The cages were piled up like coffins: iron bars coated in rust and straw bedding that smelled of decomposition and misery. Each one carried a human. They were all numbered.
Lot 01911 was her number.
She didn't know whether she ever had a name. Perhaps. a long time ago. But names were for humans. Additionally, 01911 was no longer a human being. She was a stock. Sometimes meat. if she was fortunate enough to have one.
She sat with her legs drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her slender knees, and her chin resting on the bony curve. Her skin was pale, resembling paper and illness rather than porcelain. For years, she had never seen the sun. The stone floor was covered with bruise-like shadows from the softly humming overhead gas lamps.
Her hair was too filthy to shine, and it was knotted in lengthy, dark tangles. It covered her like a veil, a curtain, a shield. That was how she preferred it. It gave her the impression that she was less visible.
The bell rang over the store entrance.
She kept her head down.
The others moved a little in their cages. Even here, hope was a hard thing to suppress. To get a look at the purchaser, several people leaned forward. Others, as they had been instructed, knelt down beautifully. She just made herself tiny.
"Fresh delivery," the shopkeeper shouted. "Humans, clean-blooded. No illnesses. Not crazy. We've almost broken in a few of the high-spirited ones.
The sound of footsteps reverberated. Heavy and sluggish. 01911 squeezed closer to the rear of her cage, the kind that indicated someone significant. She knew better than to draw attention to herself.
They always favored the attractive ones. Or the powerful ones. Or the loud ones.
She wasn't any of those things.
"This one?" a voice asked. Perhaps a man. Or something that had once been one. "Thin."
"I lived here through two winters," the seller said, tapping the bar of her cage with the end of a cane. "Hardly any noise at all." eats little. There were no outbreaks. She was barely touched.
The cane pushed her face up by passing through the bars.
At 01911, there was a start.
Her wide, brown eyes betrayed a sense of silent terror. Her neck had lash marks, some faint and disappearing, while her arms and ankles had others. Like a defeated dog, she endured them without retaliation or self-respect. Only the monotonous pain of ownership.
"Does she speak?" the client inquired.
The seller stated, "Only when ordered. Number?"
She licked her chapped lips in 01911. Her voice was so low that it was almost a whisper. "Zero-one-nine-one-one."
"She smells like fear," the guy remarked as he observed her.
"She certainly does. She is, after all, still a person."
A break. "Not worth the coin," said the snort that followed. There was nothing in her; it was too silent.
As the buyer walked away, the seller gave her a disgusted stare and whispered, "You should try harder. Even rabbits learn to look pretty."
She remained silent.
She curled beneath the thin blanket they had thrown in months before, even though it smelled of mildew and mice, after the lights went out and the business became quiet. It was still her. The one thing there was.
A girl was crying into her hands in the adjacent cage. In the straw, a youngster threw up somewhere along the row.
Although she had never actually seen them, 01911 shut her eyes and retreated into her thoughts, where there were still trees and wind. Her recollections were hazy: lullabies without melody and voices without faces.
She didn't have fantasies about being free. It was excessive.
However, during the worst of the darkness, she occasionally wished that she would be called by a name. Any name.
Only once.