Fever. Lauren DeStefano

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СКАЧАТЬ a giant wheel of lights spinning lazily in the distance.

      “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I say.

      “Well, someone must be over there. Come on.”

      He pulls me to my feet and tugs my bleeding hand, but I stop him. “We can’t just go wandering off into lights. You don’t know what’s over there.”

      “What’s the plan, then?” he asks.

      The plan? The plan was only to escape. Accomplished. And now the plan is to reach my brother, a thought I romanticized over the sullen months of my marriage. He became almost a figment of my imagination, a fantasy, and the thought that I’ll be reunited with him soon makes me light-headed with joy.

      I had thought we could at least make it to land dry, and during the daylight, but we ran out of fuel. And we’re losing daylight by the second; it’s not any safer here than anywhere else, and at least there are lights over there, eerie as they may be, spinning like that. “Okay,” I say. “We’ll check it out.”

      The impromptu seaweed wrap seems to have staunched the bleeding. It’s so carefully tied that it’s amusing, and Gabriel asks what I’m smiling about as we walk. He is dripping wet and plastered with sand. His normally neat brown hair is in tangles. Yet he still seems to be searching for order, some logical course of action. “It’s going to be okay, you know,” I tell him.

      He squeezes my good hand.

      The January air is in a fury, kicking up sand and howling through my drenched hair. The streets are full of trash, something rustling in a mound of it, and a single flickering streetlight has come on. Gabriel wraps his arm around me, and I’m not sure which of us he means to comfort, but my stomach is churning with the early comings of fear.

      What if a gray van comes lumbering down that dark road?

      There are no houses nearby—just a brick building that was maybe once a fire department half a century ago, with broken and boarded windows. And a few other crumbling things that are too dark for me to make out. I could swear that things are moving in the alleys.

      “Everything looks so abandoned,” Gabriel says.

      “Funny, isn’t it?” I say. “Scientists were so determined to fix us, and when we all started dying, they just left us here to rot, and the world around us too.”

      Gabriel makes a face that could be perceived as disdain or pity. He has spent most of his life in a mansion, where he may have been a servant, but at least things were well-constructed, clean, and reasonably safe. If you avoided the basement, that is. This dilapidated world must be a shock.

      The circle of light in the distance is surrounded by bizarre music, something hollow and brassy masquerading as cheerful. “Maybe we should go back,” Gabriel says when we get to the chain-link fence surrounding it. Beyond the fence I can see tents illuminated by candlelight.

      “Go back to what?” I say. I’m shivering so hard, I can barely get the words out.

      Gabriel opens his mouth to speak, but the words are lost by my own scream, because someone is grabbing my arm and pulling me through an opening in the fence.

      All I can think is, Not again, not like this, and then my wound is bleeding again and my fist is hurting because I’ve just hit someone. I’m still hitting when Gabriel pulls me away, and we try to run, but we’re being overpowered. More figures are coming out of the tents and grabbing our arms, waists, legs, even my throat. I can feel the skin bunching under my nails, and someone’s skull crashing against mine, and then I’m dizzy, but some otherworldly thing keeps me violently moving in my own defense. Gabriel is yelling my name, telling me to fight, but it doesn’t do any good. We’re being dragged toward that spinning circle of light, where an old woman is laughing, and the music doesn’t stop.

      

      Gabriel lands a perfect punch that sends one of the men crashing backward onto the dirt, but then there are others grabbing his arms and kneeing him from all sides.

      “Who do you work for?” The old woman’s voice is calm. Smoke billows out of her mouth and from a stick held in her fingers. “Who sent you to spy on me?” She’s a first generation, short and stocky, with gray hair arranged in a bun encrusted with gaudy glass rubies and emeralds. Rose, who over the years had been showered by our husband, Linden, with trinkets and gems, would laugh at this cheap jewelry—the oversize pearls hanging from the woman’s chicken-skin neck; the silver bangles, rusted and peeling, that run up to her forearm; the ruby ring as big as an egg.

      The men are holding Gabriel up by his arms, and he’s struggling to stay on his feet, when another man hits him. A boy, really; he can’t be any older than Cecily.

      “Nobody sent us,” Gabriel says. I can see in his eyes that he’s not entirely here right now. He took the worst from our assailants, and I’m worried he might have a concussion. He takes another punch, this one to the ribs, and it sends him to his knees. My stomach lurches.

      One of the men has got me by the throat, and two others by the arms, and all of them are smaller than me. It’s so difficult to see them as boys, even though that’s what they are.

      Gabriel’s eyes are closing and then jolting open; his breath escapes in fluttery astonished gasps. My heart is pounding in my ears; I want to go to him, but the only thing that reaches him is my frustrated whimper. This is all my fault. I was supposed to be able to protect him; this is my world. I should have had a plan. I mutter something indignant and snap, “He’s telling the truth; we’re not spies.” Who would spy on a place like this?

      Filthy girls are peeking out from a slit in the rainbow-striped tent, blinking like bugs. And I know immediately that this must be a scarlet district—a prostitution den of unwanted girls that Gatherers couldn’t sell to House Governors, or who simply had nowhere else to go.

      “You shut up,” one of the men—boys—says into my ear. The old woman cackles and clatters with fake jewels that are like big glass insects and infectious boils on her fingers and wrists.

      “Bring her into the light,” the old woman says. They drag me into the rainbow-striped tent below a ceiling of swaying lanterns, and the bug-girls scatter. The old woman grabs my jaw and tilts my head for a better look. Then she hocks spit onto my cheek and smears it, clearing away some of the blood and sand. Her black, horrible eyes light up with joy, and she says, “Goldenrod. Yes, I think that’s what I’ll call you.” The smoke makes my eyes water. I want to spit back at her.

      The girls in the tent moan their protest, and one of them raises her head. “Madame,” she says. Her eyes are languid and filmy. “It’s after sunset. It’s time.”

      The old woman backhands her, and in that same calm voice she says, as she examines her jeweled fingers, “You do not tell me. I tell you.”

      The girl sinks in with the others and disappears.

      Gabriel spits a mouthful of blood. The boys tug him to his feet.

      “Bring her into the red tent,” the old woman says. It doesn’t matter that I’ve slumped to a dead weight and refuse to move my legs; two of the boys have no trouble dragging me away.

      This is it, СКАЧАТЬ