her, their eyes big and round and glassy. More girls emerged from the corners and shadows, like small creatures poking tentatively out from a cave.
Alouette hesitated for a moment, unsure where to go or what to say. The haunted, round eyes just stared at her, and no one said a word.
Until Alouette felt something touch her elbow, light and gentle like a butterfly.
“What lovely hair,” a voice whispered.
Alouette looked down to see a tiny girl in a silky azure dress, stained at its collar and shabby at its hems. The girl’s eyes were wider and more haunted than all the others in the room. But she was gazing up at Alouette with a shy smile. “Is this your first time?”
“Actually, I—” Alouette tried to say, but another girl in an ill-fitting yellow dress sidled up to them.
“If you relax, it doesn’t hurt at all,” she said. Her voice was rough and harsh, but her expression was kind.
Alouette’s gaze moved quickly over the girls. She tried to picture her mother sitting there, on that couch, in this room, huddled and staring. But she simply couldn’t grip the image in her mind. It was too loose, too slippery. And she didn’t have enough to hold on to. She had no real memories of her mother. No kind eyes. No gentle, reassuring arms embracing her. No scents. Nothing.
All she had was a small titan box stashed away in her bag.
And those words flitting around her like nasty, biting insects.
“… the daughter of a worthless blood whore.”
That horrible cyborg inspecteur, Limier, had said this about Alouette back in the Forest Verdure. The words were spiteful and malicious, and at first, Alouette hadn’t dared believe them. Until she remembered that cyborgs were incapable of lying. It was part of their programming. And that’s when Alouette realized the words—as painful as they were to hear—were a clue.
Her mother had once been one of these girls. She’d sold her blood in a bordel. This bordel. It had to be. Montfer was the last known location Alouette had for her mother, and Dahlia had said this was the only bordel in the city.
“Just remember, don’t accept the first offer they give you,” said the girl in yellow, nudging Alouette with her pointy elbow. “You can always negotiate a higher price.”
“She’s right,” the tiny girl in blue whispered, still smiling. “I learned that lesson too late.”
“But I’m not here to—”Alouette began, but she was cut off again as an authoritative voice rang across the room.
“Heloise! What are you doing, standing there chattering?”
An older woman emerged from the darkness wearing green medical scrubs as threadbare and stained as the rugs on the floor. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun and her small, shrewish eyes glimmered in the room’s low light.
“I called you five minutes ago,” she went on. “It’s time for your treatment.”
The small girl in the blue dress—Heloise—gave Alouette one last smile, before wordlessly slinking away and disappearing behind an unmarked door at the other end of the reception area.
“And Zéphine,” continued the woman. “You can go in now too.”
As Alouette watched the girl in the yellow dress follow Heloise through the door, she suddenly couldn’t help but notice how young she was. So frail and thin, she looked almost sickly. All of them did, in fact. There was a drabness about their complexions, a hint of bruises and rashes on their bare shoulders, and their eyes were sunken and tired.
Alouette had read about the illegal blood trade in the Chronicles. Young girls being lured to the bordels to have the nutrients stripped from their blood and shipped off to some fabrique to turn them into rejuvenating face creams and injections for the upper estates. Girls could make ten times what they made in a Ministère-assigned job. But many girls went too far. Sold too much. They grew thin and sick and wasted. And many of them ended up in the morgue.
All for the sake of a larg.
Was that how her mother had died? Had she sold too much? Alouette had always been told her mother had gotten very sick, but no one had divulged more than that. Was this place responsible for her death?
“Welcome, chérie.” Alouette turned toward the woman in the green scrubs who was now speaking directly to her. “It’s always nice to see a new face here. And such a pretty one too. I’m Médecin Clodie.”
Alouette studied the woman’s clean, unmarked features. There was no way she was a true médecin. She