“Do you understand what I’ve been telling you? I’m giving you an opportunity here, Andi, and you should not take it lightly. It’s been twenty years or more since we’ve offered anyone what I’m offering you.”
“And if I say no? What then? Do you kill me? And take this . . .” What had she called it? “This steam?”
Rose smiled. Her lips were rich and coral pink. Andi, who considered herself asexual, nonetheless wondered what that lipstick would taste like.
“You don’t have enough steam to bother with, dear, and what you do have would be far from yummy. It would taste the way the meat from a tough old cow tastes to a rube.”
“To a what?”
“Never mind, just listen. We won’t kill you. What we’ll do if you say no is to wipe out all memory of this little conversation. You will find yourself on the side of the road outside some nothing town—Topeka, maybe, or Fargo—with no money, no identification, and no memory of how you got there. The last thing you’ll remember is going into that movie theater with the man you robbed and mutilated.”
“He deserved to be mutilated!” Andi spat out.
Rose stood on her tiptoes and stretched, her fingers touching the roof of the RV. “That’s your business, honeydoll, I’m not your psychiatrist.” She wasn’t wearing a bra; Andi could see the shifting punctuation marks of her ni**les against her shirt. “But here’s something to consider: we’ll take your talent as well as your money and your no doubt bogus identification. The next time you suggest that a man go to sleep in a darkened movie theater, he’ll turn to you and ask what the f**k you’re talking about.”
Andi felt a cold trickle of fear. “You can’t do that.” But she remembered the terribly strong hands that had reached inside her brain and felt quite sure this woman could. She might need a little help from her friends, the ones in the RVs and motorhomes gathered around this one like piglets at a sow’s teats, but oh yes—she could.
Rose ignored this. “How old are you, dear?”
“Twenty-eight.” She had been shading her age since hitting the big three-oh.
Rose looked at her, smiling, saying nothing. Andi met those beautiful gray eyes for five seconds, then had to drop her gaze. But what her eyes fell upon when she did were those smooth br**sts, unharnessed but with no sign of a sag. And when she looked up again, her eyes only got as far as the woman’s lips. Those coral-pink lips.
“You’re thirty-two,” Rose said. “Oh, it only shows a little—because you’ve led a hard life. A life on the run. But you’re still pretty. Stay with us, live with us, and ten years from now you really will be twenty-eight.”
“That’s impossible.”
Rose smiled. “A hundred years from now, you’ll look and feel thirty-five. Until you take steam, that is. Then you’ll be twenty-eight again, only you’ll feel ten years younger. And you’ll take steam often. Live long, stay young, and eat well: those are the things I’m offering. How do they sound?”
“Too good to be true,” Andi said. “Like those ads about how you can get life insurance for ten dollars.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. Rose hadn’t told any lies (at least not yet), but there were things she wasn’t saying. Like how steam was sometimes in short supply. Like how not everyone lived through the Turning. Rose judged this one might, and Walnut, the True’s jackleg doctor, had cautiously concurred, but nothing was sure.
“And you and your friends call yourself—?”
“They’re not my friends, they’re my family. We’re the True Knot.” Rose laced her fingers together and held them in front of Andi’s face. “And what’s tied can never be untied. You need to understand that.”
Andi, who already knew that a girl who has been raped can never be unraped, understood perfectly.
“Do I really have any other choice?”
Rose shrugged. “Only bad ones, dear. But it’s better if you want it. It will make the Turning easier.”
“Does it hurt? This Turning?”
Rose smiled and told the first outright lie. “Not at all.”
7
A summer night on the outskirts of a Midwestern city.
Somewhere people were watching Harrison Ford snap his bullwhip; somewhere the Actor President was no doubt smiling his untrustworthy smile; here, in this campground, Andi Steiner was lying on a discount-store lawn recliner, bathed in the headlights of Rose’s EarthCruiser and someone else’s Winnebago. Rose had explained to her that, while the True Knot owned several campgrounds, this wasn’t one of them. But their advance man was able to four-wall places like this, businesses tottering on the edge of insolvency. America was suffering a recession, but for the True, money was not a problem.
“Who is this advance man?” Andi had asked.
“Oh, he’s a very winning fellow,” Rose had said, smiling. “Able to charm the birdies down from the trees. You’ll meet him soon.”
“Is he your special guy?”