Read Fever for Free Online Page A

I think she must have been serious. Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide in a person.
    Madame shows me her gardens, which are mostly patches of weeds and buds, encased in low wire fences. The strawberries, though, are growing under a weatherproof tarp. “You should see them in the spring sunshine,” she says giddily. “Strawberries and tomatoes and blueberries so fat they explode between your teeth.” I wonder where she gets the seeds. They’re so hard to come by in the city, where all of our fruits and vegetables seem to have taken on the city’s gray tinge.
    She shows me the other tents, full of antique furniture, silk pillows piled on the dirt floors. Only the best for her customers, she says. The air in each of them is muggy with sweat. At the last tent, which is all pink, she turns to face me. She takes my hair from either side, in both hands, holding it out and watching the way it falls from her fingers. A strand gets caught on one of her rings, but I don’t flinch as it’s ripped from my scalp. “A girl like you is wasted as a bride.” She says the word like vasted. “A girl like you should have dozens of lovers.”
    Her eyes are lost. She’s staring through me suddenly, and wherever she’s gone, it brings out the humanity in her. For the first time I can see her eyes under all that makeup, see that they’re brown and sad. And oddly familiar, though I’m sure I’ve never seen anyone like this woman in my life. I never even dared to peek into the shadows of scarlet districts nestled in alleyways back home.
    I was never even curious.
    Her lips curl into a smile, and it’s a kind smile. Her lipstick cracks, revealing a bleary pink underneath.
    We’re standing by a heap of rusted scrap metal that is humming mechanically and emitting a faint yellow glow. One of Jared’s projects, I assume. Madame raves about his inventions. “Contraptions,” she calls them. “This will be a warming device for the soil. My Jared thinks it will make it easier to plant crops in the winter,” she tells me, patting one of the rusted pieces.
    “So, what do you think of my carnival, chérie ?” she asks. “The best in South Carolina.”
    It amazes me how Madame can speak without the cigarette ever falling from the corner of her mouth. Maybe I’ve been breathing in too much of her smoke secondhand, but I’m in awe of her. Things fill with color as she moves past them. Her gardens grow. She created a strange dreamland with only the ghost of a dead society and some bits of broken machines.
    She also never seems to sleep. Her girls are napping now that it’s daytime, and her bodyguards seem to alternate shifts, but she is forever weaving between tents, tilling, primping, barking orders. Even my dreams last night smelled of her.
    “It’s not like any other place I’ve seen,” I admit, which is the truth. If Manhattan is reality, and the mansion a luxurious illusion, this place is a dilapidated, blurry line that divides the two places.
    “You belong here,” she says. “Not with a husband. Not with a servant.” She wraps her arm around me, leading me through a patch of shriveled, snowy wildflowers. “Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound. That boy of yours,” she says, unaccented, “is a wound.”
    “I never said I love him,” I say.
    Madame smiles mischievously, her face flourishing with creases. It strikes me how the first generations are aging. Soon they’ll be gone. And no one will be left to know what old age looks like. Twenty-six and beyond will be a mystery.
    “I’ve had many lovers,” she tells me. “But only one love. We had a child together. A beautiful little creature with hair that was every shade of yellow. Like yours.”
    “What happened to them?” I ask, feeling brave. Madame has prodded and scrutinized me from the moment I arrived, and now, at last, she’s exposing her own weakness.
    “Dead,” she says, picking up her accent