The House of Quiet

Chapter One

A House Is Not a Home

The House of Quiet sits waiting, the only firm, immovable point in a landscape of rot and treachery. Deep within it, a heart beats. The heart of the house feels everyone scurrying around above it, all those little points of heat and life and noise. The heart hates the noise, and it needs it, all at the same time.

Inside the house, tucked not where they belong but instead in the bedrooms downstairs, young people sleep. They’re so loud. The people who used to lie in those beds were old. They took the noise away; they didn’t bring it with them.

But now the young things are there and the house can never rest. Its heart beats too hard, agitated and twitching, and the House Wife feels it and knows that agony but cannot help it.

Yet.

The House Wife, eyes and hands of the house, drifts down the hallway. The heart squirms and thrashes somewhere beneath them all. She wants to soothe it, to promise that soon, soon, things will go back to how they were. Soon, they’ll always have enough.

They just have to deal with all the bodies sleeping fitfully around them first.

She stands over them, staring, hating them. Knowing they must hate themselves, too. She presses a hand to a fevered brow and shushes, but it does no good. She’s not the one who can take this burden from them. She glances upward in longing toward the second floor.

That used to be the noisiest place in the house. There was an order to things then. An even, predictable ebb and flow. Nothing like the strain of how things are now.

They explained the change to her so many times, but words are hard to hold on to. All she knows is now she must be careful. But the house isn’t built to care, and neither is she. She thinks she might have been once, but it’s too hard to think of anything before the house.

She’s always been in the house, and the house has always been in her.

The House Wife returns to where she belongs, standing in front of the red circle. She stares into that scarlet abyss and waits, listening to the cries coming from somewhere far beneath.

“Shh, shh, shh,” she whispers, like the whoosh of blood pumping through a heart. “Soon.”

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 sister was.

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.