“Yes,” Victor tells her, and she smirks.

“For the first—attrition. He never took more than the Garden could support, so generally he only went shopping when one of the Butterflies died. That wasn’t always the case, but usually. For the second . . .” She shrugs and presses her palms flat against the table, studying the stippling of burned tissue across the backs. “A new girl was a stressful time in the Garden. Everyone got on edge, remembering their own kidnapping and how it was when they woke up the first time, and then the inevitable tears just made it all worse. Once a new girl settled, things were quiet for a while, until the next death, the next wings on display, the next new girl. The Gardener was always—mostly—exquisitely sensitive to the prevailing mood in the Garden.”

“Is that why he allowed Lyonette to act as a guide?”

“Because it helped, yes.”

“Then how did you end up doing it?”

“Because someone had to, and Bliss was too angry, the rest too skittish.”

It wasn’t the girl after me but the next one that I first helped with, because Avery had brought the flu into the Garden and it was cutting a hell of a swath through the girls.

Lyonette was a train wreck. She was pale and sweating, her tawny hair plastered to her neck and face, and the toilet bowl was a much truer friend than I could ever be. Bliss and I told her to stay in bed, to let the Gardener deal with his own mess for once, but as soon as the walls lifted to let us out of our rooms, she pulled on clothes and staggered out into the hallway.

Swearing, I tied on a dress and jogged after her until I could loop one of her arms around my shoulders. She was so dizzy she couldn’t walk without keeping a hand to the wall. She didn’t flinch away from the display cases like she usually did even after almost five years. “Why does it have to be you?”

“Because it has to be someone,” she whispered, and stopped to swallow back her need to vomit. Again. Even though she’d been kneeling in front of the toilet for most of the past eighteen hours.

I didn’t agree, not at that point.

Maybe not ever.

The Gardener was very, very good at guessing ages, better than any carnival whack I’d ever heard of. A few girls came in at seventeen, but most were sixteen. He wouldn’t kidnap younger—and if he thought there was a chance of fifteen or less, he said he chose someone else—but he tried not to go any older. I guess he wanted the full five years whenever possible.

The things that man felt comfortable talking about with his captives . . . or maybe just with me.

The new girl was in a room that was every bit as naked as the one I’d woken up in. Mine was slowly starting to accumulate personal touches, but for now she had a plain grey fitted sheet and nothing else. Her skin tone was dark and, combined with the cast of her features, suggested mixed race: Mexican and African, I’d find out later. She wasn’t much taller than Bliss, and except for a rather astonishing set of tits that looked like they’d been a quincea?era gift, she was reed-slender. Small holes marched all the way up one ear and most of the other. Another hole on the edge of her nostril and yet another around her navel suggested they’d been pierced as well.

“Why’d he take them all out?”

“Maybe he thought they were tacky,” groaned Lyonette, sinking to the floor beside the unshielded toilet.

“My ears were double pierced when I came. Still are.”

“Maybe he thinks yours are classy.”

“Plus the cartilage cuff on the right.”

“Maya, don’t be a bitch. This is rough enough, all right?”

Surprisingly, that actually was enough to make me stop. It wasn’t just that she was clearly pathetic at the moment. It was also the undercurrent. Trying to make sense of why the Gardener did what he did was an exercise in futility, and completely unnecessary besides. We didn’t need to know why. We just needed to know what.

“Not that you’re actually capable of going anywhere, but wait here.”

She flapped her hand and closed her eyes.

There were two refrigerators in the kitchen attached to our dining room. One held our meal ingredients and was always kept locked, Lorraine having the only key. The other held drinks and what snacks we were allowed to have between meals. I grabbed a couple bottles of water for Lyonette and a juice for myself, then pillaged a book from the library to read aloud to her while we waited for the new girl to wake up.

“There was a library?” Eddison asks incredulously.

“Well, yeah. He wanted us to be happy there. That meant keeping us occupied.”

“What kinds of books did he give you?”

“Whatever we asked for, really.” She shrugs and settles back into her chair, arms crossed loosely over her chest. “It was mostly classics at first, but those of us who genuinely enjoyed reading started a wish list by the doorway, and every now and then he’d add a few dozen or so volumes. And some of us had personal books, direct gifts from him, that stayed in our rooms.”

“And you were one of the readers.”

She starts to give him a disgusted look, then reconsiders. “Oh, right, you weren’t here for that part.”

“What part?”

“The part where I explained that being in the Garden was usually boring as fuck.”

“If that’s boring, you’re clearly not doing it right,” he mutters, and it startles a laugh out of her.

“It wasn’t boring when it was my choice,” she admits. “But that was before the Garden.”

Victor knows he should drag the conversation back to the original question, but the sight of the two of them in agreement about something is far too entertaining, so he lets it go, even ignores the slight trace of a lie in the girl’s face.

“And I suppose your favorite was Poe?”

“Oh, no, Poe had a purpose: to distract. I liked the fairy tales. Not the watered-down Disney shit, or the sanitized Perrault versions. I liked the real ones, where horrible things happened to everyone and you really understood it wasn’t intended for children.”

“No illusions?” Victor asks, and she nods.

“Exactly.”

New Girl took a long time to regain consciousness, long enough that Lyonette even debated sending for Lorraine. I talked her out of it. If the girl was going to die from it, there was little enough our nurse could do to prevent it, and that pinch-faced bitch wasn’t the first thing I would want to see. Lyonette used that to insist I be the first thing New Girl saw.

Given that Lyonette looked like death warmed over, I didn’t even argue . . . much.

It was late in the afternoon before the girl finally stirred, and I closed Oliver Twist on a finger to see if she was actually waking up. We got another two hours of reading in before you could call her any sort of coherent. Under Lyonette’s instructions, I poured a glass of water to have ready and wet down a few cloths to help against the headache. When I folded one of them under the girl’s neck, she batted at my hand and swore at me in Spanish.

Good enough.

Eventually she gathered enough of her wits to pull the washcloths away from her face and try to sit up, her entire body swaying with the force of her nausea.

“Careful there,” I said quietly. “Here’s some water, it’ll help.”

“Get away from me, you sick fuck!”

“I’m not the one who kidnapped you, so save it. Either you want the water and aspirin or you can eat shit and die, your choice.”

Lyonette groaned. “Maya.”

The girl blinked at me, but meekly took the pills and the cup.

“Better. You’re being held by a man known as the Gardener. He gives us new names, so don’t bother telling us yours. Remember it, but don’t say it. I’m called Maya, and the lovely one with the flu over there is Lyonette.”

“I’m—”

“No one,” I reminded her sharply. “Not until he gives you a name. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”