Lyonette stood outside the tattoo room as ever, her eyes politely averted from me until I could put on the slinky black dress that had become my only piece of clothing. “Close your eyes,” she told me. “Let’s take this in stages.”
I’d kept my eyes closed so long in that room that the thought of being voluntarily blind again made my skin crawl. But Lyonette had done well by me so far, and she’d clearly done this before for other girls. I made the choice to trust her a bit further. Once I closed my eyes, she took my hand and led me down the hall in the opposite direction than we usually went. It was a long hallway, and we turned left at the end of it. I kept my right hand out against the glass walls, my arm flopping free whenever we passed one of the open doorways.
Then she directed me through one of the doorways and positioned me where she wanted with gentle hands on my upper arms. I felt her step back. “Open your eyes.”
She stood in front of me, off-center in a room nearly identical to mine. This one had small personal touches: origami creatures on a shelf above the bed, sheets and blankets and pillows, pumpkin-colored curtains hiding the toilet, sink, and shower from sight. The edge of a book stuck out from under the largest pillow and drawers lined the space under the bed.
“What name did he give you?”
“Maya.” I staved off the shudder that came from saying it aloud for the first time, from the memory of him saying it over and over while he—
“Maya,” she repeated, and gave me another sound to hold on to. “Take a look at yourself now, Maya.” She held up a mirror, positioning it so I could use it to look into another mirror behind me.
Large portions of my back were still pink and raw and swollen around the fresh ink, which I knew was darker than it would become once the scabs flaked off. Fingerprints were visible on my sides where the fabric gapped, but there was nothing to obscure the design. It was ugly, and terrible.
And lovely.
The upper wings were golden-brown, tawny like Lyonette’s hair and eyes, flecked through with bits of black, white, and deep bronze. The lower wings were shades of rose and purple, also marked through with patterns of black and white. The detail was astonishing, slight color variations giving the impressions of individual scales. The colors were rich, almost saturated, and they filled almost my entire back, from the very tips of my shoulders to a little below the curve of my hips. The wings were tall and narrow, the outer edges just barely curving onto my sides.
The artistry couldn’t be denied. Whatever else he was, the Gardener was talented.
I hated it, but it was lovely.
A head popped through the doorway, quickly followed by the rest of a tiny girl. She couldn’t have topped five feet with her shoulders back, but no one could see those curves and think her a child. She had flawless, frosty-white skin and huge blue-violet eyes, framed by a haphazardly pinned profusion of tight black curls. She was all striking contrasts, with a button nose that leaned toward cute rather than beautiful, but like all the girls I’d glimpsed in the Garden, she was nothing less than stunning.
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“So, this is the new girl.” She flopped down on the bed, hugging a small pillow to her chest. “What’d the bastard name you?”
“He might hear you,” Lyonette chided, but the girl on the bed just shrugged.
“Let him. He’s never asked us to love him. So what’s he call you?”
“Maya,” I said in time with Lyonette, and the word got a little less hard to hear. I wondered if it would continue to be that way, if in time the word wouldn’t hurt at all, or if it was a tiny shard that always would, like the piece of a splinter you can’t reach with tweezers.
“Huh, that’s not too bad then. Fucker named me Bliss.” She rolled her eyes and snorted. “Bliss! Do I look like a blissful person? Ooh, let’s see.” Her fingers made a twirling motion, and in that moment, she reminded me a little of Hope. With that in mind, I slowly spun to show her my back. “Not too bad. The colors flatter you, anyway. We’ll have to look up what kind that is.”
“It’s a Western Pine Elfin,” Lyonette sighed. She shrugged at my sideways look. “It’s something to do. Maybe it makes it a little less awful. I’m a Lustrous Copper.”
“I’m a Mexican Bluewing,” added Bliss. “It’s pretty enough. Awful, of course, but it’s not like I have to look at it. Anyway, the name thing? He could call us A, B, or Three and it wouldn’t matter. Answer to it but don’t pretend it’s somehow yours. Less confusing that way.”
“Less confusing?”
“Well sure! Remember who you are and then it’s just playing a part. If you start to think of it as you, that’s when the identity crisis hits. Identity crisis usually leads to a breakdown, and a breakdown around here leads to—”
“Bliss.”
“What? She seems like she can handle it. She isn’t crying yet, and we all know what he does when the ink is finished.”
Like Hope, but much smarter.
“So what does a breakdown lead to?”
“Check the hallways, just don’t do it after you eat.”
“You’d just walked through the hallways,” Victor reminds her.
“With my eyes closed.”
“Then what was in the hallway?”
She swirls the remainder of the coffee in her mug rather than answer, giving him a look that suggests he should already know.
Static crackles in his ear again. “Ramirez just called from the hospital,” Eddison says. “She’s sending pictures of those the doctors expect to make it. Missing Persons has had some luck. Between them and the ones fresh in the morgue, they’ve got about half the girls identified. And we have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
The girl looks at him sharply.
“One of the girls they identified has some important family. She’s still calling herself Ravenna, but her fingerprints matched to Patrice Kingsley.”
“As in Senator Kingsley’s missing daughter?”
Inara settles back in her chair, her expression clearly amused. Victor isn’t sure what she finds funny about what promises to be a hell of a complication.
“Has the senator been informed yet?” he asks.
“Not yet,” answers Eddison. “Ramirez wanted to give us a heads-up first. Senator Kingsley has been desperate to find her daughter, Vic; there isn’t a chance in hell she won’t push into the investigation.”
And when that happens, any privacy they may be able to offer these girls will be out the window. Their faces will be plastered on every news network from here to the West Coast. And Inara . . . Victor rubs wearily at his eyes. If the senator learns they have any suspicions about this overly contained young woman, she won’t rest until charges are filed.
“Tell Ramirez to hold off as long as she can,” he says finally. “We need time.”
“Roger.”
“Remind me how long she’s been missing?”
“Four and a half years.”
“Four and a half years?”
“Ravenna,” Inara murmurs, and Victor stares at her. “No one ever forgets how long they’ve been there.”
“Why not?”
“It changes things, doesn’t it? Having a senator involved.”
“It changes things for you, as well.”
“Of course it does. How could it not?”
She knows, he realizes uneasily. Maybe she doesn’t know specifics, but she knows they suspect her of some kind of involvement. He measures the amusement in her eyes, the cynical twist to her mouth. She’s a little too comfortable with this new information.
Time to change the subject, then, before he loses the power in the room. “You said the girls in the apartment were your first friends.”
She shifts slightly in her seat. “That’s right,” she answers warily.
“Why is that?”
“Because I hadn’t had any before.”
“Inara.”
She responds to that tone of voice the same way his daughters do—instinctively, grudgingly when she realizes it a moment too late, and just a bit sulky. “You’re good at that. You have kids?”
“Three girls.”
“And yet you make a career in broken children.”
“In trying to rescue broken children,” he corrects. “In trying to get justice for broken children.”
“You really think broken children care about justice?”