Wither

This, I suppose, is something I have in common with my new husband. Before my brother and I were born, my parents had two children, another set of twins, who were born blind and unable to speak. Their limbs were malformed and they didn’t live past five years. Genetic abnormalities like this are rare, given the perfection of the first generations, but they do happen. They’re called malformed. It seems my parents were incapable of making children without genetic oddities, though now I have cause to be grateful for my heterochromia. It may have spared me a gunshot to the brain in the back of that van.



Rose and I talk about happier things too, like cherry blossom trees. I even come to trust her enough to tell her about my father’s atlas and my disappointment at having missed the world in its prime. As she braids my hair, she tells me that if she could have lived anywhere in the world, she would have chosen India. She would have worn saris and positively covered herself in henna, and she would have paraded the streets on an elephant shrouded in jewels.



I paint her nails pink, and she arranges novelty jewels on my forehead from a sticker sheet.



Then one afternoon, as we’re lying beside each other on the bed, stuffing ourselves with colorful candies, I blurt out, “How can you stand it, Rose?”



She turns her head on the pillow to face me. Her tongue is deep purple. “What?”



“Doesn’t it bother you that he has remarried, while you’re still alive?”



She smiles, looks at the ceiling, and fiddles with a wrapper. “I asked him to. I convinced him it will be easier, with new wives already in the house.” She closes her eyes and yawns. “Besides, he was starting to get teased in the social circles. Most House Governors have at least three wives, sometimes seven—one for every day of the week.” It’s absurd enough that she laughs a little, sup-presses a cough. “But not Linden. Housemaster Vaughn has been trying to talk him into it for years, and he has always refused. Finally he agreed to it, as long as he had a choice in the selection. He didn’t even have a choice with me.”



Her voice is cool, and she is so bizarrely serene. It worries me that I’ve become her favorite new bride simply for my blond hair, my vague resemblance to her. She is such a brilliant, well-read girl, and I wonder if she has figured out that I’ll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he’ll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.



Chapter 6



“I want to play a game,” Cecily says.



Jenna doesn’t look up from her novel. She’s strewn languidly on the couch, with her legs dangling over the armrest. “No shortage of those.”



“I don’t mean the keyboard or virtual skiing,” Cecily insists. “I mean a game game.” She looks to me for help, but the only game I know is the one where my brother and I set noise traps in the kitchen and try to survive the night intact. And when I was taken by Gatherers, I sort of lost.



I’m curled up on the window ledge in the sitting room—a room that is filled with virtual sports games and a keyboard meant to imitate a symphony orches-tra—and I have been staring at the orange tree blossoms that flutter like thousands of tiny white-winged descending birds. Rowan wouldn’t even believe them, the life they imply, the health and beauty. Manhattan is full of gasping, shriveled weeds that grow from the asphalt.



Refrigerator-smelling carnations for sale that are more science than flower.



“Don’t you know any games?” Cecily is asking me directly now. I feel her brown eyes staring at me.



Well. There was one game, with paper cups and string, and the little girl who lived across the alleyway. I open my mouth, prepared to explain it, but change my mind.



I don’t want to whisper my secrets into a paper cup to share with my sister wives. Really I only have one secret that’s worth anything, and that’s my plan to escape.



“We could play virtual fishing,” I say. I can feel Cecily’s indignation without even looking at her.



“There has to be something real we could do,” she says. “There has to be.” She paces out of the room, and I hear her shuffling around down the hall.



“Poor kid,” Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. “She doesn’t even understand what kind of place this is.”



It happens at noon. Gabriel brings my lunch to me in the library—which has become my new favorite place—and stops to look over my shoulder when he sees the sketch of a boat on the page.



“What are you reading?” he asks.



“A history book,” I say. “This one explorer proved the world was round by assembling a team and sailing all the way around it on three boats.”



“The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria,” he says.



“You know about world history?” I ask.



“I know about boats,” he says, and sits behind me on the arm of the overstuffed chair and points to the image.



“This one here is a caravel.” He begins describing its structure to me—the trio of masts, the lateen rigging.



All I truly understand from this is that the style was Spanish. But I don’t interrupt him. I can see the intensity in his blue eyes, that he’s taken a brief respite from the sullen work of cooking for and catering to Linden’s brides, that he has a passion for something.



Sitting in his shadow in the overstuffed chair, I actually feel a smile coming on.



That’s when Cecily’s domestic, Elle, comes bursting into the room. “There you are,” she cries at Gabriel. “You need to hurry to the kitchen and bring Lady Rose something for her cough.”



I can hear her coughing now, at the end of the long hallway. It’s become such a fixture in this place that I don’t always notice it. Gabriel hurries to his feet, and I close the book, make a motion to follow him out. “Don’t,” he says, stopping me at the doorway. “It’s better if you stay in here until this passes.”



But past his shoulder I can see an unusual chaos.



Domestics are scrambling past one another. First generation attendants are coming out of the elevator carrying all sorts of bottles, and a machine that resembles the humidifier my parents put in my bedroom the winter I caught pneumonia. But there’s an air of futility about it all, and Gabriel senses it too. I can tell by the look in his eyes.



“Stay here,” he says. But of course I follow him into the hallway. And it’s so frightening out here that I want to follow him into the elevator, which probably isn’t allowed, but I’m beyond caring about that. The domestics freeze in place; the attendants are left holding blankets and pills and breathing machines. Linden is kneeling by Rose’s bed with his face buried in the mattress.



He’s holding the long white stem of her arm, and I follow it up to her body, which doesn’t move and doesn’t breathe. Her gown, her face, is splattered with blood she must have been coughing up as she made those horrible sounds. But now an eerie silence fills the floor. It’s the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable islands, a silence that can be seen from space.



Cecily and Jenna come out of their bedrooms, and it’s so quiet that we hear the strangled noise in Linden’s throat. “Go away,” he murmurs. Then louder, “Go away!”



It’s not until he smashes a vase against the wall that we all scatter. I end up on the elevator with Gabriel, and when the doors close behind us, I’m grateful.



There’s nothing for me to do but follow Gabriel to the kitchen; I’d get lost going anywhere else. I sit on a counter, nibbling on grapes while the cooks and the servers talk as they go about their work. Gabriel leans against the counter beside me, polishing silverware. “I know you were fond of Rose,” he whispers to me, “but you won’t find much love for her down here. She gave the staff a hard time.”



As if in affirmation, the head cook shrieks, “My soup isn’t hot enough! Oh, now it’s too hot!” and makes dramatic spitting noises as a few others burst into a riot of laughter.



I won’t deny that this is painful to hear. I have witnessed Rose’s wrath on the help, but she never once raised her voice to me. Here in this place of syringes, sullen Governors, and looming Housemasters, she has been my only friend.



I say nothing, though. Our bond was a private thing, and none of these people, laughing at her expense, would understand anyway. I begin to pick grapes from the vine and turn them in my fingers one at a time before setting them back into the bowl. Gabriel steals glances at me as he works, and for a while it’s like that, with the rest of the kitchen chattering loudly, a million miles away. And upstairs, Rose is dead.



“She always had those candies,” I say wistfully. “They make your tongue change colors.”



“They’re called June Beans,” Gabriel says.



“Are there more of them?”



“Sure. Tons,” he says. “She’d have me order them by the crate. Here . . .” He leads me to a pantry between the built-in refrigerator and the wall of stoves. Inside there are wooden crates overflowing with the shimmering wrappers in every color. I can smell their sugar, the artificial dyes. She ordered them, and here they wait to be poured into her crystal bowl and savored.



My longing must be all over my face, because Gabriel is putting some of them into a paper bag for me. “Have all you want. They’ll only go to waste.”



“Thank you,” I say.



“Hey, you, blondie,” the head cook calls to me. She’s a first generation with greasy hair tied into a graying bun.



“Shouldn’t you get upstairs before your husband catches you down here?”



“No,” I say. “He won’t know I’m gone. He doesn’t notice me.”



“He notices you,” Gabriel says. I look at him, unbelieving, but he was turned his blue eyes away from me.



One of the cooks opens the door and tosses out a pot of water, because the sink is in use by the muttering head chef. A gust of cold air pushes the hair from my face. I see a flash of blue sky and green earth, then it’s gone.



There are no key cards, no locks. So this is why the wives aren’t allowed to leave their floor; not every part of the mansion is meant to keep us trapped.



“Do you get to go outside?” I ask Gabriel in a low voice.



He gives me a rueful smile. “Just to do yard work or take in deliveries. Nothing terribly exciting.”



“What’s out there?”



“Eternity,” he says, with a small laugh. “Gardens. A golf course. Maybe a few other things. I’ve never been in charge of the yard work, so I don’t know. I’ve never seen the end of it.”