The Book of V.

about this?” she asks two girls standing nearby. They look at her, then walk away. Esther has gained a reputation in the night station. She scrubs herself apathetically, refuses the oils and perfumes, does nothing to ameliorate her hair situation, though it’s growing out more quickly than she’d like and she can’t get Mona—the night-station mother—or any of the eunuchs to bring her scissors. Early on, when she was still begging them on a daily basis, another girl lay down on her bed without asking and said, Don’t bother, of course they won’t allow scissors, they’re afraid we might hurt ourselves, and Esther, seeing that she was honest, befriended her. She is Esther’s only friend, a Babylonian named Lara whose problem—the extent of which was discovered only after she was chosen for the final forty—has been deemed her excess of hair. Her hair is like a fur, running from her nape to her crack, and from her navel to her cleft. Esther finds these warm paths beautiful, and knows that in the camp they would be objects of envy, but here, Lara is shaven. Her skin burns from shaving and every day she is shaven again. Lara and Esther have in common one language, Farsi, and one goal: neither will become queen and both will go home. They decided this from the start, when the rest of the girls were still high from being among the chosen and still besotted with the comforts of the night station. Every one of them is from the traveling, impoverished tribes. The families of means understood that when a man in power is done with a noble queen he is done with nobility—he wants a woman accustomed to some degree of suffering, a woman who can’t afford to question. They understood that they didn’t want their daughters following Vashti. So it was left to girls from desperate places and peoples, orphans and daughters of whores and daughters of slaves and daughters of failed rebellions and daughters on the verge of being sold into slavery.

In the early weeks, even Esther and Lara had to admit that life in the station was easier in most ways than the lives they lived outside. They were given as much food and wine as they wanted. They slept on mattresses as thick as four pallets. There was no work required of them, no hauling or washing or planting or cooking. They walked only as far as the dressing room, the hair room, the face room. All they had to do was prepare. All they had to do was keep living.

But even the most enthusiastic of the girls now understands that this particular sort of ease can be unbearable. They understand that they are essentially slaves—and that only one of them will be freed. Their response is to fight, like dozens of crows going after the same bone. They hoard wires and ribbons and animal hair and bird feathers for their hair towers, whatever the eunuchs will smuggle in to them for whatever services they’ll perform for the eunuchs. This, too, they understand: they do work in the night station, albeit a particular kind of work, the oldest kind. They hide, they steal, they sabotage one another. They also braid each other’s hair, and take turns putting on finger-shadow plays about the king and Queen Vashti, and make each other laugh. They have to, or they’ll go crazy. Another old story. They have to despise and depend on each other.

The night station is not as Marduk thought: a brutal prison or a luxurious bathhouse. Evil or pure. Like nearly everything, it is neither, and both.

Lara and Esther are different from the other girls in that they believe that the one chosen as queen won’t actually be free. Lara’s tribe is anarchic and violent—anyone who tries to lead, man or woman, is swiftly killed. The palace, she says, is nothing but a facade, with the queen at the center of its hidden misery. Esther’s view, while less extreme, bears similar fruit: as a Jew she was raised to mistrust people who are worshipped, and as the daughter of her particular parents, she was taught to judge those who aspire to wealth and power. Both girls believe themselves superior to other people, subject to different rules, or in Lara’s case no rules at all. Between them they have created a third option, an alternate plot in which they will be released. Each has begun cultivating her own eunuch; she gives him something, but not too much. Esther’s is tall and too thin and has heavy eyelids and a soft mouth that make him look perpetually half-asleep. She lets him watch her. They meet in the room where the sheets and towels are stacked and she touches herself while he watches. One breast. That’s all, for now. Soon, she’ll introduce a second—later, she’ll lift her cloth. The eunuchs are nothing like girls, it turns out. Their voices aren’t high, despite what historians will report. They are not sexless. She has watched them hold a girl down until she licked another eunuch’s asshole, stick fingers into any place a finger can be stuck, make girls lie beneath them on the floor in the defecation room. Her eunuch is not like that. Baraz is his name, and she chose him for his fealty, perceived it in him as palpably as a scent. Though she doesn’t trust him fully yet, she trusts this. He touches her only with his eyes. The idea is that little by little, Esther will agitate and titillate him to such a degree that eventually he will do whatever she asks. The idea is that after the king has finally chosen, and Esther is not queen, she will go to him and say: Get me out. Do anything you want to me. I’ll do anything, if you’ll bring me back to the camp. And by that point his anguish will be such that he’ll do anything to have her.

Lara chose her eunuch