Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  The deadbolt clicks. I drop to my knees and weep, and the sadness sedates me into something that I mistake for sleep.

  Chapter 3

  The second time I wake up in the greenhouse, it’s dark. My legs are cold, and at some point in my unconscious state, I must have taken off my gloves, because my hands are free. My joints ache and my entire head hurts. I’m hours past hunger pangs. A mass of glue and sand has lodged itself in my throat.

  The minutes crawl like hours while my vision gets used to the light. I spot a glove resting by my shoe, and it’s not until I reach for it that I realize my skirt’s hitched over my knees.

  Did he…?

  No. He didn’t.

  He wasn’t interested in raping me. He was interested in watching me starve. Or maybe someone else was watching me.

  Leaning forward for the glove, I check the camera. The red light glows steadily.

  Darius hadn’t been speaking lightly when he threatened my survival, but it wasn’t pure sadism. He was after the Colony.

  The only way to keep him from getting what he wants is to take myself out of the negotiations. Just then, my eyes adjust to the shapes on the tile. He removed my laces to keep me from killing myself, but he left the shards.

  Well, that was his mistake.

  Grabbing the glove, I gather my skirts, slyly picking up a triangle of pottery to tuck into the base of my palm.

  To mask what I’m doing from the camera, I pretend to put the glove back on while—under the fabric—I tuck the pointy side of the shard into my wrist. Once I cut it open, all I have to do it curl up and bleed out. They won’t notice until I’m already dead. They can’t stop me, and they’ll lose. We’ll survive.

  My starving brain decides it’s a good plan, until the edge of the ceramic is pressed to my skin, and all I have to do was put the glove on quickly. It’s then that I realize that the *elders could be on the video feed. They might miss it and give up everything, or they might be building a plan that included me dying at some other, more strategic, point.

  I keep the shard in my glove, flat side against my skin, but I can’t use it.

  Even suicide’s too risky, too self-involved, too much an individual decision.

  The best way to help the colony is to be predictable.

  My thoughts degrade into colors weaving together. Fear is green and yellow. Thirst is brown and burgundy. They become a whirring, spinning loom that clatters around my head.

  ***

  Kylah’s family had come from the Good Hope Colony in Connecticut. Her father was an accountant who must have been extremely talented at weaving together our web—with its secrecy and fiscal traditions—and the Outside—with its taxes and disclosures, because relocation was rare and had to be approved by a plurality of Council members across regions.

  She was fourteen—the same age as me—when she came to Preparation. I’d just gotten my blood a few months before and was still excited about the daily routines of preparing me for my sixteenth year, when I’d enter Training, and learn how to please a husband.

  I knew traditions were different in other parts of the country, but she was wearing a skirt. We weren’t supposed to wear skirts until we were married.

  “I heard about the Hollow,” she said on the first day as I showed her the underground lunchroom. She seemed fascinated by the stone archways between rooms and vaulted ceilings of the largest chambers. “That these are beer fermentation tunnels built by Father Anselme himself. Is that true?”

  “I wasn’t there, so…here’s where we keep our lunches cool. We can’t draw electricity so we use this—”

  “You can feel the history,” she said, looking at the ceiling with fists balled in excitement.

  “Lift the lid,” I continued. “But don’t forget to put it back. Okay. So, the library is this way.”

  She gasped, slapping her hands over her mouth as if she needed to keep an escaping butterfly inside it. Her nails weren’t polished, but they were well-kept and longer than appropriate.

  “Are there histories?” she asked as I followed the yellow line to the library. “Books? Primary sources?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m just so loving the idea of writing down everything about us. And this place. Back home, everything’s done in this supposed Catholic church they built in like, the fifties but—”

  “You can’t write it down,” I stopped her in the hallway before she could go further. “And you can’t say you’re going to. Not out loud. Not ever again.”

  “But…no. I’m sorry. I mean like…as fiction!”

  She was so sunny and bright that I hated her and craved her company at the same time.

  “Listen.” I held my hands up, whispering urgently in the stone hallway. “You even think of doing that and you’re going to be in big trouble.”

  Her expression was all question marks. I didn’t know how to be any clearer with her. She was one of us—and safe because of it—but she was also walking across a minefield in clown shoes.

  “And get pants until you’re married,” I said. “You’re not supposed to be accessible.”

  “Pants won’t keep a man from thinking or doing anything.”

  “That’s not the point. It’s tradition. Please. I don’t want you to end up in the Palace.”

  Her face fell, and I hated that I did that to her and loved knowing I’d saved her at the same time. I could have predicted our relationship would be one of contradictions on day one.

  “You have those here?” she asked. “Palaces?”

  With tight lips and crossed arms, I exhaled. How was I supposed to explain that we didn’t consign women to communal sexual servitude any more, but that the threat of it was as real as it was before we stopped the practice? I couldn’t even explain this particular bogeyman to myself, but I believed in it just the same.

  “Just follow my lead on everything,” I said. “Until you’ve got your feet under you. Okay? Wear what I wear. Clip your nails. And please…write regency romance or something. Don’t borrow from real life.”

  She nodded, casting her eyes down, and I thought I’d done a good thing.

  I thought I’d fixed her in time.

  ***

  I don’t need to be fixed. This isn’t my fault. My father saw everything. He knows it wasn’t my choice.

  When this ends, I will still be a worthy bride. I’ll need more time to sew another gown. The intricate beading on this one is pulled. Its silk fabric stained with dirt and tears. And it’s stained with invisible memories that will never wash out.

  Besides, after this, I’m going to eat like a pig for a year. It won’t fit around the ham and soft cheese.

  Coffee.

  I want coffee.

  And sausages. Miles of them.

  Lèige waffles drowned in chocolate, like when I was a kid, but no limits. I’ll need a gown ten times the size, but I’ll definitely still need a gown, because I’m still pure, and worthy, and desirable.

  Water.

  Gallons and gallons of water.

  I have not been tainted, not by a man’s body, and not by Outside. I cling to that as the endless hours unfold.

  This wasn’t my choice, and I can still belong to only one man.

  But every time I try to reassure myself with this thought, another set of memories comes rushing in: half-remembered snatches of gossip, tales of women who had queaned themselves, as if our bodies didn’t belong to everyone. As if the treasure is theirs to spend.

  They are not banished. No one is ever banished.

  Sometimes, though, they are gone. Just gone. Not for wearing a skirt before marriage or anything like that. But when a woman willfully—and without permission— associates herself with Outside People, she’s never the same, even if she stays.

  The sun slips below the horizon and in the night’s darkness I try to sleep. Rest is fitful, uneven, and my dreams are all nightmares: the horrors of Reconditioning*, or what I’ve heard of it, anyway, chasing me through my sleep.
The worst Colony criminals are imprisoned underground in our tunnels, passages built by our brewers long before Manhattan was a city, and just before dawn breaks I am trapped in a feverish delusion of being stuck down there, punishing darkness enclosing me, surrounded by the skittering sounds of criminals and madmen.

  I’m half-mad myself by the time the sun is overhead again, shimmering down brilliantly at me from the cold blue sky. It’s lower than where it was when I woke the day before, which means I’ve now been missing for more than a day. I clutch the sharp piece of pottery under my glove. It’s a safety blanket. A choice I can make in a situation where my decisions are meaningless.

  Hovering in half-consciousness, my eyes are closed when the door bangs open again, and Darius enters, carrying a tall glass of water. He sets it on a dirty counter in front of me and then leans against the table, crossing one long leg over the other.

  I get to my feet and approach the glass, wary but unable to stay away from its promise. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life; my eyeballs burn and my tongue’s made of layers of cardboard.

  Darius watches me silently, but then, as I reach out to take the glass, he slaps my hand away. I am already weak and dizzy, and the force of the blow makes me stumble and spin.

  “Please!” I cry. I realize I am on my knees. I had intended to be strong, to refuse to let him see me suffer any more, but I am so, so thirsty.

  “Take that stupid dress off.”

  I shake my head. I’m past caring about modesty. I care about the dress. It’s ruined, but it’s mine. I worked on it for months, my fingers numb from stitching, my eyes and back aching as I worked into the night. It may be the only piece of the Colony left to me besides my own body and I will not take it off.

  He shrugs and picks up the glass of water.

  I remain defiant.

  He turns to go.

  And I think, with blinding clarity: I cannot die here.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He stops, turns around, but does not take another step.

  I slip the dress off slowly, regretfully, because as awful as it looks, the fabric is still fine, soft and sweet, a reminder of who I was and what I expected just yesterday. The gloves stay and so do the undergarments I’d worn to please Kyle, because Darius just said to take off the dress, and I’m weak but not dead. I’m not giving him anything he didn’t ask for.

  He places the cup back on the table. Then he sweeps a hand through the dust and dirt on its surface and sprinkles them into the water. I watch helplessly as it clouds with gray.

  “Down to the skin,” he says. “Show me every inch.”

  The suggestion in his command floods my dry veins with resistance.

  “No. You said the dress.” I hold out my left hand, the bare one without the distorting piece of pottery under the glove. “Give it to me.”

  This time, he takes a discarded nursery container and pinches out white-flecked potting soil. He drops it in like a chef seasoning too heavily.

  “It’s going to be mud soon,” he says. “If you aren’t naked.”

  “Where’s my father?” I squeak without spit. “Did he give you the names?”

  “Haven’t spoken to him since the car, when he told me to do what I wanted with you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “We tried. He won’t negotiate with outsiders…so. Take your fucking clothes off.”

  I do everything I can not to cry as I lower my underpants and slip out of my matching bra, my hands shaking the entire time. I leave the glove for last, hoping its beside the point.

  “I know what you’re hiding in your glove. You’re not going to kill me with a broken flowerpot.”

  “It wasn’t for you.”

  He nods, then flicks his finger at me. I peel the glove off. The shard clatters to the floor.

  I am finally bare before him, exposed as I have never been before a man.

  My breath skips, and I cry, but I don’t make tears or snot over this destroyed moment—the first time a man’s eyes see my skin, my nipples, my utter vulnerability and power.

  This was supposed to be one of the most beautiful moments of my life. Instead, it is a violation.

  He isn’t satisfied yet though.

  “Stay still,” he commands.

  He walks behind me, hovering for a moment before grabbing my hair and yanking it back, so that I’m gazing up into the camera’s merciless eye.

  “Can you imagine how good it will feel,” he murmurs, his breath hot against my neck, “when I let you drink? That cold, sweet water, sliding down your throat?”

  I’m barely holding myself upright. I nodded helplessly, swallowing a lump of garden pebbles.

  “Even with a little dirt, a little dust, you’ll take it all down, won’t you? And then you’ll beg for more.”

  “I’ll beg,” I agree. “I’ll do it.”

  “You need it,” he says, and I can feel the cruelty of the smile in his voice.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Please—please—”

  “Say it for the camera.”

  Who’s on the other side? His boss? His partners? The entire Outside?

  “Please give it to me.”

  “Let me swallow it,” he whispers thickly.

  “Let…let me swallow it all.”

  “I know what your body needs. And what you’ll do to get it.” And then, just as abruptly as he’d grabbed me, he spins me around so that I’m facing him, and then he lets me go.

  I sink to my knees, dropping my face to hide my fury and shame.

  “Okay,” he says after a moment. He’s bored again, casual. “You can drink now.”

  I do. I am shameless and desperate, and I savor every drop in the glass, dirt and all.

  He leaves before I finish, apparently not interested in watching me debase myself any further.

  I lie naked where he left me, legs in the letter K, bare skin on cold tile, the empty glass a few inches from my hand, watching the clouds form in the grid above me.

  There door clicks and whooshes open. The room spins when I bolt to a sitting position. A tray of food, accompanied by a whole pitcher of water, is pushed across the threshold.

  The door claps shut again and the deadbolt is smacked home.

  I glance at the camera. He’s watching. He has to be.

  I should stand up and walk like a human, but by the time I finish making that decision, I’m already crawling on my hands and knees like an animal.

  We eat hearty food, but the tray contains food I’ve never eaten: a plastic clamshell with a sandwich inside—pink meat spills from a circle of bread split into a pocket.

  Taking it slow, I peek into the pocket and find cheese and the familiarity of mayonnaise. A pink container of yogurt that proudly proclaims—next to a bulbous strawberry—that it has REAL FRUIT inside.

  I rip it open, ready to suck it down, but I stop.

  Kylah had confessed to me that she’d tried Outsider food once. She’d snuck out and gone to a restaurant where they served things she’d never heard of, raw fish on rice with salty, spicy dipping sauces. “It was disgusting,” she’d said, giggling. “But… kind of fun, too.” Some girls thought it fun to flirt with the Outside, to get a taste of what the men in our community were protecting us from, just to see, but I had never had such impulses, because I am Sarah Antoine.

  I am the Colony, and I live for the good of all.

  I stand up carefully, my head still swimming from the heat, my hunger and thirst and poor night’s sleep. I walk over to my discarded pile of garments first, though, and put them on again: the underwear and bra, the ruined dress, my shoes. I leave the glove and shard.

  Then I put the tray onto the counter, right a white plastic chair that matches the one on the roof, and—dressed in silk garments that had once been a hopeful symbol of my purity and were now nothing more than a painful, ridiculous reminder of everything I have lost—I nourish myself, dreaming of the day I murder Darius.

  * * *

&n
bsp; Take Me is the first of three, and it’ll release on 1/12.

  GET TAKE ME

  Subsequent releases — Make Me and Break Me will release with four to six weeks between. I’ll get preorders up as soon as I can.

  TAKE ME - 1/12

  MAKE ME - 2/16

  BREAK ME - 3/23

  For the time being, these books will be wide. I reserve the right to change my mind for any reason including, but not limited to laziness.

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