The Butterfly Garden

The door slams open and Eddison tosses a new bottle of water at the girl. Protocol says they’re supposed to remove the cap for them—choking hazard—but his other hand is occupied with a sheaf of photo papers that he drops onto the table, along with the bag of IDs in the crook of his elbow. “By not telling us the truth,” he snarls, “you’re protecting the man who did this.”

Inara was right; it is different seeing it than just reading about it. Victor lets out a slow breath, using it to push down the instinctive revulsion. He shifts the first picture off the pile, then the second, the third, the fourth, all depicting portions of the hallways in the ruined garden complex.

She stops him at the seventh one, easing the paper away so she can look at it more closely. When she sets it back down on top, her finger pets a tawny curve near the center of the image. “That’s Lyonette.”

“Your friend?”

Her bandaged finger gently moves along the line of glass in the picture. “Yeah,” she whispers. “She was.”

Birthdays, like names, were best forgotten in the Garden. As I got to know the other girls, I knew they were all fairly young, but ages weren’t something you asked about. It just didn’t seem necessary. At some point we’d die, and the hallways provided daily reminders of what that would mean, so why compound the tragedy?

Until Lyonette.

I’d been in the Garden for six months, and while I’d become friendly with most of the other girls, I was closest to Lyonette and Bliss. They were the most like me, the ones who really didn’t feel up to the high drama of weeping or bemoaning our inevitably tragic fates. We didn’t cower before the Gardener, we didn’t suck up to him like becoming favorites would somehow change our fortunes. We were the ones who put up with what we had to and otherwise did our own thing.

The Gardener adored us.

Except for meals, which were served at specific times, there was never a place we had to be, so most of the girls room-hopped for comfort. If the Gardener wanted you, he’d simply check the cameras and come find you. When Lyonette asked Bliss and me to spend the night in her room, I didn’t think anything of it. It was something we did all the time. I should have recognized the desperation in her voice, the edge to her words, but that was something else the Garden numbed you to. Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.

We were provided with clothing for the daytime—always in black, always things that left our backs bare so the wings could be seen—but were given nothing for sleeping. Most of us just slept in our underwear and wished for bras. The hostel and the apartment had been good practice for me; I had far less modesty than most of the other girls had had coming into the Garden, one less humiliation that might break me.

The three of us curled together atop the mattress, waiting for the lights to go out, and gradually we became aware that Lyonette was shaking. Not like a seizure or anything, just a tremor that ran under her skin and electrified every part of her with movement. I sat up, reaching for her hand to lace our fingers together. “What’s wrong?”

Tears gleamed in her gold-flecked eyes, making me suddenly nauseated. I’d never seen Lyonette cry before; she hated tears in anyone, especially herself. “Tomorrow’s my twenty-first birthday,” she whispered.

Bliss squeaked and threw her arms around our friend, burying her face in Lyonette’s shoulder. “Fuck, Lyon, I’m so sorry!”

“We have an expiration date then?” I asked quietly. “Twenty-one?”

Lyonette clutched Bliss and me with desperate strength. “I . . . I can’t decide if I should fight or not. I’m going to die anyway, and I kind of want to make him earn it, but what if fighting makes it more painful? Shit, I feel like such a coward, but if I have to die, I don’t want it to hurt!”

She started sobbing and I wished this was one of the times the solid walls came down around the glass, so we could be trapped in this little space and her weeping wouldn’t be heard by everyone down the hall. Lyonette had a reputation for strength among the girls, and I didn’t want them to think her weak once she was gone. But for the most part, the walls only came down two mornings a week—what we’d taken to calling the weekend, whether it was or not—so the actual gardeners could do maintenance around our beautiful prison. The hired help never saw us, and the multiple sets of closed doors between us and them guaranteed they never heard us either.

No, wait. The walls came down when a new girl was brought in too. Or when one died.

We didn’t like it when the walls came down. Wishing they would was kind of extraordinary.

We stayed with Lyonette the entire night, long after she’d wept herself into an exhausted sleep and had woken only to weep again. Around four, she roused enough to stumble into the shower, and we helped her wash her hair, brushed it out and arranged it in a regal braided crown. There was a new dress in her closet, an amber silk fancy with glimmering gold threads that was bright as a flame against all the black. The color made her wings glow against her light brown skin, brilliant pumpkin-orange flecked with gold and yellow closest to the black spots and the white fringed bands of black on the very tips. The open wings of a Lustrous Copper.

The Gardener came for her just before daylight.

He was an elegant figure of a man, maybe a little above average height, well built. The type of man who always looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he really was. Dark blond hair, always perfectly in place and well-trimmed, pale green eyes like the sea. He was handsome, that couldn’t be argued, even if my stomach still turned at the sight of him. I’d never seen him dressed all in black before. He stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked in his pockets, and just looked at us.

Taking a deep breath, Lyonette hugged Bliss tightly, whispered something in her ear, before kissing her goodbye. Then she turned to me, her arms painfully tight around my ribs. “My name is Cassidy Lawrence,” she whispered, so quietly I could barely hear it. “Please don’t forget me. Don’t let him be the only one to remember me.” She kissed me, closed her eyes, and allowed the Gardener to lead her away.

Bliss and I spent the rest of the morning in Lyonette’s room going through the small personal items she’d managed to accumulate over the past five years. Five years she’d been there. We took down the privacy curtains, folded them together with the bedding into a neat stack on the edge of the naked mattress. The book she kept under her pillows turned out to be the Bible, with five years of rage and despair and hope scrawled around the verses. There were enough origami animals for all the girls in the Garden and then some, so we spent the afternoon giving them away, along with the black clothing. When we sat down to dinner, there was nothing left of Lyonette in the room.

That night, the walls came down. Bliss and I curled together in my bed, which actually had more bedding than a sewn-on sheet now. Personal touches were things we earned by not being troublesome, by not trying to kill ourselves, so I had sheets and blankets now, the same rich rose and purple as the lower wings on my back. Bliss cried and swore when the walls came down and trapped us in the room. They rose after a few hours, and before they’d come higher than a foot off the floor, she grabbed my hand and squeezed us through so we could search the hallways.

But we only had to go a few feet.

The Gardener stood there, leaning back against the garden-side wall as he studied the girl in the glass. Her head was bowed nearly against her chest, small stirrups under her armpits keeping her upright. Clear resin filled the rest of the space, the gown caught in the liquid like she was underwater. We could see almost every detail of the bright wings on her back, nearly pressed against the glass. Everything that was Lyonette—her fierce smile, her eyes—was hidden away, so the wings were the only focus.

He turned to us and ran a hand through my sleep-tangled hair, gently tugging through the knots he encountered. “You forgot to put your hair up, Maya. I can’t see your wings.”

I started to gather it to twist into a rough knot but he caught my wrist and pulled me after him.

Into my room.