Blending in was much easier for Lenore. She wore the same kind of contacts to turn her distinctive lilac irises into a nondescript and rather forgettable shade of brown, but she’d grown up passing for human and was much more used to the contact lenses than Zyanya was, thus much less likely to rub her eyes and pop one out.
“When is your baby due?”
My palms felt damp as I turned to the woman at the table behind me and scrounged up a smile. “Any day now.” With a sixty-day margin of error.
“Do you know what you’re having?” she asked as she gathered the empty sweetener packets from her table and dropped them onto a plate that held nothing but crumbs.
A baby, I thought. Though at that point, the little person wiggling around inside me felt more like a toddler.
“No,” I said with another forced smile, and she probably had no idea how true my answer was. Neither Gallagher nor I had any idea what to expect from a baby that was partfear dearg, part human. “We like surprises.”
The woman glanced at my left hand, where it rested on the upper curve of my swollen belly, and when she found no ring, her smile lost a little of its warmth.
I had to swallow bitter laughter. If the knowledge that I wasn’t married made her uncomfortable, I could only imagine how she’d react to finding out how I’d gotten pregnant.
Not that I remembered much of the event.
“Well, best of luck to you.” She stood and draped her purse strap over one shoulder. “The Lord never gives us more than we can handle.”
Lenore snorted as the woman walked away. “Spoken like someone who’s never lived in a cage,” she whispered.
A couple of minutes later, Zyanya joined us with three steaming cups—mine had an orange decaf lid—and a pocket full of sugar packets and stirrers. While I dumped sugar into my coffee, I indulged a long look at the freshly baked cinnamon rolls and scones on display up at the counter. My sweet tooth had become an irritable imperative in what I hoped was late pregnancy, but we were very low on cash and couldn’t even really afford the coffee we had to buy in order to access the complimentary internet.
Lenore followed my gaze to the glass display cabinet, then pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocket. “Will you go get her a cookie?” She pushed the cash toward Zyanya, who looked thrilled by the challenge of a second round of ordering.
“No, it’s okay. Really,” I insisted. “I don’t need a cookie.”
“Lilah, the baby wants a cookie,” Zyanya whispered, and I felt even more guilty knowing that none of her pregnancy cravings had ever been indulged, because all of her pregnancies were engineered and endured while she was a captive in Metzger’s Menagerie.
That reminder always helped me put things in perspective. What Gallagher and I were forced to do at the Spectacle felt like a monstrous, humiliating violation of the one bit of dignity I’d managed to keep intact during my imprisonment. And it was. But Zyanya and thousands like her had been forced to breed with other captives they hardly knew—some of whom were rented out specifically for that purpose—over and over throughout adult lives spent entirely in captivity. They were forced to bear children bred for profit and doomed to chains and cages from the moment they were conceived.
Compared to that, my lack of a cookie fund could hardly compare.
“Don’t worry about it.” Lenore’s smile died before it reached her eyes. She seemed determined to celebrate my pregnancy with me, despite the brutal end of her own, and it was difficult for me to think of my own relative good fortune without also thinking about her loss.
My pregnancy, like our freedom-in-hiding, felt bittersweet, yet I clung to them both because I had no idea when they would end.
“I’ll sweet-talk someone out of his wallet on the way out of town.” Lenore shrugged, as if her offer wouldn’t mean taking another monumental risk. “We need a fresh infusion of cash, anyway.”
My eyes watered as Zyanya stood with the five-dollar bill, and I decided to blame the tears on hormones.
When I was a kid, I’d imagined that having sisters would feel like this. Like friends sharing living space and secrets and envy and laughter.
Of course, when I was a kid, I hadn’t imagined us as fugitives likely to be shot on sight, if we were discovered.
Zy came back from the counter with two dollars in change and the biggest peanut butter cookie I’ve ever seen, and I insisted we split it three ways.
I hated the fact that we were living hand-to-mouth, in a “borrowed” cabin and on stolen funds, but I hated it even worse that the burden for providing those borrowed and stolen goods fell squarely on Lenore. Especially considering the consequences if she were to get caught. Gallagher, Zy, Claudio and Eryx—the more physically imposing among our group—could easily have intimidated men in dark parking lots into handing over their cash, but they would have been reported to the police.
Under the right circumstances, Lenore could inject enough compulsion into her voice to convince people that theywantedto give her what they had. That they were donating to a down-on-her-luck woman with four kids to feed, or a college scholarship student struggling to care for her sick grandfather. A siren’s gifts were as substantial as they were subtle.
Even so, we were careful not to take Lenore “shopping” too often in the same town, because people would remember giving money to her. And they would remember her face if they saw it again.
That’s the problem with being beautiful. Even when you look completely human.
“So?” Zyanya whispered as she broke a small chunk from the huge cookie. “Find anything new online?” Though she’d made incredible strides in literacy since our escape, she’d had no opportunity to practice typing, so Lenore and I usually worked the coffee shop tablets.
“I figured out what triggered the angry mob outside,” I whispered. “A couple of days ago, a fourth-grade teacher injected some kind of poison into her class’s snack-time milk cartons, then passed them out.”
