Wither (4 page)

This is my story. These things are my past, and I will not allow them to be washed away. I will find a way to have them back.

“She has such agreeable hair,” one of the women says, scooping warm cupful after cupful of frothy water over my head. “Such a lovely color, too. I wonder if it’s natural.” Of course it’s natural. What else would it be?

“I bet that’s what the Governor liked about her.”

“Let me see,” says the other woman, cupping my chin and tilting it. She studies my face and then gasps, letting her hand flutter spasmodically against her heart. “Oh, Helen, look at this girl’s eyes!”

They both stop bathing me long enough to look at me. Really look at me, for the first time.

My eyes are usually the first thing people notice, the left eye blue and the right eye brown, just like my brother. Heterochromia; my parents were geneticists, and that was the name they gave my condition. I might have asked them more about it when I grew older, if I’d had the chance. I had always thought the heterochromia was a useless genetic glitch, but if the women are right and my eyes are what the Governor noticed, heterochromia has saved my life.

“Suppose those are real?” one woman asks.

“What else would they be but real?” This time I speak aloud, and they’re startled, then delighted. Their doll has a voice. And suddenly they’re all questions. Where am I from, do I know where I am, don’t I just love the view, do I like horses—there’s a lovely stable—do I prefer my hair up or down?

I answer none of these. I will share nothing with these strangers—however well intentioned they may be—who are a part of this place. The questions come so fast that I wouldn’t know where to begin anyway, and then there’s a soft knock at the door.

“We’re getting her ready for the Governor,” one of the women says.

The muffled voice on the other side of the door is soft, gentle, and young. “Lady Rose would like to speak to her right this moment, please.”

“We’re only half done bathing her! And her nails—”

“Excuse me,” the voice on the other side of the door says, patiently, “I have a direct order to bring her now, whatever condition she may be in.”

Lady Rose is apparently someone who has the final say in things, because suddenly the women are tugging me to my feet, patting me dry with a pink towel, brushing my wet hair, and slipping me into a robe that feels like waves of silk against my skin. Whatever was in that bathwater has heightened my neurons, left me feeling unpeeled and exposed. I still feel as though bubbles are popping against my skin.

When the door opens, I see that the voice belongs to a little girl, barely half my height. She is dressed like the older women, though, in the feminine version of the white blouse Gabriel wore, with a tiered black skirt, where Gabriel had worn black pants. Her hair is braided into a circle around her head, and her cheeks bloom into apple shapes when she smiles at me. “You’re Rhine?”

I nod. “I’m Deirdre,” she says, and puts her hand in mine. It is cool and soft. “It’s just this way,” she says, and leads me out of my room and along the hallway down which I made my brief escape yesterday.

“Now,” the girl says, nodding seriously, her eyes focusing ahead. “Just speak if spoken to; she doesn’t like questions, so you’d do best not to ask any; refer to her as Lady Rose; there’s a button above her night table, a white one—press it if she becomes ill. She’s in charge of things. The House Governor will do anything she asks, so be sure to stay on her good side.”

We stop before the door, and Deirdre reties the belt of my robe into a perfect bow. She knocks on the semi-open door and says, “Lady Rose? I brought her like you said.”

“Well, then, let her in,” Rose snaps. “And go make yourself useful somewhere else.”

As she turns to leave, Deirdre clasps both of her hands around one of mine. Her eyes are round as moons. “And please,” she whispers, “try to avoid the topic of death.”

When she’s gone, I push the door open and step only as far as the threshold. From here I can smell the medications Rose complained of yesterday. I see the assortment of lotions, pills, and bottles on her nightstand.

She’s sitting up today, in a satin-upholstered divan by the window. Her blond hair is tangled in sunlight, and her skin appears to be less sallow. There’s color in her cheeks, and at first I think she’s feeling better, but when she beckons me closer, I can see the unusual almost neon pink of her cheeks, and I know it must be cosmetics. I know the red of her lips must not be real either. What are real are her eyes, incredibly brown things that stare at me with intensity, with youth. I try to imagine a world of natural humans, when twenty
was
youthful, when it was years from a death sentence.

Natural humans used to live for at least eighty years, my mother told me. Sometimes a hundred. I hadn’t believed her.

Now I can see what she meant. Rose is the first twenty-year-old I’ve spoken to at length, and though she’s stifling a cough that sprays blood into her fist, her skin is still smooth and soft. Her face is still full of light.

She doesn’t look very different from, or very much older than, me.

“Sit,” she tells me. I find a chair across from her.

There are wrappers all over the floor around her, and a bowl on her divan filled with candies. When she speaks, I can see that her tongue is bright blue. She fiddles with another candy in her long fingers, bringing it close to her face, almost looking like she’ll kiss it. Instead she lets it fall back into the bowl.

“Where are you from?” she asks. Her voice has none of the peevishness she showed Deirdre at the door. Her thick eyelashes flutter up. She watches an insect spiral around her and disappear.

I don’t want to tell her where I’m from. I’m supposed to sit here and be polite, but how can I? How can I when I’m made to sit and watch her die so I can be given to her husband and forced to bear children I never wanted?

So I say, “Where were you from when they took you?”

I’m not supposed to ask her questions, and as soon as I’ve asked it, I realize I have stepped on a land mine.

She’ll be screaming for Deirdre or her husband, the House Governor, to take me away. Lock me in a dungeon for the next four years.

To my surprise she only says, “I was born in this state. This town, in fact.” She reaches up behind her, takes a picture from the wall, and holds it out for me. I lean in to get a look.

The photo is of a young girl standing beside a horse.

She’s holding the reins, and her smile is so bright that her teeth dominate her face. Her eyes are nearly closed with all the delight of it. Beside her, a much taller boy stands with his hands behind his back. His smile is more controlled, shy, as though he hadn’t meant to smile but couldn’t help himself in the moment.

“This was me,” Rose says of the girl in the photo.

Then she traces her finger over the boy’s outline. “This is my Linden.” For a moment she seems lost in the sight of him. A little smile comes to her painted lips. “We grew up together.”

I’m not sure what to say to this. She is so lost in this memory, and so blind to my imprisonment. But still I feel sorry for her. In another time, under different circumstances, she would not have needed to be replaced.

“See?” she says, still pointing to the photo. “This is in the orange grove. My father owned acres of them. Here in Florida.”

Florida. My heart sinks. I’m in Florida, on the bottom of the East Coast, more miles from home than I can count. I miss my ivy-silhouetted house. I miss the distant commuter trains. How will I ever find my way back to them?

“They’re lovely,” I say of the oranges. Because it’s true, they are lovely. Things seem to thrive in this place.

I would never have suspected that the vibrant girl standing beside her horse in the grove could be dying now.

“Aren’t they?” she says. “Linden prefers flowers, though. There are orange blossom festivals in the spring. That’s his favorite. In the winter there are snow festivals, and solstice dances—but he doesn’t like those. Too loud.”

She unwraps a green candy and pops it into her mouth.

She closes her eyes for a moment, apparently savoring the floor. The candies are each a different color, and this one, the green, has a peppermint smell that takes me back to my childhood. I think of the little girl who would throw her candies into my bedroom, how their smell would fill the paper cup into which I’d respond to her voice.

When Rose speaks again, her tongue has taken on the emerald color of the candy. “But he’s an excellent dancer. I don’t know why he’s such a wallflower.”

She sets the picture on the divan in a sea of wrappers.

I can’t decide what to make of this woman, who is weary and so sad, and who snapped at Deirdre but is treating me like a friend. My curiosity quells my bitterness for the moment. I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

“Do you know how old Linden is?” she asks me. I shake my head. “He’s twenty-one. We’d planned to marry since we were children, and I suppose he thought all these medicines would keep me alive for four extra years.

His father is a very prominent doctor—first generation.

Toiling away at finding an antidote.” She says that last bit fancifully, letting her fingers flutter in the air. She does not think an antidote is possible. Many do, though.

Where I come from, hordes of new orphans will file into laboratories, offering themselves up to be guinea pigs for a few extra dollars. But an antidote never arrives, and a thorough analysis of our gene pool turns up no abnormalities to explain this fatal virus.

“But you,” Rose says. “Sixteen is perfect. You can spend the rest of your lives together. He won’t have to be alone.”

I feel the room go cold. Outside there are things buzzing and chirping in the infinite garden, but they are a million miles from me. I had almost, for just a moment, forgotten why I’m here. Forgotten how I arrived. This beautiful place is dangerous, like milky white oleanders.

The thriving garden is meant to keep me inside.

Linden stole his brides so he wouldn’t have to die alone. What about my brother, alone in that empty house? What about the other girls who were shot to death in that van?

My anger is back. My fists clench, and I wish someone would come to take me out of this room, even if it means being imprisoned somewhere else in this house.

I cannot bear another moment in Rose’s presence. Rose with her open window. Rose who has mounted a horse and ridden beyond the orange groves. Rose who intends to pass her death sentence on to me once she’s gone.

My wish comes true, to make matters worse. Deirdre returns and says, “Excuse me, Lady Rose, the doctor is here to prepare her for Governor Linden.”

I’m led down the hall again, and into an elevator that requires a key card in order to work. Deirdre stands beside me, looking rigid and worried. “You’ll meet Housemaster Vaughn tonight,” she whispers. The blood has drained from her face, and she looks at me in a way that reminds me she’s just a child. Her lips purse in—what? Sympathy? Fear? I don’t know, because the elevator doors open and she returns to herself, guiding me down another, darker hallway that smells of antiseptic, and through another door.

I wonder if she has any advice for me this time, but she’s not even given the chance to speak before a man says, “Which one is this?”

“Rhine, sir,” Deirdre says, not raising her eyes. “The sixteen-year-old.”

I wonder, briefly, if this man is the Housemaster or the Governor who’s to be my husband, but I don’t have the chance to even look at him before there’s a stinging pain in my arm. I have only time to process what I’m seeing: a sterile, windowless room. A bed with a sheet, and restraints where arms and legs might go.

Keeping in theme with all the other things in this place, the room fills with shimmering butterflies. They all quiver, and then burst like the strange bath bubbles.

Blood everywhere in their wake. Then blackness.

It’s my turn to keep watch. We’ve locked the doors and windows and barricaded ourselves in the basement for the night. The tiny refrigerator hums in the corner; the clock is ticking; the lightbulb swings on its wire, doing erratic things with the light. I think I hear a rat in the shadows, foraging for crumbs.

Rowan is snoring on the cot, which is unusual, because he never does. But I don’t mind. It’s nice to hear the sound of another human, to know that I’m not alone. That in a second he would be awake if there were any trouble. As twins, we make a great team. He has the muscles, and his aim with the shotgun never misses, but I’m smaller and faster, and sometimes more alert.

We’ve only had one thief ever who was armed, the year I turned thirteen. Mostly the thieves are small children who will break windows or attempt to pick the lock, and they only stay long enough to realize there’s nothing to eat or nothing worth. They’re pests, and I would just as soon feed them so they’d go away. We have plenty to spare. But Rowan won’t allow it. Feeding one is feeding them all, and we don’t own the goddamn city, he’d say. That’s what orphanages are for. That’s what laboratory wages are for. Or how about the first generations? he’d say; how about the first generations do something because they caused this whole mess.