She fell limp and they dragged her to the table where they proceeded to scan her stomach. After Laney’s outburst, the other girls turned their attention on me. I kept my head up, held high and waited patiently. Soon, a calm seemed to fall over the others.
Some who had been in other lines first, fell in behind me and I was ushered into a seat. A Greater combed and separated my hair several times, raking my scalp in different places as if looking for something. Before he allowed me to get up, I saw my name on a communicator.
Abigail B. Kelley—negative for lice. Lice? What is a lice? Whatever it was, I was pretty sure it was a good thing that I didn’t have one. I was ushered into another line, the one waiting for the steam closets, my guard only one step behind.
“Is it really necessary that you’re here?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.” I motion to all of the Greaters around us.
“Following orders.”
“Of course you are.” I grumbled. “Looks like you always do as you’re told regardless of whether or not it’s right.”
“I—”
“Abigail Kelley, move forward,” barked another faceless Greater. She shoved me into the small box, instructed me to undress and stand still, closing my eyes tight. Pushing down the gown, I stepped out of it and then my undergarments and shoes, throwing each over the top of the stall at her. I hoped she lost an eyeball from the point of my heel, but knowing those freakish glasses, they would protect her.
No sooner than I closed my eyes, my entire body felt like it was being fried or steamed rather. I was being scalded. When it finally stopped pouring into the small compartment, I peeked out and saw that my hair was wet and my skin was tinged pink. The compartment door flew open. Covering my intimate parts as best as I could, I looked up to see a raging bull where the Greater woman had stood. The Greater that I’d tried to assault with my wardrobe stood there with a look of rage on her face. Her lips shook. “Lesser, get dressed. Now!” she roared, shoving me backwards with one of the white paper gowns.
I put on the strange garment, which left my rear end exposed. Clamping the paper closed at my derriere, I stepped out of the box. Her face was still red. She looked like she’d gone a round in the steam box. I smirked at her and looked over her shoulder at my guard whose shoulders shook in restrained laughter. Smiling sweetly, I stepped toward him. He would protect me from her, right?
I clenched the back of my gown closed. It was barely long enough to hit my upper thigh and cut low enough in front to nearly show my breasts. Settling on one hand on my behind and one on my chest, I inched through the line. My guard laughed. “You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen before, Lesser.”
“You know, I really wish you’d stop calling me that. You Greaters have no manners at all. It’s disgusting.”
He smirked. “What would you have me call you, if not Lesser?”
“Abigail is my name. You could start with that. And, what should I call you? Guard?”
The line moved ahead and I was next for the stomach scan. “Guard is fine. I probably won’t be with you much longer. My orders were just to see to it that you were processed with the others and then taken to the palace.”
“Palace?”
“Where the President and his family reside.” He looked at me as if I were dense.
“Great.” I deadpanned.
“Next!” barked the man standing beside the table holding the strange wand. He motioned me over and I climbed up onto the table. The man tugged a scratchy sheet up to cover my bottom half, and then raised my short paper dress. I clenched it under my breasts, holding it tight to my body. Sweat began to bead on my head and chest and I found it difficult to breathe all of a sudden.
“What are you doing to me? What is this for?”
“Do not speak unless spoken to, Lesser.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he squeezed some sort of blue gel like goo onto my lower stomach and began to smoosh it around with the wand. Stopping occasionally, he would punch something into a communicator and begin digging into my flesh again. Nothing about it was gentle. Though the probe glided over my skin and flesh easily with the gel lubricant, the man dug it deeper and deeper across my stomach, bruising my skin.
When finished, he wiped the goo off of my skin and gave me permission to go with his sharp dismissal as he screamed for the next in line to step forward. I pulled down my gown and then carefully moved my legs together and off the table, trying to remain as modest as possible under the circumstances.
Guard refused to make eye contact with me. He led me by the elbow to the next station where three Greater women used strange devices to scan my hands and fingers, and then my eye. A retinal scan, they called it. When the scanner wouldn’t work, one woman banged it on the table. When it refused to scan my eye again, they called for a male Greater from another section to help. He couldn’t get it to scan me either and became very irate.
“What kind of trick is this? It’s worked all day.” The portly man jammed the machine at my eye causing me to yell out in pain.
“That’s enough,” Guard told the evil man. “It’s broken. Get it fixed. If you need to scan her later, she will be at the Palace.”
“Let me just try one more time.” He tried to thrust the small rectangle at me again, but Guard caught his arm, stopping the assault about an inch away from my eyeball. My eyelashes nearly brushed the cold, metal contraption.
“I don’t think so. You’ve damn near blacked her eye already. I have to deliver her and I prefer her to be unscathed. Unless you want to answer to the King himself, back off,” he warned.
The evil man backed away and held up his hands in surrender. “Just doing my job.” He slapped the device back into the palm of the woman who’d summoned him to help. The girl behind me stepped forward, tears streaking her face, nose red and swollen. She peeked at me from behind now stringy blonde hair and sniffed. The woman held the retinal scanner up to her and it worked fine.
The Greater woman pinned me with an incredulous look and shooed me and Guard away. Maybe she thought I was a witch. If only that were true. I would poof myself out of here in an instant and take my Lesser friends with me. I flashed what I hoped was a freakish smile at her. Maybe if I scared them, they’d leave me alone.
Guard moved toward the door, his hand still positioned on his weapon. “Let’s go.”
“I need clothes.”
“You’ll get clothes—at the Palace.”
I shook my head. “No way I’m leaving in this. My hind end is all but hanging out. It doesn’t even close in the back and you can see all of my legs. I need clothes. Please.”
He blew out a breath, and then spoke slowly to me, as if I were a child. “Look, I don’t have them. These girls are going to be placed in housing for now. They’ll all be together and given clothes there. You are to be taken to the Palace. Your clothes are there.”
“Fine.”
“Fine. Follow me.” He opened the door and we descended the stone staircase. He led me down a small sidewalk to another platform where several individual train cars were awaiting passengers. “Your chariot, my lady.” He swiped his hand dramatically and the train’s door opened automatically with a loud whoosh of air.
I stepped inside with him and it closed behind us and then took off into the city so fast that I rocked backward and nearly fell over. Guard caught me by the elbows and stood me upright again, but not before I caught him looking down my shirt. I jerked my arms away from him. “Hey! Stop ogling me.”
“As if I would need to ogle a Lesser.”
“Well, you just were. I saw you!”
He smirked and snorted leading the way onto the white pod. Jerk guard.
In no time at all, our tiny white train car zipped between several enormous buildings and then was slowing. It stopped smoothly in front of a tall stone gate. When we exited, the train’s doors snapped closed and it sped away quickly making a strange, high-pitched zipping noise as it left. “Weird little trains,” I remarked.
/> “They aren’t trains. They’re PerTs.”
“Perts?”
“Personal Transporters.”
I nodded. Whatever they were, they were weird and fast. The whole city was on rails and the tiny white cars zipped along the tracks like busy little bugs, rushing from stop to stop, happily zipping this way and that. The stone wall was tall—taller than the trees in the forest at home, tall. Guard led me to a gate. It was wooden, white washed and intricately engraved with the Olympian insignia, which stretched across both doors. “The Palace,” he said.
He punched something in to his small communicator machine thing and the doors opened for us. The sight behind those doors was more than I could have ever imagined. Perfectly manicured grass led to immaculately sculpted hedges that swirled and wound around the grounds in intricate patterns all pointing toward a large fountain in the center of a brick lined courtyard. Amazed by the water shooting high into the air, I almost missed it.
The Palace stood ominously in the background. It was constructed of stones larger than the old rusty pickup trucks at home. Large windows with arched panes stretched toward the heavens. The main structure was huge, but the towers and turrets that pointed toward the clouds were even more intricate and beautiful. It was like one of the stories that Lulu used to tell me—of a princess trapped in a tower. I could almost picture the girl she had described in such detail sitting on one of the window sills that towered above us.
“Close your mouth, Lesser.” Guard teased.
“Huh?”
“You act as if you’ve never seen a building before.”
“Well, we don’t have buildings like this in our village. Most structures are made out of wood and are small. My house is tiny. There are only three rooms.”
His brows knitted together. “Seriously?”
“Yes. There’s nothing wrong with it, either.” I huffed.
“No. There’s not. I just...I just can’t imagine you there. In the dress you were wearing, you almost looked the part of Greater.”
“Well, don’t let the fancy clothes fool you, Mister. I’m as Lesser as they come.”
He chuckled. “I doubt that. You obviously caught the eye of the Crown Prince during his visit.”
“Unfortunately, yes. I did. He pretended that he was a Lesser from another village, helping with our harvest. He’s a liar and perhaps you Greaters shouldn’t trust him either.”
Leaving him with his mouth gaping open, I clenched the paper dress tight to cover my bottom and started carving a path directly to the Palace.
Guard caught up with me a moment later and we ascended the massive stone staircase side by side. The stairs led to an enormous wooden door. He punched more buttons on his communicator and then pinned me with his dark orange eyes. Opening his mouth as if to say something, he was interrupted.
The door opened and I was ushered into the Palace by a rotund middle-aged woman covered head-to-toe in black. “Hurry!” she squawked. I almost lost hold of my gown as she grabbed my arm and yanked me forward. “I’m to prepare you for dinner.” She led me past enormous shiny wooden tables that held equally huge vases of freshly arranged flowers, closed doors, enormous crystal structures that hung precariously from the ceiling, up a staircase that curved along with the walls that it skirted and down a long hallway. Doors mirrored one another all the way down its length.
I followed along quickly. Guard’s footsteps fell heavy on the stone stairs and richly carpeted floors. The woman’s graying brown hair flowed behind her as she led us up a tightly spiraled staircase, to a locked door at the top. “Your room,” she said, out of breathe. From her apron, she fished out a set of iron keys. She picked through the keys until she found the one to unlock my door and then pushed it open.
The walls were stone. A fireplace sat cozily in the far corner of the rounded room. A turret. I was in a turret. The woman scared me by abruptly turning on her heel. I nearly ran into her. “Guard! Start a fire quickly!”
“That’s not—”
Pinning him with a no-nonsense stare, she reiterated slowly, “I said, start a fire. Quickly!” He grumbled but complied and began piling logs and kindling into the hearth. A long white piece of furniture sat across from the fire. It sort of looked like a couch on one side, and then stretched down into a bed, or something. The woman must have noticed my gaze. “It’s a lounger. A chaise.”
I nodded. Okay. A large bed sat on the opposite side of the room as the fireplace. Its posts nearly hit the ceiling and delicate swaths of gauzy white fabric canopied the top of the frame and cascaded delicately to the floor. It was beautiful. Plush blankets and more pillows than I could count were piled upon the mattress. A large wooden armoire sat next to the bed next to the window.
A window! I rushed over to it and looked down. Wow! I was really high up. I’d never been so high. Climbing up the trees in the orchard, or even in the woods had never scared me. This was frighteningly high. I slowly backed away from the sill.
The woman rushed around frantically, grabbing towels, cloths and what looked like soap. “Come on, dear. Time to get you cleaned up and dressed for dinner.” She ushered me toward a small door. Stepping in behind her, I gasped. A large porcelain tub stared back at me, along with a sink. She turned some sort of knob and water began pouring into the tub automatically. Steam wafted up into the air. It was water. Running water. Hot water. Guard stood behind me. The woman pinned him with a stare. “You stay out there.”
Red filled his cheeks and I giggled. He looked angrily at me and then turned and strode back toward the fire. She moved around me and slammed the door after him and then took a deep breath.
“Alright, dear. I’m Gretchen. I’ll be your servant here at the Palace. I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself because we’re in a real hurry. I know you don’t know me and I know you’re probably overwhelmed, but we have to do this quickly, so just let me take care of you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She released a pent-up breath and said, “Let’s get you out of this hideous excuse for a garment. Shall we?” The skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled and helped me into the tub. Into perfection. Pure bliss.
I let Gretchen work her magic. She scrubbed my skin with purple soap that smelled like flowers that were even more fragrant than the lavender soap we had at home. She washed my hair twice and then helped me out of the cloudy water and into a plush robe. I snuggled into its comfort while she combed my hair out quickly and efficiently.
She powdered my face and spread light pink lipstick on my lips. She weaved my hair into intricate braids and then knotted them to the side at the nape of my neck, before inserting a yellow lily into my hair. The flower’s center was brown and speckled. It was beautiful. It made me beautiful and its sweet smell baptized me in complex floral notes. I could only enjoy the scent for a moment.
“Follow me.” She jerked me up from the chair and led me back into the main bedroom where guard looked up in surprise at us. His gaze fell over my hair and face, and then lower. He’d seen me in the tiny paper gown, but by the look in his eyes, you’d never have known it. It was as if he’d seen me for the first time. I clutched the robe tight across my chest and ran along after her, out of his scrutinizing gaze.
“You get out,” Gretchen told him. “She has to get dressed. Wait outside the door.” This time, he didn’t even put up a fight. He just grabbed his gun and quickly exited the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Rummaging around in the wardrobe, she pulled out a beautiful gown. It had only one shoulder and was stark white at the top, gradually fading into pale and then bright yellow at the bottom. She held it up to me and nodded. “This is it. Right now, since you’re still not technically a member of the royal family, you can wear some color. Don’t get used to it, though. Royalty wears white. Nothing else is permitted. So this will be the best of both worlds, I think.”
She helped me cinch a tight white corset after I pulled on my undergarments. Then, Gretchen held the dress
up while I dove into it, careful not to mess up my hair. It fit perfectly, as if it had been made for my body alone. She smoothed and tugged it into place, stuffed my feet into some bright yellow heels and then looked me over from top to bottom. A bright smile stretched over her face and she nodded in approval, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Time for dinner. Ready to meet your Prince?”
My prince? My fingers found purchase on the cool steel ring still clinging to my throat. “Let’s get you to the dining hall, sweetie.” She led me to the door and instructed Guard to escort me to dinner immediately, before turning around, winking at me and pushing me forward. Guard was perched on one of the stone steps, his mouth open as if he was about to say something, but no sound ever came out.
I stepped forward and began down the staircase, holding onto the stone walls for support. Heels weren’t something I was used to at all. They’d never been practical in the village. My feet teetered dangerously as I made my way to guard.
His gun was slung across his shoulders by the wide black strap. He gripped it for dear life. “Is everything okay?” I paused, looking at how he held his weapon.
“What? Oh, yeah.” He relaxed and released the gun, which fell to his side and collided with the wall behind him. “Do you need a hand?” He extended his hand to me and I took it, thankful to have something else to steady me. His sunset eyes watched me until I stepped onto the stair just above the one he was standing on.
“Hmmm.”
“What?” He asked.
“The ring around your eyes. It’s not very pronounced like the others I’ve seen. It’s barely visible.”
He shifted on his feet and looked away and then back up to me. “Some rings are larger than others.”
I laughed out loud. “Do you have ring envy?”
“No.” He grumped. “I do not have ring envy, as you put it.” A lazy smirk surfaced, his smile lopsided and ornery. “Besides, the size of a man’s ring has nothing to do with the size of his—”
Reap (The Harvest Saga Book 1) Page 19
