The boys are scared. The woman scares them, with good reason. I do not know where Abigala went, or my parents. Well, they are going to jail. I don’t know what the woman will do with Abigala. I just know that she sticks me and the boys into the back of a truck. The youngest one there is fourteen. He wraps his arms around me in the darkness, and I exhale, trying not to tremble. He threw away his wedding ring when he came to us. It does not matter. They’ll figure it out, they’ll figure it out for all the boys, and they’ll all go back, it doesn’t matter that they’re younger than eighteen, the laws are not upheld here. No one cares about these boys. And they took me as one of them.

I should’ve listened to Abigala.

I always should, I think to myself. She’s usually right about things.

They open the doors to the back of the truck after a bumpy ride and the person in black is joined by two more. They are all women, I think. Their eyes sparkle out of the slits in their masks, and they gesture for us to come down. I go first. Hesitantly the other boys follow.

We are in a small room, dirt floors, wooden walls. A door sits hanging half-open on the other side of the room, and after a moment of standing in a line, the woman who raided our shelter comes in and examines us. She examines me, specifically, and I shudder. She notices, smiling slightly, then glances over her shoulder. I then notice the other woman in the room.

She’s leaning against the doorframe. A cigarette is lit between the first two fingers of her left hand, and a wedding ring sparkles on the third. She does not look at the boys gathered before her. She’s just looking at the truck that brought us here.

The first woman snaps her fingers at her. She sighs, inhaling on the cigarette, and blows the smoke out of her mouth. She’s young, much younger than the first woman, but with the same pale blonde hair. Hers has streaks of brown flowing through it. Her eyes are hazel, and they run over us for a moment, then go to the first woman. “Yes?”

“Your choice,” she says quietly.

I swallow.

The young woman comes into the room. Her steps are slow but sure, and she ends up next to the first woman, running her eyes over us. “You raided a shelter for them.”

The older woman doesn’t say anything. The young woman sighs, inhaling on her cigarette again. “Based on what you’ve told me, you’ve really put me at a moral crossroads here, mother.”

My eyebrows go up. Neither of them notice. The young woman, the daughter, continues. “On one hand, I could pick one of these boys to drag back into the system they obviously tried so hard to escape from, and on the other I could introduce a clean boy to it entirely new.”

My heart drops to my feet.

“Don’t let me influence you, Ava,” says the first woman.

“Then leave,” says Ava.

She stares at her for a moment, and her daughter taps some ashes onto the ground. She leaves the room.

The young woman, Ava, drops her cigarette on the ground, then looks up at all of us. She runs her eyes down the line, taking a deep breath, then locks her eyes on me. She steps on her cigarette, crushing it into the dirt as she approaches me.

I’m still looking at the ground, like everyone else, but she gently reaches out for me and nudges my chin up so I’m looking at her. She studies me for a second, then asks quietly, “Are you clean?”

After a moment of silence, she pulls her hand away, and I nod. She swallows. “What will happen to them? The ones I don’t pick?”

She glances down the line. If I didn’t know better I would think the look in her eyes was genuine concern. I open my mouth, then close it and shrug. I honestly don’t know.

“They ran away,” she says quietly. “They’ll go back to their wives.

“How old are you?” she asks suddenly, still looking at the others, then looks at me.

“Me?” I ask quietly.

She nods.

“Eighteen.”

“And these boys?”

I shrug again. “Fourteen, fifteen, some sixteen. Mostly pretty young.”

“Mother,” she calls suddenly. A few boys jump. The other woman comes back into the room.

“All of these boys are illegal,” says Ava, flinging her arm out towards the line of boys. “Too young to be married, and yet they’ve had to escape their wives.”

She sighs, looking at her daughter. “Ava-“

“You wanted me to cooperate,” she says, then jerks her head at me. “He’s eighteen.”

“The clean one?” asks her mother with a hint of a smile.

Ava gives her a half-grin. “If you get these boys to a home.”

Her mother sighs. “Ava, you already agreed-”

“I agreed to a new husband?” she interrupts. “One I actually get to chose this time?”

Her mother stares at her, her eyes hard.

“I appreciate it,” says Ava dryly. “I’ll appreciate it more if you do it right.”

Her mother sighs again, but turns back to the door. She opens it and leans out, saying a few quiet words to the people outside. This time, when the black-clothed women enter the room, they do not force the boys into the back of the truck. They escort them all, except me, out the door.

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“Come, Ava,” says her mother quietly. “Tell Bayan to take the boy.”

Ava watches her leave, and soon after, another man comes into the room. Ava nods to him, then turns back to me.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. I don’t answer.

“I already have a prominent,” she continues. “I just don’t have any children.”

Her eyes flicker to mine again, and then she turns away. “But if you want to stay clean, you will.”

And with that, she follows her mother out.

I become aware that my mouth is slightly open, and close it, then look at the man. He raises his eyebrows at me. I take a deep breath. “What do I do now?”

He shrugs, then gestures to the door. “You come with me.

“And your name?” he asks once we’re out in the hallway. I look at him, then follow him outside. He opens the side door to a car for me. Once he gets in the driver’s seat I answer. “Aberworth.”

He nods but doesn’t say anything, and we start to move. I’ve never been in a car before.

The moments pass in silence. I don’t know where he’s taking me. I don’t know where he learned to drive. “Are you-”

“I’m not married to Miss Ava, no,” he says quietly, not looking at me. “I just work for her mother.”

“But you know her.”

He glances at me, then looks back at the road.

“Why did she free the other boys? Send them to a home?”

Bayan laughs slightly, then stops the car. I don’t know where we are. “One thing to learn early on is that the opinions of Miss Ava and her mother often clash.”

And with this, he leads me somewhere else.

I still don’t know where I am. I don’t know where Ava is or the other husbands or the mother or my sister or the other boys are. All I know is that Bayan has parked in a garage of a house that he is now leading me into, and I am following.

We pass no one as we go up the stairs, and he brings me into a room with four doors and three windows and two beds and one mirror. He points to one of the beds. “Yours.”

He then places his hands on my shoulders and makes me sit in the chair. I watch him in the mirror as he tries to organize my hair so it sticks up less. Then he spins me around so I’m facing him, and studies my face for a second before suddenly grabbing my chin. I feel his hand against my cheek and then a sharp pain above my eye. “Ow!”

He smiles slightly, showing me the tiny hair clenched between the metal prongs of a pair of tweezers. He’s pulling out my eyebrows. He’s still holding my chin and I can’t look away, and for a good third of the hour he plucks and studies and decides and plucks again. When he spins me back around to face the mirror to attack my hair with a comb, I look at my eyebrows, still stinging a little. They’re shaped nicely so that everything about me looks like an artist’s design, and the illusion is complete when Bayan manages to get my hair to lie flat.

He spins me around again and I start to get dizzy. He then gestures to the pair of doors. “That’s another bedroom, but yours is out here.” He points to another door. “That’s the closet. There’s clothes in there, they’ll probably fit you but you can let me or Miss Ava know if not. And that’s the bathroom,” he finishes, pointing to the final door. “Miss Ava’s bedroom connects to it too, from the other side.”

“Wonderful,” I murmur.

“May I give you a word of warning,” said Bayan suddenly, turning back to me. The question doesn’t sound much like a question at all. “Miss Ava doesn’t have a bad side to get on, not when it comes to you.”

I look at him. He continues, his voice low. “With Miss Lilly, though, her mother, you start on her bad side. You know to be careful, but know of whom.”

He slips through the door to the bathroom, and someone knocks on the door to the hallway. I jump, startled by the abruptness of it all, and turn to see Ava’s mother. My mother, now, I suppose, my mother-in-law.

She doesn’t give any sign of having heard Bayan. She just looks me up and down, then goes into the closet and pulls out a different sweater and a pair of pants. “Dress.”

I take them from her, and for a moment she stands. I’m afraid she’s going to watch me change, but she goes out into the hallway, and I quickly change and then open the door. She looks at me again, then places her hand on my shoulder and leads me down the stairs. On the second floor landing, she stops and gently pushes me up against the wall. “You don’t want this marriage.”

I stare at her. How do I answer that? Of course I don’t. She’s holding legal papers in her other hand.

“You’re getting into it anyway. My daughter chose you. You do whatever she says, you make her happy. I’m sure you know how it goes.”

With this, she grabs my shoulder again and drags me out to the backyard.

Ava’s sitting on the stone barrier around the fountain, another cigarette between her fingers. She has two other husbands. One of them is sitting by her feet on the ground, leaning against the stone with a book in hand, his blond hair falling into his eyes. The other is lounging next to her, and the only thing I can see of his head is his spiky black hair because his arm is over his face.

“Ava,” says Miss Lilly, her mother, quietly. Her nails dig like claws into my shoulder and Ava takes a long drag from her cigarette and says through a cloud of smoke, “Let go of him.”

Her mother does, which surprises me. She sighs, however, and shows Ava the papers she has clenched in her hand. “Come inside for a moment.”

“Just do it here,” she answers, and Miss Lilly raises her eyebrows. “In front of them?”

She gestures to the other boys as if they aren’t there. Ava shrugs, glancing at them. Neither has reacted to the conversation at all. “They don’t care.”

Ava gestures me to sit down next to her, and after her mother gives me a slight push I hesitantly do. She takes the papers from her mother and lies them flat between us, and then takes my hand with the fingers not currently occupied by a cigarette and swiftly dips my thumb into the water.

I wince, but she just presses my thumb onto the paper where a small box outlines a textured section. When Ava lets go of me I can see small swirling lines left by my finger. Ava snaps at her mother and holds her hand out, and she hands her a pen. She signs her name deftly at the bottom, then collects the papers again, all with one hand, and shoves them back in her mother’s face.

She takes them back, unperturbed, but when Ava stands, she holds up her hand. “Ah, wait.”

“For what?” asks her daughter.

“Stay out here a moment more. Get to know him.”

Ava raises her eyebrows at her mother, but she just turns on her heel, papers in hand, and starts back towards the house. Ava sighs, then inhales on her cigarette and glances at me. “Well, this is awkward.”

The black-haired boy lying on the stones with his arm over his eyes snorts.

“Shut up,” responds Ava, and neither of them react, save a slight smile on the blond boy’s lips. Ava jerks her head at him. “You can share a room with Nua. That one.”

Nua grins a little more, not looking up from his book, and Ava suddenly looks over at her other husband. The black-haired boy has removed his arm from over his eyes and is staring at her. She stares back for a second, her jaw clenching, and then she swallows. She coughs slightly and inhales on her cigarette again. I think she blows the smoke out her nose as she heads inside.

Once she’s gone, he stands, brushing himself off, and wanders off into the flowers. I exhale, glancing at the fountain. As I look up at the tall stone structure in the middle water starts to spurt out of the top, and I jump.

The blond one grins slightly. “It’s a fountain.”

“I know,” I say quietly. He doesn’t look up from his book. Nua, she said.

“That’s Keol. He’s the prominent.”

I nod, glancing over at him, then back to Nua. They both look in physically good shape, solid if not strong, and there are no visible injuries that I can see marking their skin. “What was the water for?”

Nua laughs slightly, turning another page. “On the paper? To get your fingerprint. It’s how you get married.”

“I just got married?” I say softly, and he grins at the pages of his book. “Yep, that was it. She signed her name, you gave your fingerprint, now you’re together and now you can’t ever leave.”

“Did you do that?” I ask, and he shrugs. “I signed too, but yes.”

“I could’ve signed,” I murmur, and he glances up at me, then raises his eyebrows. “Oh.”

“She didn’t seem too enthusiastic.”

He laughs slightly, glancing towards the house. “I’m not entirely sure she wanted another husband.”

I swallow, then nod. He turns a page in his book. I wonder how often he gets to come out here. “But you’re here now,” he says quietly, and I nod. He glances at me. “Aberworth?”

“Aber,” I say quietly, “is fine.”

He nods. “You should tell her that. Not sure how often she’s going to talk to you, but she would want to know.”

I glance back over to the house, looming over us, and Nua adds, “Oh, and she hates the whole ‘Miss Ava’ thing from us. Her mother is Miss Lilly, not that you’ll ever be addressing her, but just call her Ava.”

Miss Lilly and Miss Ava, just Ava. Trapping Bayan, Keol, Nua, and Aber here. I stare up at the house, and then lean my head back and close my eyes. I feel the spray of the water splashing into the fountain, and swallow. Where is Abigala?