CHAPTER SIX
“KEEP YOUR EYES down, and your expressions respectful, girls. Remember what you’ve been taught. Don’t look at anyone directly. Don’t speak. Don’t make a single noise. The Alpha will tolerate no disrespect—and neither will I,” Mother Shade snapped.
It had been a week since I’d come to the capital city with Isobel. Seven days since I’d entered the doors of the tower where the Chosen girls were kept prisoner, until they were chosen by and married to their Sworn husbands. A week, but it felt as though I’d been imprisoned here a century.
I’d counted the days out. Each was an eternity of misery.
And I was no closer to finding a way to contact the Order of the Crimson operative Baz had told me about, let alone finding my mother.
With the seed tracker in my neck, I couldn’t simply sneak out the back door, not that I’d had any opportunity of the sort. We were watched like precious jewels and treated like broken rocks.
I stood in the communal bedroom the rest of the Chosen girls, all thirty-two of us, each standing by her bed at attention.
Agnes had never returned to our ranks, and we learned only later that she’d leaped from a window trying to escape and died in the attempt.
Thinking about it made the place where my seed sat under my skin throb. If she had managed to survive the leap, she would’ve been tracked down immediately by her seed. Would she have cut the seed out with a rock? Trying to dodge death on the streets as a human without one? Was she planning to escape the city across the vast moat of water that surrounded it, a moat we’d learned was built to keep out the treecrawlers? A moat guarded day and night by soldiers?
My head spun from thinking these things, the same things that kept me up at night. How I would escape with my mother once I found her. How we’d cut out our seeds right before we ran across the moat, so we wouldn’t risk any more than we had to. How we’d go under cover of darkness, and hope the guards didn’t see us.
It was a flimsy plan, but so far, it was all I’d got.
We’d only gotten poor Agnes’s replacement yesterday. The Chosen household had been abuzz with whispers about the new girl, and sorrow about the previous one. But there was no time to process the changes today.
Today, we were to be presented before the Alpha.
We were dressed in long white dresses except for the edges of our garments, which were stained with black as if we’d walked a mile in a field of soot. Symbols I didn’t understand were embroidered across the black. The dresses had hoods that covered our hair and shadowed our faces, and we all wore white masks—plain ones, different from the Sworn’s wolf masks. Ours were molded like the humans that we were, and the faces were blank and expressionless like the Sworn wished us to be, with only our eyes and lips showing through a slit above the nose and beneath the edge of the mask. Everything else, from nose to forehead and ear to ear, was covered, blank, walled away. We were nothing but wombs for them, destined to have babies of the right blood, the blood that would allow them to become werewolves.
Mother Shade was lecturing us, as she did day and night. Stuffing words in our minds, trying to change our loyalties and our sense of selves. Trying to wipe us of our personalities, of every scrap of whatever we’d been before we were Chosen.
“You should be grateful, girls. You were chosen out of poverty, neglect, and misery. Chosen and anointed with a future. You are the mothers of the future. Never forget that,” Mother Shade said.
A few of the Chosen shuffled, but no one spoke. No one dared to. The young woman beside me twitched at Mother Shade’s words, her fingers clenching and unclenching in fists against her white-robed sides. Her lips trembled.
I knew her only as Number Thirty-Two. I hadn’t been able to exchange names with her in hurried whispers, but I could tell that she was not here willingly. Her fury and outrage were written all over her face.
“The Alpha likes to see the newest crop of girls,” Mother Shade continued. “So, we make the pilgrimage every so often. It is an honor for you to be welcomed in the Great Hall. You will show yourselves to be good girls, and you will show the Alpha that you are grateful.”
Grateful.
At this, Number Thirty-Two muttered something.
Mother Shade, who seemed to have supernaturally strong hearing, snapped her gaze to the muttering girl. “And what was that, Number Thirty-Two?”
The girl’s chin jerked with fear, but she lifted it higher as she responded, “I said, Screw the Alpha.”
Her wavering words rang through the room.
Mother Shade stiffened.
My stomach curled. The young women, although already silent, went even more still and quiet, so much so that they seemed to be made of stone. All eyes were focused on Number Thirty-Two, who straightened with terrified resolve as Mother Shade stalked across the floor toward her.
“You are new here,” Mother Shade said. “You have not yet learned proper respect.”
The girl reddened but held her ground.
“Open your mouth,” Mother Shade demanded. She motioned to our ever-present guards, who came forward and grabbed Number Thirty-Two.
The girl pressed her lips together for a moment as if considering a rebellion.
“Open your mouth!” Mother Shade thundered.
Number Thirty-Two turned her head. One of the guards caught her face with a gloved hand and forced her mouth open by sticking thumb and finger behind her molars.
The silence turned stifling. The only sound was Mother Shade fumbling with her belt, and the breathing of the other Chosen all around me.
Mother Shade withdrew the whip from her waist. The end fell to the floor in a coil, and she drew it upward along her hand, her fingers stroking it. “Keep it open,” she said to the guards, and to Number Thirty-Two, “Stick out your tongue.”
Number Thirty-Two, trembling, tried to resist, so the guard pushed her tongue across her teeth.
“Farther!” Mother Shade ordered.
The guard obeyed, and Number Thirty-Two’s tongue was forced past her teeth, past the brim of the white mask, so that it was visible to all, like a naked, pink petal peeking out from a white flowerpot.
“The tongue,” Mother Shade said, pacing around the frightened, immobilized Chosen girl with the whip resting in her hand like a snake. “A small thing, isn’t it? But never forget, girls. Your tongue has power, even as a Chosen. If you speak against the Alpha, you could bring death upon yourself. Upon your children, even, once you have them. You must all learn never to be so foolish.”
She turned and struck with the whip.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOTHER SHADE’S AIM was precise, and the lash cut across Number Thirty-Two’s tongue. A seam of bright red appeared across the pink, and then Number Thirty-Two gave an agonized, gargled scream that wrenched through me as if I had felt the same pain as she. The girl crumpled in the arms of the guards, who dropped her to the ground. She curled into herself, her hands pressed to her mouth, making a soft, keening sound.
“Now,” Mother Shade said, coiling the whip around her waist once more and surveying the rest of us. “Does anyone else have something to say? Anyone?”
The young women in white were silent.
“Then let us go. Except you, Number Thirty-Two. Take her to the punishment room.”