The House of the Stone

I wonder who Lot 193 is. Maybe that blond girl with the hair that looked like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket.

I stop moving. I’m in an empty room with bare concrete walls, circular like the stage above it. Doors are scattered around, all closed, all leading to who knows what or where. I’m clenching my jaw so tightly my head is starting to hurt.

Suddenly, a woman in a gray dress is standing in front of me. “Lot 192?” Her eyes dart between me and a clipboard clutched in her hands.

I nod.

“Countess of the Stone,” she says. “This way.”

I follow her through one of the doors and down a hallway lit with flickering torches. We enter a small, domed room made of octagonal stones. The only furniture is a simple table and chair. A fire burns in a grate to my left. A lumpy thing on the table covered in black cloth holds my attention.

“Sit,” the woman says.

“I’ll stand.” I hate the tremble in my voice. Reality is clawing its way to the surface and I push it down. This is just a room. With a table and a fire. Nothing to be afraid of.

The woman frowns.

“Very well,” she says. She unwraps the cloth to reveal a blue vial and a syringe. “The royalty says that no surrogate is allowed to see her way into or out of the Auction House. I promise this won’t hurt you.”

“Right,” I say, making sure I’m heavy on the sarcasm. I’ll take even the illusion of control at this point, because I can’t stop staring at that syringe.

The woman does not seem particularly surprised or offended. Instead she just looks at me, like a parent waiting for a toddler to stop throwing a tantrum. I clench my jaw tighter and my head throbs.

When she’s satisfied that I’m not going to speak again, she continues.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s up to you—I know they don’t give you a choice on your way in. The easy way is, you let me put you to sleep. The hard way is, I press a button and four Regimentals come through that door and hold you down, and then I put you to sleep anyway. Do you understand?”

I understand.

I am sold.

Sold. I can’t ignore it anymore. I am someone’s property. And for all my mantras and all my false bravado, I am just one of two hundred. I don’t have any control over what happens to my life or my body after this moment; and I am so scared and I don’t want to be scared, I want to be mad.

This woman can take her easy way and shove it.

“I’ll take the hard way,” I say.

Then I wind up and hit her hard in the face.

It feels so good, my hand connecting with her jaw, even as it sends a shooting pain through my knuckles. She falls back against the table and lunges forward, and at first I think she’s going to hit me, but she pushes me aside and presses something by the door.

I don’t know where those Regimentals were hiding—I didn’t see any trace of a door on my way here—but they burst into the room like they were waiting outside the whole time. I recognize the man who took me from prep.

One grabs my neck as I kick out, my foot connecting with a knee. But the Regimental may as well be made of stone for all the good it does. They wrestle me to the floor, holding my legs and arms down, my cheek pressing against the cold cement ground.

“Get off me!” I shriek.

“Keep her still,” the woman says, and she sounds almost bored. I fleetingly wonder whether she gets punched in the face often, before I feel a needle sink into my arm. And then the world goes black.





Two


“SHE’S WAKING UP. GO.”

I hear a door open as my brain swims out of a drug-induced sleep. My eyelids feel like they’ve been glued together. I try to sense where I am. I’m not wearing that awful kimono anymore—there is a breeze on my arms and legs, and whatever I’m dressed in is light, like cotton. Hard floor beneath me. Stale scent in the air. I would have thought the Jewel would smell better.

“I know you’re awake, so don’t bother pretending otherwise.”