Lauren DeStefano - Wither

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1

I WAIT. They keep us in the dark for so…

2

FOR MALES twenty-five is the fatal age. For women it’s…

3

IT’S NOT GABRIEL who wakes me in the morning, but…

4

IT’S MY TURN to keep watch. We’ve locked the doors…

5

WHEN THE EVENING is at last through, I languish on…

6

“I WANT TO PLAY a game,” Cecily says.

7

I HOLD MY BREATH as they pass. Eternity is the…

8

THE ATTENDANTS arrive in abundance. All of them rushing into…

9

LINDEN is so delighted about the pregnancy, and the mood…

10

IT SEEMS THAT leaves are always bursting with new colors.

11

THE HOUSE doesn’t blow away. Aside from a few broken…

12

THE AIR IS STILL. It’s quiet. I can breathe without…

13

LINDEN SEEMS to have no idea that I sustained these…

14

ALL NIGHT I dream of rivers, and beneath the water,…

15

WHEN CECILY finishes playing her song, and the illusion shrinks…

16

I DON’T SEE GABRIEL the next day. My breakfast is…

17

I’M SICK for the rest of the afternoon. Jenna holds…

18

LINDEN SAYS, “You and Jenna get along well, don’t you?”

19

I WORRY for the rest of the evening. Deirdre tries…

20

WE WAIT, and we wait. I want to look away,…

21

ON THE MORNING of the winter solstice, Jenna manages to…

22

THE BABY will not stop crying. His face is bright…

23

JENNA WAS RIGHT. She leaves before I do. We lose…

24

WE RETURN from the New Year’s party in the early…

25

IN THE MONTH before my escape, I spend all of…

26

I TAKE the elevator to the ground floor and cross…

27

WE RUN for what feels like all night. It feels…

Fever

The First Bride

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

we lose sense of our eyelids. We sleep huddled together like rats, staring out, and dream of our bodies swaying.

I know when one of the girls reaches a wall. She begins to pound and scream—there’s metal in the sound—but none of us help her. We’ve gone too long without speaking, and all we do is bury ourselves more into the dark.

The doors open.

The light is frightening. It’s the light of the world through the birth canal, and at once the blinding tunnel that comes with death. I recoil into the blankets with the other girls in horror, not wanting to begin or end.

We stumble when they let us out; we’ve forgotten how to use our legs. How long has it been—days? Hours? The big open sky waits in its usual place.

I stand in line with the other girls, and men in gray coats study us.

I’ve heard of this happening. Where I come from, girls have been disappearing for a long time. They disappear from their beds or from the side of the road. It happened to a girl in my neighborhood. Her whole family disappeared after that, moved away, either to find her or because they knew she would never be returned.

Now it’s my turn. I know girls disappear, but any number of things could come after that. Will I become a murdered reject? Sold into prostitution? These things have happened. There’s only one other option. I could become a bride. I’ve seen them on television, reluctant yet beautiful teenage brides, on the arm of a wealthy man who is approaching the lethal age of twenty-five.

The other girls never make it to the television screen. Girls who don’t pass their inspection are shipped to a brothel in the scarlet districts. Some we have found murdered on the sides of roads, rotting, staring into the searing sun because the Gatherers couldn’t be bothered to deal with them. Some girls disappear forever, and all their families can do is wonder.

The girls are taken as young as thirteen, when their bodies are mature enough to bear children, and the virus claims every female of our generation by twenty.

Our hips are measured to determine strength, our lips pried apart so the men can judge our health by our teeth. One of the girls vomits. She may be the girl who screamed. She wipes her mouth, trembling, terrified. I stand firm, determined to be anonymous, unhelpful.

I feel too alive in this row of moribund girls with their eyes half open. I sense that their hearts are barely beating, while mine pounds in my chest. After so much time spent riding in the darkness of the truck, we have all fused together. We are one nameless thing sharing this strange hell. I do not want to stand out. I do not want to stand out.

But it doesn’t matter. Someone has noticed me. A man paces before the line of us. He allows us to be prodded by the men in gray coats who examine us. He seems thoughtful and pleased.

His eyes, green, like two exclamation marks, meet mine. He smiles. There’s a flash of gold in his teeth, indicating wealth. This is unusual, because he’s too young to be losing his teeth. He keeps walking, and I stare at my shoes. Stupid! I should never have looked up. The strange color of my eyes is the first thing anyone ever notices.

He says something to the men in gray coats. They look at all of us, and then they seem to be in agreement. The man with gold teeth smiles in my direction again, and then he’s taken to another car that shoots up bits of gravel as it backs onto the road and drives away.

The vomit girl is taken back to the truck, and a dozen other girls with her; a man in a gray coat follows them in. There are three of us left, the gap of the other girls still between us. The men speak to one another again, and then to us. “Go,” they say, and we oblige. There’s nowhere to go but the back of an open limousine parked on the gravel. We’re off the road somewhere, not far from the highway. I can hear the faraway sounds of traffic. I can see the evening city lights beginning to appear in the distant purple haze. It’s nowhere I recognize; a road this desolate is far from the crowded streets back home.

Go. The two other chosen girls move before me, and I’m the last to get into the limousine. There’s a tinted glass window that separates us from the driver. Just before someone shuts the door, I hear something inside the van where the remaining girls were herded.

It’s the first of what I know will be a dozen more gunshots.

I awake in a satin bed, nauseous and pulsating with sweat. My first conscious movement is to push myself to the edge of the mattress, where I lean over and vomit onto the lush red carpet. I’m still spitting and gagging when someone begins cleaning up the mess with a dishrag.

“Everyone handles the sleep gas differently,” he says softly.

“Sleep gas?” I splutter, and before I can wipe my mouth on my lacy white sleeve, he hands me a cloth napkin—also lush red.

“It comes out through the vents in the limo,” he says. “It’s so you won’t know where you’re going.”

I remember the glass window separating us from the front of the car. Airtight, I assume. Vaguely I remember the whooshing of air coming through vents in the walls.

“One of the other girls,” the boy says as he sprays white foam onto the spot where I vomited, “she almost threw herself out the bedroom window, she was so disoriented. The window’s locked, of course. Shatterproof.” Despite the awful things he’s saying, his voice is low, possibly even sympathetic.