“I was hoping for better flow,” he said. “I might be able to fix it by upping the voltage.”
“I think it’s fine, Simon,” said Emily. She held her father’s hand, looked up into his weathered face with an expression of merged concern and wonder.
Otis was weeping.
15: Private Demons
Selena looked at the dress as if presented with photographs of a ghastly murder. Trejo extended the garment toward her, his smile widening at her reaction. He gave the dress an enticing wiggle.
“I hope it is to your liking,” Trejo cooed.
“You can dangle that thing in front of me all day, there’s no way I’m wearing it.”
The other girls made a loose semicircle around Selena and Trejo, bearing witness to the confrontation with varying degrees of reluctance. Theodora shifted from foot to foot, forearms crossed over her belly and clutching opposite elbows. Eleanor chewed her lip, struggling to follow their exchange in Llanures. Mary appeared the calmest of the three, though tension revealed itself in the reflexive curling and uncurling of her fingers. The three of them had already donned their party attire, providing concrete examples of Selena’s own reluctance. Satiny crescents scooped Eleanor’s breasts into tight orbs, their naked tops quivering with her slightest movement. A slit appeared at her breastbone and widened until it reached her navel, forming a teardrop of bare midriff. Theodora’s neckline plunged to the top of her abdomen, offering a wedge of cleavage to anyone in eyeshot, while strips of sheer fabric offered hypothetical cover for her hips, through which the contours of her underwear could be clearly seen. Mary’s outfit was less revealing, though the term was of course relative—much of her was still on prominent display. Selena looked from them to the red and gold monstrosity Trejo dangled before her. Behind it, Trejo’s smile sank into a bitter, flat line at Selena’s ongoing obstinacy.
“No more delays. We must depart.”
Selena sized up Trejo. A compact man, but hardly weak. Some men adopted stiffness as a false form of strength, as if bearing and posture, if constantly upheld, could lend a future blow greater power. Selena didn’t count Trejo as this type. His was a frame rigid with potential energy, a bowstring pulled taut and ready, at the slightest twitch, to fire. Selena still thought she could beat him, but there would doubtless be consequences for her impertinence.
With a snort of disgust, she snatched the dress from its hanger and marched to the far end of the room, where pelts strung between wooden struts formed a crude changing screen. Beside her hung a sheet of polished metal that served as a mirror for the girls of the barracks. Selena made a point not to look; even through its scratched and hazy lens, a glimpse of herself in that outfit would’ve been unbearable.
She emerged a few minutes later with as little fanfare as she could muster, hoping the other girls—and above all Trejo—couldn’t sense the depth of her discomfort. Trejo looked her up and down with a gaze devoid of the slightest lust, as if assessing a bit of second-rate livestock he’d gussied up and hoped to pawn off onto some unwitting buyer. He shook his head, pulled a tuft of yellow cotton from his bag, and affixed it to the side of her head with a hairpin. After a bit of mussing, the folds of cotton bloomed into a shape roughly resembling a flower, the petals of which obscured her mangled ear. Stepping back to inspect his work, he spat through his teeth, mumbled something in Mejise, and shrugged in a manner suggesting he’d done all he could. Selena absorbed this treatment silently, anger shifting behind her face like magma beneath cool crust.
Trejo ferried the girls into a covered wagon drawn by a pair of stout grey mules. He hopped onto the wagon’s perch and spurred the mules into action. Sunlight dribbled through the canvas roof, suffusing the material with a yellowish glow and filling the cabin with shadowy half-light. Selena tugged the hem of her skirt as low as possible, hoping to cover another inch or two of leg. She leaned across the aisle to Mary.
“I thought you said we were bruisers,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
Mary shrugged. “Bruiser or beauty, every girl’s gotta play hostess sooner or later. Trust me, it’s not so bad. You serve drinks, you have a chat—and given you don’t speak Mejise, you won’t even have to do much of that.”
“I doubt it ends there,” Selena said darkly.
Mary shrugged. “Not always, no. Pesos can change hands. But it’s not mandatory. In fact, Mr. Todd kind of frowns on it. He’ll look the other way if a fellow casero gets a bit handsy, but he doesn’t let things get too far. It’s one of his quirks. His best one, I’d say.”
Selena didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure how “handsy” a guest she could tolerate, but the reassurance that Todd wasn’t running his own private bordello was some small comfort, at least. Mary, perhaps sensing Selena’s discomfort, settled into uncharacteristic silence. The wagon rocked on its wooden frame, its steady undulations amplified with staccato jostles whenever the wheels hit a rut or bump.
The haciendas perched on the high ground at the southern end of Nuevo Juarez proper, their stately verandas facing the town below as if surveying it with a proprietary air. Selena watched them roll past through portholes in the canvas until the mules turned up a curving path and toward Mr. Todd’s. It wasn’t the biggest, but it was more elegant than most, its lawn artfully sculpted with creosote and cacti, a desert analog to the sultry rooftop gardens of New Canaan’s Seraphim. Marble columns—clearly pre-War, given their size and symmetry—held its terracotta awning aloft, their piebald lengths polished to shine, and statues of winged creatures from forgotten myths stalked its perimeter in frozen silence.
The wagon juddered to a halt, and the girls descended, maneuvering their dresses with a skill that denoted frequent practice. Selena struggled with hers, catching the hem on an exposed nail and pulling a loose thread from the seam. She yanked it free, winced at the sound of ripping fabric, and followed the others onto the verandah. A pair of burly marcados stood to either side of the door, filling a role that fell somewhere between valet and guard. The taller of the two nodded to Trejo, opened the door, and ushered them inside in a single smooth motion.
As she entered the hacienda, Selena felt a momentary chill pass through her. It took her a moment to discern its cause: the place reminded her of the Mayor’s manor. It bore the same trappings of antiquity, with wainscoted walls and filigreed molding and paintings hung in ornate frames. But though the content was the same, Selena spotted differences in execution. Mr. Todd’s rooms were tidier and more sparsely furnished, its collections and furnishings curated rather than stored. There was a care to their selection that felt paradoxically effortless, as if the choices had been made reflexively by some automatic impulse. Selena was familiar with the rigid boundaries of class imparted by New Canaan, the unbridgeable gap between Salter and Seraphim, and Mr. Todd’s effortless décor could serve as one of a dozen silent badges denoting his membership to the uppermost stratum of the society in which he dwelled.
Mingled conversations drifted in from some distant corner of the manor. The other girls knew their way, and Selena followed them, gritting her teeth as the noise grew louder. Her hands kept curling into fists, and she had to force them time and again to loosen. She smoothed her dress against her thighs and tugged at the material to keep it from clinging.
They crossed an archway and entered a ballroom with a vaulted ceiling. Chandeliers hung overhead with an air of otherworldly weightlessness, celestial jellyfish imported from some far-flung alien ocean. Beneath them drifted shoals of partygoers, their wrists and fingers clinking with loops of precious metal, their well-fed frames shawled in brightly-colored fabrics. They reclined on antique furniture or clustered around hip-high tables, trading banter and plucking hors d’oeuvres from trays. Selena spotted a few women, most of them in puffy gowns and clinging closely to their husbands, but the guests were predominantly male.
Gender was more evenly split among the marcado, its delineation obvious at a glance. The men wore matching charcoal suits
and cravats the color of rust. Their tattoos were tiny and discreet, positioned below the ear or peeking out the cuffs of their shirtsleeves. They scuttled from group to group, silently proffering canapes from silver platters balanced on the tips of their splayed fingers, ignored and interchangeable.
The women, by contrast, preened, bare flesh framed by slim cuts of multicolored fabric. There were at least a dozen of them, their cheeks branded with Todd’s blue lines, their young bodies sheathed in wrappings of fine silken cloth. They shared few characteristics apart from their youth, bearing round hips and sleek legs and skin shaded from mahogany to freckled alabaster. Hair flowed down backs or piled in arabesques of startling complexity. Jewels glittered in navels. They seemed never to stand or sit but to pose, their bodies moving with a control that Selena would’ve found impressive if it weren’t so disgusting.
A heavyset man in a beige jacket caught a girl by the arm and swept her into his lap, his conversation with the man next to him continuing unabated. He placed a meaty hand casually, almost absently, on the girl’s breast. The girl wriggled up closer to him, her lips composed in an artful smile. A revolted shiver traced up Selena’s back.
“Move, girl,” Trejo growled, prodding her with a bony finger. His words skimmed over her cheek in a gust of sour air. “Make like the others. I don’t expect miracles, but fake it as best you can. And play nice. Girls who bite get bitten back twice as hard.”
With these words of motivation, he gave her a brisk shove toward an assembly of guests.
Selena stumbled a bit before catching herself, her fighter’s equilibrium offset by the chorus of fabrics sounding around her waist. She tugged the hem of her skirt and waded into the murk of their conversation, her teeth bared in something that she hoped resembled a smile. The man who was speaking—younger than the rest, his angular face rounded by a neatly sculpted beard—gave her a brief glance. A man to her left ran his hand over the curve of her hip but otherwise ignored her. She clenched her fists. Bright flecks of pain flashed along her palm where her nails dug into the skin. His fingers continued their exploration, tracing the ridge of muscle along her abdomen, venturing downward to pinch a bit of thigh. Selena’s fists strained like wolves at weak and fraying leashes.
Mary shouldered into the narrowing gap between Selena and her accoster, her voice bright and jangling. She exchanged a few easy words with the guests, nudged one in the ribs, and led Selena from the fray. Her hand slid down her wrist and gently but insistently pried her fingers free of the hard knot of knuckles and rage into which they’d tangled themselves.
“You’ve got to relax. You stand there looking sour like that, it just encourages ‘em. You can get away with a lot if you just act coy about it. Insult ‘em, rebuff ‘em, slap their faces. They think it’s a game.”
Selena shifted in her dress, tugging here and there at stray bits of fabric. “Easy for you to say. I don’t even speak Mejise.”
“Yeah, and they don’t speak Llanures. Call ‘em a bunch of dough-faced pigfuckers. Tell ‘em their dicks are so tiny they couldn’t satisfy a flea. They won’t know the difference. Just smile when you do it.”
“I am smiling.”
Mary gave her a sympathetic shake of the head. She placed her fingers on Selena’s cheeks and kneaded them into shape, pausing on occasion to study her work. After a few minutes, she dropped her hands.
“We’ll get there.”
She shepherded Selena through the party, snatching cheese and fruit and fluted glasses of brandy from trays, exchanging flirtatious barbs, and waving at attendees without stopping in any one place long enough for wandering hands to settle on her. Occasionally she’d flag down one of the other girls and exchange a few bits of information—which of the guests had had too much to drink, which had been calmed by a decorous member of their party or stirred into greater lasciviousness by youthful male boasting, who was doling out pesos to girls with a bit of cleavage to show, and who bore around his eyes the signs of a hunger that could be easily and inadvertently nudged into violence. She and the others traded these notes in economical bursts, pausing only a few seconds to keep Trejo from chewing them out for lollygagging when they should be chatting up the guests. It was a complex and sophisticated maneuver, and Selena recognized in it the feints and topographic considerations of a good fighter’s footwork. Strange how she could be so graceful in one arena and so clumsy in another.
As they drifted about the room, Selena noticed one woman who was never privy to the grapevine of nods and motions and sisterly snickers. She stood aloof near a marble-clad pillar, the fingers of one hand resting against the side of her slender neck. The others kept apart from her, repelled by some unacknowledged but fundamental force. Her black hair clung to the back of her head and a tightly-coiled bun. Most of the girls would have been called pretty—Selena was the outlier in this respect—but hers was a stiffer, more regal beauty. She looked to Selena like a tribal deity, her likeness carved by worshippers from the heartwood of some nameless jungle tree.
Selena found her attention drawn to the woman and would glance her way whenever they passed nearby. Eventually the woman, perhaps sensing a sudden and sustained interest in her person, raised her head and locked eyes with Selena, who winced away as if caught peeking through a stranger’s curtains at night. Mary, noticing this exchange, gave a sardonic smile.
“The princess shootin’ you daggers?” she asked.
“No, nothing like that,” said Selena. She felt a slight affront at the tone of the question, as if the tall girl needed defending. “Who is she?”
“Same as you and me,” Mary drawled. She grabbed a pair of drinks from a nearby server, handed one to Selena and sipped at the other. “Nowadays, at least. Grace Delgado. She was sister of one of the three Senadores, heads of the city’s ruling families, back when there were three. Thorin was set to toss her to the brothels after he took power, but Todd put his bid in and got her instead. About the luckiest break you could imagine from where she stood, but you’d think she was sulfur mining come day and takin’ johns three holes at once come night by the way she pouts. A hard knock mingling with us poor marcadas, I guess.”
Her description finished, Mary dismissed the tall girl with a sniff. Selena’s own gaze lingered. She set her eyes on a spot to the girl’s left and observed her in the periphery. The former Senador’s sister shifted from heel to heel, arms crossed over her belly, hands clutching opposite elbows. Her movements were furtive and incomplete, gestures half-made and rescinded, as if she’d been placed in a new body and still working out the controls.
A man in a red jacket swaggered over to Grace. Spirals of gold filament threaded the rim of his left ear, and a diamond stud sat atop his right nostril like a glistening pimple. He moved with the bandy-legged strut of a man who’s far drunker than he realizes. His thick lips parted to reveal a set of large yellow-white teeth accompanied by a single golden incisor.
He said something to Grace and wiped a hair from her forehead. Having completed this task, his fingers continued their southward journey, descending along her jaw and leaping from neck to breastbone, where they adopted a slower, more luxuriant pace. They veered east, snuck beneath her dress strap, and pulled it from her shoulder, revealing a wedge of creamy skin.
Grace absorbed this treatment with none of the dry ripostes or giggling good-humor of the other girls, who’d honed their particular defenses over years of such onslaughts. She looked appalled, her disgust masked by only the thinnest veneer of frozen civility. Selena noted her stiff arms, her clenched jaw, the balling of her fingers into futile fists. Her nerves sung in tandem.
Selena approached the two of them. The man remained focused on his task, his fingers creeping past the strap to rummage deeper inside the dress. Grace snapped her eyes from the man to Selena and back but remained otherwise motionless. Selena watched for a moment longer, raised her glass, and calmly upended its contents over the man’s head.
The glass was small, c
ontaining only enough liquid to wet his hair, but the effect of her action was outsized. He staggered back as if she’d clocked him, eyes blinking through a daze. Selena made no effort to slip away, but merely stood, her empty glass dangly by its stem from between two fingers.
Mary rushed over, draped an arm around the man, and led him away from the scene. Her free hand gesticulated madly, painting elaborate scenes in the air. She led him to Theodora, who leaped nimbly into the role of fretting conciliator, mopping the liquor from his hair and cooing over the state of his jacket in a manner he seemed to find quite satisfactory. The few guests who’d noticed the exchange watched with amusement. Mary returned a few minutes later.
“Okay, I think I smoothed that over, though I owe Theodora a big favor now. What the hell was that about?”
Selena shook her head. She couldn’t say exactly why she’d done it. Certainly, the drunk’s behavior wasn’t the worst she’d witnessed at the party so far. Nor could she say the other girls were less in need of intervention on their behalf—they hid their discomfort better, but most were enjoying the party no more than she was. There’d simply been something in Grace’s manner that cried out for a response—and something in Selena’s that cried out to give it. The two cries had met, anonymous yet oddly unified, the sympathetic howls of dogs in the night.
Mary cupped Selena’s shoulders. “You’ve gotta quit acting like you’re at the bottom and things can’t get worse for you. Trust me, they can.” Her eyes flicked over Selena’s shoulder. “Case in point.”
A hand closed around Selena’s wrist and yanked. Trejo snarled, his humorless face puckering with rage.
“With me, girl,” he hissed.
Mary caught Selena’s eye and mouth a single word: “Easy.” Selena bit her cheek and nodded.
Trejo dragged Selena from the manor and out into the street. Selena expected to be tossed to the curb, but they reached the road, and Trejo kept going, eyes deadlocked on some unknown target in front of him, limbs rigid as iron. She trotted to keep up, hating the subordinate feeling of being escorted like a misbehaving child, but not quite daring to break his grip. Pouring the drink on the guy had been an overstep. She didn’t regret it, but she didn’t care to compound the insult either.
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