Spectacle--A Novel

by Rachel Vincent

  She still shouldn’t know, even eight weeks in. Especially considering that the first two weeks of the nine-month pregnancy calendar are actually preimplantation of the fertilized egg. Even in most cryptids, according to my college classes. So how had she known from the very beginning? From before implantation?

  She couldn’t have. And she certainly couldn’t have been sure that the baby was human.

  Unless...

  “What the hell did you do?” I sat up on the table, and Dr. Grantham backed away from me, startled. “I’ve been here before, but it wasn’t for an ultrasound, was it?”

  “You’ve been here twice, for your initial exam, then the ultrasound. If you hadn’t lost your memory, you’d remember,” Tabitha insisted calmly.

  “But I wouldn’t remember the very first time, would I?” I demanded, as pieces of the puzzle began to slide into place, forming a horrifying picture. “You made sure I wouldn’t.”

  “Mrs. Vandekamp?” Dr. Grantham backed farther from the table, reaching for a preloaded syringe lying on the rolling tray to his left. “Calm her down, or I’m going to have to use this. But that’s not ideal.”

  “Tabitha?” I demanded, boldly using her first name. “What did you do?”

  She glanced back and forth between me and the doctor. “I only helped fate along. The oracle told me you’d give me a baby. I just wanted to speed things along. And make sure it was Willem’s.”

  No.

  I clutched my stomach. “This is your husband’s baby?” I turned to the doctor, my hands shaking against my scrubs top. “You inseminated me? Without my permission? Without my knowledge?”

  “I had you sedated,” Tabitha admitted. “Willem wasn’t ready to know, and you didn’t need to know until you started having symptoms. Dr. Grantham wasn’t even sure it would take.”

  “You didn’t tell your husband. How did you even—” I bit off the end of my question. I didn’t want to know how she’d gotten a donation from Vandekamp without his knowledge.

  And since he didn’t know, he’d had no reason to take me off that sadistic full-contact roster. “Now you don’t know whose baby I’m carrying.” I swung my legs over the bed and stood on the cold tile floor. “You and your husband are both sick. You deserve each other. But neither one of you deserves a kid, and you’re sure as hell not getting mine.”

  I marched past them both, my focus on the glass door, beyond which Pagano stood watching the whole thing unfold, wide-eyed. Waiting for instructions.

  “Grab her!” Tabitha ordered, and the doctor’s shoes shuffled behind me. I didn’t think he’d touch me—surely he knew what I was capable of—until pain stabbed into my right thigh.

  I stumbled backward and made it four steps before the room started to look...fuzzy. “Help me catch her!” Dr. Grantham shouted as I began to wobble, and though Tabitha didn’t move, someone caught me from behind. Someone braced my back with one arm and swung my legs up with the other, until I was being carried like a child.

  Pagano stared down at me, frowning.

  “Put her on the table,” Dr. Grantham ordered, and a second later I felt cold paper beneath me.

  I tried to sit up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. My limbs were too heavy.

  “Help me strap her down.” The doctor’s voice sounded like it was being stretched, and Tabitha’s face seemed to have suffered the same fate.

  “No. Let me up,” I insisted, but the syllables came out all mashed together. As if I were somehow speaking without the use of my teeth.

  Tabitha’s oddly loose and stretchy face turned toward the end of the table. “I’ll get her feet.”

  Something soft surrounded my wrists and ankles, but I no longer felt like struggling. My head rolled to the side, where the doctor’s gut took up most of my field of vision. The weave in the sweater beneath his lab coat began to scroll strangely, as if the threads were constantly moving, stitching themselves together over and over.

  While I knew that that made no sense, I found the whole thing more fascinating than truly bizarre.

  Someone lifted my shirt up to my rib cage, and I gasped when something cold and wet landed on my stomach.

  “What’s that for?” Tabitha asked, but I had to listen carefully to understand her. Time seemed to be stretching, and taking the rest of us along for the ride.

  “We use an ultrasound to guide the needle.” The doctor pressed something into the goop on my stomach and began to move it back and forth in small motions that spread the goo. The machine on my right beeped, then erupted in a soft whooshing sound. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat.”

  Tabitha’s hands flew to her mouth and her eyes widened.

  Mine filled with tears.

  “Don’t get too attached...” the doctor warned, his voice fading in and out, along with my vision “...won’t have the results for a few days.”

  Tabitha nodded, staring at the screen as if it were a glass ball about to show her future.

  “Delilah, I need...hold still,” the doctor said.

  “And I need you to go fuck yourself.” I’m not sure anyone understood me, but that didn’t matter. Even if all the energy hadn’t been sucked from my body by the sedative, I wouldn’t have moved. That would only mean hurting myself or the baby.

  My plan was to hurt everyone else.

  “Okay, I think we’re ready.”

  I gasped at the pinch in my abdomen, then I let my head fall to the side again, where the threads in the doctor’s shirt were still weaving their way around his soft belly toward his back.

  When I blinked, tears ran down my face onto the padded table.

  “I think that will do it...the heartbeat is still strong.” The doctor set something on the wheeled tray, then began wiping goop from my belly. “She’ll need to rest... No work, no intercourse and obviously no travel. A little fluid leakage from the site is... If there are any other symptoms...me immediately.” He finished wiping my stomach, then tugged my shirt over my still-sticky skin, and I struggled to bring the world back into crisp focus. “And in a few days, we’ll know whether we need to reorder those prenatal vitamins or schedule an end to this whole thing.”

  Dr. Grantham picked up the sample he’d pulled from my womb and as he walked away, I stared at his back and willed the furiae to wake up. To find a reason—any reason—to give him the self-inflicted, gory end he so richly deserved.

  Delilah

  I was confined to my cell for three straight days, and by the end of the second, I’d decided that solitary confinement qualified more as torture than rest. I saw no one but Pagano, who was evidently under orders to check on me every few hours, in spite of the fact that a camera had been installed in the corner of my cell while I was doped out of my mind and being stabbed by a needle.

  They wouldn’t let me see or talk to Gallagher, but when I told Pagano that isolation was stressful, and that stress wasn’t good for the baby, he told me that Gallagher had been given the night off from the arena, since I couldn’t be there to make him perform.

  It worried me to think that he might not know why I wasn’t there. He might think I was dead. He might try to tear through everyone he came into contact with until someone got off a lucky head shot.

  After breakfast on the fourth day, when I’d run out of songs to sing, stories to tell myself and gruesome deaths to plot for my enemies, Pagano showed up to take me for a walk around the grounds.

  “Thank you,” I said as we rounded the building, headed for the topiary garden. “If I had to stare at those walls for another minute, I might have lost my mind.”

  “In that case, I hate to tell you what your evening’s going to look like.”

  “Let me guess. More grilled chicken, green peas and wall staring?”

  He actually gave me a small smile as he clicked something on his
remote to allow me through the iron gate. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a caged hamster without a wheel. Any word on those test results?”

  “Not that they’ve told me. I’m sure you’ll be the first to know.”

  But he was wrong. If the baby was Gallagher’s, I wouldn’t know until I was strapped to another table. “Michael, I need a night out.”

  He laughed. “So, what, Italian food and a movie?”

  “I’m serious. Can you get me the dinner shift? I feel good, and I need more than a stroll around the yard. Seriously. Tell Tabitha the baby needs it.”

  Pagano stopped and studied my face, looking for any sign of a ruse, but there was none to find. I truly needed to see something other than the inside of my cell. The fact that a work shift would give me time to observe more of the Spectacle’s security measures and potentially talk to several of my fellow captives was incidental, at that point.

  “She’s not going to go for it. This isolation isn’t just about rest. She’s enforcing a gag order. I don’t think she’s told her husband about your...insemination yet.”

  I blinked at him. “You heard?”

  “Through the glass door. Tabitha’s threatened to fire me if I tell a soul, and she’s paying me triple overtime. She’s not going to let you near anyone you could tell about her plan.”

  “So tell her to silence me. I don’t think that’ll hurt the baby, and I won’t make a fuss.” But Pagano looked reluctant. “Please. Just try.”

  “Okay,” he said, as he gestured for me to head back in the direction we’d come from. “But I’m not promising anything.”

  * * *

  Dinner came and went with no word from Pagano. Someone slid my tray beneath my door, and by the time I got close enough to the window to see through it, there was no one left in the hall.

  The sun set, and the lights came on in my cell. I brushed my teeth and paced across the length of my room 467 times. Then Pagano opened my door. He was smiling.

  “I couldn’t get you the dinner shift, but I told Tabitha how upset you were and mentioned that your mental health could have a direct effect on the baby. So she said you could have one hour of a special duty.”

  “Special duty?” I stopped and ran my fingers through my damp hair. “What duty?”

  “Nurse’s aide. One of the shifters got hurt during the hunt last night, and since we’re down one doctor...” He shrugged. “But you’ll be restricted to one room, and you won’t be crossing paths with any of the other staff, just in case.”

  “Then what good will I be?”

  Another shrug. “It’s mostly just to give you something to do and someone to talk to, to elevate your mood. To keep the baby happy.” But I could tell with one look at him that he hadn’t really been thinking about the baby.

  “Thank you.”

  He adjusted the settings on my collar and led me down the hall and out of the building. The air outside was unexpectedly crisp and the night was so clear that the earth seemed to be blanketed by a sheet of stars.

  “Do you think I could just lie on the grass and look up at the sky for a minute? You can’t see anything but treetops from my window, and it’s been a while.”

  “Tabitha would kill me if I let you catch a cold from lying on the ground.”

  “But the earth holds heat much longer than the air. The ground’s probably still warm.”

  He shook his head, so I continued down the path reluctantly, the sidewalk rough but not really cold against my bare feet.

  “My favorite part about running the menagerie was closing time. For hours, there was nothing but calliope music and bright lights, and callers shouting at the customers, trying to get them to play a game or buy some food. But when the customers went home, we could turn all that off, and the world just felt so...still. So quiet. So civilized.”

  Pagano chuckled. “That’s not a word often used to describe carnival life.”

  “Well, after we’d freed everyone who could safely be free, that’s what it felt like. It was the first time most of them had been allowed to step out of their cages and eat real food. Put on real clothes. Spin around and around, then fall down on the grass, too dizzy to move. There’s nothing more civilized than freedom.”

  “But they can’t read. They can’t add.”

  I shook my head. “Civilization isn’t about what you know. It’s about how you behave. How much respect and dignity you give to those around you. The staff here...” I let that thought fade away, because insulting my handler when he’d gone to bat for me wasn’t a great way to buy future favors.

  “Say it,” he insisted, as the infirmary drew nearer.

  I stopped walking and turned to look at him. “You guys have never been denied adequate food. Proper shelter. The right to raise your own children. To choose to have them. To choose who to have them with. You don’t know what it’s like to truly suffer, so it means nothing to you to perpetuate suffering in others.”

  “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “No, I really haven’t. It doesn’t require much thought. Dignity and respect are the most basic of social concepts. Children understand them before they can even say the words.”

  Pagano rolled his eyes and started walking again, leaving me no choice but to follow. “Okay, but not all cryptids are like you. You were raised human. You are human.”

  “That’s bullshit. People are different just like cryptids are different. Some are kind, and some are cruel. This isn’t a one-species-fits-all world.”

  Pagano looked like he had something to say. Or something to ask. But we were feet from the infirmary, and someone was already waving at us from the well-lit foyer.

  He opened the glass door and waved me inside, where a woman in pink scrubs and a white lab coat looked me up and down. Then took a step back. “You’re sure this is safe?” she said to Pagano over my shoulder.

  He nodded as he clicked something on the remote, restricting me to the infirmary. “But you won’t be with her anyway. Lead the way.”

  Instead, the nurse gave us directions. “Third door on the right. Restrict her to the back half of the room. There’s a shifter cuffed to the last bed. She can get him water and talk to him. But that’s it.” Then she crossed her arms over her chest and watched us follow her directions, mumbling under her breath about how unsafe it was to have me “wandering the halls.”

  As far as I could tell from glancing through the long viewing windows, the first two rooms were full. In each, a row of narrow, sturdy steel cots was bolted to the floor. The occupants were all cuffed to the cots and covered up to their chests by a white sheet. Most appeared to be sleeping.

  A small figure in the second room caught my attention, and I stopped to stare through the window. “Genni.”

  Pagano followed my gaze. “They say she’ll have a limp, but she’s going to be fine.”

  “For how long?” How could a thirteen-year-old with a limp possibly survive another round of hunts? “Why do you even know that?”

  He didn’t answer. Yet I understood.

  “You’re betting on her? Or against her?”

  “I don’t gamble,” he insisted. “But I hear the talk. Her odds are good, if she gets placed in the second round again.”

  “And if she’s placed in the third?”

  He shrugged. “No one’s odds are good in the last round.” He waved me forward again, and I had to leave little Genni asleep, chained to her bed.

  The third room looked empty, but unlike the first two, it was divided in half by a wall and a doorway fitted with a red sensor, and I couldn’t see much of the back half.

  Pagano adjusted my collar to allow me through the first two doorways, but when I stepped into the rear section, I forgot he was even there.

  “Claudio!” The werewolf’s
hands were cuffed to the side rails of an actual hospital bed and his ankles were secured with chains to something beneath the thin mattress. “What happened?”

  “J’ai survécu.” His voice was even huskier than usual for a shifter, as if his throat were very dry. “They hit me with a Taser, not an arrow, so I will live to run for my life another day.”

  “Those bastards.” I took a small plastic cup from the counter to my left and filled it with cold water from the sink. “The game is rigged in their favor and you can’t fight back, yet they think they’ve somehow conquered the universe by cornering an unarmed man in a closed course.”

  Claudio lifted his head, and I helped hold it up so he could drink from the cup. “Merci,” he said, when he’d finished. “Have you seen Genni?”

  “She’s next door. She took an arrow to the thigh, but they say she’s going to be fine. She’s strong, Claudio. Just like her father.” And it killed me to know that thirteen years may be all the parenting she would get.

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Not since the hunt.”

  While I was refilling Claudio’s cup for the third time, footsteps clomped into the other half of the room, blocked from sight by the wall. A handler told whoever he’d escorted to have a seat on the bed. Steel groaned, and I heard the metallic click of cuffs being locked, accompanied by the rattle of heavy chains.

  “Not that I’m not glad to see you,” Claudio said, as I carried the water back to him. “But why are you here?”

  I shrugged, and a drop splashed over the rim of the cup. “I have friends in high places.” Wherein friends could only be defined as mortal enemies. But Claudio didn’t buy that for a second, so I told him as much of the truth as I could. “I’ve been in isolation for four days, and my handler finally had pity on me.”

  “Why...?” Claudio sniffed the air in my direction. Then his golden wolf eyes widened. “Congratulations.” He frowned. “Or condolences. Which is it?”

  I gaped at him. “How can you tell?” I whispered, hoping whoever was in the other room couldn’t hear me and hadn’t understood him.