Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

After that she just sat and finger-combed her hair until it was dry, which the ancient machine announced with a ping.

The next station was a bit like the day after Thanksgiving at a big shoe store. The stronger or more determined girls managed to wrench shoes away from their weaker sisters and jammed them on one foot, only to start the process again the next minute. Bonnie was lucky. She saw a tiny black shoe that had a faintly silvery bow coming down the ramp and kept her eye on it while it passed from girl to girl until someone dropped it and then she swooped in and tried it on. She didn’t know what she would have done if it hadn’t fit. But it did fit, and she went to the next station to get its mate. As she sat waiting, other girls were trying on perfume.

Bonnie saw two entire bottles go down the bodices of girls and wondered if they meant to sell them or try to poison themselves with them. There were also flowers.

Bonnie was already dizzy with perfume and had decided not to wear any, but a tall woman bellowed over her head and a garland of freesia was pinned to frame her curls, without anyone asking her permission.

The last station was the hardest to bear. She had on no jewelry and would have worn only one bracelet with the dress. But she was given two: slim unbreakable plastic bracelets, each with a number on it — her identity from now on, she was told.

Slave bracelets. She had now been washed, packaged, and stamped, so that she could be conveniently sold.

Damon! she cried voicelessly, but something had died inside her, and she knew now that her calls would not be answered.

“She was picked up as a runaway slave and confiscated,” the sweetshop man told Damon impatiently. “And that’s all I know.”

Damon was left with a feeling he didn’t often have. Sickening terror. He was really beginning to believe that this time he had cut it too fine; that he would be too late to save his redbird. That any of several dreadful scenarios might have played out before he got to her.

He couldn’t stand to visualize them in detail. What he would do if he didn’t find her in time…

He reached out and without the slightest effort gripped the sweetshop man around the throat, lifting him off the floor.

“We need to have a little chat,” he said, turning the full force of his menacing dark eyes on the bulging ones of his prey. “About just how she got confiscated.

Don’t struggle. If you haven’t hurt the girl, you’ve got nothing to fear. If you have…”

He pulled the terrified man completely across the counter and said very softly, “If you have, then, by all means struggle. It won’t make any difference in the end — if you know what I mean?”

The girls were put into the largest carriages Bonnie had yet seen in the Dark Dimension, three slim girls to a seat and two sets of seats in a carriage. She got a nasty jolt, though, when instead of going forward like a carriage, the whole thing was lifted straight up by sweaty male slaves straining at poles. It was a giant litter and Bonnie immediately snatched off her freesia garland and buried her nose in it.

It had the added function of hiding her tears.

“Do you have any idea of how many homes and dancing rooms and halls and theaters there are where girls are being sold tonight?” The golden-haired Guardian looked at him sardonically.

“If I knew that,” Damon said with a cold and ominous smile, “I wouldn’t be here asking you.”

The Guardian shrugged. “Our job is really only to try to keep the peace hereand you can see how well we succeed. It’s a matter of too few of us; we’re insanely understaffed. But I can give you a list of the venues where girls are being sold. Still, as I said, I doubt you’ll be able to find your runaway before morning. And by the way, we’ll have an eye on you, because of your little query. If your runaway wasn’t a slave, she’s Imperial property — no humans are free here. If she was, and you freed her, as reported by the baker across the street—”

“Sweet-seller.”

“Whatever. Then he had a right to use a stun gun when she ran. Better for her, really, than being Imperial property; they tend to char, if you get my drift. That level’s a long way down.”

“But if she was a slave — my slave…”

“Then you can have her. But there’s a certain mandatory punishment set before you can have her. We want to discourage this kind of thing.”

Damon looked at her with eyes that made her shrink and look away, abruptly losing her authority. “Why?” he demanded. “I thought you claimed to be from the other Court. You know. The Celestial one?”

“We want to discourage runaways because there’ve been so many since some girl named Alianna came around,” the Guardian said, her frightened pulse visible in her temple. “And then they get caught and have even more reason to try it again… and it wears out the girl, eventually.”

There was no one in the Great Hall when Bonnie and the others were hustled off the giant litter and into the building.

“It’s a new one, so it’s not on the lists,” Mouse said, unexpectedly at her shoulder. “Not that many people will know about it, so it doesn’t fill up till late, when the music gets loud.”

Mouse seemed to be clinging to her for comfort. That was fine, but Bonnie needed some comfort of her own. The next minute she saw Eren and, dragging Mouse behind her, headed for the blond girl.

Eren was standing with her back against the wall. “Well, we can stand around like wallflowers,” she said, as a few men came in, “or we can look like we’re having the best time of any of them right here by ourselves. Who knows a story?”

“Oh, I do,” Bonnie said absently, thinking of the star ball with its Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones.

Instantly there was a clamor. “Tell it!” “Yes, please tell!”

Bonnie tried to think of the fairy tales that she had experienced.

Of course. The one about the kitsune treasure.

“Once upon a time,” began Bonnie, “there were a young girl and boy…”

She was immediately interrupted. “What were their names?” “Were they slaves?” “Where did they live?” “Were they vampires?”

Bonnie almost forgot her misery and laughed. “Their names were…Jack and…

Jill. They were kitsune, and they lived way up north in the kitsune sector around the Great Crossings…” And she proceeded, albeit with many excited interruptions, to tell the story she had gotten from the star ball.

“So,” Bonnie concluded nervously, as she opened her eyes and realized that she’d attracted quite a crowd with her story, “that’s the tale of the Seven Treasures, and — and I suppose the moral is — don’t be too greedy, or you won’t end up with anything.”

There was a lot of laughter, the nervous giggling of the girls and the “Haw! Haw haw!” kind of laughter from the crowd behind them. Which Bonnie now noticed was entirely male.

One part of her mind started unconsciously to go into flirt mode. Another part immediately squashed it. These weren’t boys looking for a dance; these were ogres and vampires and kitsune and even men with mustaches — and they wanted to buy her in her little black bubble dress, and as nice as the dress might be for some things, it wasn’t like the long, jeweled gowns that Lady Ulma had made for them. Then they had been princesses, wearing a fortune’s worth of jewels at their throats and wrists and hair — and besides, they had had fierce protection with them at all times.

But now, she was wearing something that felt a lot like a baby-doll nightgown and delicate little shoes with silvery bows. And she wasn’t protected because this society said you had to have men to be protected, and, worst of all…she was a slave.