Chapter Two

Every woman-servant had a series of tasks that changed day-to-day depending on need, but they did have a few dedicated ones, things just for them alone. Iris’ last task of the day was to prepare the milk before bed. She’d been instructed over and over to warm the milk, add vanilla, and then add a heaping tablespoon of the white powder in the sugar container. It was sugar, for sure, but what Iris now knew was that it was mixed with some kind of sleeping pill all crushed up – and she’d been stirring it into her Garden sisters’ drinks. Theirs and her own.

Iris had never liked sugar, never liked sweet stuff, not even as a kid. She’d added the sugar to her own milk every night because she’d been told to, until the one night that she just didn’t. To this exact second that she lay in her bed waiting for Violet to fall under the drug’s effects, Iris remained awed by this tiny act of rebellion, this decision that had been motivated by nothing more than a sense of I don’t want the goddamn sugar.

She’d been exhausted from an eighteen-hour day of washing laundry by hand and cooking and office work, and had been drained from the night before because it had been her turn to be called to Gideon’s room for the Ritual, and she’d been longing to just get to bed and fall into mindless, blissful sleep.

She’d been fed up and done, and unlike all the other long, brutal days when she’d felt this way, she hadn’t wrestled the negative thoughts and emotions into submission. That night, Iris had allowed her resentment to build and her anger to grow – and she’d decided that she just didn’t want the goddamn sugar.

At the time, she had thought it a small thing, a private revolution of one. A risk if she was caught breaking one of Gideon’s approximately nine thousand iron-clad rules, to be sure, but in the end it was mostly just a childish little temper tantrum, just something to give her a brief respite and a giggle to herself at the end of yet another day when she’d had no reason to smile. She’d regretted going to the Garden for months and months anyway, ever since she’d been sent to the basement, and that night she’d just snapped at last.

It was a small thing…but it ended up being the thing that changed everything.

That change had led her to not putting sugar in her milk the next night, and the night after that, and on and on –  all of which had then led her to this night.

It had taken six months of not stirring the drug-laced sugar into her milk, six months of practicing at night to unlock doors with a hairpin while her sisters slumbered, six months of covertly finding every blind spot between her dorm room and the world outside. Six months of refusing to put the half-teaspoon of sugar in her mandated morning tea as well – and suddenly she saw everything so clearly. The cloudy fog was gone, lifted and melted away, and Iris felt like herself for the first time since walking through the gates of the Garden. She also understood that she had spent a year being drugged into obedience and subservience, day and night.

With her newfound clarity, she had spent six months sneaking around the compound observing the men’s routines and schedules, all while preparing tea for the others and cooking and cleaning and giving none of her furious thoughts away. She had suffered through the drug withdrawal on her own, running over that old familiar battleground with a grim, weary acceptance and faith that it would get better… and after five shaky, shaking days, it did. Just like the last time.

The morning dose of ‘sugar’ was much smaller than the evening one, and she knew that it was to keep the women on their feet and functional enough during the day to perform their chores and duties, but hazy enough to be malleable and docile. Their thoughts were jumbled and slowed down just enough to keep them from thinking too much – and made them far more receptive to Gideon’s bullshit sermons and pronouncements. All of this made her solitary rebellion against his orders all that more astonishing, made her private defiance nothing short of miraculous.

So for six months Iris had carefully watched her sisters and seen their dreamy, zombie-like calm as they floated around doing their chores without protest or even a flicker of independent thought and Iris had copied them perfectly. Outside, she was a silent, dutiful woman-servant; inside, she was scheming feverishly and wishing death on every man who crossed her path.

It had been an entire half-year of stealing money and praying that nobody noticed, a half-year of planning this night, of running over it in her head again and again while pretending to be lying in a drugged stupor in her bed, or washing dishes in a mock drug-trance. She’d rehearsed her escape so many times now, it felt like she’d done it a thousand times.

She hadn’t, though. Tonight was the first time.

And the last, if they catch you.