Fever

by Lauren DeStefano

Page 9

 

  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.

  Chapter 6

  EXHAUSTED, 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.

  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. ”

  Gabriel looks at her and says nothing. When she leaves, he hands me a rag to dry off my face.

  “It has to be soon,” he insists.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “Soon. ”

  I force myself to stay awake despite the heavy pull that’s weighing me down. Gabriel and I whisper about our options, which are dishearteningly bleak. All of our ideas lead back to the fence. Ways to climb it. Ways to dig under it. He tells me that he and some of the bodyguards are going to be repainting the merry-go-round, and he will try to get a better look around then.

  We sleep, eventually, when the sun is high and being in our tent is like being in the heart of an emerald. Just before I drift off, I feel his kiss on my lips. It’s certain, sincere, and I return it in kind. Something stirs in my chest, and I want more, but I force those feelings away. I cannot rid myself of the sense that we’re being watched.

  In my dream I follow the pink pill that Madame forced down my throat. I slide down the tongue that stretches into a dark cavern. I land with a loud splash, liquefied and startled.

  Lilac tugs
my hair, startling me awake with the pain. “Napping on the job?” she says. I open my eyes. All I can smell, once again, is the charred air and Madame’s many perfumes. Lilac had been curling my hair. I must have drifted off.

  Now she is grabbing my wrists and yanking me to my feet, fluffing my curls. “Madame wants to see you,” she says.

  “Now?”

  “No, tomorrow, when she’s hungover and all the customers have gone. Put this on. ” She hands me a wad of sunny yellow fabric that I guess is supposed to be a dress, and doesn’t bother turning the other way while I change into it.

  The dress is so long that it drags across the ground, and Lilac has to help me figure out how to wrap it over my shoulder. “It’s called a sari,” Lilac says. “They feel a little weird at first, but trust me, Madame only lets a girl wear one when she wants to show her off. ”

  “Show me off to who, exactly?”

  Lilac just smiles, straightens the fabric hanging over my shoulder, and takes my hand to lead me out.

  She drags me out into the night, and the air is so cold, it’s like a slap. Snow is whirling around in wisps that never accumulate on the ground. It’s fitting that snow doesn’t settle—nothing else does either. The girls are forever in motion, everything like cogs in a machine, gears in a giant wristwatch.

  Madame runs toward me, arms out, her scarves and billowy sleeves trailing in oranges and purples and silky greens. “Now you look like a real lady,” she says.

  Jared stands behind her, arms folded, an orange cord draped over his neck, and a lantern in his fist. His sleeves are torn off, and his arms are muscular and smeared with grease. Earlier I saw him lying under a giant machine that looked like a heap of vibrating car parts strung with lights. Despite the cold, there are beads of sweat glistening on his face. He stares at me with dark deadpan eyes.

  Madame pinches my cheeks, twists them between her knuckles. I cringe but don’t withdraw. “You needed more color,” she says, and cackles. “Come, come. ” She leads me by the wrist, and Jared follows at a distance. I can feel his stare boring into the back of my head.

  Pebbles cut at my feet as I step on them. That’s another strange thing about this place—nobody ever wears shoes.

  We pass the Ferris wheel that’s spinning, with no one to ride it. We pass tents that rustle and giggle and glow with flickering lights. The cold wind mutters words I can’t understand. The embers of Madame’s cigarette fly at my eyes. Something is moving in the field of dead sunflowers, following us. At first I think it’s some kind of animal, but then I see the white flutter of Maddie’s dress. Strange child. Even Lilac says so. Says she’s mad and brilliant and wonderful. Says she was meant for a better world.