Scarlet tried to gulp, but her mouth was parched, her saliva too thick. She must be going crazy to be carrying on silent conversations with wolves.
“He likes you.”
Gasping, Scarlet flipped onto her back.
A stranger, a girl, was sitting cross-legged in her cage, so close Scarlet could have touched her. Scarlet tried to push herself away, but the action sent pain rippling through her bandaged hand. She hissed and fell back onto the ground.
Her hand was the worst of it—the hatchet had taken her left pinky finger to the second knuckle. She had not passed out, though she wished she would have. A Lunar doctor had been waiting to bandage the wound, and he had done it with such precision, Scarlet suspected it was a very common procedure.
But then there were also the scratches on her face and stomach from her time spent in the company of Master Charleson, and countless aches from sleeping on hard floors for—well, she’d lost count of how many nights.
The girl’s only reaction to Scarlet’s grimace was a long, slow blink.
Clearly, this girl was not another prisoner—or “pet” as the extravagantly dressed Lunars called Scarlet when they passed by her cage, giggling and pointing and making loud remarks on whether or not it was safe to feed the animals.
The girl’s clothing was the first indication of her status—a gauzy, silver-white dress that had settled around her shoulders and thighs like snowflakes might settle on a sleepy hillside. Her warm brown skin was flawless and healthy, her fingernails perfectly shaped and clean. Her eyes were bright, the color of melted caramel, but with hints of slate-gray around her pupils. On top of all that, she had silky black hair that curled into perfect spirals, neatly framing her high cheekbones and ruby-red lips.
She was the most beautiful human being Scarlet had ever seen.
Yet, there was one anomaly. Or—three. The right side of the girl’s face was marred by three scars that cut down her cheek from the corner of her eye to her jaw. Like perpetual tears. Strangely, the flaws on her skin didn’t reduce her beauty, but almost accentuated it. Almost compelled a person to stare at her longer, unable to peel their eyes away.
It was with this thought that Scarlet realized it was a glamour. Which meant this was another trick.
Her expression changed from awestruck and blushing—she despised that she was actually blushing—to resentful.
The girl blinked again, drawing attention to her impossibly long, impossibly thick eyelashes.
“Ryu and I are confused,” she said. “Was it a very bad dream? Or a very good one?”
Scarlet scowled. The dream had already begun to wisp away, as dreams do, but the question reignited the memory of Wolf and her grandmother before her. Alive and safe.
Which was a cruel joke. Her grandmother was dead, and last she’d seen Wolf, he’d been under the control of a thaumaturge.
“Who are you? And who’s Ryu?”
The girl smiled. It was both warm and conspiratorial and it made Scarlet shiver.
Stupid Lunars and their stupid glamours.
“Ryu is the wolf, silly. You’ve been neighbors for four days now, you know. I’m surprised he hasn’t officially introduced himself.” Then she leaned forward, dropping her voice to a whisper as if she were about to share a closely guarded secret. “As for me, I am your new best friend. But don’t tell anyone, because they all think that I’m your master now, and that you are my pet. They don’t know that my pets are really my dearest friends. We shall fool them all, you and I.”
Scarlet squinted at her. She recognized the girl’s voice now, the way she danced through her sentences like each word had to be coaxed off her tongue. This was the girl who had spoken during Scarlet’s interrogation.
The girl reached for a strand of filthy hair that had fallen across Scarlet’s cheek. Scarlet tensed.
“Your hair is like burning. Does it smell like smoke?” Bending over, the girl pressed the hair against her nose and inhaled. “Not at all. That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to catch fire.”
The girl sat up just as suddenly, pulling a basket toward her that Scarlet hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a picnic basket, lined with the same silvery material as her dress.
“I thought today we could play doctor and patient. You’ll be the patient.” She removed a device from the basket and pressed it against Scarlet’s forehead. It beeped and she checked the small screen. “You’re not running a fever. Here, let me check your tonsils.” She held a thin piece of plastic toward Scarlet’s mouth.
Scarlet knocked her away with her uninjured hand and forced herself to sit up. “You’re not a doctor.”
“No. That’s why it’s pretend. Aren’t you having fun?”
“Fun? I’ve been mentally and physically tortured for days. I’m starving. I’m thirsty. I’m being kept in a cage in a zoo—”
“Menagerie.”
“—and I hurt in places that I didn’t know my body even had. And now some crazy person comes in here and is trying to act like we’re good pals playing a raucous game of make-believe. Well, no, sorry, I’m not having any fun, and I’m not buying whatever chummy trick you’re trying to play on me.”
The girl’s big eyes were blank—neither surprised nor offended by Scarlet’s outburst. But then she glanced out toward the pathway that wound between the cages, overgrown with exotic flowers and trees to suggest some semblance of being in a lush jungle.
A guard was standing at the pathway’s bend, scowling. Scarlet recognized him. He was one of the guards that regularly brought her bread and water. He was the one who had grabbed her rear end the first time she’d been thrown into this cage. At the time she’d been too exhausted to do anything more than stumble away from him, but if she ever had the chance, she would break every one of his fingers in retaliation.
“We’re all right,” the girl said, smiling brightly. “We’re pretending that I cut off her hair and glued it to my head because I wanted to be a candlestick, and she didn’t like that.”
While she spoke, the guard’s glare never left Scarlet, only narrowed in warning. After a long moment, he meandered away.
When his footsteps had faded, the girl pulled the basket onto her lap and riffled through it. “You shouldn’t call me crazy. They don’t like that.”
Scarlet faced her again, her gaze dragging down the raised scar tissue on her cheek.
“But you are crazy.”
“I know.” She lifted a small box from the basket. “Do you know how I know?”
Scarlet didn’t answer.
“Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” She shrugged, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “No one believes me, but in some corridors, the blood has gotten so thick there’s nowhere safe to step. When I have to pass through those places, I leave a trail of bloody footprints for the rest of the day, and then I worry that the queen’s soldiers will follow the scent and eat me up while I’m sleeping. Some nights I don’t sleep very well.” Her voice dropped to a haunted whisper, her eyes taking on a brittle luminescence. “But if the blood was real, the servants would clean it up. Don’t you think?”
Scarlet shivered. This girl really was crazy.
“This is for you,” she said, astoundingly bright once again. “Doctor’s orders are to take one pill twice a day.” She tilted toward Scarlet. “They wouldn’t let me bring you real medication, of course, so it’s just candy.”