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groan. Either way, I don’t want to know. Madame is unfazed, and tightens her arm around my shoulders. I fight to keep my breathing even, but I want to cry out. I’m furious—maybe as furious as I was when I climbed out of the Gatherers’ van. I stood very still in a line with the other girls. I said nothing when I heard the first gunshot—the unwanted girls being murdered one at a time. There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn’t want us at all. It steals us, destroys us, piles us like dying cattle in circus tents and leaves us lying in filth and perfume until we’re wanted again.
    I ran from that mansion because I wanted to be free. But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.
    And I feel something I’ve never felt before. Anger at my parents for bringing my brother and me into this world. For leaving us to fend for ourselves.
    Maddie stares at me, her eyes glassy and bizarre. This is the first time I’ve really looked at her. She’s obviously malformed—not just the strange, almost colorless blue of her eyes. In addition to her shriveled leg, one of her arms, the left, is shorter and much thinner than the other; her toes are almost nonexistent, as though something kept them from growing all the way out of her feet. But her face is angular and sharp, her expression all fearlessness and ire. It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.
    Maybe that’s why she doesn’t speak. Why should she? What could she possibly have to say? She watches me, and then her eyes become distant, inaccessible, like she’s diving into waters too deep for me to follow her into.
    Madame mutters something unkind and kicks the child in the shoulder, then she steers me outside.
    There are plenty of other children, with stronger bodies and normal features. They work, polishing Madame’s fake jewels, doing laundry in metal basins and hanging it on wire that’s strung between dilapidated fences.
    “My girls produce like jackrabbits.” Madame says the last word with malice. “Then they die and leave me to care for the mess they leave behind. But what can be done? The children make good workers at least.” Ze children.
    Long ago President Guiltree did away with birth control. He’s of the pro-science mentality and thinks geneticists will fix the glitch in our DNA. In the meantime he feels it’s our responsibility to keep the human race alive. There are doctors who know how to terminate pregnancies, though they charge more than most can afford.
    I wonder if my parents ever did it. For all the time they spent monitoring pregnancies, I’m sure they knew how to terminate one.
    Abortions are supposed to be banned, but I’ve never heard of the president actually punishing anyone for disobeying one of his laws. I’m not entirely sure what the president even does. My brother says the presidency is a useless tradition that might have once served a purpose but has become nothing but formality—something to give us hope that order will be restored one day.
    I hate President Guiltree, who has been in charge of this country longer than I’ve been alive. With his nine wives and fifteen children—all sons—he does not believe the end of humankind is near. He makes no move to stop the Gatherers from kidnapping brides, and encourages madmen like Vaughn to breed infants who will live their lives as experiments. Sometimes he’s on television, promoting new buildings or attending parties, flashing smiles, toasting his champagne glass at the TV like he expects us all to be celebrating with him. Or maybe he’s mocking us.
    “He’s kind of handsome,” Cecily said once, when we were all watching TV and his face appeared in a commercial. Jenna said he looked like a child molester. We’d laughed about it then, but now that I’m in a scarlet district, Jenna’s former home,