Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)(4)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

Time passes. Girls come and go. I pretend I am asleep and strain to hear what they’re whispering to each other. They say things I don’t understand. Angel’s blood. The new yellow. Dead greens. Men yell at them from a distance, and they go, their jewelry clattering like plastic shackles.

I feel myself falling asleep and try to fight it. But one minute I’m here, and the next I’m rocking on the glittering waves. One minute Gabriel is beside me, and then in the next, Linden is wrapping himself around me the way he did in sleep. He sobs in my ear and says his dead wife’s name, and I open my eyes. The hard dirt and thin blanket is an unwelcome change from the fluffy white comforter I was just hallucinating, and for a moment Gabriel seems strange. His bright brown hair nothing like Linden’s dark curls; his body thicker and less pale. I try rousing him again. No response.

I close my eyes, and this time I dream of snakes. Their hissing heads erupt from the dirt, and they coil around my ankles. They try to take off my shoes.

I wake in a panic. Lilac is kneeling at my feet, easing my socks off. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. I feel like hours have passed, but I can see through the slit in the tent that it’s still nighttime.

“What are you doing?” My voice is hoarse. It’s so cold in this tent that I can see my own breath. I don’t know how these girls haven’t frozen to death in their flimsy dresses.

“These are soaked. You have to keep extremities warm, you know. You could get pneumonia.”

She’s right, I am freezing. She wraps my bare feet in towels. I watch her as she rummages through a small suitcase. Her curls are disheveled, her dress more rumpled. When she kneels by Gabriel this time, she’s got an array of things in a black handkerchief. She mixes powder and water in a spoon and takes a lighter to it until it bubbles, then draws it up into a syringe. Then she starts tying a strip of cloth around Gabriel’s arm above the elbow—which is something my parents used to do before administering emergency sedatives to hysterical lab patients—and that’s when I push her away. “Don’t.”

“It’s going to help him,” she says. “Keep him calm, keep you both out of trouble.”

I think of the warm toxins flowing through my blood after I was injured in the hurricane, how Vaughn threatened me and I couldn’t even muster the strength to open my eyes. How helpless and numb and terrified I was. I would rather have suffered the pain of my injuries, the broken bones, sprained limbs, stitched skin, than have been paralyzed.

“I don’t care,” I say. “You’re not giving him anything.”

She frowns. “Then, it’s going to be a rough night.”

I could laugh. “It already is.”

Lilac opens her mouth to say something else, but a noise at the tent’s entrance makes her turn her head. There’s a moment of fear in her eyes; maybe she thought it would be a man, but then she relaxes. “You know you’re supposed to stay hidden,” she says. “You want to piss Madame off?”

She’s talking to the child who has just crawled into the tent, not through the guarded entrance but through a small opening along the ground. Dark, stringy hair is covering her face. She moves more into the light, tilts her head to me, and her eyes are like marbled glass, so light they’re barely even the color blue—a startling contrast to her dark skin.

Lilac sets down the spoon and pushes the child back in the direction she came from, saying, “Hurry up. Get lost before we both get hell for it.”

The child goes, but not before pushing back and huffing indignantly through her nose.

Gabriel stirs, and I snap to attention. Lilac offers up the syringe again, gnawing her lip. I ignore it. “Gabriel?” My voice is very soft. I brush some hair from his face, and I realize how damp and clammy his forehead is. His face is splotchy with fever. His eyelashes flutter, but it’s like he can’t quite raise them.

Out in the night someone yelps in pain or maybe just aggravation, and Madame’s shrill voice cries, “Useless, filthy child!”

Lilac is on her feet the next instant, but she has left the syringe on the ground for me. “He’ll want it,” she tells me as she hurries for the exit. “He’ll need it.”

“Rhine?” Gabriel whispers. He’s the only one in this broken carnival who knows my name. He screamed it in the gale, pieces of Vaughn’s fake world whipping around us. He whispered it within the mansion’s walls, leaning close to me. He’s lured me from sleep that way, while my husband and sister wives slept before dawn. Always with such purpose, like it matters, like my name—like all of me—is a precious secret.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m right here.”

He doesn’t answer, and I think he’s lost consciousness again. I feel stranded, start to panic about him going back to that dark, unreachable place. But then he sucks in a hard breath and opens his eyes. His pupils are back to normal, no longer losing themselves in all that blue.

His teeth are chattering, and he’s stuttering and slurring when he asks, “What is this place?”

Not where, but what. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, blotting some sweat from his face with my sleeve. “I’m going to get us out of here.” We’re both lost here, but of the two of us I have a better understanding of the outside world. Surely I can figure something out.

He stares at me for a long while, shuddering from the cold and the aftereffects of whatever was in that first syringe. And then he says, “The guards were trying to take you away.”

“They took me,” I say. “They took both of us.”

I can see him fighting to stay awake. There’s a dark bruise forming on his cheek; his mouth is chapped and bleeding; he’s shaking so hard, I can feel it without touching him.

I wrap the blanket around him more snugly, trying to imitate the cocooning technique Cecily swaddled the baby with on a cold night. It was one of the few times she looked sure of what she was doing. “Rest,” I whisper. “I’ll be right here.”

He watches me for a long time, his eyes darting up and down the length of my face. I think he’s going to speak. I hope he will, even if it’s just to say this is all my fault, that he told me the world was dangerous. I don’t care. I just want him here with me. I want to hear his voice. But all he does is close his eyes, and then he’s gone again.

I manage a fitful sleep beside him, shivering, covered with only a damp towel so Gabriel can have all the covers. I dream of crisp bed linens; of sparkling gold champagne that warms my throat and stomach as it goes down; of category-three winds rattling the edges, revealing bits of darkness behind a shiny perfect world.

I’m ripped from sleep by a gurgling, retching sound that at first makes me think I’m at my oldest sister wife’s deathbed. But when I open my eyes, I see Gabriel doubled over in a far corner of our tent. The smell of vomit is not quite as overwhelming as all the smoke and perfume that keeps this place in a perpetual smog.

I hurry to his side, all earnest, heart pounding. And now that I’m close to him, I can smell and see the coppery blood coming from a gash between his shoulder blades; the skin tears as he tenses his muscles. I don’t remember there being any knives in the struggle, but we were ambushed so fast.

“Gabriel?” I touch his shoulder but can’t bring myself to look at the stuff he’s coughing up. When he’s finished, I offer him a rag, and he takes it, slumping back on his heels.

It seems stupid to ask if he’s all right, so I’m trying to get a good look at his eyes. Shades of purple are tiered under them, from dark to light. The cold is making clouds of his breath.

In the light of the swinging lantern, his own shadows dance behind his still form.

He says, “Where is this place?”

“We’re in a scarlet district along the coastline. They gave you something; I think it’s called angel’s blood.”

“It’s a sedative,” he says; his voice is slurred. He crawls back for the blanket and collapses facedown. “Housemaster Vaughn kept it in stock. Hospitals used to carry it, but they stopped because of the side effects.”

He doesn’t resist as I position him onto his side and draw the blanket over him. He’s shivering. “Side effects?” I say.

“Hallucinations. Nightmares.”

I think of the warmth that spread through my veins after the hurricane, think of being unable to move; Vaughn only kept me conscious long enough to threaten me. And though I don’t remember it, Linden claimed I muttered horrible things while I dreamt.

“Can I do anything?” I say, tucking the blankets around his shoulders. “Are you thirsty?”

He reaches for me, and I let him draw me to his side. “I dreamt you’d drowned,” he says. “Our boat was burning and there was no shore.”

“Not possible,” I say. His lips are chapped and bloody against my forehead. “I’m an excellent swimmer.”

“It was dark,” he says. “All I could see was your hair, going under. I dove after you and realized I was chasing a jellyfish. You were nowhere.”

“I’ve been here,” I say. “You’re the one who’s been nowhere. I couldn’t wake you up.”

He raises the blanket like a wing, wrapping me inside with him. It’s warmer than I thought it would be, and I realize at once how much I’ve missed him while he’s been under. I close my eyes, breathe deep. But the smell of the ocean is gone from his skin. He smells like blood and Madame’s perfume, which lingers in the white soapy film that floats in all the water basins.

“Don’t leave me again,” I whisper. He doesn’t answer. I reposition myself in his arms and draw back to look at his face. His eyes are closed. “Gabriel?” I say.

“You’re dead,” he mumbles sleepily. “I watched you die”—his voice hitches with a yawn—“watched you die all those horrible deaths.”

“Wake up,” I tell him, and sit up, and pull the blankets away, hoping the sudden cold will shock him awake.

He opens his eyes, glossy like Jenna’s when she was dying. “They were cutting your throat,” he says. “You tried to scream, but you had no voice.”

“It’s not real,” I say. My heart is pounding with fear. My blood is cold. “You’re delirious. Look; I’m right here.” My fingers brush his neck, which is flush and warm. I remember when we kissed, Linden’s atlas between us; I remember the warm air of his little breaths on my tongue and chin and neck, the sudden draftiness when he drew back. Everything dissolved from around us in that moment, and I’d never felt so safe.

Now I worry that we’ll never be safe again. If we ever were.