Page 6

But wake, I did. And I kept waking up. Kept being pulled back into the misery that existence had become. There was no escaping it. There was no inch of my body that they did not alter. One would think that knowing your own identity, the face in the mirror you’d taken for granted was no longer your own, would be unsettling enough. But when long black nail-tipped fingers forced themselves inside of me, and I felt the barbed wire of my flesh being changed where only a few others had ever been, I was shattered.

I wanted to die. I wanted to cease to exist. I wanted to have never existed to begin with. There was nothing about what was being done to me that I could escape from and nothing I could do to stop it. I could only watch, focus on the smear of something brownish on the wall, and hope that eventually the agony would end . . . or I would.

“That should do it. Sell this one for more than the others.” The twisted features of Mr. Ben, the creature who had become the stuff of nightmares, came into my upside-down view, obscuring my friend Smear. “You’ve cost me a lot of magic, little sun. When you go on the block tonight, you’d better glow. And if you do not?” He leaned down, the point of his nose stabbing into the raw flesh of mine. “Then what has happened here tonight will be the sweetest dream you have ever had. And this was easy for me. Remember that, should you wish to rebel. This, remaking you into a pleasing image, was only an hour of my time.”

Had it been only an hour? It had felt like a thousand years of nothing but burning and misery.

I had no witty remarks left. I had no smart-ass words to give. My rules had gone silent.

I had gone silent.

The cage shifted and reformed into a more cage-like mass, and I was left alone. Every fiber of my being ached like I had been run over by a steamroller. Shaking fingers reached up and gingerly touched at the edges of my new face. I didn’t know who she was, and she didn’t know me. I felt my eyelashes longer, fuller, around eyes twice the size as I knew.

The shaking tips of my fingers explored the uncharted planes of a face completely foreign to me. Every centimeter my fingertips grazed screamed as if I were nursing an especially vicious sunburn. My nose was smaller. I once had an aquiline nose, and now it was dainty and narrow, with a slight depression on the tip. I wondered how it sat on my diamond-shaped face. Vanity was never one of my vices, but I would have killed to have a mirror handy, even if I was terrified to my very marrow to see what the evil little creature had done to me.

I cried out when my fingertip bumped a metallic plate that resonated through my skull with the nudge. Panic laced through my blood as I followed its edges with a ginger touch. It spanned the width of the center of my face from the edge of one eyebrow to the other and ventured halfway up my forehead and halfway down the bridge of my new nose.

I was no longer Sóna Mac Raith. I didn’t know who I was any more, but the Sóna I had once known was dead. The aching beast left in her place was someone unknown to me. I hoped she was someone I’d like.

I didn’t like many people.

I curled into a tight ball. The throbbing in my skin from core to toe echoed my hollow heartbeat as fat tears rolled down my new cheeks and soaked into the living cage’s velvet lining.

“Shhh,” a voice called from the darkness. “Stop that racket! You’ll make them come back! And if they come back, we will all be punished for it.”

There was someone else in this gloom? I wanted to be hopeful, but the last petals of the woman I once was crept up. Sonny’s Rule #1: No one is coming to save you. Whomever was in here with me was just as fucked as I was. Had they watched silently as I was tortured? Had they witnessed that grimy little beast finger fucking me and scrambling my organs? If so, they were just like everyone else.

I wouldn’t cry in front of company. Sonny’s Rule #10: No one sees your tears. Who cared if they couldn’t see them—it wasn’t the point of the rule. Never let anyone see the pain you were in. It was a weapon to be used against you, and there was no point in arming an unknown enemy.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, pushing the burning acid tears away from my too-large eyes. “Who are you?”

“The Rook,” the man hissed.

“Like the chess piece? What sort of name is that?”

Oh, that sarcastic tone, I knew her. That was the Sonny I knew.

“Like the bird, you idiot. And it’s the name they gave me when they took mine. None of us have our own names anymore. What did they give you?”

“That is stupid,” I hedged.

Was it the same? Mr. Ben had called me little sun. Was that the name he’d given me?

“And yet it is the way things work here. What did he call you? I couldn’t hear over Maw’s hissing.”

His voice was pitched low, but I recognized the weave of fear and anger, the same weft my voice usually held.

“Who the hell is Ma? And what does that mean? Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck are these people? What the fuck is going on?”

Hysteria was starting to inch into my voice.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Rook, just tell the new girl the abridged version and shut the fuck up. Some of us are trying to sleep before they finally ship us back to the Market.”

Another man’s voice, this one annoyed, came from my left.

I turned my head, trying to breach the darkness outside of my cage to see any sort of shapes in the gloom. But there was nothing. I couldn’t even see my friend Smear anymore. It was like I was hovering in the inky pool of midnight’s heart.

“Alright, new girl. Listen carefully because I don’t know when Rictus will come back, and if he catches us talking to you, we’re done for.” I heard the whistle of him taking a deep breath before he pushed on. “Never give them your name. I imagine, like us, you already made that mistake once. Don’t do it again. Never agree to anything. Not even a simple thing. Never give them anything. Maw is the woman. Rictus is the man. These people don’t use their names. Ever. If you hear their name, remember it. Use it. It’s the best weapon you’ll ever have. I don’t know what’s beyond the Market. Cypress, that’s the other guy you heard, and I have been to the Night Market twice and haven’t sold yet. From what the others there managed to tell me, it’s a land of nightmares. You’re a slave now, girl. A daoire in their tongue. Get used to it. There’s no running. There’s no escape. You are a thing now. You don’t even own your own body anymore. They can and will, as you’ve experienced, change it and everything else about you to their whims. And they have a lot of whims. Rictus did a number on you. The magic on my cage is fading. I got to see a few moments here and there, but he’s invested a lot of magic into you for some reason. And he’ll expect you to earn it back. So, do what he says. Keep sharp. They can do whatever they want to you, but the one thing they can’t touch is your mind. Remember that. Shit, he’s coming. Shut up!”