Tiana walked toward the cell.
F1 and F2 followed behind her, their footsteps steady and unhurried, the way people moved when they had stopped thinking about where they were going and simply went.
Survival, she thought. That was the word she kept returning to. The word that had replaced most of the others over the years.
She remembered a time when she had felt sorry for girls in cells like this one. When she was still human, still capable of the particular kind of ache that came from seeing something unfair and knowing you couldn't change it. That version of herself felt very far away now, like a story about someone else, told in a language she had mostly forgotten.
Lord Callinis had turned her on a Tuesday. She remembered the day specifically because of how ordinary it had started.
"You're lucky," he had told her, forcing his blood down her throat with the particular ease of someone who had done it many times before and expected gratitude each time. Something had died in her that day, not her life, which continued, but something underneath it. The part that had believed in the possibility of something better.
She had understood, in that moment, what survival required. Not strength, exactly. Not courage. Just the willingness to feel nothing. To be cold in the places that mattered most and warm only in the places that were useful.
She was very good at it now.
She had learned early. Her mother and brother had been beheaded in front of her when she was a child, accused of stealing from a Middle Class household, executed publicly the way Lower Class people were executed, with nobody watching who cared and nobody watching who would remember. Her father had saved himself by selling her and becoming the kind of man who did things like that.
She had never forgotten. She had simply decided that forgetting wasn't the point. Surviving was.
No one gave a damn about the Lower Class.
She had learned that early too.
"Life's brutal," she said aloud, to no one in particular.
F2 opened the cell door.
Tiana stepped in and took stock. The girls were where she had left them, in various states of restless waiting. She scanned the room with the practised eye of someone cataloguing rather than seeing, checking for problems before they became inconveniences.
Something felt off.
She couldn't place it exactly. A shift in the air, perhaps, the particular quality of stillness that followed something that had already happened and been quickly covered. She filed it away.
"Good morning, girls," she said. "I trust you all slept well."
"Hard to sleep well when you were knocked out," said a voice near the back.
The new girl. Silver eyes, unguarded mouth, the specific kind of impulsive honesty that came from someone who hadn't yet learned where she was.
If it isn't the strange one, Tiana thought.
There was something genuinely unusual about her, the silver eyes were the obvious thing, rare enough in Thaloria to mean something, valuable enough to raise a price considerably. But it was something else too. Something Tiana couldn't categorise and therefore didn't want to spend time on.
The red-haired girl with the purple eyes was the same. Two rarities in one cell. Callinis was pleased.
"Poor thing," Tiana said pleasantly. "Maybe you'll sleep better after tomorrow. When you've been bought."
"If she lasts that long," Layla said from her corner. "Depends on whether her buyer wants to drain her immediately or save her for later."
Tiana turned slowly. "How many times have I told you not to speak when I'm speaking, Layla."
"Can't keep count, miss."
Tiana held her gaze for a moment, then looked away, and stopped.
Layla's chin. There was a mark on it. A specific kind of mark.
"What happened to your chin?"
Layla's eyes moved to Lilith for exactly one second. Then back to Tiana.
"Blood hunger," she said. "I scratched myself without thinking. You know how it gets."
It was a lie. They both knew it was a lie. Tiana also knew that pressing it would open a problem she didn't have time for today, with the auction tomorrow and three other cells still to attend to.
She glanced at Lilith once more. The new girl's face gave nothing away.
"If you say so," Tiana said. "Just know your value has already been adjusted downward. Let's hope it isn't your grave you're going to tomorrow."
She turned to the room.
"Today is your preparation day. There are things you need to know before you are presented tomorrow, things that will determine whether you survive your new circumstances or not. You will follow me now."
Everyone rose.
Sophia moved toward Lilith and held out her hand. "Come on."
Lilith glanced at Jacinta, who stood with the specific grace of someone who had never once needed to be told how to carry herself, sighed faintly at Sophia's extended hand, and walked out without waiting.
"Thank you," Lilith said, taking Sophia's hand.
"That fan," Sophia said immediately, dropping her voice. "How did you get it in here? And how did one fan hit that hard?"
Lilith just smiled. She had no answer to give, not because she was hiding it, but because she genuinely didn't know. She touched the pocket of her gown as they walked. Nothing. No fan.
Where had it gone?
She was still thinking about it when something cracked open inside her head and she stopped walking.
The group moved ahead without her.
She stood in the middle of the corridor and raised her hand and slapped herself.
"Wake up."
Another slap.
"Please wake up."
Another.
"You are not meant to be here. Wake up."
Each slap was accompanied by the sincere conviction that this time, this specific time, she would open her eyes and be back. In her room. In her world. In the Life that had been terrible but had at least been understandable.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Kept them closed.
Opened them.
Stone corridor. Torchlight. Seven girls were staring at her.
Tiana had stopped walking and turned around. She observed Lilith with the particular patience of someone watching something unfold that they had not expected but found privately interesting. She had thought the girls were fighting each other. Then she had turned and found the new girl fighting herself.
"Wake up," the girl kept saying. "I'm not meant to be here."
Must be the river, Tiana thought. It really had done something to her head.
She walked back toward Lilith slowly, swinging her heels against the stone floor with each step, raised her hand, and delivered a single precise slap.
The sound echoed.
"That," Tiana said, "might help." She turned. "Move, girls. We don't have all day."
Lilith's head stayed turned to the side for a moment.
The slap had hurt. It had hurt exactly the way a slap from a vampire should hurt, which was considerably more than a slap from a human. And then, like the wound on her head last night, the pain simply… left. Clean and sudden, like a candle going out.
This is not a dream, she thought.
The question that followed was harder.
Is this my reality now?
She didn't have an answer. She wasn't ready to have one. She needed more information before she was willing to accept anything as permanent, and until then she was going to move forward and observe and stay quiet and not slap herself in corridors in front of people.
"Lilith." Sophia appeared at her side and took her arm. "We need to move."
Lilith nodded and let herself be pulled along.
The room Tiana led them into was noticeably better than anything Lilith had seen since arriving, cleaner, better lit, with actual furniture. Seven individual rooms branched off from the main space, each one small but private.
"Clean yourselves and change into the clothes provided," Tiana said. "Thirty minutes. Do not attempt to escape through the windows unless you'd like to find out what kind of death waits outside. When you're done, we begin."
Sophia leaned toward Lilith. "Seven rooms for seven of us. Very specifically made for us."
"The seven special slave girls," Lilith said, mimicking quotation marks with her tone.
Sophia laughed quietly and they both went to their respective rooms.
Lilith's room contained a small bucket of water, something that looked like soap, and a cloth she chose not to examine too closely. There was a mirror on the wall. She stood in front of it for a moment before she started.
She looked thin. Thinner than usual, which was saying something. Her silver eyes still looked perfect and hadn't lost their shine. She checked her cheeks for marks and found none, the skin smooth, unblemished, no trace of the slap from the corridor or the cup from last night.
She turned slightly and checked her waist. The small tattoo was still there — a smiley face, simple and deliberately cheerful, in a spot she could see when she needed to. She had gotten it as a reminder. A small, permanent argument against despair.
Everything would be well. You just had to smile.
She stared at it for a longer moment than she intended.
Then she thought: the Fan.
She turned to face the mirror directly. Held out her open palm. Felt slightly ridiculous.
"Black fan," she said. "Appear."
Nothing.
She tried seven more times, with varying degrees of conviction and an increasingly specific awareness that she might actually be losing her mind.
She had turned away to start bathing when something warm moved across her palm.
She looked down.
The fan was there. Black, folded, exactly as it had been before, sitting in her hand like it had always been there and was simply waiting for her to stop looking.
Her heart went very fast.
She reached for it with her other hand , and it disappeared. Between one breath and the next, simply gone.
She stood with both hands open and looked at them for a long time.
She was not going to think about this right now. She was going to have her bath, put on whatever was in that folded pile, and go sit in Tiana's class and get as much information about Thaloria as she possibly could. She was going to lay low. She was going to be sensible.
She bathed.
Then she unfolded the clothes.
She held them up. Looked at them. Set them down. Looked at them again.
"Oh," she said.
The garment was sheer. Short at the front, longer at the back, designed with the specific intentionality of something meant to be looked at rather than worn. She understood immediately what it communicated and why.
She put it on anyway, because there was nothing else, and looked at herself in the mirror.
"Well," she said after a moment. "At least it fits."
She came out of the room last.
Everyone was already seated and waiting. Jacinta looked at her with lazy eyes and damp red hair and the expression of someone who had been beautiful so long it had stopped being interesting. Lilith pushed down the specific envy she felt towards her and decided to find a seat.
The only available one was next to Jacinta.
Of course it was.
"You used an extra five minutes," Tiana said.
"I apologise, Miss."
"Don't. I was waiting to see if you'd take ten, so I could send F2 to collect you regardless of the state you were in." She let that land. "Sit."
"This garment isn't very different from nothing," Lilith said, settling into her seat, "so I doubt the state would have mattered much."
A sound from somewhere in the room that might have been a suppressed laugh.
Tiana's expression didn't change.
"Now," she said, tapping her heel once against the floor. "We begin."