Page 3 of The House of Quiet

Chapter Two

A Bird in Flight

Maids aren’t supposed to be seen, but they’re always supposed to see. Birdie tugs on the carriage curtains once more. They’re sewn firmly in place. It makes her feel unsettled and vulnerable to have no idea where she is. The driver could be taking her anywhere.

She used to watch carriages pass by and dream of what it would be like to ride inside instead of clinging to the back like a tick, but right now she’d give anything to be hanging on, breathing in the familiar burning stink of Sootcity.

Able to anticipate anything coming for her.

Able to jump off and flee, if she needed to.

She can’t run away, though. Not now that she finally has a destination to run toward. She takes deep breaths and closes her eyes. They’re picking up two other maids. She has to calm down first. The worst thing she can do right now is look suspicious.

“Magpie in the tree, are you looking for me?” Birdie sings, voice so quiet it’s lost to the clattering of wheels on cobblestones. And then she sings the answer, even though it’s Magpie’s part, not hers. “Birdie in the bush, will you learn to shush?”

She closes her eyes at the memories of Call and Answer, Magpie’s favorite other than the dizzy game.

The way Magpie always giggled singing her response.

She was convinced she could throw her voice when it was Birdie’s turn to look.

Birdie bumbled through cupboards and stoves and cabinets in the neighborhood junk pile, never getting close to where she knew her little sisterwas.

Birdie knows where Magpie is again, at last. And nothing’s going to stop her. Birdie’s heart rate calms. She retreats into herself and becomes a perfect maid once more.

The carriage stops, and two young women climb in. One has light brown skin, black hair, and eyes as round as buttons. The other has pale white skin, with an abundance of freckles the same reddish color as her hair. They’re both in sturdy gray dresses nearly identical to Birdie’s own.

At the minister’s house, the maids were required to wear white dresses to blend in better with the walls.

Which meant they stayed up every night scrubbing and cleaning their own dresses after scrubbing and cleaning everything else.

Most nights Birdie barely got three hours of sleep, between waiting for the other maids to drift off and visiting her friend.

Despair and guilt litter her mind at the thought of that last locked door that never opened for her, but Birdie sweeps those emotions away with ruthless practice. She’s a maid. Maids don’t have feelings.

“Hi!” the redhead says. She must not have gotten the same training, because her feelings are written all over her face. Excitement and nerves both conveyed in a brilliant smile. She has a gap between her front teeth that Birdie finds immediately charming. “I’m Rabbit!”

“Minnow,” the round-eyed maid says, keeping her gaze on her lap. They both have animal names, which means they’re from the same lower class Birdie is.

Was , she reminds herself, flooded with bitter anger. Somewhere up in the hills, her parents sit in a cavernous, empty house. She hopes they rot there.

But it’s good they’re Rabbit and Minnow.

She was worried with prime positions in the House of Quiet, the maids might have had plant names, indicating families with healthy prospects for growth.

The upper classes always use more abstract names.

Geological features, seasons, nonsense like that.

Birdie almost laughs, thinking about Nimbus, the boy from the first big house she worked in.

Such a silly name for such a sweet person.

After she left Nimbus’s house, she went to work for the minister of finance. Six months of fear and deception and struggle, with only one safe place in the whole house. But she’s here now. That’s the only thing that can matter.

“What’s your name?” Rabbit prods.

“Birdie.” Birdie was the nickname Magpie gave her, though Birdie often daydreamed of being named after a plant.

Someone with a name like that would have been able to earn enough money to keep her family together.

If she were Rowan, and Magpie were Willow, they would have had enough to get by.

They never would have sent Magpie to get the procedure, hoping to buy a new future for all of them.

“Where are you from?” Rabbit asks the third maid. “Name like Minnow, it isn’t the city.”

Birdie can’t tell if Minnow is scared or alert or simply always looks that intense thanks to her large, round eyes.

“The coast,” Minnow says at last, her blunt delivery making it clear she’s not interested in elaborating.

Birdie doesn’t need to be best friends with her, but she does need both maids on her side.

Maids cover for each other. It saved Birdie from being caught more than once in the minister’s house.

Hopefully Rabbit and Minnow follow the same unspoken code from the lower quarters of Sootcity: We help our own, because no one else will .

“I’ve never left the city,” Rabbit says breathlessly, trying and failing to peer out the curtains. “I’ve never worked as a maid before, either. I was in a laundry.”

A quick glance at Rabbit’s hands shows hints of blue under her skin.

Before, when Birdie thought her mother was there to protect them and keep the family together, before she knew so devastatingly otherwise, Birdie used to hold her mother’s hand and trace the blue creeping outward from her veins.

A few more years in the laundry and Rabbit’s hands would seize up and stop working, just like Birdie’s mother’s did.

Which is the luckiest possible outcome. Unlucky is the chemicals finding their way to the heart and stopping it outright.

But obviously Rabbit’s lucky, because she’s here.

“How did you get a position in the House of Quiet?” Birdie tries not to sound as shocked as she is. After all the scheming and spying and extorting Birdie did to get here, a laundress got the same position?

“Oh, I had the procedure last year.” Rabbit’s smile fades a bit.

“It was supposed to be my cousin, but she died three weeks before. Run over by a cart, crushed her legs, it was terrible. All my other cousins were too old and had already joined the military to pay for her procedure. So my family stuck me in instead.”

“How old are you?” Birdie asks. Rabbit doesn’t look much younger than Birdie, but fourteen is the cutoff for the procedure. Any older, and the brain doesn’t have enough room to adjust to such violent changes.

“Sixteen.”

Birdie’s jaw drops in surprise. “It didn’t kill you?”

Rabbit giggles at the absurdity of the question. Even Minnow cracks a smile but wipes it quickly away and stares blankly at the floor.

“I’m a late bloomer, as my da says. I was barely fifteen then. We just lied about my age. The procedure didn’t kill me, but it didn’t take well, either. I’m an inward empath.”

Minnow stiffens almost imperceptibly, shifting away from Rabbit as though distance will help. If Rabbit can sense their feelings, she’ll know when Birdie’s not being truthful. This is a disaster. She’s going to fail before she ever even gets to the house.

There are two categories of abilities—inward and outward.

An inward empath means Rabbit can feel other people’s feelings.

An outward one would have meant Rabbit could send her feelings out to others.

That was the one Birdie always hoped for with Magpie.

Outward empaths were employed taking care of children, or as nurses, or as companions.

Birdie always thought Magpie would be good at it, and she didn’t want Magpie to have to endure the intrusions of inward abilities.

She has no idea what the procedure did to Magpie, though.

Another thing her parents refused to tell her.

Birdie spent years obsessively gathering lists of abilities—the broad categories of empath, thought reading or thought projection, and future sensing, with more specific specializations depending on what the procedure triggers—all while dreaming of what Magpie would be able to do.

What did Magpie become when she went into that building with its enormous machine? And why is she gone now?

Rabbit laughs. “You two shouldn’t look so nervous.

Like I said, it didn’t take well. I can guess more about how you’re feeling from your faces than your actual emotions.

But the government certification meant they assigned me to a spot in the House of Quiet.

And they paid in advance! My little brother can go to school.

” Rabbit beams. “I made him promise to write me as soon as he knows how. Do you think someone there will read the letters tome?”

Birdie nearly volunteers before she catches herself.

The more people underestimate her, the easier it is to hurt them.

Birdie didn’t need the procedure to get a position in the House of Quiet.

She just needed several months of picking locks and reading tedious correspondence until she found something she could use to manipulate the minister.

Thinking of what she did and whom she left behind makes her sick to her stomach, though. Or it could be the claustrophobic carriage interior. Birdie’s tempted to bang on the door and ask if she can ride on the back, but then her new dress would be mud-splattered.

After a couple of tortuous hours with nothing to do—a situation deeply unfamiliar to all three girls, as evidenced by their fidgeting—the horses stop.

The driver, an older man with lines so deep in his forehead they look like fissures in a stone, opens the door.

Birdie can’t see anything past him but trees.

They’re out of the city; that much is obvious by how fresh the air is. But there’s nothing around them.