THE GIRL SITS ON her cot,
silently reviewing the things that make her important.
Long, golden hair. Green eyes. A
shape that boys and men will like. She’s only thirteen, but already the
treatments have begun to remove the freckles from her cheeks and soften her
skin. Her legs are a little skinny, but she’s taking supplements to fix that.
By the time auction comes, she’ll be perfect.
That’s what her father calls her. Perfect.
The keepers call her spoiled, and smart-mouthed, but they don’t know anything.
They’re not the ones who’ve been groomed for the stage since birth. She is. And
she’s going to get chosen her first auction. She wishes she could see their
smug little faces when she gets a five star rating in every category.
She’s been to the auction before.
Her father takes all his girl children so that they may learn what’s expected.
He sits apart from them, of course, in the viewing box with the other computer
programmers—magnates, though a step below the really big box with the
mayor and the other city lawmakers. She sees the way her father looks up at
those men when they walk through the crowd to their seats. It’s the same way
she looks up to the girls who walk across the stage. Wanting. Ready.
Closing her eyes, she inhales, and
tries to conjure the smell of candy, and the musk from the livestock. Voices
rise in her ears—a thousand people talking all at once, shouting and jeering as
the Watchers bring out the criminals to hang on the wooden stage. The keepers
look away at this, saying it’s barbaric and disgusting, an old-fashioned
punishment for a progressive age, and so she stares straight at the bodies,
feeling a familiar panic shaking inside her. She is not afraid of this. She is
not afraid of anything.
She cannot be afraid of
anything.
Then the girls are announced, and
her mouth tilts up in a smile. They come from the Garden, the preparation
facility across town where girls are trained for this day. They’re named after
flowers—Rose, and Lily, and Daisy. Things she’s only seen in pictures.
Sometimes they wear dresses, sometimes costumes, always in a riot of colors.
Their hair is art, their makeup soft or severe but always flawless. When she
looks at them, the wanting grows. She’s learned to spot the mistakes they
make—mistakes she will not repeat. A too-quick smile will bore the audience.
Faces should be lifted, but eyes downcast. Confidence is rewarded with votes,
but not showiness. Magnates don’t like a girl to challenge, that’s what her
father says, but a girl who’s open and willing to learn. Who can be molded into
the perfect wife. A forever wife. Like her birth mother.
Sometimes a girl does everything
right. A perfectly timed smile, a gentle look to the side. Her walk is graceful
and comfortable. Her body swaying in perfect, curvy lines. In those moments,
she is transfixed. She wants to know more and how and everything.
The lights in the room rise slowly,
and a moment later she hears the soft pull of the sliding door opening on the
other side of the room.
“Awake!” cries a keeper, as if
they’ve wasted half the day sleeping. It’s only just after dawn, and the girl’s
father will soon be heading for work. All eight of his children, two boys and six
girls, will present themselves in the living room before he leaves. This is how
it is every day, but she wonders if he knows that today is special. That today,
everything will change.
Her stomach suddenly hollows out at
the prospect of saying goodbye. She is his favorite, the one he always brings
sweets and pats on the head. When she was little, he would let her play quietly
on the floor beside him when he brought home work. But now she will be gone,
and the thought of him choosing another makes her wish she had more time.
No. She will not let regret spoil
this day.
She rises beside her bed while the
keeper ushers into the room. At the Garden she will have ten keepers, each
attending to her different needs. One to bring food. Another to take it away. Another
to trim her nails, and fix her skin, and make her just right. This thought
settles her.
She files out into the hallway
behind her siblings—last, because despite her excitement, she wants one last
look at this room. The bunks are stacked three tall, the blankets left askew
for the staff to clean later. The children’s room is in the center of their
high-rise apartment, and has no windows, but she knows this far up the view of
the city will be blocked by haze anyway.
Still, her steps slow. This is the
only home she’s ever known.
Before her, her second brother,
Farall, is yawning. He’s only five, but will soon be moved to his own bedroom
like her older brother Mehmet. She always wished she could have her own room
too, but things will be different soon.
She touches his head, feeling the
thin, soft strands that are a paler shade of yellow than her own.
“Are you going to school, Two?” he
asks, yawning again.
“Better than school, Five,”
she says, deliberately using his birth rank as he does hers. Because he’s a boy
he gets his own name, but she has had to wait thirteen years to get hers.
She beams at the thought of a name.
Not just a number, a name.
“I’m going to the Garden,” she tells
him.
“I want to go,” he complains. He
already goes to school though, like all the boy children in the city, where he
learns to read and write. By ten, he will already be on a trade path, and with
their father’s status, will almost certainly be a magnate someday too.
“You can’t go,” she says. “You’re a
boy.”
He groans. “It’s not fair.”
A hard chill spears through her joy.
He is right. It’s not fair. If life were fair, she’d have her own bedroom.
She’d have a name, and know how to write it. She would be able to wear pants,
and go on hunting trips in the mountains, and sit in the box with her father
and the other magnates, smoking and drinking, and voting on the girls who
walked across the stage. Maybe she’s only thirteen, but she knows what the
judges look for.
But that is not the way it is, and
she feels foolish for even thinking it. Women hadn’t stood beside men since the
Red Years, and everyone knows how that turned out.
This unwanted desire fades as she
spends the next minutes in the bathroom with her sisters. She’s the first to be
groomed today, and her golden hair is braided in a crown that circles her head.
She doesn’t tell the keeper, whose unnaturally smooth and youthful face is now
pinched in consternation, how much she loves it. How perfect it is. It’s his
job to care for her, and today, his work is about to be put to the test.
After makeup, she’s given a meal
pill, which fills her stomach just enough that she isn’t starving, and makes
her way to stand in line to greet her father. Beside her, Mehmet is typing
something into his handheld tablet, and while they wait, she looks over at the
scratchy marks she is forbidden from knowing.
“It says good riddance,” he tells
her, and she shoves him in the shoulder.
He smirks, and she is torn, because
that smirk has always made her giggle, and she might not see it again for a
long time. Maybe not ever.
“Stop it!” Their keeper scurries
their direction, his long caftan flowing behind him. “You’ll mess up your hair,
Two.”
She rolls her eyes, but her hand
rises to the braid anyway. It makes her look like a movie star.
“I want a pretty braid,” says Six,
the much shorter sister to her other side. But she has stiff, brown hair that
never lays flat, even with the treatments. Normally, Two would tell her to keep
wishing, because that’s never going to happen, but not today.
“One day you’ll have one,” she says.
And then they’re quiet, because their father and his forever wife have arrived.
The tall, wiry man in blue silk
pajamas makes his way toward the living room, scratching his triangular beard.
Their birth mother follows, smiling pleasantly, looking at nothing in
particular. Two has memorized every detail of that smile, has practiced it a
thousand times in the mirror. Girls who get chosen only have one shot of
impressing their bidder. If they fail to impress, can’t be bred, or produce
only girls, they’ll be cast aside. Made to be breeders, or worse, sent to the
Black Lanes as companions. But once, her father told them the reason he kept
their mother was because of her smile, and if that’s what it takes, Two will
smile until her cheeks go numb.
Her father starts with the youngest
and nods to each of them as he passes, but when Two catches his eye, he pauses.
“Good morning,” he says, and pats
her on the head. There is a small smile, and she feels her siblings’ envy
thicken around her.
And then he sits down at the table,
opens his tablet, and begins to read.
She watches him, her anxiety
growing, and when the keeper dismisses them, and tells her it’s time to go, she
feels a drop of panic slide down her spine.
“Father,” she says.
He lifts his chin. Her mother looks
up as well, her smooth, golden hair hanging in soft ringlets to her shoulders.
Her morning robe without even a single wrinkle. She is a piece of
art—beautiful, and made to be admired, and Two wonders, not for the first time,
if this is what it looks like when you have everything you always wanted.
“Come. Don’t bother him,” says the
keeper.
“I’m leaving today,” she says, and
he groans and rolls his eyes.
Her father looks confused. Slowly,
recognition dawns on him.
“To the Garden,” he says. “That’s
right. Good luck, my dear.”
And that’s it.
She’s not sure what she expected,
but as she turns, it feels like she’s walking through water. Nothing can come
with her, she hasn’t even packed a bag. All she has are her dress and the two
long, beaded earrings that hang to her shoulders—signs that she is unpromised.
She rounds the corner, and in sight
of the door, her sisters and Farall hug her. Six is crying, tears sticking to
her long blonde lashes, and the other sisters are giving her advice to sway her
hips, and stand tall, and not to snort when she laughs. Memhet squeezes her
shoulder and then looks back to his tablet, but his cheeks are red and she
wonders if there’s something he wants to say but can’t.
There are a hundred things she wants
to say, but can’t.
“Two.”
Just as she nears the door, she
hears a voice she hardly recognizes. It’s her father’s forever wife. She meets
Two’s gaze, and it’s so unnerving, Two falls back a step. The shape and color
of their eyes is exactly the same. They don’t have a lot of contact, but Two
still cannot believe she’s never noticed this before.
The woman hesitates, then embraces
her stiffly. Two keeps her arms down, unsure if she should embrace back. Her
insides are shaking and her heart is pounding and nothing about this moment
feels like it should.
“Don’t feel,” her birth mother
whispers, and it sounds like a warning.
And then that pleasant smile is
back, and she turns and walks away.
Two is led out of the apartment into
the hallway, and then into the elevator that carries them fifty floors down to
the carriage. From inside, she stares back at the tall green glass building,
still hearing her birth mother’s voice. Don’t feel. She doesn’t
understand what it means.
Her last view of home is the keeper,
turning back to go into the building.
The city pulls by too quickly, green
glass and factories, black smoke and gray skies, and then she’s there, at the
black building with the artificial lawn that she’s only heard the keepers talk
about. The iron gates swing back and the carriage is brought around a circle,
and then she’s led through the doors into a waiting area, where she’s given a
black dress, so tight it shows every bump of her skin, and is told to wait for
the Governess.
She does wait. She waits and waits
and waits, soaking in the cold from the tile floor, and the black glass walls,
and the changing pictures hanging from them, of beautiful girls with smiles
that aren’t reflected in their eyes. She tells herself she will soon be one of
them, but it doesn’t feel like it did in her dreams.
Don’t feel.
A woman appears through a sliding
door, wearing a dress that looks more like an active water fountain, with
splashes of blue silk and beads of silver that look like raindrops sliding down
the tight bodice. Her hair is a mountain of curls, cascading over her
shoulders, and her makeup is so dark she looks like a monster.
Two’s eyes widen.
There is a keeper behind the
Governess, all in black, who says, “This is the Governess. Stand up straight.”
She does.
“Ugh,” groans the Governess. “The
hair’s going to have to go. Yellow is such a drab color. Chop it and make it
red. Fire red. Immediately.”
Two is horrified. She snaps her
mouth shut. I am not afraid.
This is everything she’s ever
wanted.
“What name’s next on rotation?” the
Governess asks.
The keeper scans down a list on his
tablet, then raises his beady eyes. He looks so much like her keeper at
home—the resemblance is uncanny. But he is different. He doesn’t know her, and
she does not know him. It’s only the hormone treatments which have made them
all look the same.
“Daphne,” he says.
“Well,” says the Governess flatly.
“Welcome to the Garden, Daphne.”
