Wither

“Where are you from?” she asks. Her voice has none of the peevishness she showed Deirdre at the door. Her thick eyelashes flutter up. She watches an insect spiral around her and disappear.

I don’t want to tell her where I’m from. I’m supposed to sit here and be polite, but how can I? How can I when I’m made to sit and watch her die so I can be given to her husband and forced to bear children I never wanted?

So I say, “Where were you from when they took you?”

I’m not supposed to ask her questions, and as soon as I’ve asked it, I realize I have stepped on a land mine.

She’ll be screaming for Deirdre or her husband, the House Governor, to take me away. Lock me in a dungeon for the next four years.

To my surprise she only says, “I was born in this state. This town, in fact.” She reaches up behind her, takes a picture from the wall, and holds it out for me. I lean in to get a look.

The photo is of a young girl standing beside a horse.

She’s holding the reins, and her smile is so bright that her teeth dominate her face. Her eyes are nearly closed with all the delight of it. Beside her, a much taller boy stands with his hands behind his back. His smile is more controlled, shy, as though he hadn’t meant to smile but couldn’t help himself in the moment.

“This was me,” Rose says of the girl in the photo.

Then she traces her finger over the boy’s outline. “This is my Linden.” For a moment she seems lost in the sight of him. A little smile comes to her painted lips. “We grew up together.”

I’m not sure what to say to this. She is so lost in this memory, and so blind to my imprisonment. But still I feel sorry for her. In another time, under different circumstances, she would not have needed to be replaced.

“See?” she says, still pointing to the photo. “This is in the orange grove. My father owned acres of them. Here in Florida.”

Florida. My heart sinks. I’m in Florida, on the bottom of the East Coast, more miles from home than I can count. I miss my ivy-silhouetted house. I miss the distant commuter trains. How will I ever find my way back to them?

“They’re lovely,” I say of the oranges. Because it’s true, they are lovely. Things seem to thrive in this place.

I would never have suspected that the vibrant girl standing beside her horse in the grove could be dying now.

“Aren’t they?” she says. “Linden prefers flowers, though. There are orange blossom festivals in the spring. That’s his favorite. In the winter there are snow festivals, and solstice dances—but he doesn’t like those. Too loud.”

She unwraps a green candy and pops it into her mouth.

She closes her eyes for a moment, apparently savoring the floor. The candies are each a different color, and this one, the green, has a peppermint smell that takes me back to my childhood. I think of the little girl who would throw her candies into my bedroom, how their smell would fill the paper cup into which I’d respond to her voice.

When Rose speaks again, her tongue has taken on the emerald color of the candy. “But he’s an excellent dancer. I don’t know why he’s such a wallflower.”

She sets the picture on the divan in a sea of wrappers.

I can’t decide what to make of this woman, who is weary and so sad, and who snapped at Deirdre but is treating me like a friend. My curiosity quells my bitterness for the moment. I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

“Do you know how old Linden is?” she asks me. I shake my head. “He’s twenty-one. We’d planned to marry since we were children, and I suppose he thought all these medicines would keep me alive for four extra years.

His father is a very prominent doctor—first generation.

Toiling away at finding an antidote.” She says that last bit fancifully, letting her fingers flutter in the air. She does not think an antidote is possible. Many do, though.

Where I come from, hordes of new orphans will file into laboratories, offering themselves up to be guinea pigs for a few extra dollars. But an antidote never arrives, and a thorough analysis of our gene pool turns up no abnormalities to explain this fatal virus.

“But you,” Rose says. “Sixteen is perfect. You can spend the rest of your lives together. He won’t have to be alone.”

I feel the room go cold. Outside there are things buzzing and chirping in the infinite garden, but they are a million miles from me. I had almost, for just a moment, forgotten why I’m here. Forgotten how I arrived. This beautiful place is dangerous, like milky white oleanders.

The thriving garden is meant to keep me inside.

Linden stole his brides so he wouldn’t have to die alone. What about my brother, alone in that empty house? What about the other girls who were shot to death in that van?

My anger is back. My fists clench, and I wish someone would come to take me out of this room, even if it means being imprisoned somewhere else in this house.

I cannot bear another moment in Rose’s presence. Rose with her open window. Rose who has mounted a horse and ridden beyond the orange groves. Rose who intends to pass her death sentence on to me once she’s gone.

My wish comes true, to make matters worse. Deirdre returns and says, “Excuse me, Lady Rose, the doctor is here to prepare her for Governor Linden.”

I’m led down the hall again, and into an elevator that requires a key card in order to work. Deirdre stands beside me, looking rigid and worried. “You’ll meet Housemaster Vaughn tonight,” she whispers. The blood has drained from her face, and she looks at me in a way that reminds me she’s just a child. Her lips purse in—what? Sympathy? Fear? I don’t know, because the elevator doors open and she returns to herself, guiding me down another, darker hallway that smells of antiseptic, and through another door.

I wonder if she has any advice for me this time, but she’s not even given the chance to speak before a man says, “Which one is this?”

“Rhine, sir,” Deirdre says, not raising her eyes. “The sixteen-year-old.”

I wonder, briefly, if this man is the Housemaster or the Governor who’s to be my husband, but I don’t have the chance to even look at him before there’s a stinging pain in my arm. I have only time to process what I’m seeing: a sterile, windowless room. A bed with a sheet, and restraints where arms and legs might go.

Keeping in theme with all the other things in this place, the room fills with shimmering butterflies. They all quiver, and then burst like the strange bath bubbles.

Blood everywhere in their wake. Then blackness.

Chapter 4

It’s my turn to keep watch. We’ve locked the doors and windows and barricaded ourselves in the basement for the night. The tiny refrigerator hums in the corner; the clock is ticking; the lightbulb swings on its wire, doing erratic things with the light. I think I hear a rat in the shadows, foraging for crumbs.

Rowan is snoring on the cot, which is unusual, because he never does. But I don’t mind. It’s nice to hear the sound of another human, to know that I’m not alone. That in a second he would be awake if there were any trouble. As twins, we make a great team. He has the muscles, and his aim with the shotgun never misses, but I’m smaller and faster, and sometimes more alert.

We’ve only had one thief ever who was armed, the year I turned thirteen. Mostly the thieves are small children who will break windows or attempt to pick the lock, and they only stay long enough to realize there’s nothing to eat or nothing worth. They’re pests, and I would just as soon feed them so they’d go away. We have plenty to spare. But Rowan won’t allow it. Feeding one is feeding them all, and we don’t own the goddamn city, he’d say. That’s what orphanages are for. That’s what laboratory wages are for. Or how about the first generations? he’d say; how about the first generations do something because they caused this whole mess.

The armed thief was a man twice my size, at least into his twenties. He somehow picked the lock on our front door without making a sound, and he figured out quickly that the residents of our little house were hiding somewhere, guarding what was worth taking. It was Rowan’s watch that hour, but he’d fallen asleep after a full day of physical labor. He takes work where and when he can get it, and it’s always arduous; he’s always in pain at the end of the day. Long ago, America’s factory jobs were outsourced to other industrialized countries. Now, because there’s no importing, most of New York’s towering buildings have been converted to factories that make everything from frozen food to sheet metal. I’m usually able to find work handling wholesale orders by phone; Rowan finds work easily in shipments and delivery, and it exhausts him more than he cares to admit. But the pay is always cash, and we’re always able to buy more than we need in terms of food. Shopkeepers are so grateful to have paying customers—as opposed to the penniless orphans who always try to steal the essentials—that they give us deals on extras like electrical tape and aspirin.

So there we were, both asleep. I awoke with a blade to my throat, looking into the eyes of a man I did not know.

I made a small sound, not even a whimper, but that was all it took for my brother to jolt back to consciousness, gun at the ready.

I was helpless, paralyzed. Small thieves I could handle, and most thieves did not want to kill us, not if they could help it. They only made meager threats on the hope of getting food, a piece of jewelry, and if they were smaller than you, they would just run away when you caught them. They were only trying to survive however they could.

“Shoot me, and I cut her,” the man said.

There was a loud sound, like the time one of our pipes burst, and then I saw a line of blood roll over the man’s brow. It took a second for me to realize there was a red bullet hole in his forehead, and then the knife went slack against my neck. I grabbed it, kicked him away from me.

But he was already dead. I sat up, eyes bulging, gasping. Rowan was on his feet, though, checking to be sure the man was really dead, not wanting to waste another bullet if it wasn’t necessary. “Goddamn it,” he said, and kicked the man. “I fell asleep. Damn it!”

“You were tired,” I said reassuringly. “It’s okay. He would have gone away if we’d fed him.”

“Don’t be so naïve,” Rowan said, and lifted the dead man’s arm pointedly. It was then that I noticed the man’s gray coat. The clear mark of a Gatherer on the job. “He wanted—,” Rowan began, but couldn’t finish the thought aloud. It was the first time I’d ever seen him tremble.

I had thought, before that night, that Gatherers swept young girls from the street. While this is true, it isn’t always the case. They can stake a girl out, follow her home and wait for an opportunity. That is, if they think she’s worth the trouble, if they think she’ll get a good price. And that’s what had happened. That’s why that man had broken into our home. Now my brother refuses to let me go anywhere unless he’s with me. He worries over our shoulders, peers into alleyways we pass. We’ve added bolts to the door. We’ve strung the kitchen floor in a labyrinth of kite strings and empty aluminum cans so that we’ll be alerted—loudly—to any intruders before they can hope to break into our basement.