The Jewel (6 page)

There's nowhere else to look but up, and suddenly a bright light shines in my left eye, then my right. I blink furiously, but it's like my retinas have been seared—all I can see is a green glow. The pen scratches again.

“Very good, 197. Almost done. I'm going to touch you now. I promise I will not hurt you.”

All my muscles clench into tiny fists, and I blink harder, but I still can't see. Then I feel a gentle pressure low on my stomach, first on the left side, then the right.

“There we are,” the voice says soothingly. “All done.”

The glow fades from my eyes and the face behind the voice comes into focus.

It's the face of a man, but it's oddly childlike, with delicate features, a narrow nose, a thin mouth, cream-colored skin. His head has been shaved except for a circle of chestnut hair on his crown, which is tied up into an elegant topknot, a hairstyle that I remember from my classes on royal culture and lifestyle. It means he's a lady-in-waiting.

Ladies-in-waiting are more than just the highest of servants—they're confidantes and advisors to their mistresses. They are selected and trained from a young age, and some of them are men, castrated so they can be considered “safe” to work so closely with royal women.

Humiliation washes over me at being naked in front of a man, and I squirm against the restraints. He waits patiently, looking only at my face, ignoring my body, and something in his expression makes me wonder if he knows how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking. I stop struggling. He smiles.

“Hello. I'm Lucien. I'm going to take the straps off now, all right?”

My voice seems to have disappeared, but he doesn't wait for an answer. As he reaches over me to undo the restraints, I notice he's wearing a long white dress with a high lace collar and long sleeves. His fingers are manicured and his body is slim but soft, like the muscle hasn't been toned under the skin.

“You have beautiful eyes,” he says, undoing the last strap. “Why don't you sit up, and I'll get you a robe?”

He disappears and I scramble into a sitting position, hugging my knees tight to hide my body. My eyes still have a hard time adjusting; I hold up my hand to block out the brilliant light overhead.

“Oh yes, let's do something about the lighting.” Lucien's voice drifts from the darkness. The light goes out. At first, it's terrifying—then slowly, light seeps back into the room. Different colored globes, attached to gold fixtures on the walls, begin to glow, and their colors blend together until the room is lit in a comfortable shade of pinkish yellow.

“Here you are.” Lucien hands me a dressing gown made of ice-blue silk. I slip it on quickly, the delicate fabric soft against my skin, and try to pretend that it's my mother's bathrobe. He holds out his hand, an offering, not a command; I ignore it and hop off the table onto trembling legs.

“First things first. Let's get rid of this ghastly table.” He gives me a conspiratorial smile, but the muscles in my face aren't working—I can only stare at him blankly. He presses a button on the wall and the floor underneath the table drops down, a platform being lowered into nothing, and then another piece of wood slides over the gaping rectangular hole, clicking into place and fitting so perfectly, I would never have guessed it was there. “I don't suppose you see many false floors in the Marsh, do you?”

I blink, and look from him to where the table used to be, and then back again. Suddenly, I feel like I'm twelve years old again, just entering Southgate, when everything seemed so new and bright and fancy.

Lucien sighs. “You don't talk much, do you, 197?”

I clear my throat. “My name—”

He holds up a finger and shakes his head. “Sorry, honey. I can't know your name.”

Even though I have no attachment to this man, and I'll probably never see him again, the fact that he isn't allowed to know my name,
my
name, not some number I've been assigned, brings tears to my eyes. My chest tightens.

“Don't cry.” Lucien says it gently, but there is an urgency in his tone. “Please.”

I take a deep breath, willing the tears back, away from my lashes, from their precarious balance on my lids, back down into the deep well inside me. In a second, they're gone.

Crying will be useless from now on anyway.

“All right,” I say, my voice steady. “I'm not crying.”

Lucien raises an eyebrow. “No, you're not. Good girl.” The way he says it, it doesn't sound condescending. He seems impressed.

“So,” I say, hoping I sound braver than I feel, “what happens now?”

“Now,” he says, “you look in a mirror.”

My heart plummets to my toes so fast it leaves my head spinning. I force myself to breathe normally as all the colors of the room blur together.

Lucien puts a hand on my shoulder. “It's all right. I promise, you'll like what you see.”

He leads me over to a lumpy, covered thing in the corner. It's elevated on a little platform, and Lucien indicates that I should step onto it. My legs are still shaking.

“Do you want to close your eyes first?” he asks.

“Does it help?”

“Sometimes.”

I nod and squeeze my eyes shut. In the darkness behind my lids, I remember the last time I saw my own reflection. I was twelve. I kept a little mirror on the dresser in the room Hazel and I shared, and I was brushing my hair. Everything about my face was thin and pinched. My nose, my cheekbones, my eyebrows, my lips, the little point of my chin. Everything but my eyes. Huge and violet, they seemed to take up half my face. But the memory is old; it's been taken out and pored over so many times, like a letter, read and reread until it's wrinkled and creased and some of the words are blurred.

There is a gust of air and a swish of fabric. “Whenever you're ready,” Lucien says.

I hold my breath and focus on my heart as it punches against my chest. I can do this. I won't be afraid.

I open my eyes.

I'm surrounded by three identical women. One looks directly at me, the other two at angles on either side. There is no thinness in her face, except maybe in the tiny point of her chin. Her cheeks are round, her lips full and parted slightly in surprise. Black hair cascades over her shoulders. But her eyes . . . her eyes are exactly as I remember them.

She is a stranger. She is me.

I try to reconcile those two thoughts, and as I move my hand to touch my face, I start laughing. I can't help it. The girl in the mirror moves with me exactly, and for some reason I find this funny.

“That's not the usual reaction,” Lucien says, “but it's better than screaming.”

That brings me up short. “Some girls scream?”

He purses his lips. “Well, now, we don't have all day. Let's get you ready. Please, sit.”

He gestures to a chair beside a table littered with makeup. I take one last look at the stranger in the mirror, then step off the podium and sit down. There are so many tubes and creams and powders, I can't imagine what they're all for or that they could possibly be used on just one person. Three hourglasses sit on a small shelf above the table, in different sizes with different colored sand.

Lucien dips his hands into a basin of sweet-scented water, drying them on a fluffy white towel. Then, very carefully, he turns over the first hourglass, the largest one, full of pale green sand.

“All right,” he says. “Let's get started.”

W
HENEVER
I'
D IMAGINED THE PREP PROCESS,
I
ALWAYS
thought it might be the only fun part of the Auction. Someone doing your hair and makeup and all that.

It's actually incredibly boring.

I can't see anything Lucien's doing, except when he manicures my hands and polishes my toenails, or covers me from head to toe in a fine silver dust—I have to take my robe off for that part, and I put it back on as quickly as I can. But for the most part, I just sit in the chair. I wonder how Raven is faring, and who is prepping her. She must be hating this.

“Where are the other prep rooms?” I ask, as Lucien applies a thin layer of translucent powder over my neck and shoulders.

“They're all on this level, or the one below it,” he replies, frowning at some imperfection on my collarbone.

“When does the Auction start?” I hope I sound casual.

“It's already started.”

I feel like I've been punched in the stomach. I have no idea how long I was unconscious; I have no idea what time it is. “How long?”

Lucien mixes some powders together on a little palette. “A long while,” he says softly.

My fingers dig into the leather-covered arms of the chair, and I try to keep my face smooth, but all I can think is,
Lily has been sold by now.

Lily's gone.

“I'm going to work on your face,” Lucien says. “Try to keep as still as possible. And close your eyes.”

It's like he's giving me a little gift, shutting out the world for a while and staying in darkness. I think about my mother, and Hazel, and Ochre. I see our house in my head and picture Mother knitting by the fire. Ochre is at work. Hazel is in school. I wonder if she's found my lemon yet.

I think about Raven, and the first time we met. She was thirteen and had been at Southgate for a year already, but she kept failing her Augury tests (on purpose, she later told me). I was learning the first Augury, Color, and she was in my class. I tried and tried but I couldn't turn my building block from blue to yellow—they start you off with one block, and you can't advance to another level until you've changed it. I didn't understand what they wanted from me. I didn't know how I was supposed to do it. Raven helped me. She taught me how to relax my mind and then focus it, how to see it before it happened, and she held the bucket for me when I coughed up blood. She gave me her handkerchief to stanch my nosebleeds, and showed me how to pinch the bridge of my nose to help them stop, and she promised me it wouldn't always be this bad. My head was pounding and my body ached, but by the end of the day, that block was yellow.

I have no idea what Lucien's doing to my face, and I hope I still look like myself after this. Layer after layer after layer is applied to my cheeks, my lips, my eyelids, my eyebrows, even my ears. He spends a lot of time on my eyes, and uses soft powders and cold creams and something thick and hard, like a pencil.

“Done,” he says at long last. “You have incredible patience, 197.”

“What's next?”

“Hair.”

I watch the hourglass, the tiny trickle of green sand that has been slowly filling the lower bulb. Lucien's fingers are gentle and deft, and he uses hot irons and steam curlers to manipulate my hair. I hope I don't lose it when I see myself again. Maybe I won't have to look in the mirror. Maybe I'll just go straight to the Auction.

My stomach tightens at the thought.

“May I ask you a question, 197?” Lucien says quietly. I wish he'd stop calling me that.

“Sure.”

The silence that follows is so long, I wonder if he's forgotten what he wanted to ask. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, he says, “Do you want this life?”

My muscles freeze. I feel like this question is not allowed, not permitted to be asked, or even thought about in the Jewel. Who cares what the surrogates want? But Lucien asks me. It makes me wonder if maybe he'd like to know my name, too.

“No,” I whisper back.

He finishes my hair in silence.

T
HE SECOND HOURGLASS IS SMALLER AND FILLED WITH
pale purple sand.

I stand in front of one of the three closets while Lucien pulls dresses off the racks and I squeeze myself into them. He picks ones that are a hair too tight, telling me it's to “emphasize my curves.” Some of the dresses are outrageous things, like costumes, with wings sprouting out of them, or finlike attachments. Thankfully, Lucien gives up on those pretty quickly.

“Definitely not your style,” he says. I don't know what my style is, but I'm glad he agrees that it's not
that
.

I try on a series of dresses made of heavy brocade, relieved when Lucien dismisses those as well—they make me feel like I weigh a thousand pounds. There are dresses with full skirts, short skirts, long sleeves, no sleeves, made of silk, damask, taffeta, lace, in every color and pattern imaginable. Lucien's brow furrows as I try on more and more, the pile of discarded fabrics growing higher and higher. A light sheen of sweat beads on his forehead, and he glances at the hourglass—the purple sand has nearly filled the bottom bulb. We're running out of time.

Suddenly, a smile breaks across his face and he gives me a look that makes me immediately suspicious.

“You know what?” he says, tossing aside a long dress made of red velvet. “
You
choose.”

I blink. “What?”

“You choose. Just poke around in the closets and pick what you like best.”

For a second, I'm too stunned to move. Isn't this sort of important, what I wear for the Auction? Won't it influence who buys me? Isn't this his
job
?

But then I wonder if he's giving me another little gift, like closing my eyes for the makeup. I remember what Raven said yesterday, about how it was the last day we'd ever get to choose our own outfit. Lucien's giving me one more choice.

“Okay,” I say. I ignore the first closet, where most of the costume-y stuff is, and head straight for the second. I run my hands along the racks, seeing which materials feel best. The farther back I go, the simpler the dresses become.

The moment I touch it, I know.

It's made of muslin, in a purple so pale it reminds me of the sunrise yesterday, of the sky just before it exploded with color. It has an empire waist and falls in a clean line to the floor. It has no ornamentation. It doesn't even look expensive.

I love it.