The Glass Arrow(5)

“Did you hear that screeching? How dreadful,” says another. She’s a singer; I’ve heard her practicing all week for tomorrow. Her hands are planted on her bony hips. They call her Lily.

“She probably doesn’t even know what she’s doing,” says Lotus. “I’ve seen people like her before. Not right in the head. She’s probably a witch.” She whispers the last part.

They talk about me like I’m not right in front of them. Like I’m deaf or something. Daphne’s examining her nails now, as if they’re the most interesting things she’s ever seen.

“Well she is from the outside,” says Lily.

I wonder how well she’d sing if I punched her in her skinny little throat.

Lily’s delicate fingers lift to one of her long beaded earrings, the sign of the Unpromised. They don’t let me wear mine anymore. The last time I ripped one out right before they tried to put me on stage.

“Yes,” says Daphne in a small voice. “And it’s because of that she’s going to fetch twice your bidding price.” She peels a hangnail off her thumb; a nervous habit I knew from our time here together. She always gets nervous on auction days. I don’t suppose this situation is making her feel any calmer; even I can feel the tension in this murky air.

Lotus scoffs. “I don’t see why. It’s not as if she’s prettier than me … than any of us, I mean.”

“I don’t know about that,” I tell her. She sneers.

“It’s her insides that are different.” Daphne says this as though she’s bored, but her words have a bite to them. “She’s fertile, like the girls brought in from the outliers. She doesn’t have to have the treatments to activate her babymaker.”

Daphne was the first to tell me why the hunters were so eager to sell me to the Garden. The city scientists think it’s the fresh air or the real food—as opposed to the meal supplement pills pumped down their throats in the early, formative years—that make wild girls like me, and those born in the outlying towns, like my mother, different. Whatever the reason, I’m worth quite a lot. I’m twice as likely to produce a living, healthy boy child than any other woman born in the city.

Daphne cringes slightly, and I wonder if she’s thinking about the fertility injections. A lot of the girls here complain about them. The medicine gives them the shakes, and makes them throw up, and cry for no reason. The whole process seems a huge waste if they don’t even conceive a boy, but the docs do it because treating the girls they have is more reliable than pulling stock from the outliers. The census works for women, just as it works against us. There must be a steady pool of childbearing females to populate the city.

“Rumor,” says Lily. “It can’t be true. If it was, they’d move all of us outside the gates.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh.

“Right,” I say. “You wouldn’t last a day.” I try to imagine her setting a trap or cleaning a kill, but I can’t. “Besides, if the men set us all free, it’d be just a matter of time before they’d have an uprising on their hands.”

“Stop it.” Daphne glances up as the camera above focuses with a buzzing noise. She’s warned me before that talking this way could get me in trouble. I’d do it a lot more if I thought it might actually get me out of here.

“Deny it if you want,” I say with a shrug, “but it’s the truth.”

These girls don’t know freedom. Men own women in the city, right down to the Virulent—those whose crimes have been recorded with a permanent X on their cheek—pimps and their whores. Not even the women in the surrounding towns are safe. Maybe they can still choose a husband, but the moment the female census gets too high, they’ll be collected, along with their girl children, to be sold in the city. Sometimes their families even offer them up early for credits.

“It’s an honor to be chosen,” snaps Daphne. “I’d rather be pampered than end up a poor housewife in the outliers, or a prostitute in the Black Lanes, or living in a tent.”

Her voice hitches on that last part. I shouldn’t have told her how we lived. She never understood how much warmer it was there than within these cold glass walls.

“The wild girl might think she’s better than everyone else, but she never gets bids.” The fourth girl finally speaks. She’s tall, with a round face, and has been shoved in the Garden’s weight shifter so many times her waist is half the size of her hips and breasts. She looks like her back might break if she bends over too far. “She’s not worth the credits.”

It shouldn’t bother me—a buyer is the last thing I want—but my cheeks get hot all the same. I size her up.

She’s big, but not too smart. She likes to pick on the smaller ones around here and no one tries to stop her. Sweetpea is her name, sent over from one of the packed dorms on the south side of Glasscaster, where Keepers collect girl children and raise them for auction. She’s been on a registry since birth, groomed to be obedient and mild mannered. I don’t think any of their training stuck. She’s a brute.

“Exactly,” says Lotus. “Look at her hair—it’s like sheep’s wool. I bet her mother laid down with a sheep and that’s how she came to be.”

Daphne snorts. I glare at her for only a moment. My blood’s turning hot, and my fists clench at my sides.