Page 153 of Red Rooster

In one of the many towns where they stopped just long enough for her fire dance to earn them a roll of cash, a parking lot carnival had boasted that it possessed an elephant. It had indeed. A female Indian elephant, small, the wide space between her eyes speckled with pink. In the half-light of dusk, Red had been struck by the wiry bristles of her tail; the white, impossibly wide toenails on her big pad-like feet. She’d been in a corral of tubular panels, meant for horses or cattle, quietly munching alfalfa hay one dainty mouthful at a time.

Red had stood at the corral for a long time, not touching the rail, because when she’d tried to do so, unconsciously, fascinated, the carney in charge had snapped at her to keep back. So she’d linked her hands together in front of her, squeezing tight first in excitement, and then wonder, and then…sadness, as an unexpected melancholia swept over her. A beautiful wild thing in a cage, all alone, numbed by the wrongness of it.

She dreamed of that elephant, and Rooster’s hand on her shoulder, a gentle squeeze of silent commiseration, in the flickering moments just before full consciousness returned. And then she was fighting her way through a dense fog.

Bright lights. Eyes watering. Painful cold numbness all through her body, pins and needles, an unfamiliar tension. She turned her head and it weighed a thousand pounds. She opened her mouth and her tongue stuck to her palate, two dry sheets of parchment pressed together.

Soft beeps, and hums. Medicinal smells.

She was back. They had her again.

She managed to blink the crust from her eyes and found that she was in a small, white-walled room, surrounded by machinery whose lights flickered in unknown combinations. Her hands lay on her chest, bound by the thick cuffs, and this time, with both of them fastened into place, her power lay dormant deep beneath her skin, untouchable.

She was alone.

Red closed her eyes against he burn of tears. She didn’t regret it, not if Rooster was out there still alive.

But panic began to swell inside her all the same.

They had her again. And this time, after all the blood Rooster and she had spilled, there would be no pretense of gentleness.

Somewhere behind her, a door clicked open.