Gathering back long hair, the captain exposed the familiar face the girl tried to hide.
A face that had been mutilated—cuts left to close without proper suturing. Angry, infected, ghastly patterns.
Brooke hardly blinked.
His voice soft, the captain said, “Here’s your map, Eugenia. Your advice to travel south toward Fresh Water. You gave her directions straight into the worst hive of violence in five hundred miles. Fresh Water is gangland. You did this to her, and if you leave, this is what will happen to you.”
The verbal knife slipped through her ribs, straight for the heart. In horror, Eugenia drank in a friend. A woman holding on to the captain as if he might keep her safe. As if this was the good place.
Eugenia had enough medical training to understand the damage on display was never going to heal properly without repeated reconstructive surgeries. And surgery was not an option. She’d never gone that far in her medical training. “You let me give her the map.”
Nodding, he tore out her heart. “The savages mutilated her genitalia. Her clitoris and labia were removed—the wounds seared shut the same night they began to rape her for sport.”
Very little was more hideous than the concept of female circumcision. It was a forever rape—the total loss of ability to enjoy sex without a great deal of effort and proper mental stimulation. “I didn’t know.”
“Yes, you did.” Letting Brooke’s beautiful hair fall back to cover her face, the captain added, “You knew, because you have been out there for six years. You’ve seen this before.”
Her reply was small, her chin quivering. “Yes.”
“And you told all the women on Level 15 that there was a world out there worth living in. Fed them your talk of freedom.”
“There has to be.” There just had to be! This couldn’t be it. Locked away and used to make babies. What of her mind? What of her ambition? “Somewhere has to be the way it was!”
“The world is nothing but savagery and violence.” He almost seemed to pity her. “There is no life for you off this ship, Eugenia.”
That was the last straw. His ploy, his manipulation of history, laying all the blame at her feet was wrong. “You whored her for tickets and let her walk off this ship, knowing what was south!”
“You gave her the map. You filled her head with possibility.” Blunt patience and pity became anger. “And don’t think I didn’t try to stop her. Brooke had been given the option to transition straight to Level 9. But she had your map, and your misguided bullshit to see her to freedom. And look at her now.”
No, Eugenia couldn't bear to look anymore.
“LOOK AT HER, EUGENIA!”
Startled by the soft-spoken man’s yell, Brooke began to pee in submission like a spooked dog. And it didn’t stop—the damaged girl’s urine kept hitting the carpet.
In horror, Eugenia found she lacked the bravery to move from the safety of the captain’s bed to help her. “Brooke?”
“Can I go home now?” The whisper for the captain, not for her.
“Yes, lamb.” Pressing a kiss to the top of Brooke’s bent head, his whole demeanor shifted to gentle. “Of course you can go home. I’ll take you right back.”
Guiding the shuffling female from the room, the captain didn’t so much as look over his shoulder at the stricken redhead sobbing into her hands.
Chapter Sixteen
Tears running down her cheeks, Eugenia pulled on her only dress.
Using the fine towels from the captain’s bathroom, she blotted up the mess of urine. Urine that smelled of an unwell person.
Do no harm. The first rule in medicine.
Yet she had harmed Brooke. The advice had been well-meant. Eugenia had only suggested the exact same course she intended to follow once she made an escape: follow the map to Fresh Water.
Where John would have sold her to a far more hideous fate than serving drunken, horny men.
Over the years, all the credit she’d given herself for being smarter than everyone else. All the abuses she’d eluded.
Sheer. Dumb. Luck.
Spirited, determined Brooke was broken… Eugenia would have been broken too.
Was breaking.
A fissure ran through her spirit; it had been eating at her for years. Growing wider with each encounter, deepening with each escape. An aching throb of emptiness and loneliness that was only held together by tattered bits of hope.
And lies.
All the lies she told to herself so she might stumble through another day.
There was no good place. There was only survival or death.
There were only men who pushed too hard and stole pieces off the gameboard. Who broke the rules and twisted the sport. Men who were willing to subject dead women in living bodies to the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth they didn’t want.
As if humanity deserved a fresh start. As if the transgression would disappear with a smiling new generation raised by mothers locked on Level 9. Children devoid of fathers like Neil who only wanted to hold their offspring.
Neil who Eugenia knew had fathered at least one of the babies on the ship. He wouldn’t have grieved the loss of holding a baby so much if he hadn’t.
She hadn’t known him well, but he’d seemed like a good man. Yet outside the ship, good men changed. They mutilated the genitals of women for reasons Eugenia couldn’t even begin to grasp.
Even the captain’s leashed men slipped. He’d had to put them down, he’d said.
The lock clicked, the door opening… Eugenia still cleaning up pee, grieving a million different things at once.
Brooke’s mutilated mouth, her glassy-eyed stare… the reason her friend walked with so pronounced a limp. The unbearable guilt for thinking she’d find salvation in saving Brooke.
For knowing that as much as she hated it here, it was better than anything she’d ever found out there. “I’ll never love you. If you got me pregnant, I’ll find a way to not be anymore.”
Eugenia was poison.
Living in such close quarters, she had gotten to know the women on Level 15—the ship the closest thing she had to family in six years. And she couldn’t bear it. She could not bear knowing she’d fed into their desire for freedom they’d never have.
She knew the men. She’d laughed with them, mocked them, yelled at them, belittled them for her own amusement.
She’d grown dependent on Aaron for mental stimulation and a sense of normality. She’d had sex with him and given over to the act. Enjoyed it even after she grasped how he’d tricked her.
Aaron who had no pity left. “Fine. Take off your dress. Get up on the bed. All fours. Don’t look at me.”
His disappointments weighed down upon her back, as if he’d been saving it all up for that moment. The pain of it felt… familiar, because this new world hurt.
Or maybe at heart she was a masochist. Either way, Eugenia deserved what was coming. Which was why she was already lifting the two-day-old blue dress over her head. Which was why she went to the bed as if stumbling through a dream and assumed the position every Level 15 girl knew by heart.
Already up behind her, voice devoid of feeling, the captain ordered, “Spit on your hand. Rub it between your legs.”
Shifting to balance her weight so she might look at her palm, so she might try to make her dry mouth produce saliva, she obeyed. She smeared her opening.