Gemma was led to a bathroom with no stalls at all, just toilets bolted to the floor at regular intervals. A nurse was summoned—she was wearing a shapeless medical smock over her street clothes, and had that blind-mole look of someone who’d just been asleep—to unbutton Gemma’s reeking pants and underwear and haul them to her hips while Gemma peed, since her wrists were still bound.
The nurse’s hands were cold. Gemma tried to blink away the sudden pressure of tears: the woman’s fingers swept the place between Gemma’s legs when she went to hitch up Gemma’s underwear and then jeans.
“Sorry,” the nurse whispered. “We’ll find you something dry to put on in a bit.” But Gemma felt something come down around her, some inner space collapsing.
There was no air-conditioning. If it wasn’t obvious enough from the smell of must and raw wood, from the filthy corners and cables of dust visible through open gaps in the walls, it was clear to her now: whatever this place was, it wasn’t like Haven. There was no experimentation here, no medical treatments or analyses. This was a holding pen, pure and simple.
Outside the bathroom, the woman in the pantsuit was waiting, yawning behind a hand. She straightened up and frowned briefly at Gemma. “Well?”
“Well what?” the nurse responded, keeping a hand on Gemma’s elbow. Her touch was surprisingly gentle, as if she wanted to make up for what had happened in the bathroom.
“That’s the last of them, isn’t it?”
“How should I know?” The two women obviously despised each other. “That’s your business. What I’m supposed to do is keep them alive.” Gemma disliked the way she emphasized that. It suggested the other woman’s business was something else entirely.
“No need to get defensive. I was just asking. They all look the same to me, even the ones that aren’t doubled.”
“I bet.” The nurse’s voice was hard with sarcasm. “We still have bodies to match. Some of ’em no more than fingers—thanks to you.” She sniffed. “But if you say so, you say so.”
They moved again down the hall, cavernous with shadow, and half-splintered spaces suggesting their original purpose: countertops, old glass display cases where she imagined sandwiches withering behind glass.
Something smelled: a trash smell, an inside-of-the-body smell. The scent of urine was strong. They stopped to draw water from a long industrial sink: plastic cups overflowed a massive trash can. The nurse had to hold the cup while Gemma suckled at it like a baby, but she was too thirsty to say no. Then, to her surprise, the woman turned Gemma and released her handcuffs. Gemma nearly fainted from the rush of pleasure, of relief, when she could move her shoulders freely.
But she understood, as the woman gestured her on, why the restraints weren’t necessary: patterns of footsteps sounded softly on the linoleum, overlapping, like the drum of distant rain. Soldiers with guns. Even when they hung back in the dark she could see the barrels winking like animal eyes.
“Be a good one, now, and you won’t get in any trouble,” the nurse said. For the first time since being taken into the van, she felt a spark of hope. This woman wasn’t evil. Maybe she could be made to understand. To believe.
“Please listen to me.” Gemma spoke in a whisper. Her throat was raw from crying. “My name is Gemma Ives. I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have parents. They’re looking for me.”
She couldn’t tell whether the woman was even listening. This part of the airport was almost completely dark: a runner of cheap battery-pack lights lit a narrow aisle of floor, like those on an airplane designed to help you find your way to the emergency exit. Around them furniture was lumped and piled and stacked in the darkness. It looked like a whole warehouse had been emptied. The smell was terrible, too. It was so bad it had weight, and form, and even movement. They paused briefly in front of a set of plastic shelves piled with cheap T-shirts and plain cotton pants, laundered to the point of stiffness.
“Laundry day’s Friday,” the nurse said. “You’ll get a replacement soon as you turn in this pair.”
“Please,” Gemma said. She found herself speaking in a whisper, as once again fear flooded into her, poured down her throat like the taste on the air, like the grit of human skin and nails. “I don’t belong here.”
Someone moaned. Then a cry in the dark, quickly stifled. But the sound seemed to find Gemma, to burrow deep in her chest, like a hook. And at the same time her eyes adjusted, she realized that what she’d mistaken for piles of furniture were really people, girls: hundreds of girls, dressed identically, some of them visibly wounded, others so thin they looked like a wreckage of bones; sleeping on the floor, on mattresses, on piles of fabric and tarps, on stacked blankets.
“Nobody belongs here, child,” the nurse said. She was holding her throat. Gemma saw a small gold cross nested between her fingers. “Not even the devil himself.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Lyra’s story.
PART II
TEN
KRISTINA IVES SPENT THE FIRST day of her fifty-first year crying, and picking the cuticles of her fingernails until they bled, and then shivering damply in bed, waiting for the Xanax to take effect, and the second day counting all the ugly things she could find on the way to Nashville, Tennessee.
A dead deer, mangled on the side of the highway. A house punched in by age and neglect, spilling its rot onto the porch, as if it had been gutted. Billboards advertising strip clubs, XXX stores, erectile dysfunction clinics.
Since having Gemma, she’d hardly ever traveled: she liked to be home with her things, in the beautiful house with the rugs that went hush hush, with Rufus and the cats and the pool in summertime where she could lie out with a book, her feet damp with dew and new grass, the hum of a lawn mower in the background like the pleasant buzz of one of her pills.
They had a house in Vail and Geoff hosted clients there several times a year, but she hadn’t been, not since Gemma was a toddler. Though Geoff had urged her to learn to ski, she could never see the point in it, the suiting up and the rentals and the waiting in line to crank all the way to the summit only to plunge down the mountain again.
One time, only one time, he’d convinced her to put Gemma in ski school. She was maybe four years old, so young even she didn’t remember the experience, and Kristina had stood with a crowd of other parents in the lodge while outside a group of fluorescent children made pie-wedges with their skis. No one else was worried—the other mothers and the scattered father drank spiked hot cocoa or went off on runs of their own—but Kristina had stayed at the windowpane, her breath misting the glass, watching the little gob of purple that was her only daughter, funny-faced and precocious with cheeks so fat Kristina had to stop herself from biting them.