Page 593 of Rage

My jaw tightened as I continued petting down Cassie’s hair. Getting in an argument with the woman wasn’t going to help any of us so I bit my tongue. All the same, if we’d run into each other under different circumstances, I would have gladly wrapped my own fingers around her throat.

Instead, I focused on what I could do.

“And what’s your name?” I asked her.

“Yours first,” she sneered.

“You must be fun at parties,” I said.

“Wouldn’t know; never been to one,” she said. “Just know better than to give my name out freely to strangers. ‘Specially ones that coo little niceties to comfort babes in swaddling. That’s how you end up in a bargain you can’t afford. I’m not stupid enough to fall for it when we all woke up in the dark.”

So she was superstitious. Maybe she was one of the wise women that called the tent encampments outside of the city home. I’d only heard a few of their stories, usually chortled by the men at the gambling tables that complained about how the encampments were eyesores at best and slowed the flow of commerce at worst. I always hated how they sneered at the tales of the very people that staffed their factories at a fraction of the cost that would be paid to someone born and bred in town.

“My name is Briar,” I said. “How many of us are there in here? Does anyone remember anything about how they wound up here?”

There was quiet for a while, broken only by the shifting of heels against the wet dirt beneath us. Details were slowly coming into focus; not so much through vision, but through sound. The floor was irregular and rough, covered in sand or dirt but not carpeted in it. So we were definitely in some kind of cave. As voices hesitantly chimed in, I formulated a rough idea of the size of the place we’d been thrown into; it was tiny. Perhaps the size of the patio outside of my tenement in the pleasure district.

Names were given, and by the time everyone quieted again, I’d counted nine of us. The wise woman, Atreya, was named for the goddess to which she devoted herself to as a high priestess; virgin goddess of the hunt and medicine.

The woman closest to me, Diana, called herself homebody and a bookworm. She wrote books under thenom de plumeof D. T. Trenton, a name we all recognized.

Freya had only just arrived at the port from the warring country of Vidalgo. She hadn’t even been here long enough to have an occupation.

Marguerite, an aptly named florist. A nurse named Bella. A young spinster by the name of Eugenia. And a recently emancipated orphaned girl called Lily.

None of us had anything in common as far as we could tell. We all hailed from different countries, all had different backgrounds of family, different levels of wealth. We did slowly begin to piece together memories, though. Each hand stitched more pieces of it to the quilt until a picture became clear.

“I was casting stones for a man. He asked about how his god regarded him,” Atreya scoffed. “Arrogant thing to assume his god even looked his way. Even more so to think my mistress would act as his messenger.”

“I was meeting with my publisher,” Diana said. “We were toasting my most recent best seller.”

“Wait, I was drinking, too!” Lily exclaimed. “Someone left a handle of whiskey outside the place I’m squatting in. I thought it was my lucky day.”

“I don’t drink,” Marguerite warbled. “My pa always struggled with it so I never touched the stuff. I remember someone grabbing me, though–f-from behind. I didn’t see his face but his hand smelled like the tobacco shop across the street from mine.”

“It was the same for me,” Bella said, her voice steady. “Someone injected something into my neck, too. I was only in the room with the doctor but…he’s usually so kind to me.”

None of my memories had returned as clearly as they had for the others. I did remember who I’d been meeting though. Richard Ganswell. We were meant to go to the gambling tables. The last thing I remembered was pinching my cheeks in the reflection of the carriage window he’d picked me up in.

“So safe to assume we’ve all been drugged,” I said.

“They would have had to drug me,” Atreya scoffed. “Never would have let an oaf drag me away.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “The bravado is getting tiresome,” I griped.

“We can’t all become a shrinking violet like dear, sweetCassandre,”she sneered.

“Can’t you just leave the poor girl alone?” I said. “It’s not her fault she was captured. No more her fault than it was yours.”

“Gullible thing like her probably let herself be carted away for the promise of candy,” Atreya said.

“Shut it,” I snapped.

“Or what?” Atreya said.

A familiar rage built in my chest–though it was the first time I could remember that feeling burning behind my sternum for anyone other than a man. I almost lost myself to it, but then Cassandre spoke.

“My brother brought me tea,” she said sullenly. “I was feeling under the weather. Been….out of sorts since Papa died. He said it would balance my humors.”

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