“Hold on. I’ve got an idea.”
Problem was, I didn’t want any part of this girl’s ideas. She might be sort of a nurse, she might be Ethan’s old friend, she might be nice, but none of it mattered. If she owned a slave, she couldn’t be trusted, period. There was no telling how she’d take it when the first person I asked her to call was known abolitionist radical Erica Muller.
But what choice did I have?
Ivy wasn’t waiting, anyway. She turned to murmur something to her apparent slave, and a second later, I heard their footsteps pounding away.
In the meantime, Ivy’s hands gently examined my body, careful not to put pressure on the burns.
“Shit. These look like second-degree. Which I know doesn’t sound like good news, but it is. Here, do you think you can drink this?”
The sound of a plastic water bottle uncapping, then a hand holding my head up. My lips felt too weak to close around the bottle to ingest much, but even the sensation of cool, fresh water reminded me that dehydration was probably closer to killing me than the burns. I was still trying to gulp the water when a whirring noise approached, and before I could struggle or protest, Ivy and the slave kid each took an arm and laid me down awkwardly across the back seat of an electric golf cart—the same kind my father seemed to spend half his life zooming around in.
But the breeze on my face felt oddly nice as we sputtered off the grass and over the pavement at all of five miles an hour, the engine humming and jouncing gently beneath me. Ivy and the slave talked to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. As if they didn’t want me to.
But that was nothing I had the energy to worry about.
For now, it was enough to feel Thalia’s wet, cold nose on me from where she panted and snuffled from the floor of the cart, and to smell her faint canine musk.
“Thalia’s being so good back there,” Ivy remarked.
“She hardly ever tries to jump out of the cart anymore!” the kid spoke up excitedly, clearly for my benefit.
The remark received a gentle shush from Ivy, but I got the sense that it was entirely formybenefit. In any case, it sounded cautious, not angry. Odd.
I wished I could see where and how Ivy lived, and who else lived with her. But I could only be dragged along blindly as the two others managed to haul me out of the cart and into a house.
“I’m putting you in a cool bath now, okay?” Ivy explained, her voice echoing as we entered what must be a high-ceilinged bathroom, already ringing with the sound of flowing water scented with herbs.
With no further warning, Ivy plunged me into it, and it was a revelation. The cool evaporated the heat, erasing the pain on contact, at least temporarily. The musk of grit and sand and charred flesh that had filled my nostrils for the past hour was at last replaced by lilies and hyacinths, and the echoes of rushing water filled my ears and drowned out all my other senses. I inhaled deeply as Ivy’s hands stroked my hair and soaped the detritus off my body; the bubbles indistinguishable from the tears I knew were falling again for reasons I couldn’t even explain.
And then, for a few minutes, Ivy left me alone.
The swelling and pain near my eyes lessened. I blinked away the soapy water and opened them, revealing a typically cavernous bathroom tiled in blue-and-white swirls. Droplets glistened like diamonds as they fell from my eyelashes, catching the light of the candle resting on the ledge of the claw-foot tub I floated in.
And in the corner, setting a pile of fluffy towels on a chair, was the slave.
They couldn’t have been more than thirteen, with creamy, unmarred skin, freckles, and dark, wavy hair falling across their face. They were dressed in a T-shirt with a brand logo and shorts—clean, well-fitting, even expensive-looking. Except for the bracelet—a chain that looked too tight, as if they were growing out of it—they looked… normal. Healthy. Nourished. Not quaking in fear or covered in bruises.
They startled when they saw my eyes open. They gently stroked Thalia, who’d come to them after lying protectively at the foot of the tub.
“Oh, I’m sorry, miss, I thought you were?—”
“Call me Lou,” I managed to get out. And then, ridiculously: “Are you okay?”
They didn’t have time to answer. A second later, Ivy—long, straight, auburn hair, peachy skin, full lips, and thin eyebrows penciled in high—entered the bathroom.
The kid looked from one to the other. And I didn’t know how or if I could explain that they needn’t be afraid. I wasn’t one ofthem.
Not like I was doing all that well at proving it.
After all, what about Maeve? What about Erica? What about my father?
“Why are you helping me?” I finally blurted out. “I don’t even deserve it.”
“In a world as shit as this one, I can say almost definitively that that’s not true,” Ivy said. “Now who do you need me to call? There’s obviously someone.”
I tried to shake my head, but it probably came off as a twitch of pain. I couldn’t say the name. What if it resulted in me being thrown out wet and naked on the lawn, or worse?
