Still, she’d had to admit that Roman had a point. She was so much smaller than anyone else in the Black Cirkus. The other Freaks looked at her like she was something to be devoured. Like she was a snack. Sometimes she imagined she heard them licking their lips as she walked past.
It wasn’t just her size. Her injury was taking longer to heal than she’d expected. It looked garish, red and raw and painful. It bled constantly. Dorothy had spent most of her time huddled in bathrooms, changing bandages and cleaning her shredded skin so it wouldn’t get infected. At Roman’s suggestion, she’d taken to covering her carved-up face with a low hood, so the other Freaks wouldn’t know how badly injured—how vulnerable—she really was. But that only made them more suspicious of what she was hiding.
Worse than that, it made them curious.
There weren’t a lot of girls in the Black Cirkus. Being female, Dorothy already drew far too much attention. The Freaks whispered about what she looked like beneath her ever-present cloak. Dorothy could feel the weight of their stares whenever she walked down the hallway, and she knew it would be only a matter of time before their curiosity got the better of them.
And then, one night, it did.
She’d been late sneaking back into the Fairmont, and some boy—a newer Cirkus Freak who she didn’t recognize—had emerged from the shadows and grabbed her. For one dizzy moment, she’d thought it had been a mistake, that he’d been expecting someone else, perhaps, or simply bumped into her in his rush to get down the hall.
But then she heard the sounds of his friends hidden around the corner, laughing and cheering him on, and she knew that it’d hadn’t been a mistake at all but an ambush.
They’d been waiting for her.
The boy was rough as he’d pinned her to the wall, one arm braced across her collarbone so that she couldn’t move, the other gripping her waist, fingers jabbing painfully into her skin.
“Look at her wriggle,” he’d said, his breath sour and too, too close. “Didn’t I tell you she’d be fun?”
Fun? He thought this was fun? Dorothy hadn’t been able to catch her breath. She knew that if she didn’t do something now, this would happen again and again and again. She was small and weak and fun. Everyone at the Fairmont would see her as an easy mark, someone to be taken advantage of. Her new reality would be running from boys like this, fighting off grabbing hands and stinking breath.
And so she’d done the only thing she could think to do.
She’d bitten him. On the face.
She’d gotten a big chunk of his skin off, too, leaving behind a deep, ugly gash. The boy had dropped her and fallen to his knees, howling, as blood dripped from her chin.
She hadn’t bothered to wipe the blood away but said only, “I don’t like to be touched.”
The boy was called Moon Face after that, in reference to the crater left in his cheek. And the whispers about Quinn Fox officially began.
Roman started most of them. He told people that they shouldn’t get close to Quinn, that she enjoyed the taste of human flesh a little too much. It helped that she always smelled strongly of blood, courtesy of her still-healing injury. And then there was Moon Face himself, walking around with the shape of her teeth still imprinted on his face, a living warning.
Roman kept the rumors coming after that, making sure that each was ghastlier than the one before. He said that Quinn didn’t know how to smile, that she’d been kept inside a closet until she was twelve years old and grew up without ever seeing another human face and it’d left her . . . wrong.
He said she could only mimic human emotions and she wore the hood low over her face to hide her empty facial expressions.
She could learn anyone’s secrets by staring into his or her eyes.
She could kill a grown man with her bare hands.
With her finger.
With a look.
Dorothy felt foolish, that she hadn’t thought of this earlier. Quinn Fox was a cannibal. It was one of the first things she’d ever learned about New Seattle.
Where I’m going, there are entire cities hidden underwater, and gangs that steal little old ladies on their way to the market, and a girl who lives off human flesh.
Ash had told her that, when she’d first met him in the clearing behind the church