not leaving until you turn around, freaks!” Matt shouted, propelling himself another foot up the six-foot fence.
The creatures on the right and left of the semicircle hunched even closer to the center, but the one in the middle slowly began to turn.
Delilah held her breath, and Matt dropped onto the ground but clutched the fence with both hands. All six of the classmates watched, spellbound, as the form in the middle stood on human legs and feet and turned to face them. Long dark hair hung over her face, obscuring the source of her monstrosity, and silence fell over the fifth graders as they waited, frozen.
Finally the girl in the dress lifted one human-looking hand and pushed her hair back to reveal...
A perfectly normal-looking little girl.
“Awww!” Neal frowned. “She looks like my little sister.”
“What is she?” Elías asked, as the nanny approached.
“She’s not a she, she’s an it,” Matt insisted, backing solemnly away from the pen. “That’s the most dangerous kind of freak. The kind that looks like us. She must be a surrogate.”
“Are those her sisters?” Neal asked. “Surrogates don’t have brothers and sisters.”
“She’s an oracle,” the nanny said. “All three of them are. Right now they mostly find lost things and guess your middle name, but someday, they’ll be able to see the future.”
“You think they’ll see another reaping?” Shelley whispered.
Delilah hardly heard her best friend’s question. When her classmates had bored of the normal-looking freak and moved on to eat their lunch, Delilah stood alone in front of the pen, staring at the child oracle, who stared right back at her through haunting golden-brown eyes. The girl was a couple of years younger than Delilah, and a lot skinnier. Her nightgown was stained. Her hair was tangled and dirty, her bare feet caked in mud. There was no food in the oracles’ pen, nor any furniture at all.
When Delilah finally turned away from the girl on the other side of the fence, bothered by something she couldn’t quite put into words, she could feel the oracle watching as she walked all the way back to her table and sat with her friends. That unseen gaze followed her as she pulled a sandwich from her brown bag and stared at it, suffering a sudden loss of appetite.
Finally, as she opened her carton of milk, Delilah’s grim tangle of thoughts cleared enough for one to shine through. If that girl was a monster, anyone could be a monster. That’s why the world was so terrified of another reaping. Because just like last time, humanity would never see it coming.
But if monsters could look like humans, and humans could look like monsters, how could anyone ever really be sure that the right people stood on the outside of all those cages?
“Three hundred one thousand babies were born in hospitals across the United States in March of 1980. Not one of them made it home from the hospital.”
—Opening lines of a 1996 documentary entitled
The Reaping—America’s Greatest Tragedy
A bead of sweat rolled down Rommily’s brow and soaked into the thin blanket beneath her head. In midsummer, the inside of the cargo trailer was always sweltering, and being accustomed to the dark and the heat and the relentless jostling from the road wasn’t the same as being comfortable. But then, comfort wasn’t a concept she remembered very well anyway. She’d been sold to the menagerie as a skinny six-year-old with wide honey-brown eyes, clinging to her older sister’s hand while she whispered reassurances into her younger sister’s ear.
At twenty, Rommily was still thin and her eyes were still wide and honey brown, but the rest of her was all grown-up.
For the past decade of their fourteen years in captivity the oracles had shared a single cage on wheels, just wide enough to let them sleep side by side and just tall enough to stand up in. Rommily’s entire world consisted of 192 cubic feet of space, which she shared with her sisters. What little time they didn’t spend staring out at the world through steel mesh was spent performing, in chains.
Rommily could recall little of her life before the menagerie, and what memories she still possessed had taken on the hazy quality of a half-remembered dream.
The overloaded semi rolled to a stop with a familiar groan and the harsh squeal of brakes, and her body rocked with the motion. Near the front of the trailer, the pup whined in her cage, and at the rear one of the cats snorted, startled from sleep by the sudden loss of forward momentum.
The cats, she knew, always dreamed of trees, of wind and earth and prey. The pup dreamed about her mother. Rommily remembered their dreams clearly, though she hadn’t been able to peek into them in months.
She sat up on the threadbare quilt that served as her pallet in the summer and her blanket in the cold. She glanced at the sister on her left, then at the sister on her right, both still asleep in spite of the narrow empty space she had left between them. She could hardly see them in the muddy darkness, but she knew their shapes by heart.
On the left was Lala, with her perpetual baby face and thin frame, dirty toes peeking from beneath her long layered skirt, even with her legs curled up to her chest. Lala was the youngest of the three, and the smartest, according to most.
On the right was Mirela, whose bountiful figure endured, though she was fed no more than the rest of the livestock. Mirela had a spine of steel, a fact evident in her proud posture. Mirie would not bend. Not for food, not for sleep, and not for comfort. Deep down, her sisters understood that if she were ever pushed too hard, she would snap, and the recoil might kill them all.
There wasn’t enough room to move around in the steel crate, so Rommily sat with her knees tucked up to her chest and stared into the cage across the narrow aisle that ran down the center of the cargo trailer. A set of eyes flashed in the dark, reflecting what little light filtered through the vents in the top of the wide-load trailer.
The minotaur was awake. If he ever slept, Rommily couldn’t tell. Every time she woke up on the road, the bull was watching her. Not just looking at her. Watching her. She wasn’t sure of much anymore, but she was sure of that.
The rumble of the engine died, and in its absence voices echoed from outside, shouting orders and barking replies. Rommily couldn’t tell what time it was from the muddy light overhead, but the time of day never mattered anyway. Regardless of the hour or the weather, the roustabouts would start setting everything up the moment they arrived at the site, the latest in an endless blur of rural county fairgrounds. Lost time was lost money, and if there was anything old man Metzger wasn’t willing to lose, it was money.
Something scraped the outside of the cargo trailer, and Lala rolled over in her sleep. Metal creaked from the left and right as the other livestock began to stir in their cages. The acrid scent of fresh urine wafted from the front of the trailer and Rommily’s nose crinkled. Someone’s bladder control had failed. Probably the pup’s. But that was no surprise, considering how long they’d been locked in the dark.
A sudden violent squeal of metal ripped through the voices echoing from outside, and Rommily’s eyelids snapped shut as mental images rolled over her. Visions still came like that sometimes, triggered from deep within her by a sight, scent, or sound.
“Take the key and lock her up,” she mumbled.
The bull’s eyes narrowed as his attention to Rommily intensified, but she didn’t notice. She could no longer see anything but what played in her head, and even if she actually understood what she saw this time, no one else ever would. They hadn’t been able to make much sense of anything she’d said since the rainy night they’d found her wandering between the cages on some Midwestern fairgrounds, drenched to the bone and dripping with enough blood to drive