Spectacle--A Novel

  “They don’t just look, do they?”

  He took his time chewing and swallowing, and when I hadn’t moved on by the time he’d finished his bite, he sighed. “Willem Vandekamp has amassed a large list of very wealthy and very depraved clients.”

  I knew that much even without eight weeks’ worth of memories. “When we’re free, we will burn this place to the ground.”

  Gallagher’s smile was the slow coalescence of every violent, indignant, vengeful impulse we shared. “Flames are a particularly poetic form of destruction.”

  “So is blood.” I lifted my milk carton and held it toward him. “To fire and blood.”

  He tapped my carton with his own. “To vengeance and death. May they all get what they deserve.”

  I drained my milk carton. Then I crushed it.

  “How long did I stay that night?” I asked a while later, as I slid our empty trays into the hall. “The night you killed Argos. Did they leave me here until morning?”

  “No. They came for you in the middle of the night,” he said as I sank onto the mat next to him and tucked my feet beneath me. “And they didn’t let you keep my shirt.”

  My dinner threatened to come back up. They’d made me march naked through the grounds. And they would do it again.

  When the lights went out, instead of curling up on Gallagher’s sleep mat, we sat side by side in the dark while he told me about all the beasts he’d been forced to kill, including the two whose blood had kept him alive.

  In the middle of the night, footsteps echoed from the hall, and my heart lurched into my throat. Gallagher’s light came on. I stood, and he stood with me. My hands hovered at the hem of the borrowed shirt, but I wasn’t going to take it off voluntarily.

  The door opened, and Bowman tossed a set of scrubs and underwear at me. “Change quickly.”

  I headed into the bathroom to get dressed, trying not to look too grateful.

  “I hope to see you sooner than eight weeks from now,” Gallagher said, when I emerged, fully dressed.

  “Me too.” I stepped closer to whisper the rest. “Promise me that if I don’t remember this, you’ll tell me everything we’ve talked about tonight.”

  “You have my word.” Gallagher pulled me into a hug, and I gasped at the sudden aching pain in my breasts. “What’s wrong?” He stepped back to study my eyes, searching for the source of my pain.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. But my eyes fell closed as the sudden, surreal truth coalesced from the bits and pieces of information I had.

  Nausea. Exhaustion. Sore breasts. Though I still had no idea how my memory had been taken, I understood exactly why.

  I hadn’t been drugged. I was pregnant.

  Delilah

  Alone in my cell again, I used the restroom and brushed my teeth, but I didn’t taste the toothpaste or feel the bristles.

  Pregnant.

  The enormity of that idea was so overwhelming that at first, I couldn’t think past it. A lifetime ago, I’d thought I might want kids someday. Back when I’d had a normal life and inalienable rights. When the best thing about my boyfriend’s compulsive stability was what a great dad he’d be.

  But now?

  I didn’t have a boyfriend. I hadn’t had sex since the day I was sold into the menagerie.

  Except obviously I was wrong about that.

  Tears filled my eyes, so I closed them. I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming as images flickered behind my eyelids.

  Hands reaching for Zyanya’s straps. The private room hidden by drapes. The party host handing his credit card to the guard.

  Was that how it had happened? Was I rented for a night? An hour?

  Did I fight?

  My stomach heaved, and I lurched for the toilet. My dinner came back up and I flushed it away, but the nausea remained.

  I lay down on the floor and pressed my burning face to the cool concrete, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Who was he? Was it just once, or was I missing multiple memories of abuse?

  Somehow, not knowing made it worse.

  Could it be a guard? It would have to be one the furiae had never seen abuse anyone, or touching me would have had serious consequences for him. But the Spectacle had plenty of guards who didn’t actively mistreat their charges.

  Magnolia said the handlers couldn’t touch us without paying the rental fee. Had one paid for me? Had I seen him today?

  Did I walk right past him without knowing what he’d done to me?

  My skin crawled with the possibility.

  Someone had touched me. Someone had been inside me, in some brutal moment I’d had no control over. I couldn’t remember it, yet I couldn’t stop picturing it, and suddenly my body itself seemed to be my biggest adversary.

  My brain was withholding the truth. My womb was harboring an uninvited stranger. And the furiae...

  She who could avenge any wrong had put me in the path of danger, then refused to defend me. Or to avenge me.

  Or even tell me whose face had been stricken from my memory.

  Maybe he was a stranger I’d never see again. But he could be someone I saw every day. Someone I talked to and worked with. Someone who had absolute power over my living conditions and my meals and my body.

  And maybe over my mind.

  There must be a reason I couldn’t remember.

  I forced myself off the floor and curled up on my stack of sleep mats, where I stared at the concrete wall inches from my face.

  Obviously, the fact that I was pregnant meant that whoever he was, he’d taken no precautions. What if I’d caught something?

  A fresh wave of nausea rolled over me with that thought. I needed to see a doctor.

  Maybe the doctor could tell me about the...fetus. Was it human? Could it be born a furiae?

  Questions tumbled through my head too fast for me to focus on, but ultimately, none of the answers about what would happen to a child born in captivity—even if it were human—mattered.

  They wouldn’t let me have a baby.

  When Tabitha Vandekamp found out, she would do to me what she’d done to Magnolia. I would have no more say in the fate of my unborn child than I’d had in its conception.

  She must not know yet, or that would already have happened.

  How far along was I? If I’d lost another month’s memories, Tabitha Vandekamp could have ended the pregnancy, and I might never even have known about it.

  Could that still happen? Could I wake up tomorrow missing another two months and never remember that I was pregnant?

  Does the baby have to do with my missing memories? Why bother to erase the conception, if they didn’t know about the pregnancy? Why bother at all? They didn’t do that for Magnolia.

  After trying to untangle a knot of possibilities that led nowhere, I felt like I somehow knew even less than I’d started with.

  What I did know was that to buy time to think it through, I’d have to hide my pregnancy for as long as possible.

  I could not go see a doctor, even to test for communicable diseases.

  Disgusted, terrified and exhausted beyond measure, I closed my eyes. Then noticed that though it must have been well past midnight, the light was still on. How was I supposed to sleep with—

  Footsteps echoed down the hall, then stopped on the other side of my door.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  A tray slid through the slot at the bottom of the door. It held half a red apple and about an ounce of cubed cheddar.

  “Hey!” I crossed the small space to stand as close to the door as I dared. “Who’s out there?”

  But the window only showed an empty hallway, and I could already hear footsteps receding toward the door at the end. As I knelt to pick up the tray, the ov
erhead light dimmed to a level that would be comfortable to sleep in, yet still let me see the food in front of me.

  I sank onto the stack of thin mattresses with the tray in my lap, and at first I could only stare at the food. Apple and cheese. A perfectly healthy snack, which was an extravagance in a facility that labeled itself “savage.” I’d never been given a snack by the Spectacle staff—not that I could remember anyway. Neither had anyone else, that I knew of. So why...?

  Because I’d lost my dinner.

  The answer hit me with the emotional force of a sledgehammer swung right at my soul. A private cell. Exercise and sunlight. Vitamins. Late-night snacks.

  Someone knew about the baby. Someone with the authority to give me healthy privileges and protect both me and my unborn child from Tabitha Vandekamp and her infanticidal tendencies.

  I could think of only one person who fit that bill, and who could have arranged to make me forget eight weeks of my life.

  Willem Vandekamp knew about the baby.

  And wanted it to live.

  Untitled Document

  “Scientists at Colorado State announce that they have isolated the specific hormone that initiates the change in form of canis lupus lycanus, otherwise known as the common werewolf.”

  —from the June 2, 1998, edition of the New York Times

  Delilah

  When Pagano brought my breakfast, he had to open the door, because my milk carton wouldn’t fit under it.

  “I need to talk to Vandekamp.” I had to know how I got pregnant. I had to look into his eyes while I demanded information, so I could see the truth and hopefully rule him out as a suspect.

  I needed to know why he’d locked me away from everyone else and put me on a prenatal health food diet, and what all of that meant for the fate of the baby I shouldn’t even be carrying.

  I needed to shove my thumbs into his eye sockets and listen to him scream.

  “That’s not a request you get to make.” Pagano pushed my breakfast into my room, then picked up the snack tray I’d slid into the hall untouched in the middle of the night. He frowned at the browning apple as he started to close the door to my cell.

  “Wait. Please. Just tell him I want to talk.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “If you don’t let me talk to him, I won’t eat a bite of this.”

  Pagano shrugged. “Do what you’ve got to do.” But the tight line of his jaw said something else entirely. If he’d been instructed to make sure I took my vitamin, he was probably also supposed to make sure I ate.

  I picked up the tray he’d slid into my room and held it over the toilet, tilting it so that the blueberries would have tumbled from their compartment, if not for the plastic wrap. “How much trouble are you going to be in if I flush this?”

  He gave me an exasperated sigh. “Yes, you’ll get me in trouble. But you’ll also lose your work privileges.”

  I retracted my breakfast tray, surprised by the news. “Why didn’t I have work privileges yesterday?”

  Pagano frowned. “Yesterday you had an engagement.” At the arena, of course.

  “So, if I play nice, I get to work this afternoon? Outside my cell? Where I’ll see other people?”

  My handler’s frown deepened. “What’s wrong with you?” His gaze narrowed on me. “Should I call the infirmary?”

  “I’m fine.” I sank onto my stack of mats with my tray. “Close the door on your way out.”

  He frowned at me for several more seconds, then left.

  When his footsteps receded down the hall, I peeled the plastic wrap from my breakfast tray. The scents of the sausage and egg-white omelet sent me lurching for the toilet, but heaving for several minutes produced nothing more than the water I’d drunk an hour earlier.

  Only the fact that I’d never been pregnant—and hadn’t known it was a possibility—could have led me to mistake morning sickness for a side effect of sedation.

  When the nausea finally passed, I sat on the floor by the toilet for several more minutes, staring at my breakfast as if it had betrayed me. Then I scooped the omelet into the toilet and flushed it out of my life. I ate the fruit and the biscuit, then washed the vitamin down with my carton of milk. Then I brushed my teeth, ran my hands through my hair and sat on my stacked sleep mats and stared at the door, waiting for it to open.

  With no way to measure time, I couldn’t be sure how much of it passed before Pagano finally came back, but the interval felt like eternity. I was up and ready to go before he got my door open.

  Pagano walked me from my own isolated building to the dormitory kitchen, where two men in plain white aprons were cooking, while a staff of four filled trays according to the specifications listed on the charts hanging above a prep table.

  Mahsa and Simra were among the women loading carts with prepared trays. They both smiled and nodded, unsurprised to see me in what was evidently our normal routine. But when I headed for the empty cart next to theirs, Pagano grabbed my arm and redirected me with a frown. He hadn’t yet figured out that I was missing memories, but he couldn’t be far off the conclusion.

  To my utter shock, Mahsa and Simra each left pushing a cart full of trays unattended. I couldn’t understand that until I heard a handler warn them at the kitchen doorway that they had exactly fifteen minutes to complete their rounds and return the carts, before they would be paralyzed on the spot and collected by their handlers. That knowledge, along with the fact that their collars kept them from leaving the building or passing through any unauthorized doorway seemed to satisfy the staff that this was a perfectly safe arrangement.

  Evidently the collars were equipped with locators, as I’d suspected.

  The cart my handler led me to was being loaded with trays of gooey lasagna, aromatic garlic bread and a fresh spinach-and-cherry-tomato salad drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette. Unless Vandekamp was hiding another two dozen pregnant women, my best guess was that I would be delivering lunch trays to the guards, rather than to my fellow captives.

  Pagano escorted me around the building, where I delivered the first few lunches to guards assigned to monitor the dormitories. They were all men. Every time I handed one of them a tray, I held my breath and looked right into his eyes, both hoping for and dreading the possibility of finding some private kind of recognition in them. Some cruel knowledge.

  Would I be able to tell, if I were looking at the father of my child? Did I truly want to know, if there was nothing I could do about it?

  After the dormitory, Pagano led me to the main building, where he knocked on a door labeled Security, and I gave a tray apiece to two men watching a huge bank of wall-mounted monitors. I tried not to be too obvious as I glanced at a tall shelf stacked with boxes identical to the one my collar had come in.

  Were those extras, waiting to be programmed for new arrivals?

  Was the security room also ground central for collar programming?

  Pagano pulled me from the room before I’d learned anything useful, and I followed him back through the topiary and another iron gate, then into an unfamiliar building he called “the stable.”

  Inside, I found a small foyer joining two hallways.

  “Are you good from here?” my handler asked, as he pointed his remote at me and pressed a button. I blinked at him in confusion. “You remember where you’re going?” he clarified, and I noticed that Olive Burnett, the arena event coordinator, was hovering in the doorway, waiting to claim his full attention. He rolled his eyes at me in exasperation. “There are only two hallways, Delilah.”

  “Yeah.” I glanced from Pagano to Burnette, then back. Evidently this was our regular arrangement. “I got it.”

  I couldn’t leave the building, but I would get no better chance to snoop on my own.

  I turned down the left-hand hallway and
knocked on the first door, encouraged by the fact that I wasn’t paralyzed or driven to my knees with pain by the proximity sensor in my collar.

  “Yeah?” a guard said as he opened the door. His gaze brightened when it fell on my cart. “Great. We’re starving.”

  I gave him two trays while I stared over his shoulder at a room lined with sterile white-tiled horse stalls, each occupied by a centaur or satyr. The centaurs each had room for only a couple of steps forward or backward, and they couldn’t turn around at all in the cramped space.

  My heart ached for them.

  I recognized three of the centaurs and four of the satyrs from Metzger’s, but they did not smile when they saw me. Their glazed gazes held nothing but fear, and just the sight of their misery made the furiae stir deep inside me.

  But before my inner beast could get me in trouble, the handler closed the door in my face.

  I distributed trays to three more rooms, then I knocked on the last door in the left-hand hallway. “Come in,” a woman’s voice called.

  I opened the door to see a female handler holding an electric rotary file—it looked like an electric toothbrush, with a rough metal cylinder in place of the bristle head. Strapped to the table in front of her was an adolescent feline shifter I’d never seen before. That I could remember. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was deep enough to indicate sedation, rather than true sleep.

  “Just set the trays over there.” The handler hardly glanced at me as she pulled the poor girl’s mouth open and began filing the points of her sharp canines.

  I had to force myself to look away.

  The back of the room—just like the four before it—was lined with built-in cages, each of which contained a single young shifter. I counted three boys and two girls. The last pen on the left stood open, waiting for the girl on the table to return.

  I set two trays on the desk the handler had pointed at, and as I was heading back into the hall, my gaze caught on a familiar set of golden wolf eyes and long, tangled blond hair in one of the pens. “Genni!” I whispered, glad that the handler couldn’t hear me over the grinding sound of her electric file.