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.
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 .
Violet’s breathing was even and deep now, and Iris knew that she had to go. Her eyes still closed, she ran over her route one last time, checking and double-checking that she remembered everything.
She opened her eyes and got to her feet.
Then she sat down on the edge of her bed, suddenly intensely, overwhelmingly afraid.
It would be easy – so so easy – to stay here in the Garden, she knew. She could start drinking the morning tea and the warm bedtime milk again and fall back into the haze, slip under the consciousness of the realities of life, float away into the world of having no power and never having to make any decisions. She had her tasks, her duties, her routines. It was all so familiar here and that made it safe in ways that the world out there was not.
She had no idea who or what was waiting outside that fence – what if that thing or person was worse than what she had and knew in here? It’s not as if her life before a year ago had been so wonderful; it’s not like she had anyone out there waiting with bated breath for her return. At least in this ward, she had her sisters and their absolute love for her. She loved them too and she was worried about what would happen if she left.
She should stay for them… for Daisy, Zinnia, Rose, Dahlia, Camilla, Tulip, Cassia. For all eleven of them .
Iris wavered now, felt her determination start to fall to pieces all around her. Then an image came to her, the one that haunted her dreams since she’d stopped going to sleep under the influence of a drug:
Lily’s naked, twisted body. Her blue, twisted face.
Fuck. This. I'm out of here.
This time when she stood, she stayed on her feet.
Her mind snapped back into focus and Iris suddenly knew – she just knew – that it was all going to be fine. She was sure that Gideon would call this feeling a premonition or destiny or some such crap, but Iris saw it for what it was: perfect planning and a teeth-gritting will to get it done.
Oh, and since I have no choice but to finish what I set in motion when I walk out into that hallway, I’m going to do this because it’s also life-and-death. Literally.
Despite the fact that the other women were drugged into deep sleep, Iris still found that she was channeling a ninja warrior vibe and moving across the floor as quietly as possible. She reached the open door, looked left then right, stepped into the wide, dark hallway and headed for the stairs. Even though she was totally confident in the knowledge that nobody was lurking in the stairwell waiting to pounce on her, she held her breath almost the whole time, not releasing it until she was standing on the ground floor.
Still in stealth mode, she headed to the library and made a beeline for the cabinet that housed Gideon’s sermons going back as far as fifteen years, when he’d founded The Garden of Divine Light. Iris herself had spent untold hours transcribing the recordings of his words and beliefs and commandments, then copying and binding them as books before placing them with proper reverence on the shelves and cataloguing them.
Ignoring the camera above her, she reached past the first two rows of books until her fingertips grazed the back wall of the shelf. She pried the yellow envelope from between volumes 156 and 157 and checked to see that it was still glued down; it was, and this meant that she held in her hand a total of three hundred and twelve dollars. It was all that she had in the world and she was just going to have to figure it out from there, because she didn’t dare to steal any more money from Gideon.
Iris exited the library and turned left to the back entrance hall area. There she found flashlights, shoes, boots and coats belonging to the men and the Guardians – she’d have to make do with what she could get her hands on because the women-servants weren’t given outdoor apparel for a biting February night in Utah. Oh sure, each woman had a heavy sweater that was fine for quickly running out to deliver food and hot drinks to the guards, but that was it. The women’s daily uniform was a thin dress, flat shoes and something to hold back their long hair – an elastic, pins, a barrette, a kerchief.
And of course, an apron. That went without saying.
She scanned the clothes hanging off various hooks and found a heavy cardigan and a thick coat with a hood. She stuffed the money, a flashlight and two scarves into the coat pockets, added a hat and mittens, then quickly measured the boots with her eye, looking for the smallest pair. Once she found them and pulled them on, they were still pretty big so she tugged the laces as tight as possible. It was the best that she could do, so she accepted it.
There was no mirror, naturally, because Gideon said that they encouraged vanity (though his own lavish bedroom had mirrors everywhere), so Iris couldn’t see what she looked like. She pictured a clown in oversized, flapping footwear crossed with a kid playing dress-up in her Dad’s winter overcoat, and figured that was about right. But looking ludicrous wasn’t her concern: not freezing to death was. She wasn’t heading out to be a fashion icon – she was running for her life, floppy boots and all.
Now she sank to her knees on the wooden floor and tugged a pin out of her hair; all the doors were locked from the inside at ten o’clock. In less than forty seconds, she’d unlocked the door to the yard outside and was back on her feet. She swung the door open and shivered at the blast of freezing wind.
Nothing and nobody to the left, nor to the right. The outside field area was still and empty in the moonlight, and she took a deep breath.
“OK,” she said out loud and hearing her own voice seemed to steady her. “Here we go.”
Iris tugged the coat tighter around her to protect herself from the cold, then she paused. A wild burst of stupid courage rose in her, higher and stronger, a roaring rebellious need to say a few defiant words on her way out the door. A final departing shot like an old Western, a cutting one-liner just before blowing someone’s face off like a mafia movie. Just something .
But words had never been her strong suit – not even back before she was Iris – so instead she looked up at the camera above the door, stared deep into its emotionless black eye. Then she gave it a huge, beaming smile – and raised her middle finger, picturing Gideon watching the video of this moment the next morning.
Fuck. You.
Stepping out of the building was the strangest combination of terrifying and elating, and Iris took a deep, calming breath. The two Guardians at the front gate were snug and warm in their little building, just sitting there and drinking coffee from thermoses and eating sandwiches that Iris herself had made them earlier. She knew that they wouldn’t budge from their chairs, not even to do a perimeter lap, because what for? They had the motion sensors to do the work for them – but she knew all the blind spots and safe spots.
When she had first started planning her escape, Iris had toyed with the idea of drugging the Guardians’ nightly coffee, since she was in charge of preparing all their food. She imagined herself waltzing past the two slumbering forms, right on out the front gate, a triumphant exit with dignity and sass.
After several nights’ contemplation she rejected that notion, simply because it had too many unknowns: what if only one of them had coffee that night? What if they only had one sip each? What if they were sleeping and another Guardian happened by, wandering aimlessly waiting for Gideon to finish the Ritual, and he sounded the alarm when he couldn’t rouse them from their drug-induced stupor? What if they spilled the thermos’ contents? And so on and so on, too many ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ and she realized that she had to find a more controlled way out, even if that meant with the guards awake.
And then she’d found the way.
She turned right now, away from the guardhouse, and headed for the chain-link fence area closest to the woods. There was a loose section there where one of the metal posts had pulled away and out of the earth a bit; Iris had made a point of walking past it a few times when she’d brought the men their coffee outside in the yard, and she knew that she could slide through the gap. She was very small – well, all the woman-servants were, it was Gideon’s preference and he starved them so they were even smaller – and she was pretty flexible.
Less than a minute later, she had poked the flashlight through the holes in the fence, taken off her heavy coat, thrown it over and clear of the barbed wire at the top of the chain-link mesh, and was on her stomach sliding under the fence. The space between the hard ground and the bottom of the fence wasn’t very wide, and the chain-link edges caught on the oversized cardigan as she pulled herself under and through. She thought that she’d made it – when something snagged and held. Iris flailed and twisted and turned this way and that, desperately trying to get loose.
No go. Argh.
With a huge sigh, she wriggled out of the unbuttoned cardigan and then she was on her feet on the other side. She pulled on the cardigan, pulled hard, and with a horrible loud rip it came free, now with a sizable tear down the back. She didn’t care, she barely paused as she stuck her arms through the sleeves, put on the coat, hat and mittens, and wrapped one scarf around each of her bare legs. She turned on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the trees looming in front of her.
“OK,” she again, this time to the stars above. “Let’s start walking.”
There was a town called Walton in this direction, she knew. She was the twelfth of Gideon’s twelve women-servants, so she didn’t have the privilege of being driven to the store to do the food shopping, but she’d asked Marigold, Azalea and Posy about their trips out of the compound and she knew that the town was about forty-five minutes away by car, pretty much a straight shot down the road. She figured that she could walk it – keeping to the trees and with the slight obstacles of snow and some hilly mountain terrain – in three hours at most.
Walton had a bus station that ran buses all through the night and this was the part that gave her the most pause and worry: once her absence was discovered, Gideon and his Guardians would head straight to town, straight to the bus station, straight to asking questions. Iris would have been happiest just disappearing without a trace, vanishing in a puff of smoke and with no trail behind her whatsoever, but this was the reality that she was dealing with. There would be a bus ticket and there would be at least one person who’d see her get on the bus; she knew that she’d have to get off before whatever her actual ticket destination was, switch routes and directions, start throwing up dirt and causing confusion.
There was also the small matter of her appearance. A woman dressed in a nightgown and a baggy coat that hung to her knees and scarf legs and clown boots – she looked like a lunatic who had just escaped an asylum, and she knew it. It made her more memorable in some ways and the last thing that Iris wanted was to be remembered. By anyone.
This was the part of the plan that was a huge question mark, and she felt her anxiety spike as she trudged through the snow. She knew that she’d get on the first bus out of town – going anywhere – and she had to be ready to get off the bus at any time, buy jeans and boots and a sweater and another bus ticket, and keep going wherever the wind and bus schedules took her, as long as the money lasted.
She wondered when she’d be able to stop, to settle and rest. Stay.
Where will my new home actually be?
She'd been walking for about ninety minutes now and was so immersed in her thoughts and worries and watching her feet that she didn’t notice the fire flickering between the trees until she was about a hundred feet away. She stopped dead in her tracks and turned off the flashlight in a panic, praying like crazy that nobody was standing in the shadows observing her approach. Frozen, terrified, barely breathing, she stepped carefully behind a huge tree, wincing at every small crunch of snow under her ridiculous boots. She waited in the darkness.
After a minute, when nobody came and when she didn’t hear any footsteps, she peeked out from behind the tree. Now she saw movement, over by the dancing flames, deep in the woods and far away from the road.
A man. A huge man.
Jesus Christ. Are you serious right now? Just my damn luck to stumble across some random giant on my escape path .
Iris squinted, trying to figure out what he was doing, but the dense forest impeded her view almost completely. All she saw was a dark shape – a massive dark shape, God help me – moving back and forth between the fire and…
And what?
She leaned around the other side of the tree, to the side closest to the road, and that’s when she saw it by the glare of the man’s flashlight:
A van. Oh my God .
Suddenly a whole new opportunity presented itself; a whole new path opened up in front of her. She was so stunned at the possibility of what she might be able to do, she actually forgot to breathe for several seconds.
OK. OK. Calm down and think this through .
OK, so…her biggest concern about reaching town was that when Gideon and his goons showed up there, there would be clues about where Iris had gone. There would be witnesses to the crazy nightgown lady, evidence of her buying a ticket and getting on a bus, a destination where she was heading. Crumbs that Gideon could follow to track her down.
But what if…
What if I don’t get to Walton at all?
What if I just disappear into thin air?
She looked down and behind her: her bootprints were clearly visible in the deep snow and although it was cold and windy, the skies were clear. Iris didn’t think that it would snow again that night, which meant that she had literally left a path for Gideon to follow.
What if the path ended here?
If she climbed into that van, her footsteps would stop at the edge of the dark forest, all mixed in with the footprints left by the man walking back and forth from the road to the fire.
She’d be a ghost… or as close to one as she could be while still in human form.
But did she want to climb into that van? The one driven by the huge guy who was doing something deep in the woods at midnight that was surely suspicious? Walking on over and casually asking him for a ride was clearly not an option, so she’d have to sneak into the back while he was standing way over at the fire and hope hard that she didn’t get caught.
How smart is this?
Not very. But let’s keep thinking about it.
The man had gone back to the crackling fire now. Carefully, walking with her whole foot flat on the ground to minimize the noise, Iris snuck over to the side of the road to look at the vehicle more closely… and that’s when she saw that the van door was a little bit open and a tiny crack of light was spilling out from the back. She also saw the license plate.
Colorado.
A free ticket out of the state and no goddamn breadcrumbs to follow.
That’s it. I’m out of here and I’m all in.
Thirty seconds later, she was under a pile of blankets, wedged tight and snug between a wooden box full of tools and the back wall of the large van.
Waiting for the man to drive her away from the hell of the Garden and Gideon; waiting for him to stop for food or coffee in a few hours, so she could creep out of the van and start her new life.
Wherever that turned out to be.