“Iris, Iris, Iris,” I chanted, willing her to look at me, willing her to show me that there was still a little of my friend behind that blank, shattered mask. She never once looked up as she was led to the cell opposite me.
The guard leading her—a small, wiry satyr—shoved her roughly inside, stopping once he’d shut the door to shake his head at her.
“She was such fun when she was brought in. But they just don’t take proper care of themselves,” he told me conversationally. Like the Healer, he also had a British accent. But his was a posh one, like Wooster’s in Jeeves and Wooster. The satyr’s manners, however, were hardly elegant, as he let his eyes wander over my body. “They come in so lovely, but after we get to play, they wind up looking like mangled dolls at a boot sale.”
What the fuck is a boot sale? I’ll give him a boot, I thought, staring at him with fury beating through me. He was barely shielded. I could catch him unaware with a mage ball, right now, and there’d be one less monster lurking in the dark…
And that would kill your chances of getting Iris out of here, completely. So keep a lid on it.
I let hate fill my expression, but managed to hold in check both my temper and my magic. The satyr watched me with careful eyes, and only then did I realize he was assessing me.
This was a test, I thought. And I passed. They wanted to make sure the goblin did his job, and they wanted to torture me with Iris’s condition, no doubt. But in the meantime, they think I’ve been neutered.
For the first time since the goblin had squirted that shot down my back, I started to believe he was on the up-and-up; that we were going to get out of here.
The satyr was still watching me quietly, waiting to feel something from me, but I kept my power contained. Having lived as a human for so long, I found it relatively easy to slip back into no-magic mode. After a few more minutes, he nodded and turned on his heel to stalk out. As soon as he was gone, I turned to my friend.
“Iris, honey, look at me…”
She kept staring at the ground in front of her, not registering my existence in any way that I could see.
“Iris. Iris? Honey, I’m here…” I kept on like that for a few minutes. Finally, and imperceptibly, she shook her head.
“Yes,” I said, starting to choke up. “Yes, hon. I’m here.” Her only response was to keep shaking her head no.
Why? Why isn’t she saying anything? My own brain spasmed with shock and pain at my friend’s sudden reappearance, her condition, and her refusal to acknowledge me. Then I thought of my own reaction to the goblin doctor’s help; my apprehension about trusting anyone or anything in this place.
She probably thinks I’m some illusion, here to torture her… So I switched tactics, and instead of telling Iris I was there, I started to talk about home.
“Remember the first time we met, Iris? When I was with Ryu, and we were investigating Jakes’s murder? I thought you were so intimidating. So put together and beautiful. I think I was a little scared of you.” Blinking back tears that cropped up as I thought of that shining woman and compared her with the broken body in front of me, I forged on. “Ryu and I were just starting to see one another, and I was just learning about your world. I was so excited, but so scared. Remember?”
Iris still wasn’t acknowledging my words, but she had stopped shaking her head.
She’s listening, I told myself, praying I was right.
“Remember how you dressed me in all those crazy outfits? That big red belt, right under my boobs? Those pants? I’d only ever worn jeans and T-shirts up to then. I couldn’t even figure out how to get into most of those clothes. I would have tied the sash on that kimono dress over my hair, like a headband, if you hadn’t helped me.”
Iris’s head had cocked almost imperceptibly. If I hadn’t been studying her like my life depended on it, I wouldn’t have caught it. But it was there… just the tiniest crook to her neck.
She is listening, I thought exultantly.
“And those shoes. I nearly broke my neck about four times in all those heels. Remember how I told you about falling in the Compound? We were in the Pig Sty; it was only the second or third time we went out together. I’d been afraid to tell you at first, not wanting you to think I was criticizing your fashion choices. But then we drank a little too much, and I told you about how I fell, and you snorted vodka martini out of your nose into the pretzels, and it burned so badly your eyes watered and made your mascara run and I told you that you looked like a raccoon.”
Silence.
“Well, you got back at me when I forgot and ate the freaking pretzels. Then you said, ‘And you just ate my nose juice.’ We laughed for like twenty minutes.”
Silence. I was getting desperate.
“Anyway, I told you all about falling at the Compound. But at least I did it in Jimmy Choos, right? And I guess falling means that everyone got to see the red soles…”
“Louboutin,” came a hoarse whisper from across the way.
I froze. “Sorry?”
“Not Choos. They were Louboutins.”
“Oh, right.” I was thrilled to get a reaction, any reaction, but I knew Iris wasn’t yet sold I was the real deal.
“They were Louboutins, weren’t they, Iris? And you know the funniest part?” This time I didn’t keep talking. I waited till she acknowledged my question. Eventually she did so: just the barest flick of her eyes in my direction: up, then back down at the floor.
“At the time, I freaked out because Ryu bought me all that stuff. I never liked him buying me things, but it felt really weird then since we barely knew each other. And I knew everything was expensive, but here’s the funny part: I thought shoes like that cost around a hundred dollars.” I forced myself to laugh, just like we were sitting across from each other at the Sty rather than trapped in hell. “A hundred dollars! For Louboutins! Can you believe it? And even then I felt so guilty…”
“Jane?” Iris whispered. My heart lurched and I forgot to breathe.
“Yes, Iris. It’s really me.”
Then she started to cry. Wrenching sobs broke from her tortured body, and I reacted like a panicked mother hen. I jumped up, flapping my arms wildly.
“Oh, Iris, no, don’t cry! It’s okay! I’m here!”
“I don’t want you here,” she said as she sobbed. “They’re going to hurt you… the things they do…” Her voice was no longer full of honeyed anything, but empty, aching.
“Shhh, Iris. Shhh. We’re going to get out of here. Trust me… Shhh…”
But she obviously didn’t trust me, because she sobbed until she’d cried herself out. Then she drank from the little sink in her cell, I guess to refill, and cried some more. The whole time I kept telling her how much I loved her, and that it was going to be okay. Eventually, however, I’d had enough. Under normal circumstances I’d let her cry till she shriveled up like a raisin if that’s what she needed to do, but we had bigger fish to fry.
“Iris? Iris? You gotta stop crying… I need you to talk to me. Iris? I really need you to talk to me.” After I’d said that about four hundred times, she finally looked up.
“Iris, I need you to tell me about this place. Tell me about what goes on, and when, and about what you’ve seen of the layout…”
She was hesitant at first, scared to talk too much. I think she still half expected my form to shift into that of one of the guards, or the Healer, and she’d discover that she’d been duped. Or maybe to disappear altogether—just a mirage. But as she talked, and I listened without commenting, she grew in confidence until words were streaming out of her.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at how much she knew; Iris was a consumate gossip, soaking up everything around her. She wasn’t always able to perceive what was most important, or focus during the moment, but she heard everything. And everything is what she told me: the history of the house as she’d picked it up from hearing the idle talk of guards; the problems with the security; how they were stretched a bit thin, at the moment, guard-wise…
Apparently, the mansion we were in had been used as about a thousand different things over the years. Most recently, and briefly, it was a luxury hotel that went bankrupt. All of the mansion’s various incarnations meant that it was ideal, in some ways, as a place of torture: lots of separate rooms upstairs for barracking guards and doctors and keeping prisoners, large reception rooms downstairs for labs, etcetera. But it also meant that it was a total hodgepodge of additions that had all been brought up to snuff in terms of our modern fire code. So the mansion was a mess, architecturally: lots of staircases, lots of mazelike rooms, and lots of exits. All of which translated into its being a pain to keep under lock and key at the best of times, but with a shortage of guards it was especially difficult. No one here was sure why the guard supply was low, as they weren’t party to knowledge of the rate at which Jarl and his minions were liquidating labs on the outside. But I knew damned well that explained why his force was stretched thin at the moment.
