The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2) (4 page)

Chapter Four – O’Mara

The pools of the Emerald Waters are scented with things that smell green. Lime, or mint. Pine, honeydew melon, green apple. There’s one pool in the lower levels that smells like cannabis leaves. One of the most popular ones smells like cucumber. The servants who ply their trade in Emerald often have body creams and other lubricants scented to match the pools where they work.

That’s why I choose mint. I don’t want to leave here smelling like a fruit salad. And the cannabis pool is frequented by strange young women who whisper odd things to each other in the murky green light. I was invited there once, by a dorm sister, but I got the sense that I didn’t quite fit with their group.

“How long can you hold your breath?” one of them asked me, disturbingly.

I was never invited back.

The mint pool is more wholesome. Few patrons engage in sex in full view of everyone else anyway. Mostly it’s massages and facials provided by topless young servants, who work wrapped from the waist down in swathes of green silk. The women aren’t as beautiful as the ones in Lapis Lazuli and the men are all very young looking. Goldwyn once told me that the young men here are taking a holiday from working in the Columns. I suppose that means that at least some of them are Culls.

I don’t understand much about the Pleasures. I don’t visit as much as I probably should. The last time I was here I swore I’d never come back. But resolve is a hard thing to hang onto with nothing but broken sleep and bad dreams to enable you.

I scan my pass in the massage area of the mint pool and an extremely pretty young man appears as if out of nowhere and leads me to a towel covered table.

“My name is Bray. I’ll be your masseur, if it suits you,” he says.

I perch on the edge of the table, holding my gown closed around me. Bray has closely shorn black hair and clear, smooth skin. He’s very slender through the chest and shoulders, and completely hairless. When he smiles, patiently awaiting my reply, I see that his two front teeth are slightly crooked, one crossing over the other. It doesn’t mar his prettiness so much as enhance it.

“I don’t want anything sexual,” I say, lying face down on the table. “Just a massage.”

“I’m not permitted to provide sexual services yet,” Bray says. “I’m underage.”

I look up at him as I loosen my gown, baring my back and shoulders. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” he says. And then, perhaps because I show some confusion, he adds: “I’m a Cull.”

I let my face fall onto the towel covered pillow, breathing in the mint of the detergent they use. No detail is missed in Emerald.

“Does that bother you, miss?” Bray asks. “I can ask one of the women—”

“No,” I say, looking up. “It doesn’t bother me. It makes me sad, that’s all.”

He squeezes some lotion onto his hand and begins gently spreading it on my back. “Don’t be sad on my account, Miss. It was a tidy job and I was very young when it happened. I don’t know any other way.”

Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps they don’t know what they’re missing. Maybe one day, no one in our cursed city will remember that there was ever any other way to live. I’ve heard whispers that the rate of boys born is still too low. That the imbalance will never be corrected. I’ve even heard rumors that some favor culling again. The high status men who control this city like being a rare breed. I think if I ever had a son, I would try to get him out of here. Despite Bray’s words, I don’t think living as a Cull is any kind of life. And perhaps being a harem man is not much better.

I let Bray massage me, soothing away the tense muscles and aches brought on by Wilton’s rough treatment. Bray’s young hands seem to erase that—erase the dirty feeling left behind on my skin, even after the long soak I had in the minty pool. I think if I let him work on me long enough that maybe he would release whatever it is of Tully that is keeping me so tied in knots. Couldn’t that be worked out like a muscle spasm?

But the opposite happens. The more Bray works on me, the more Tully comes back into my thoughts, the brief distraction of Wilton’s brutality having worn off.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask, as a way of turning my thoughts to something else.

“Here in Emerald? Only a few months.” He moves down to work on my feet and calves, its own kind of bliss. “I worked on the farm before that. I snuck away from the care home when I was twelve.”

I turn back and look at him as he stretches out the soles of my feet.

“There wasn’t much care there,” he says, ruefully.

“And there is more care here? Here in the Pleasures?”

“Oh, yes. Much more. Roll over?”

He turns away, holding a towel for me to cover my breasts as I lie on my back.

“Who cares for you?” When I hear what that sounds like, how cruel, I reword it. “I mean, what is the nature of this care?”

Bray smiles down at me, carefully tucking the towel into the top of my underwear. “We care for each other. Abdominal massage? You’re not pregnant are you?”

“Yes. No, I mean. Yes to the massage. No the pregnancy.”

I let him press his thumbs in soothing circles around my navel, all the while thinking about what he said. Who cares for me in the city outside the walls of the Pleasures? My mother died last year from one of the few cancers that still kills. My father and brother are long gone, lost in the Expiation. The people I work with drift around the upper levels like privileged princesses. The married ones worst of all. Now that I have firsthand knowledge of what harem husbands are like I suspect that haughty air is a front. What kind of man would keep that many wives anyway? Breeding them like rabbits in a cage. It’s barbaric.

I’m embarrassed to think that I sometimes see that as my destiny.

“Are you uncomfortable, Miss?” Bray says, pausing in his attentions. “You’re flushed. Do you want me to stop?”

“No, I’m fine. Please continue.”

He carefully slides his hands under the towel until his fingers find the place where my legs meet my hips. He presses his thumbs hard into my flesh, which both hurts and gives and incredible sense of release down my legs. Bray smiles warmly as I gasp and exhale. After a minute he pauses, stopping to squeeze more lotion on his hands.

“What will you do when you turn eighteen?” I ask.

“Start doing the sexual stuff I guess. The money is much better.”

“With women or men?”

“Both, I suppose. Women are nicer to servants, I hear.”

I realize the massage is nearly over. Now he’s just gently smoothing lotion over the skin of my legs and arms. “Are you having a sexual service tonight, Miss?”

“No.” The certainty of my answer is more for myself than for him. “Why?”

“This lotion tastes nice. Minty. I could give you some for your breasts and…elsewhere.”

The idea makes me blush so furiously that I’m tempted to pull the towel over my head.

“Are you allowed to touch me there?”

Bray grins and leans one hip on the table as I sit up, clutching the towel over me. “I meant for you to do it, Miss.” He glances around the room. “But no one is watching. I can do it if you like.”

“No! I…” I frown at him, trying to read the suggestive curve of his eyebrow. “Does that interest you? My breast—I mean women’s breasts? Women’s bodies?”

He shrugs lightly, and helps me back into my robe. “Sure. Of course. I hope that hasn’t offended you, Miss. I thought you…well never mind.” He takes a deferential step backwards, out of my personal space.

“Oh, no,” I say, laying a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry. It would take a lot for me to report a servant. I know how that goes for you. Just a misunderstanding.”

“Thank you, Miss.”

I tap my wrist pass and wave it over the scanner by the bed, giving Bray a small tip that I can barely afford. I hope he sees it because I have one final thing to ask of him—something that’s been bothering me.

“So you like women?”

He nods, smiling. “More than they like me, I think.”

“And you have those feelings then? Attraction or…desire?”

Bray turns his head away for a moment, and I get the feeling I’ve said something to offend him, though of course he would never make that clear.

“It’s a myth, Miss,” he says, in his soft velvet voice. “It’s a myth that Culls don’t have those feelings.” Then he looks back at me, and somehow looks much older than the teenager he is. “Whatever other parts I lack, I still have a heart and a soul, don’t I?”

“Of course you do.” I feel ashamed for suggesting otherwise. But he’s right about the myth – that
is
the accepted wisdom about Culls. That they are not only sexless but emotionless, as though everything that makes a man a human being is cut off with his genitals. “Do you know a servant called Tully?” I’ve asked it without meaning to.

“Yes, Tully from Obsidian?” Bray gives me another cheeky grin. “Did he take you for a ride in his fantastical dream machine?”

“Yes, he did…” I forge ahead, even though my embarrassment is becoming almost crippling. “I tried to contact him in Obsidian, but they said his service was closed.”

“I haven’t seen him in a while. He lost his license, I heard.”

“What on earth for?”

Bray shrugs again, as a trio of harem wives trail past, their robes hanging open to reveal heavily pregnant bellies. Bray watches them as they waddle away, an almost wistful expression on his face. It makes a lump rise in my throat.

“I don’t know, Miss. Admin takes licenses away for very small things sometimes.”

“So has Tully left the Pleasures?” I fight not to show the distress I feel. How would I ever find him out in a city of five million? I know there aren’t many men left but he could be hiding anywhere.

“I doubt he’s left the Pleasures. He’ll get his license back eventually and I don’t think he’d walk away from his machine. It’s his pride and joy.”

“So where would he go? I mean if I wanted to find him, where would I look? Would he be in his boudoir?”

“No. They would have turned the power and heat off there.” Bray hesitates. “The Columns is where we…they usually end up. You could look for him there. Be careful though. The Columns are a little…uncivilized sometimes. Do you remember the safe word? There are a lot of scanners, so it will bring the guards if you use it.”

I have a million more questions but none of them are appropriate to ask of a boy of seventeen, even though I’m almost sure he’s not as innocent as he claims to be. I may be naïve but I’m not that naïve.

Bray gives me a final little inscrutable smile as I leave him behind in a cloud of minty steam. “Have a nice evening, Miss,” he says.

It’s dark when I emerge onto the sky level promenade, and crowds of women drift in and out of the shops and cafes, or appear from the brightly lit doorways to the boudoirs, satisfied grins on their faces. I only envy them for the air of knowing where they are going. I doubt a woman here feels as lost as I do at this moment. Some of them are pregnant; some are wearing the vibrant veils that mark them as destined to join a harem. One group of about a dozen trails along behind their husband, each attached to him with a colorful satin ribbon tied around their wrist.

My mother once told me that when she married my father it was already unfashionable for a man to only have one wife. There was no imbalance then, the Expiation was years away, but the standards expected to be considered a suitable husband were so high that few men met them. And it was also unfashionable for women to marry beneath themselves, no matter that they had their own wealth. But that’s all it was—a fashion. But fashion became tradition and tradition, eventually, law. Soon men with no wealth or wife would be found to be in breach of the law somehow and were jailed, or lost their citizenship privileges, reducing them to the status of criminal.

Then the Expiation began, because what more logical thing to do to men that didn’t fit in the new system than kill them or emasculate them? It began as whispered accusations and rumors: gangs of unaffiliated men were raping harem brides, spreading diseases that made pregnant women miscarry or bear mutants, and other more outlandish things. At first men were arrested and exiled—at least that’s what we were told. Then the cut gangs started. Terrified men formed alliances with powerful ones and did their bidding. Women were driven to violence by their own fear. Together they roamed the streets and highway leaving bloodshed and death in their wake.

As the outside world watched in horror our culture was destroyed. The mainlanders even tried to liberate our people, bombing the abandoned industrial cities on the coast as a warning. But those in control would not relent, because power was too addictive. And our society was deceptively peaceful. Even my mother remarked that our door was never locked, that there was no hunger or homelessness.

But she knew that it was all an illusion. Now our idyllic island is a prison for all of us, not just those without citizen passes. Now the mainland, the whole of the outside world, views us with such revulsion and distrust that no one is allowed in or out. Though we have some resources, we suffer under an embargo that limits fresh food, certain technologies and almost all cultural commerce. Most of us have never read a book published off-island. Data only travels one way through our servers, from the giant content factories like the one I work in, to the outside world. Never the other way.