The Book Eaters(72)
Devon knew that, had already known it was pointless to ask. It still hurt to hear the answers spoken again.
“If you’ll let me finish,” he went on, “I consider you a risky guest, given your history. One liable to spend the next thirty-six months plotting hotly to run away.” Matley pushed past her, coming to stand at the console with its many screens. “I want to preempt any such idiocy on your part by informing you that I’ve upgraded the security for this manor. Substantially upgraded.”
He pressed a series of keys. The screens compiled into one single video footage display across their conjoined surfaces: the control room itself, with Devon standing stiffly in the heart of it.
“It’s a state-of-the-art electronic in-house security system. I have given you privacy in your room but most of the house is wired and watched, as are the gates to this estate, and I’m the only one who knows the access number to this console. Good luck climbing out of this tower, princess.”
“Kind of you to think of me.” Sarcasm kept her grounded against shock. “I’m flattered to be worth the time.”
“This isn’t just for you. You’re not that special,” he retorted with his usual pettiness, and dropped into a swivel chair. “I was going to upgrade the security anyway.”
Typical Matley, she thought. Every scrap of satisfaction had to belong to him.
“If you don’t need me for anything and there is nothing to do here, then I’m going for a walk.” She needed to think. To process.
“One last thing,” he said, and held up a thimble. Her thimble, the one Jarrow had given her to communicate with. “Still need this?”
“That’s mine. Jarrow gave it to me—”
“To communicate with, which you can now do without it.” He crushed the thimble flat between forefinger and thumb, and set it down pointedly on the table.
Devon stared at the misshapen disc that had been Jarrow’s gift, and squeezed her son tight to her chest.
“You’re free to go, by the way,” Matley said. “Be aware you’ll have an escort every time you leave the house, for the next three years. Think of him as a replacement Jarrow, eh?” He snorted. “Try not to act too suspicious on your walks. He’s authorized to neutralize you, if need be.”
His words left her cold.
As prophesied, an unfamiliar man was waiting in the hallway as Devon left the control room. He was short but brawny, and sported an enormous plastic earplug. Chewing hard on nicotine gum. A human, and therefore surely less strong than her.
But he was also armed with Taser, blackjack, and walkie-talkie. Likely other weapons, too, that she couldn’t see. She remembered all too well how Tasers felt.
“Going for a walk, are we?” Earplug snapped his chewing gum loudly.
“No,” Devon said, and retreated to her room.
Earplug followed her all the way to her door but did not come inside, nor object when she drew the bolts. Thank heavens for that at least.
In the privacy of her own quarters, Devon curled up on the window seat to nurse her ever-hungry son, trying to think.
The manor had hardly been a playground before. The Easterbrooks, with their servants and seedy illicit businesses, were fond of security. Matley’s upgrades only made that worse and tied everything to him personally—the codes stored in his mind, because he could not write them even if he wished to. He could do this because, like Aike, he was patriarch, a role he’d won through a complex system of votes in which women could not participate.
There was also nothing she could do to change her situation. The system was too big, too vast, everything out of her reach and all obstacles impossible to overcome. If she left, they’d hunt her; if she escaped, her son would starve without Redemption; if she fed him sans drugs, that meant finding human folk for him to eat and then watching him go insane. And all of that was predicated on the assumption she could escape at all, much less survive in human society with a hostile Family on the prowl.
Devon looked at her sleepy, squashed-face little boy, cold wind at her back, and decided that she would enjoy every single day she had with him, until those days ran out. And when they finally came for him, these knights, these men of the Families, wrapped in their own arrogance and wielding cruelty like weapons, she would fight.
It’d be the death of her, but perhaps death was the only ending she had a right to claim, after all her years of cowardice and subservience.
* * *
Time ran away with itself for the next two years. Devon breathed in days and breathed out nights, suffused in the moment. Long orchard walks blended with even longer afternoons spent reading or eating books, all with a baby at her side. She moved through her minutes in a daze, because her life was irrevocably different yet nothing had changed.
She took her son on the walks, carrying him in a woven shawl like Romanian women had done in the past, partly because the Easterbrooks were reluctant to give her even small conveniences like a baby carriage, and partly because she found a wrap more convenient. Earplug trailed wherever she went, or sometimes it was another armed human man, who she thought of as Tallboy.
As she rambled, always accompanied but perpetually lonely, Devon took her time to think of a name, because it bothered her to keep calling her son the baby.
She’d never named anyone before. Traditionally, the Families gave their children first names that were always drawn from locations in Britain, a practice that subtly set them apart from human culture while also not requiring any of the creativity that their species often lacked. But since Matley didn’t want him, and she no longer liked the Families much, Devon decided to dispense with that custom. She would make the effort to use her imagination, such as it was.