Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(42)

“I told you what would happen if you didn’t behave.”

“I’m not in control of the furiae.” Not always. “I tried to tell you that.”

Vandekamp turned to the pair of handlers stationed by the door. “Where are the others she was serving with?”

“We’re holding them down the hall, sir, waiting for your decision.”

“Isolate each of them. No lights. No windows. No sleep mat. No communication with anyone. No food or water for forty-eight hours.”

“But I couldn’t help it!” I insisted. “Punishing them won’t teach me a lesson, because I didn’t do it on purpose!”

Vandekamp didn’t even seem to hear me.

“What about her?” one of the handlers asked, and though I couldn’t see him, I could hear hatred and fear in every word he spoke.

“Send her back to the dorm. Shut her down if she comes within three feet of any employee.”

Shut her down. As if I were a machine that could simply be turned off when it wasn’t needed.

“Sir, are you sure? She’s the problem. Shouldn’t she be punished too?”

But the handler clearly didn’t understand—the whole time I sat in a well-lit room surrounded by friends and fed three meals a day, I’d be able to think about nothing but the suffering I’d brought upon Zyanya, Lenore, Belinda and Clarisse.

“That is her punishment.”





    “In an unprecedented event, nearly two dozen cryptids of      multiple species have escaped from the Massachusetts state preserve. Residents      are advised to stay inside and lock their doors.”

    —from the Boston Gazette, September 1996





Delilah

I refused food for the next thirty-six hours.

Lala tried to convince me that what was happening to the others wasn’t my fault. But she was wrong.

Mirela and Finola told me that making myself suffer wouldn’t help those being punished for what I’d done. They were right, but that didn’t change anything. I couldn’t stop their suffering, but I could make sure they didn’t suffer alone.

After lunch on the second day after the bachelor party, the dormitory door opened and Bowman called my name. He wore thick leather gloves and the collar of his shirt was folded up, leaving none of his neck exposed.

“What?” I didn’t bother to stand. My insides had become one vicious cramp with the kind of hunger I remembered from my first few days in the menagerie, before Gallagher had started sneaking me extra food.

I hadn’t seen Gallagher since the bachelor party. None of the others who’d been taken out for engagements had seen him either.

“Delilah, you’ve been engaged,” Bowman said. “Let’s go.”

I stood, and the room spun around me. My legs felt shaky. “By myself?” In the week and a half we’d been at the Spectacle, I hadn’t seen anyone leave for an engagement alone.

“Come on.”

My first few steps were unsteady.

He adjusted the settings on my collar, then escorted me down the hall toward the makeup room. “I guess you shouldn’t have given your lunch away, huh?”

Of course they’d been watching.

Bowman held the makeup-room door open for me, revealing that three women and two men were already reclined in five of the six available chairs. “We have a late addition to the roster,” he said, gesturing for me to sit in the empty chair.

“We’ll get to her when we’re done here,” one of the makeup artists said, without looking up from the man whose face she was painting. With his sculpted features exaggerated by subtle, miraculously masculine makeup, I hardly recognized Drusus, the incubus our menagerie had picked up about a month before we were recaptured.

After at least two hours in the reclining chair, I was rubbed in body glitter and dressed in the same outfit I’d worn to the bachelor party, only this time I was given a pair of sandals with three-inch heels.

The handlers marched us through the topiary, then through a second iron gate I’d never noticed before, toward the back of the stone garden wall along a winding sidewalk.

Beyond that gate was a vast section of the Savage Spectacle I’d never seen before, completely surrounded by a tall iron fence and hidden by a thick grove of tall trees. The sidewalk wound through the grove, lit by light posts at regular intervals, and we emerged from the thicket in front of two imposing brick structures both almost absent of windows. The one on the right sat just a few hundred feet from the iron fence at the back of the property. The other was huge and octagonal, and it was surrounded by a parking lot of its own. Which implied that it also had its own entrance and driveway, though I could see neither from our vantage point.

Our handlers marched us toward a service entrance at the rear of the octagonal building, and as we approached, the familiar shape of the building finally sank in.

This is the ring.

We stepped into a large, cold room with white tile on both the floor and the walls. Three large drains in the floor formed a broad triangle, and two industrial hoses were wrapped around large hooks above faucets set into the wall.

The white tile room was made to clean up messes. Big messes.

My throat tightened so suddenly and severely I could hardly breathe but the others marched straight ahead, as if they’d seen it all before.