Rather than yammering on comms and toying about with tablets, like the other Families’ assistants did, the Bressov assistants were hawk-like in their focus-fluffing the Bressovs’ skirt trains, fetching them drinks, taking down orders and relaying messages with all the choreographed precision of a military operation. The assistants came first, in tight tweed dresses and suits, hair tamed severely on men and women both. I saved my dazzle and wit for the Administrative interviewer, determined to prove that I, Raven Meadows, might be just the thing the Faudre Family was looking for-Īnd then the auditorium held its collective breath as the doors flew open. So when she frowned her pretty frown and passed me up as a potential Donor-I’ll admit, I was acne-prone back then, and too skinny from my family’s meager human rations-I heaved a sigh of relief and let my shoulders slump forward. The quiet, behind-the-scenes work of a Family’s administrative personnel-I’d have access to all of their business ventures, their finances, and, most of all, their secrets. Not the Donor’s work, gilded in gold but gone in a blink. When the first assistant started asking me questions, assessing my intelligence, hygiene, and temperament, her smooth chocolate skin perfectly buffed and supple the way few humans’ can afford to be, I said to myself: I want her job. Everyone wanted to think one of the Families would come along and pluck them out of our miserable lot in life and offer them the brief, decadent ride of a Donor. Lots of my classmates did, girls and boys, those originally slated for Labor and Administrative vocations both. As soon as the first Family assistant showed up, she plastered a sultry grin on her blood-red lips and moved like she was auditioning for a Spectacle in Uptown-all loose, languid limbs and swaying curves. I didn’t know much then, but I knew enough not to long for the glamorous life of one of the Families’ Donors. We stood on the stage, hair wrangled back into buns to display our soft, sunless necks, and answered the examiners’ questions in clipped, rehearsed paragraphs. It was my last day of Secondary, when all the wealthiest Families turned up to comb through us trembling, doe-eyed graduates for prospects.
I remember the first time I saw the Bressov family, the way you remember your first funeral or first Donation.
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