Fever. Lauren DeStefano

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      I know the word. My father tried to describe carnivals to my brother and me. Celebrations for when there was nothing to celebrate, he’d say. I could understand, but Rowan couldn’t, so the next day when we woke up, there were ribbons draped all over our bedroom, and a cake was waiting on our dresser with forks and cranberry seltzer, which was my favorite, but we almost never had any because it was so hard to find. And we didn’t go to school that day. My father played strange music on the piano, and we spent the day celebrating nothing at all, except maybe that we were all alive.

      “This is what carnivals were all about,” Madame says. “They called it a Ferris wheel.”

      Ferris wheel. The only thing in this whole wasteland of abandoned rides that isn’t rotting or rusted.

      Now that I’m close enough to really look at it, I can see that the wheel is full of seats, and there’s a little staircase leading up to the lowest point. The chipped paint reads: ENTER HERE.

      “It didn’t work when I found it, of course,” Madame goes on. “But my Jared is something of a genius with electrical things.”

      I say nothing, but tilt my head to watch the seats spinning against the night sky. The wheel makes a rusted creaking groan as it goes, and for just a moment, I hear laughter in that eerie brass music.

      My parents have looked up at Ferris wheels. They were a part of this lost world.

      One of the boys is leaning on the railing surrounding the thing, and he eyes me warily. “Madame?” he says.

      “Bring it to a stop,” she says.

      A cold breeze swirls around me, and it’s ripe with antique melodies and the smell of rust and all of Madame’s strange foreign perfumes. An empty seat comes to a stop before the staircase where I stand. Madame’s bracelets clack and clatter as she lays her hand on my spine and presses me forward, saying, “Go on, go on.”

      I don’t think I can stop myself. I climb the stairs, and the metal shudders beneath my feet and sends tremors up my legs. The seat rocks a little as I settle into it. Madame sits beside me and pulls the overhead bar down so that it locks us in. We start to move, and I’m breathless for an instant as we ascend forward and into the sky.

      The earth gets farther and farther away. The tents look like bright round candies. The girls move about them, shadows.

      I can’t help myself; I lean forward, astounded. This wheel is five, ten, fifteen times taller than the lighthouse I climbed in the hurricane. Higher even than the fence that kept me trapped as Linden’s bride.

      “This is the tallest place in the world,” Madame says. “Taller than spy towers.”

      I’ve never heard of a spy tower, but I doubt they’re taller than the factories and skyscrapers in Manhattan. Even this wheel couldn’t claim as much. Maybe, though, it’s the tallest place in Madame’s world. I could believe that.

      And as we make our way toward stars that feel frighteningly attainable, I feel myself missing my twin. He was never one for whimsical things. Since our parents’ death, he’s stopped believing in things more fantastic than bricks and mortar, less horrific than ominous alleyways where girls become soulless and men pay for five minutes with their bodies. His every moment is consumed with survival—his and mine. But even my brother, who is all practicality, would have his breath taken away by this height, these lights, the clarity of this night sky.

      Rowan. Even his name feels far away from me now.

      “Look, look.” Madame points eagerly. Her girls are milling below in their dingy, exotic clothes. One of them twirls, and her skirt fills up with air, and her laughter echoes like hiccups. A man grabs her pale arm, and still she laughs, tripping and flailing as he drags her into a tent.

      “You’ve never seen girls as beautiful as mine,” Madame says. But she’s wrong—I have. There was Jenna, with her gray eyes that always caught the light, her grace; she would swirl and hum through the hallways, her nose buried in a romance novel the whole time. The attendants blushed and averted their eyes, she so intimidated them with her confidence, her coy smiles. In a place like this she would have been a queen.

      “They want a better life. They run away, come here to me. I deliver their babies, I cure their sniffles, I feed them, keep them clean, give them nice things for their hair. They come to this place asking for me.” She grins. “Maybe you’ve heard of me too. You’ve come here for my help.” She takes my left hand with a force that rocks our car. I tense, thinking we’ll capsize, but we don’t. We’ve stopped ascending now; we’re at the top. I look out over the side. There’s no way down, and the fear starts to set in. Madame controls this thing. If I wasn’t completely at her mercy before, I am now.

      I force myself to stay calm. I won’t let her have the satisfaction of my panicking; it would only empower her.

      My heart is thudding in my ears.

      “That boy you came here with—he is not the one who gave you this beautiful wedding ring, is he.” It’s not a question. She tries to slide the ring from my finger, but I make a fist and draw away.

      “Both of you show up like drowned rats,” she says. Her laughter creaks like the rusty gears that hold our car together. “But under that you are all sparkles and pearls. Real pearls.” She’s looking at my sweater. “And he is made up like a lowly attendant.”

      I can’t deny any of this. She’s managed to sum up the last several months of my life perfectly.

      “Running off with your attendant, Goldenrod, behind the back of the man who made you his wife? Did your husband force himself on you? Or maybe he couldn’t satisfy you, and so you met with that boy of yours in secret—in secret, late at night, rustling in your closet among your silk dresses like a pair of savages.”

      My cheeks burn, but it’s not like the embarrassment I felt when my sister wives teased me about my lack of intimacy with Linden. This is sick and invasive. Wrong. And Madame’s smoky stench is making it hard to breathe. The height is making me dizzy. I close my eyes.

      “It isn’t like that,” I say through gritted teeth.

      “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Madame says, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I catch the whimper before it leaves my throat. “You’re a woman, after all. Women are the fairer sex. And one as lovely as you—your husband must have turned into a beast around you. It’s no wonder you found yourself a sweeter boy. And this one is sweeter, isn’t he? I can see it in his eyes.”

      “His eyes?” I splutter, furious. When I open my eyes, I focus on one of Madame’s gaudy hair gems so I don’t have to look at her or the ground. “Before your henchmen beat him half to death?”

      “That’s another thing.” Madame tenderly brushes the hair from my face. I jerk back, but she doesn’t seem to care. “My men know how to protect my girls. It’s a rough world, Goldenrod. You need protection.”

      She grabs my chin, and her fingers press against my jawbone until it hurts. She stares at my eyes. “Or maybe,” she sings, “your husband didn’t want to pass this defect of yours on to his children. Maybe he threw you out with the trash.”

      Madame is a woman who loves to talk. And the more she says, the less accurate she becomes. I realize that she couldn’t read me as easily as she thought. СКАЧАТЬ