LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      

      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.

      Somewhere far away Gabriel’s worried voice is saying that it is time to go, that this must end. But in the next moment he’s kissing me, and his hands are under my arms, and I’m falling into him.

      Ferris wheels spin, leaving streaks of light in the sky. Girls cackle and vomit. Children skitter like roaches. The guards keep their guns in sight like a warning.

      Cold water hits me in the face, white and loud. I splutter.

      “Are you listening?” Gabriel whispers harshly.

      I cough, swipe my wrist across my eyes. “What?” I say.

      We’re in our green tent. There are feathers all around us.

      “We have to leave. It has to be now,” he says. I try to focus on his face. “You’re becoming one of them.”

      I blink several times, trying to wake up. Our blankets are drenched. “One of who?”

      “One of those awful girls,” he says. “Don’t you see? Come on.”

      He’s pulling me to my feet, but I resist. “We can’t,” I say. “She’ll catch us. She’ll kill you.”

      “She’s right, you know,” Lilac says. She’s standing in the entranceway, arms folded. The early morning light shines behind her, making her an elegant black ribbon of a girl. “Best not to do anything stupid. She’s got eyes everywhere.”

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