Chapter One

Uinta Mountains, Utah

The Garden of Divine Light

I’m awake. Like… I’m really really awake. Tonight is the night.

Iris lay in the women’s ward with her eyes closed; she was stock-still and consciously breathing deep and slow. Anyone passing by and checking on the open-plan room would think that eleven women were fast asleep in their single beds, in their long white nightgowns, in the moonlight.

But I’m not asleep.

Not anymore.

She was ready to go, to just get up and walk out of the Garden – but she had to wait. Gideon had sent for Violet about two hours earlier and she hadn’t come back to the ward yet, and Iris knew better than to risk leaving before the other woman’s return. There would be a Guardian roaming the compound somewhere to keep himself awake, waiting for the signal from Gideon that he was done performing the Ritual with his number ten woman-servant. That Guardian would escort Violet back to the ward, watch her drink the mandatory pre-bedtime warm milk, then leave the women until their wake-up call at five a.m.

That would be Iris’ chance, her one and only. She knew that after dropping Violet off like a cheap suitcase being left at the bus station, the Guardian would go to the men’s ward and get into his own bed. From then on, there would be no more people wandering the halls – not in any building, not on the grounds, not around the chain-link fence.

There were motion sensors outside of the buildings, of course, but she knew where they were and how to avoid them. Best of all, images from the cameras placed inside the ward went to Gideon’s office only, not the guard shack at the front gate, and he didn’t get in front of his screens until ten o’clock in the morning at the earliest. Nobody would know anything until the morning and by that time, Iris would be long gone.

She’d be free.

She heard distant footsteps now and she automatically stiffened and screwed her closed-up eyes tight enough so she saw colors behind her eyelids, then forced herself to relax again. She was pretty sure that the Guardian wouldn’t do a bed-check – because the milk should have taken full effect on all of us by now, so what is there to check? – but you never really knew. Some of these jerks were all puffed-up on their own power and a roomful of drugged, helpless women lying there prone, open to a man’s gaze and touch, was a tempting thing. Iris knew that: she knew it for a fact.

That knowledge was why she was lying there, counting seconds and heartbeats, planning to flee the only home that she’d known for the past year. She was going to escape into the early-February night in a nightgown and winter boots – dash straight into the abyss with nothing but hope and a bit of cash that she had stolen in the course of her Office duties and then hidden behind some books.

Truthfully, though, that knowledge about the men was only one small thing about the Garden of Divine Light that had led her to this night. It was weird to think that sexual assault was a minor motivation for her upping and going, but that was a fact.

The Garden hid much worse things than that; it hid many of them.

So many.

Iris heard footsteps enter the women’s room and she almost shuddered when she heard the man’s voice: it was Guardian Jonah and he was the one that she feared and detested the most. He was a short, ugly, brutish creature with wrecked teeth and deep pits in his cheeks from acne. He gloried in being an absolute pig, knowing full well that one of the woman-servants would have to go and clean his vile mess; he’d stand there and watch the woman scrub the floor or scrub the stains out of his underwear or scrub his toilet, grinning the whole time.

He treated the women like they weren’t human and that was another thing that Iris knew: she and her eleven sisters were less than human for the men. And for Gideon, she and her sisters were only human in the sense that they were warm bodies made of flesh and blood, though tainted by sin by virtue of being female – and Gideon made sure that they all carried the reminder of that sin on their flesh. After all, he told them, they were weak vessels, weak-minded, weak in body and spirit. They were just weak, warm bodies to be used for his pleasure and bent to his will… by any means necessary. Violence. Threats. Punishments. Torture. Starvation. Solitary confinement.

Murder.

And of course nightly glasses of sweet, warm vanilla milk with crushed-up drugs, presented as something comforting and cozy, but which were yet another tool to guarantee compliance. The milk kept the women quiet and asleep through the night and allowed the twelve Guardians to relax and take a break from anything except what they wanted to do – unconscious women don’t require guarding, after all. It was this arrogant male dedication to laziness and selfish fun that was going to work in Iris’ favor.

As she listened to Violet drink her milk and say goodnight to Guardian Jonah before changing into her nightgown, Iris lay quiet and still, reliving the night that she realized that she’d been drugged every bedtime for six months. It was the night that had changed everything.