Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(63)
“What? No garlic bread today?”
Delilah
“What’s going on?” I demanded as Pagano opened my door early one evening, several days after I’d awoken in the private cell.
He adjusted my collar’s settings with the press of a button and waved me into the hall. “You’ve been engaged.”
“But I delivered lunches today.”
“You’re filling in for one of the other females.”
“Who?” My pulse spiked with worry as he led me down the hall toward the exit. “What happened to her?” Had someone else been injured? Been robbed of an unborn child? Or had I lost another friend?
Pagano’s refusal to answer as he marched me down the hall left a bitter silence my brain filled with every horrible possibility for what had happened. For where we were going. For what might happen to my baby if this engagement went wrong.
Or if it went right.
The baby was never far from my thoughts. Every wave of nausea, bite of food and moment of inexplicable fatigue reminded me that I was pregnant. Each occasional beat of joy that pulsed through me with that thought immediately triggered an answering wave of guilt and anger. I couldn’t be happy about the life growing inside me without agonizing over how it got there. Without feeling like I was betraying the past version of myself who’d suffered through the conception.
A hundred times a day, a bitter carousel of unanswered questions turned around and around my head, forever seeking answers that couldn’t be caught. I knew only two things for sure.
First: I wanted the baby, no matter how I got it. No matter who its father was.
And second: I would not get to keep it, even if I got to birth it.
“Is this another one of those boring political parties?” I asked Pagano, desperate to reroute my thoughts. I’d served at two of them in the past few days, and though boring could reasonably be called a synonym for safe, it also made the time drag terribly.
Pagano gave me a strange look as he held the exterior door open. As if he hadn’t expected me to notice that Vandekamp had addressed several of his guests as congressmen and two as governors.
His hand tightened on my arm as my bare feet hit the cool sidewalk. We walked the rest of the way to the prep room in silence, but this time only two of the chairs were occupied, one by Simra, the other by Zyanya.
Pagano led me to an unoccupied chair, where the third makeup artist stood ready to work on me, and when I was seated, he aimed his remote at my collar and took away my ability to move. And speak.
By then I’d been paralyzed countless times, but as always, my sudden helplessness hit me like a knife driven straight through my gut. I’d spent days at a time locked up in a menagerie cage, yet I’d never felt as vulnerable there as I did in the Spectacle’s makeup chair, unable to either defend or express myself.
When we were all dressed and ready, the handlers led us out of the prep room, and I got a look at my fellow captives. The marid’s costume consisted only of strategically draped swaths of a filmy, sparkly blue material, so that she appeared to be wearing a flowing sheet of water. Her glittering silver hair had been pulled back from her face, where her huge blue eyes were magnified by expertly applied makeup.
Zyanya had been rubbed with body glitter so that she seemed to glow everywhere except the small patches of skin covered by her cheetah-print bikini. Her hair was pulled back and tied into a tight bun so it couldn’t fall and obscure her cat eyes, and bright red lipstick made a stark contrast to her sharp feline incisors.
As we were escorted into the kitchen, where a dozen silver trays were already loaded and ready to serve, the event coordinator announced to the handlers, “The hunt starts in about ten minutes. The spectators are placing their final bets now.”
The hunt? Dread twisted my stomach, triggering a resurgence of nausea.“You go out in two minutes,” the event coordinator said to us, as Pagano left me in line with my fellow servers.
“I hate the hunts,” Simra whispered.
Zyanya nodded. “One of these days they’re going to take me out of the kitchen and set me loose in the woods, and I’ll come back with an arrow sticking out of my chest. Or not at all.”
“That won’t happen.” But I was speaking from a platform of ignorance. I had no idea who Vandekamp used as prey for his hunts. I’d just found out there were hunts.
“Of course it will happen.” Simra shrugged bare, sparkly shoulders. “When she’s no longer young or pretty enough to serve food, they will hunt her. If she goes feral before that, they will hunt her. If they run out of prey, they will hunt her. That’s how this works. Everyone dies eventually, during a private engagement, on the sand or in the hunts.”
I could only stare at the marid, too horrified to argue.
Could I truly bring a child into this world? Would it be more merciful to let Tabitha Vandekamp end the whole thing, before the poor kid had a chance to truly suffer?
The event coordinator—Glen Fischer, according to his name tag—told us to pick up our trays.
I followed Simra through another door into the back of a large, dark room. The walls and floor were covered with black carpet, which dampened sound and seemed to absorb light. I started to step forward, but Zyanya grabbed my arm. When my eyes finally adjusted, I realized she’d stopped me from tumbling down a series of broad steps that formed stadium-style tiers the entire length of the room.