned the room full of small bodies and medical equipment. It was clear that the girls weren’t going to be much help, but there were cabinets everywhere, just begging to be explored. My heart quickened.

The tiles were cold against my feet, but the shock of them made my head feel a little bit clearer. I knew how to do this. I didn’t make a sound as I made my way over to the small cart full of medical supplies.

A month ago, I might have gone for the row of cabinets, hoping that they’d hold something big I could use to protect myself: a knife or a stun gun. But that would have been a mistake. It was the little things that I could hide inside a fist or a pocket that I needed.

A month ago, my hands would have shaken as I lifted the lid to the case full of needles. I would have held my breath the way I had the first few times I’d taken things. But I knew better now. I let the breath go, breathing out the way I did right before I played the piano. My hands moved slowly, steadily, plucking one of the glass syringes off the top of the stack without a sound.

I tucked it in my pocket and plucked one more off the pile. It was small, but I’d seen the power in that bit of clear liquid; could still feel the remnants of it in the corners of my mind.

Behind me, Missy moaned again, clutching her head.

I shuffled back over to our beds, trying not to move too quickly. “Come on,” I said, shaking her. “You have to get up.”

“My head hurts,” she mumbled.

I lowered myself down on the edge of her bed and she blinked up at me. “What’s going on, Ella?” she said. “This isn’t what I expected. I never would have come.” She shook her head, her eyes traveling around the room.

“I know we thought we’d have time to figure things out,” I said, “but we need to find something now. I don’t know what they’re doing to these girls, but it’s something scary.”

She nodded, propping herself up on her elbow. “Did you hear that?” she asked, glancing toward the curtain that ran down the center of the room.

I shook my head.

“There’s something back there,” she whispered.

I froze, waiting to hear the sound of footsteps or the gruff voice of one of the attendants ordering me back to bed, but it wasn’t that. Now that she pointed it out, I could hear it too, a humming sound like someone was speaking just below the buzz of all those machines.

“You don’t think there’s more of them?” I asked, looking back toward the girls sleeping in the rows of beds beside me.

If there were more, I didn’t want to know what the doctors had done to them. Why would they put up a curtain to separate us? My stomach twisted at the thought. They must be so much worse than these girls if they were being kept hidden.

I tugged on Missy’s hand. “We need to look.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. “This is getting bad. It’s way worse than I expected.”

“The sooner we find out what’s going on here, the sooner we get out, okay?”

That was all I wanted. To get out. My body screamed for me to run. There was an exit somewhere nearby, there had to be. And not too far down that road, Penn was waiting for me. If I left now, I knew I could get to him. But if we stayed much longer…

She nodded. “All right.”

I glanced back toward the other girls, hoping that they were sleeping soundly. But even without looking, I sensed that Carlie was watching. She blinked once and her eyes bore into me. Was it a warning? Was it a plea for help? How was I supposed to know if she refused to tell me anything?

I wanted to trust that she was still good, that she was still the person who had seen fierceness in me. But the spark had drained from her. There was something wrong with these girls. Something terrifying. Seeing their bodies tethered to these beds was bad enough, but the look in their eyes was even scarier. Empty. Broken. What if one of them pushed the call button and summoned an attendant? If they caught us out of bed I was pretty sure we’d end up with another shot in the arm and next time, I was afraid it would be days before we’d wake up.

When I turned back around, Missy was already standing in front of the curtain. Her hand tightened around the fabric as she pulled it back, peering into the next room.

“Ella,” she whispered. “Ella, come here.”

I took a deep breath, steeling myself, and peered over her shoulder, ready to see the haunted eyes of a hundred ruined girls staring back at me, but the room was merely an extension of the one that we were standing in, identical in almost every way. The rows of beds continued. I squinted, trying to make out what was so different about the bodies in these beds.

A few rows down someone stirred, moaning softly.

Missy pulled the curtain back a little further and I moved past her, stepping into the room, amazed that my legs agreed to carry me. Missy followed closely behind.

“Hello?” I whispered.

“It’s one of them,” the girl said. “Should I call someone?”

“No, please.” I crossed the distance between us in a few hurried steps. “Don’t press any buttons. Please. We’re only…” I stopped mid-sentence.

The girl’s face… It was different, not deformed, but certainly not the face of any pet I’d ever seen before. Her eyes, which had gone wide, were set a little too close together on her face, making everything about her seem a little bit pinched. Her nose was broad and turned up on the end. Even in the pale light I could tell that her skin was pocked along her jawline.

Nothing about her looked like the streamlined perfection of a Greenwich girl, or any other pet for that matter.

She looked…normal.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Her thin lips turned down in a frown and she brought her hand to her stomach.

I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it before, but now my eyes traveled down to the huge bulge beneath the blanket.

“That’s… You’re
pregnant
.” The kennel and training center had gone out of their way to keep us from understanding what could happen to a human body, but
I
knew.

She turned to the other girl, confused. “What should we do? They said—”

“Don’t look at me,” the other girl said, pulling the covers up to her chin and turning away from us all so I hardly even caught a glimpse of her. “I’m not messing with no one no more. Those doctors are wack. I don’t want to end up like the rest of them, all drugged out.” She shut her eyes, still shaking her head back and forth.

The girl with the pocked skin turned back to us. “You know you’re not supposed to be over here, right?” she asked. “You could get in serious trouble. You could get
us
in trouble, too. When I got here there was one of you that came over here a couple times. She knew about babies and stuff, even though I didn’t think…oh, never mind. She kept asking all these questions about what it felt like when the baby moved. She was kind of obsessed with it, but I think they…” Her voice trailed off and she drew her finger across her neck. “But, I mean, I could be wrong.”

“We know we shouldn’t be here,” Missy said, folding her arms over her chest as she stepped a little closer to the girl’s bedside. “We shouldn’t be in this horrible place at all. Nobody should. Something majorly messed up is happening. And you…you…” She pointed her finger at the girl.

She scooted back in her bed, clearly afraid.

I stepped sideways in front of Missy, trying to push her back with my body. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that none of this makes any sense. We just want to understand.”

“Well, I’m not the one who should be telling you anything.”

“Please,” I said. “We don’t want to get you in trouble, but it’s really important.” Tentatively, I lowered myself down onto the edge of her bed. “At least tell me who you are?”

She sighed and glanced at the rounded back of the girl she’d been talking to before we came in as if she wanted permission to speak to us. But the girl didn’t budge. Her shoulders rose and fell ever so slightly with each breath, but that was all.

“Not here,” she finally answered.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and held her lower back as she eased herself from the bed. Her stomach had looked large before, but now that she was standing it seemed impossibly big. She wore a white jumper very similar to the one that Missy and I wore, but it was so much larger. It had to be to accommodate a stomach that huge.

She glanced down at herself and then back at us. “Well, I guess we don’t need to ask who wore it best.” She snorted softly, looking at me and Missy like she’d just told a joke. “Get it? Like in the magazines.” When we didn’t respond she rolled her eyes. “Oh never mind.” She waved the comment away with a flap of her wrist and shuffled off down the aisle between the beds, waddling a little as she walked.

Missy looked just as confused as me, but we scampered after her anyway.

She surveyed the girls as she walked, stopping every few steps to make sure they were really asleep. “I’m not worried about most of them,” she whispered. “But believe me, there are a couple in here you don’t want watching you. Some of these bitches think they’re all high and mighty. They’ve been in here three, four times some of ’em.”

“What do you mean, three or four times?”

She shook her head and waved away my question, bringing her finger to her lips before she pointed to the door. Slowly, she cracked it open and stepped out into the hallway.

“They’d probably put me in the lockup if they knew that I left my bed like this at night, but sometimes I’ve just gotta get out of there,” she whispered once we’d closed the door behind us. “I had an older brother growing up, but he was five years older than me, so I might as well have been an only child.”

She glanced up and down the hall, deciding which way to go.

“There’s a supply closet that I go sit in sometimes. Pathetic, huh?”

“I get it,” Missy said, following close behind her. “Sometimes I used to hide in the laundry room because no one went in there. I’d listen to people calling for me and I’d just sit on the washing machine and sniff the dryer sheets because I liked the way they smelled.”

The girl paused in front of a door and turned around to look at us like she was seeing us for the first time. “That’s messed up,” she said.

Missy shrugged. “Probably.”

“I mean, I get that, about the dryer sheets. Those things smell good. But they’re expensive. We just always had clothes that stuck together.” She narrowed her eyes, studying us. “I’m Riley, by the way. It’s funny, ’cause I’ve been here almost two full-terms and I’ve never actually introduced myself to one of you.”

I held my hand out. “I’m Ella.”

Her hand was large in mine. The palm was rough but warm and she pumped it up and down in a sturdy shake.

“I guess I just always assumed you all were too snobby and stuck up to talk to us. Like, you should be grateful to us, for this I mean,” she said, pointing to her stomach. “But then again, I know we’re not in the same class of people or anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “But you’ve lost me. Can you just back up a little bit?”

She glanced nervously down the hallway before she opened the door to a small room lined with bottles of cleaning fluid and containers of paper towels and ushered us inside.

“Here, you all can sit on these,” she offered, flipping some crates upside down.

“You sit,” Missy said, eyeing the way she held her lower back.

Riley smiled. “Fine. You talked me into it.” She lowered herself down and sighed. “This is weird. This whole
thing
is weird, you know?”

“Actually, we don’t know,” I said.

“But you grew up here, right?” she asked. “I mean, they said this was where they raise the pets before they send them off to get trained.”