Wither. Lauren DeStefano
home. “We did such a great job with the locks, they’ll die before they get in,” he said. Necessity. Survival. It was us or them. Days later, when I suggested we bury the body—a little girl in a threadbare plaid coat—he had me help him haul it to the Dumpster. “Your problem is that you’re too emotional,” he said. “And that’s the kind of thing that’ll make you an easy target.”
Well, maybe not this time, Rowan. Maybe this time being emotional can help, because Rose and I talk for hours, and I relish our conversations, certain I can use them as an opportunity to learn everything about Linden and earn his favor.
But as the days turn to weeks, I sense a genuine friendship blossoming between us, which should be the last thing I want from someone who is dying. Still, I enjoy her company. She tells me about her mother and father, who were first generations that died in some sort of accident when she was young; they were close friends of Linden’s father, which is how she came to live in this mansion and become his bride.
She tells me that Linden’s mother—Housemaster Vaughn’s younger, second wife—died in childbirth with Linden. And Vaughn was so immersed in his research, so obsessed with saving his son’s life from the start, that he never bothered to take on another wife. He might have been ridiculed for it, Rose says, if he weren’t such a capable doctor and so in love with his work. He owns a thriving hospital in the city and is one of the area’s leading genetic researchers. She tells me that the Housemaster’s first son lived a full twenty-five years and was gone and cremated by the time Linden came along.
This, I suppose, is something I have in common with my new husband. Before my brother and I were born, my parents had two children, another set of twins, who were born blind and unable to speak. Their limbs were malformed and they didn’t live past five years. Genetic abnormalities like this are rare, given the perfection of the first generations, but they do happen. They’re called malformed. It seems my parents were incapable of making children without genetic oddities, though now I have cause to be grateful for my heterochromia. It may have spared me a gunshot to the brain in the back of that van.
Rose and I talk about happier things too, like cherry blossom trees. I even come to trust her enough to tell her about my father’s atlas and my disappointment at having missed the world in its prime. As she braids my hair, she tells me that if she could have lived anywhere in the world, she would have chosen India. She would have worn saris and positively covered herself in henna, and maybe she would have paraded in the streets on an elephant shrouded in jewels.
I paint her nails pink, and she arranges novelty jewels on my forehead from a sticker sheet.
Then one afternoon, as we’re lying beside each other on the bed, stuffing ourselves with colorful candies, I blurt out, “How can you stand it, Rose?”
She turns her head on the pillow to face me. Her tongue is deep purple. “What?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that he has remarried, while you’re still alive?”
She smiles, looks at the ceiling, and fiddles with a wrapper. “I asked him to. I convinced him it will be easier, with new wives already in the house.” She closes her eyes and yawns. “Besides, he was starting to get teased in the social circles. Most House Governors have at least three wives, sometimes seven—one for every day of the week.” It’s absurd enough that she laughs a little, suppresses a cough. “But not Linden. Housemaster Vaughn has been trying to talk him into it for years, and he has always refused. Finally he agreed to it, as long as he had a choice in the selection. He didn’t even have a choice with me.”
Her voice is cool, and she is so bizarrely serene. It worries me that I’ve become her favorite new bride simply for my blond hair, my vague resemblance to her. She is such a brilliant, well-read girl, and I wonder if she has figured out that I’ll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he’ll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.
Jenna doesn’t look up from her novel. She’s strewn languidly on the couch, with her legs dangling over the armrest. “No shortage of those.”
“I don’t mean the keyboard or virtual skiing,” Cecily insists. “I mean a game game.” She looks to me for help, but the only game I know is the one where my brother and I set noise traps in the kitchen and try to survive the night intact. And when I was taken by Gatherers, I sort of lost.
I’m curled up on the window ledge in the sitting room—a room that is filled with virtual sports games and a keyboard meant to imitate a symphony orchestra—and I have been staring at the orange tree blossoms that flutter like thousands of tiny white-winged descending birds. Rowan wouldn’t even believe them, the life they imply, the health and beauty. Manhattan is full of gasping, shriveled weeds that grow from the asphalt. Refrigerator-smelling carnations for sale that are more science than flower.
“Don’t you know any games?” Cecily is asking me directly now. I feel her brown eyes staring at me.
Well. There was one game, with paper cups and string, and the little girl who lived across the alleyway. I open my mouth, prepared to explain it, but change my mind. I don’t want to whisper my secrets into a paper cup to share with my sister wives. Really I only have one secret that’s worth anything, and that’s my plan to escape.
“We could play virtual fishing,” I say. I can feel Cecily’s indignation without even looking at her.
“There has to be something real we could do,” she says. “There has to be.” She paces out of the room, and I hear her shuffling around down the hall.
“Poor kid,” Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. “She doesn’t even understand what kind of place this is.”
It happens at noon. Gabriel brings my lunch to me in the library—which has become my new favorite place—and stops to look over my shoulder when he sees the sketch of a boat on the page.
“What are you reading?” he asks.
“A history book,” I say. “This one explorer proved the world was round by assembling a team and sailing all the way around it on three boats.”
“The Niña, Pinta, and Santa María,” he says.
“You know about world history?” I ask.
“I know about boats,” he says, and sits behind me on the arm of the overstuffed chair and points to the image. “This one here is a caravel.” He begins describing its structure to me—the trio of masts, the lateen rigging. All I truly understand from this is that the style was Spanish. But I don’t interrupt him. I can see the intensity in his blue eyes, that he’s taken a brief respite from the sullen work of cooking for and catering to Linden’s brides, that he has a passion for something.
Sitting in his shadow in the overstuffed chair, I actually feel a smile coming on.
That’s when Cecily’s domestic, Elle, comes bursting into the room. “There you are,” she cries at Gabriel. “You need to hurry to the kitchen and bring Lady Rose something for her cough.”
I can hear her coughing now, at the end of the long hallway. It’s become such a fixture in this place that I don’t always notice it. Gabriel hurries to his feet, and I close the book, make a motion to follow him out. “Don’t,” he says, stopping me at the doorway. “It’s better if you stay in here until this passes.”
But past his shoulder I can see an unusual chaos. Domestics are scrambling past one another. First generation attendants are coming out of the elevator carrying all sorts of bottles, and a machine that resembles the humidifier my parents put in my bedroom the winter I caught pneumonia. There’s an air of futility about it all, and Gabriel senses it too. I can tell by the look in his eyes.
“Stay here,” he says. Of course I follow him into the