City of Cruelty and Copper (Temperance Era) by Rhiannon Paille Page A

would be thirteen hundred and twenty years old.
    I was the only one counting my age anymore.
    I didn’t look a day over fifteen.
    They ushered me down another hallway which went from clay structures to embroidered Turkish rugs that lavishly stretched on across the mahogany-plated hallways. There were all sorts of gold-framed mirrors and glass lights lining the walls. They were pretty with their rose-colored light bulbs and intricate artwork. I admired the brass, and tried not to think about bucking against Colin and knocking them off the walls, causing the pretty carpet to catch fire.
    We reached a set of double doors at the end of the hall after what seemed like hours of trekking up a gradual incline. The room I was ushered into was oval, and stretched out like an accordion. Hattie’s footsteps clicked along the white stone as she crossed the room, fluttering like a bird and screaming at the actual teenage girls that were perched on a white settee in the center of the room. They scurried behind a screen as I was led over to one of the four marble pillars, the chains fitting around it to secure me in place. Colin stepped away and I watched the muscles in his back contract underneath the one-piece. He wasn’t going to stay for the girl time.
    Hattie clapped her hands together and the girls stopped giggling and came out from behind the screen. Both of them had handfuls of fluffy fabric. One of them was ‘asian’, but they didn’t use that term anymore. They preferred to call them Eastern Earthly. The other was Western Earthly; or ‘white’ as I would have called it back when I was actually a fifteen-year-old girl in 2020CE.
    The Eastern Earthly girl had coal black eyes and straight black hair with bangs that covered her eyebrows. She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t in the black one-piece like everyone else. Western Earthly girl was about the same, but the blonde version with blue eyes. They blinked at me in rapid succession, either trying to get over the shock of my fame, or the shock of the reason I was famous.
    I wasn’t going to hurt them.
    But it looked like I was going to, didn’t it? Colin was an idiot chaining me up to a pillar and leaving me here like live bait.
    “Ursula, Eden,” Hattie called, a sharp tone in her voice. Her eyes were like daggers and the girls disappeared into one of the side rooms.
    Hattie sauntered over to me and I smelled the perfume she had applied since I’d last seen her. She took a handful of my hair and sniffed it. I could tell her it smelled like metal and sewage and garbage, but she scrunched up her nose and snapped her fingers. The girls came back, their hands empty this time. “Draw Ms. Ketterling a bath,” Hattie ordered.
    I waited while Ursula and Eden disappeared, and then the sound of running water wafted through the spacious room.
    Hattie inspected every inch of my body, looking me up and down, pausing at the hem of my leather pants and frowning at my breasts. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about another breast augmentation, and if she was, I hoped her mind was on reduction. Before the bombs began dropping I had a modest A cup, but since all the fame and heroism, I had to have some minor adjustments made.
    “How do you feel about flame-resistant spandex?” she asked, a finger on her lips.
    I raised my eyebrows. “I have flame-resistant skin,” I said dryly.
    “Yes, but some of the parents complained about you being naked after the flame-throwers last year.”
    I groaned. Flame throwers, that was new. “Then I have no objections as long as it doesn’t itch.”
    Hattie nodded. “Great, and we wanted to give you a cape.”
    “Is the F-16 team back this year?” I asked.
    Hattie laughed. “Yes, but we don’t want to do that much bodily damage.” She glanced at my hands, the ones with all the scars on them. I grimaced. “We can ditch the cape, but we’re not going to have you looking like a boy again.”
    Great, always loved getting pulled around by my