Wilder Girls(5)

I hoist myself up onto the door of a stall, feel it swing as Byatt jumps up next to me. Reese slouches between us. She’s not allowed to shoot because of her hand, but she’s here every day, tense and quiet and watching the target.

At some point the order was alphabetical but we’ve all lost things, eyes and hands and last names. Now it’s the oldest girls who go first. We get through them quickly, most of them good enough to hit home in only a few shots. Julia and Carson both done in two, an endless, mortifying wait as Landry takes more than I can count, and then it’s our year. Byatt makes it in three. Respectable, but there’s a reason they pair her with me on Gun Shift. If she doesn’t hit her target, I will.

She hands the shotgun to me, and I blow on my hands to work the feeling back in before I take her place, lift the shotgun to my shoulder, and aim. Breathe in, focus, and breathe out, finger squeezing tight. The sound rattles through me. It’s easy. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been better at than Byatt.

   “Good, Hetty,” Welch calls. Somebody at the back of the crowd repeats it, singsong and laughing. I roll my eye, leave the shotgun on the makeshift table, and join Reese and Byatt again by the stable door.

It’s usually Cat who goes next, but there’s a little shuffle, a whimper, and someone shoves Mona out into the middle. She stumbles a step or two and then rights herself, scanning the faces of the girls around her for some ounce of pity. She won’t find any—we keep it for ourselves these days.

“Can I have a pass?” she says, turning to Welch. There’s a waxy calm on Mona’s face but a fidget in her body. She almost made it, almost got by with skipping her turn. But the rest of us won’t let it happen. And neither will Welch.

“Afraid not.” Welch shakes her head. “Let’s go.”

Mona says something else, but it’s too low for anybody to hear, and she goes to the table. The gun is laid out. All Mona has to do is point and shoot. She lifts the gun, cradles it in the crook of her arm like it’s a doll.

“Any day now.” From Welch.

Mona levels it at the target and sneaks a finger onto the trigger. We’re all quiet. Her hands are shaking. Somehow she’s keeping the gun aimed right, but the strain is tearing at her.

   “I can’t,” she whimpers. “I don’t…I can’t.” She lowers the shotgun, looks my way.

And that’s when they slice, three deep cuts on the side of her neck, like gills. No blood. Just a pulse in them with every breath, the twitch of something moving under her skin.

Mona doesn’t scream. Doesn’t make a noise. She just drops. Flat on her back, mouth gasping open. She’s still looking at me, her chest rising slow. I can’t look away, not as Welch hurries over, not as she kneels at Mona’s feet and takes her pulse.

“Get her to her room,” she says. Her room, and not the infirmary, because only the worst of us wind up there. And Mona’s been sicker than this before. We all have.

The Boat Shift girls, marked out by the knives they’re allowed to keep stuck in their belt loops, they step away from the rest. Always them, and they take Mona’s arms. Haul her up, lead her away, back to the house.

Chatter, and a break as we start to follow, but Welch clears her throat.

“Ladies,” she says, and she drags it out like she used to do during dorm checks. “Did I dismiss you?” Nobody answers, and Welch picks up the shotgun, gives it to the first girl in the order. “We’ll start again. From the top.”

There’s no surprise in any of us. We left it someplace and forgot where. So we line up, we wait, and we take our shots, and we feel the warmth—Mona’s warmth—seeping out of the shotgun and into our hands.



* * *



—

   Dinner is scattered and fraying. Usually, we manage at least to sit in the same room, but today we get our rations from Welch and then split, some here in the hall and others in the kitchen, crowded around the old woodstove, the last of the curtains burning to keep them warm. After days like this and girls like Mona, we peel apart and wonder who’s next.

I’m by the stairs, propped up against the banister. The three of us were last to get food today, and there was barely anything good left: just the ends of a loaf of bread, both slimy with mold. Byatt looked about ready to cry when that was all I brought back—neither of us got anything for lunch, not when Reese won that orange fair and square—but luckily, Carson from Boat Shift gave me some expired soup. We’re waiting for the can opener to come our way so we can eat, and until then, there’s Reese on the floor trying to nap, and Byatt looking up to where you can just see the door that bars the staircase up to the third-floor infirmary.

It used to be the servants’ quarters back when the house was first built. Six rooms branching off a narrow hallway, with a roof deck above it and the double height main hall below. You can only get there using the staircase off the second-floor mezzanine, and it’s locked behind a low, tilting door.

I don’t like looking at it, don’t like thinking of the sickest girls tucked away, don’t like that there isn’t room for everyone. And I don’t like how every door up there locks from the outside. How, if you wanted to, you could keep someone in.

   Instead, I stare across the main hall, to the glass walls of the dining room. Long empty tables ripped apart for kindling, silverware dumped into the ocean to keep the knives away from us. It used to be my favorite room in the house. Not on my first day, when I had nowhere to sit, but every one after I’d come in for breakfast and see Byatt saving me a seat. She had a single our first year, and she liked to get up early, take walks around the grounds. I’d meet her in the dining room, and she’d have toast waiting for me. Before Raxter, I ate it with butter, but Byatt showed me jam was better.