by K. L. Kettle
The rage pulls up from the floor but there’s nowhere to put it, so it spins inside me. No more dancing. No more laughing, or winking to the crowd. No more it’ll be OK, kid. No more I can fix this.
I can hear the Chancellor’s beetroot-pink tongue click. We simply take their minds, she said.
He’s not dead. I wish he was.
*
Seconds. They pull me away.
Minutes. They carry Walker up to the top floor as I follow. Everyone’s talking. I want to know if they can they fix him and what does it mean, and how did he get here and why?
Hours. He hasn’t moved and neither have I. I’m waiting for a twitch, a blink, a shuffle.
There’s no smile. No wink. No only kidding, son, which will make me hate him for a second and then never, ever, ever again.
He’s only here because of you, you say.
No. I refuse to believe this is my fault. This is her. This is the Chancellor.
In the corner of the room on the top floor of the hospital is a folded suit on a lonely chair. The sand-splattered toes of his shoes peep out from underneath. I tried to hang his suit up. There was nowhere to put it. His jacket still smells like him.
They don’t think he’ll survive. Vor said the procedure the doctors performed on him wasn’t successful. She didn’t say it out loud but it’s obvious that they botched it on purpose.
The Hysterics have already started leaving, dozens of them, out into the desert. I won’t go, not until Walker is stable, not until they can take him too. And I know what’s at stake. I know the Lice could come any second, and I know Ro won’t leave without me, but I can’t leave him.
My heart’s hot and then I’m tearing at his suit fabric, the perfect stitching, the neat seams. There has to be something! Something to tell me everything will be all right, that I can do this. That I’m not alone.
Walker designed his suits himself, had Madam Cramp put secret pockets in the lining. I shake the contents inside on to the floor: a merit book, the slips torn away; an old folded map of High House; a tin of black boot‑polish; a tube of hair oil. That’s everything that’s left of him. As I flip through his merit book, a small piece of paper flutters from its pages.
Everything slows down as it lands. It’s folded into a shape. A perfect paper dog.
My hands shake as I bend to pick it up, see the little pin marks in the paper. I run my thumb over them.
Coward.
As Ro sweeps into the room, the lantern in her hand swinging, I push the note behind my back. She’s flustered, angry.
“Are you coming?” she asks. “Everyone left is going back with Vor.”
I’m holding my breath. My whole body has gone cold. Is the message from you to Walker? Or is it to me? It’s like the note before Swims, the one the infirmary prentice delivered.
Clang go the doors. Click go the lights – little red boxes above the doors to warn of the fog.
“We’ve missed the storm window. Fog’s in. But … we can make it, Jude.”
“We can’t,” I say. Vor said pinheads won’t survive the desert.
“There are plenty of fog masks.”
Vor made me promise to go with Ro. But now…
The note crinkles in my fist.
“Jude, are you listening? We have to go. He didn’t walk to the hospital. The police are distracting us. Waiting. We have to go!”
“Not without Walker,” I repeat.
*
Hurrying with torches in our hands, we follow Cora and Haz who carry Walker between them on a makeshift stretcher.
There’s energy below. Hysterics laughing, clapping, ripples of excitement up and down. Ro’s nervous, I can tell, keeps looking back, stopping at strange sounds. At one point she even reaches out to take my hand, but I jump. Your note’s still held tight.
“What is that?” she asks.
I close my hand tighter and try to keep moving but she fights for it. Convinced she won’t be able to read it, I finally let go.
“Where … where did you get this?” Ro snaps, unfurling the scrunched-up paper.
“It’s nothing.”
I’ve got to know her face well since Reserves: the scar on her chin; the nick in her ear (a birth defect, she said); the way she rolls her green eyes when Vor talks, or lifts an eyebrow when I make a joke that’s not funny. But I’ve never seen this face: she’s worried. She runs her finger over the bumps. She can read darktext?
“Jude?” she says. Her hands are shaking. “Please, she’s playing you. Using him. It’s what she does for entertainment, for power. When she wants something, she takes it, or she takes what you love and she twists it!”
We’re alone, the twins and Walker lost in the distance. Why is everything suddenly so quiet?
Ro takes a breath, about to speak, when a boom rolls under us and the whole hospital shakes.
Through the Hysterics’ screams comes another whoosh; an explosion shreds the floor below our feet.
Barricades from the ancient windows shatter around us. Rubble and dust and wood and smoke.
And then we’re falling.
Three days until last year’s Reserves.
It was the final chance to put our names forward to our House Fathers. If I hadn’t done it that year, then I’d have only had one more year left. At seventeen, without a guardian, Father Jai would sell me to the mines. After that, we get too strong, he says, less trainable, so no woman would buy us. The nightmares had already started, of ceilings so low I could never stand, of darkness and dust and a dry mouth, of scraping at the rock with torn nails.
Last year’s auction was a fail for both of us but at fifteen this would be our best shot. Still, I wasn’t going to put my name in without knowing you’d done it too.
That year Rodders could afford to buy his way in but he decided to wait a year. In his appointments, one of the top-floor madams promised him she’d consider a bid if he took more care of himself.
He smacked his gut. “No more extra shakes for me, boys. I’m hitting the gym. This time next year I’ll be twenty pounds lighter and so hot the ladies will have to cough up much meritage. To the treadmill!” he proclaimed, standing up at the table. “Oi, Judy, you coming?”
“Really… Judy? We’re going with that now?” I’d sighed.
“Meet you there.” It was Saturday – no appointments. First to the gym could get in an hour’s work before your beefcake friends tossed them out.
You were over at your regular table with the gym boys. I knew you’d been working with Walker. It was no secret. Mr Walker’s favourite. He’d paid for your entry price. He’d arranged a special audition for you. And so on.
I kept wondering what would happen if you found out it was all because of me.
Two older prentice from the House of Entertainment had come into the dorms one day looking for the boy that wore the silver ring on his thumb. We all wondered if you were in trouble for bragging – good boys don’t brag.
Not long after that the rumour started: Walker was grooming a successor. Was I wrong? Had you impressed him more than me at your first audition, after all? Either way, you were back, and I had nothing to do with it so it was safe to tell you about the audition now, right? We’d laugh about it, and you’d be grateful and we wouldn’t tell anyone, it’d be our secret. But Vinnie and the others kept guard over you. Shut me out of the gym when I tried to talk to you. And if you weren’t in the gym, or lessons, you were in endless appointments.
So I made a plan. A note on a scrap of paper I’d saved … spent ages learning to fold it into a little man, like you could.
I was going to bribe some V-dorm boy to slip the note on to your lunch tray. I knew if I got caught I’d risk a beating from your mates, didn’t want that before auction. Bruises don’t get bids. But I had to get your attention…
We need to talk.
JG
Every breath of air coughs out of my body. There’s a jamming ache in my ribs that stabs as I try to stand. The smoke spikes at my eyeballs when I b
link through it. Dragging myself forwards, searching for shapes in the swimming black. This isn’t a normal darkness. I’m climbing through a black soup that burns in my chest. When I call out for help, I can’t hear my words for the ringing. Everything is dark and I don’t have my ears.
Can’t stop. Must keep moving or I’ll choke.
“Ro?” I shout, searching through the debris. I don’t know this place. In the appointment rooms, I’d rely on my other senses but here there’s too much noise.
I find fabric, an arm, and move my shaking hands with care to reach the familiar twists of Ro’s hair. She doesn’t stir. There’s blood in her hair, sticky and warm. Calling her name again is useless, so I pick her up with one huge shout, to stifle the pain in my side. It takes both arms to carry Ro, her body clutched against mine. I fight through the thick smoke, coughing against the brick dust clagging my throat.
Not just smoke, there’s that acrid stink too as the fog seeps in through the shattered walls.
The click and whine in my head starts to pop and I hear shouts up ahead. Or it could just be the sound of my aching head collapsing in on itself.
Bootsteps pass. I stumble forwards until a wall stops me. Us. Her heart’s still beating. I can feel it against me. Maybe we’re dancing, that’s all, dancing like before. The Lice aren’t coming. We have time. For a beat, it feels true.
A hand grabs at me, trying to take Ro away. I shout out and the noise is from somewhere animal inside. Kicking against flesh, swinging at shadows, over and over and over.
“Fine, then keep moving!” shouts a voice. Vor’s, I think. “Basement, now!”
A handful of Hysterics push ahead of us and I follow. My arms are shaking under Ro’s weight as the floor slopes, spiked with broken rubble.
As we move, a single slender needle of green light slices through the black beside me. At first I think it’s my eyes, damaged by the blast.
Then there’s another. Another. Coming from behind us, and Vor’s voice shouting louder.
I keep moving, biting down hard to stop myself from crying out from the pain in my side. Above my head bullets squeal through the air.
There’s a thud beside me.
And another. Another. Everywhere a green light touches, a Hysteric falls.
Thud. Thud. The corridors fill with flashes, the tang of hot copper and smoke and panic, as one by one, around us, the Lice fire into the dark.
I duck, move to the side.
Did some of them get out? Vor promised the Hysterics would go back for my brothers, for you! They can’t help if they’re all dead!
“Jude?” says a voice in the chaos. Ro’s hands hold tight round my shoulders as she opens her eyes.
“Jude, I’m OK.” She pushes against me until I put her down. She’s limping, coughing too, but she can walk. So we keep going together, as fast as we can, dodging the lights, scrambling over rubble, bodies, through smoke mixed with curling dark fog, holding each other up until I can’t move any more. There’s a strong smell of oil and engines. We have to be close to the basement now.
“Keep going,” I say. “I’ll catch up.” Dizzy, sniffing away the sting in my nose, coughing and spitting on the floor until my lungs have emptied of smoke, I take a breath, catch my side as it sears with a pain I’ve never felt before.
Ro tries to help as I cry out but another group of Hysterics floods past, torches burning in the dark. This time I’ve not got the strength to stop them as they sweep Ro up. I can hear her trying to get back to me, calling my name. In their disappearing light, when I look down, there’s a glint. Something sticking out of my side. When I put my hand on it, I find a hunk of glass, as sharp as a knife, buried deep in my flesh.
As I lay my hand on it, everything in me seizes up from the waist down. But it’s not from the glass; it’s from the voice getting closer, bellowing orders at her officers.
Aspiner’s sharp shouts scratch at my ribs.
My nails drive so deep into my palms I’m certain they meet bone. But all my energy’s gone. I can’t walk. Can’t run.
“We’ll have to do two trips,” Aspiner tells her officers with that biting voice of hers. As the smoke settles, I can make out the open door that leads down to the basement, its struggling red light like a dying heart.
If I can keep the Lice away – stall them – it’ll all be OK. Vor can get to safety. She’ll send people to help you, Ro will go out into the desert and find her mum and—
“Hello,” Aspiner says from behind me, through the suck and hiss of her fog mask. “The Chancellor said we’d find you here.”
She flips a switch on something in her hand and I turn, bracing myself for the electricity of her baton to flash and burn my stomach. Instead, it’s torchlight she brandishes in my swollen eyes.
After a lot of blinking, I make out the other officers halfway down the corridor, searching through the bodies at their feet.
“Get the rest. Dead go on the truck, men to the mines,” Aspiner shouts. “You heard me!”
“No sign of Romali, Spinny,” squeaks one of the officers.
“That’s Madam Aspiner, Officer Holt,” Aspiner corrects her. Madam? Does she have enough merits now to lead the House of Peace? What if Vor’s been replaced already? Can she still help? “Check down the hall. No one’d be stupid enough to try to leave the building. Not with the fog out there.”
Aspiner turns to me. “What’s down there?” she asks, casting her torch beam towards the door.
“Pardon?” I say, remembering how she pretended not to hear me when she assaulted me at the ball. Show her I haven’t forgotten, that she doesn’t scare me, even if she does.
“Maybe you should show me?”
“Sorry?” I say with Walker’s butter-wouldn’t-melt special. “I didn’t catch that.”
She looks me up and down, repeating louder, “I said, maybe you should show—”
“Sorry? The explosion.” I point to my ears. “Maybe if you said please.”
She finally gets it, I think.
Aspiner pulls off her fog mask to look right at me, moving so close I can hear her swallow. “Funny boy. Half dead and still teasing, like you’ve something to prove.” She laughs, pushing against me.
Her torch picks out my wound, blood dropping red rain into the dust between us. “Tempted to go out into the fog?” she says. Catching me staring at her fog mask, she drops it at my feet. “Let’s see how far being pretty gets you.”
Then the worst happens. Ro calls my name from below.
Aspiner snaps into action, backing away, reaching for her gun.
“Wait, take me instead. You can let Ro leave,” I say.
Ro calls up again.
There’s no time left. I jam my fingers into the wound in my side and fumble for the glass. I try to imagine I’m digging out a bone from one of the slaughtered animals they brought to the kitchens. Not me. Only meat.
Aspiner won’t hesitate to lead her Lice below, to shoot Ro.
The peppery dew on my fingers from the smoke sears through every nerve as I drive deeper, pinch the hunk of glass and pull.
Launching myself forwards with a roar of pain, I crash into Aspiner. As she hits the floor, I raise the shard of glass and drive it down.
Aspiner rolls on the ground, howling and pawing at her burst eye.
Dropping the shard of glass and grasping my wounded side, I plough through the broken building towards the basement.
I just needed to get away. Didn’t mean to—
Don’t think! Run! Don’t look back! Out of the torchlight there’s just dark but my senses are sharp now, even in the dust. Hurried breaths bounce off walls, rubble. The firm fall of my feet, moving until I find the doorway, shut it, smack, lock it. Stairs, my feet tripping over each other as I claw my way down into the guts of the earth.
Always fun when they run, the Chancellor said.
Is it the fog or my wound making me dizzy? I feel my blood, warm, oozing through my skin, over my fingers. But I don’t stop.<
br />
Aspiner shouts from above as I hunt along the wall, searching for the end of the staircase with my fingers. I hear the Lice firing at the door, trying to get through.
Darkness breaks into light but I can’t stop looking at my shaking hands. Everything beyond them is a blur. There’s a mix of dust, blood. Mine? Aspiner’s? They don’t seem like my hands. The fingers seem longer, stronger, curling in and out slowly as if their grit-lined nails could scrape chunks from the world. These are the hands that put glass in Aspiner’s eye. Not me, not my hands.
“Jude?” Ro puts her rough hand to my neck, and I jump. “You’re shaking.”
She’s fussing at my side while I tell her it’s fine, fine. Maybe she’s pretending not to hear me.
There’s a bang above and the shaking in me stops. For a second, clarity. “Aspiner,” I say. “They’re coming.”
We’re trapped down here. In the dust and dry, everything as solid as the dorms except, even though I’m surrounded by people, I feel alone. So very far away. Things start to come into focus. Someone is shouting orders I can’t quite make out – Vor. Eli is searching for something to bind my side with. It’s bleeding too much, Ro says, stop shaking. Anyone any glue? Where’s the kit? Cora!
Why am I so cold? Is it cold down here? The air tastes of oil and copper. Pressing my hands in my armpits will warm them, hide them, stop them shaking. Everything reeks down here, like the kitchen generators but worse. It sticks in the nose. Ro presses a cloth to the gash and it brings out a growling swear word from my throat. Good boys don’t swear.
“Don’t think about it,” she says. “Whatever you did, you had to do.”
“She’s not dead,” I say. “I couldn’t.” Maybe I should have. Maybe that’s why I’m shaking, because I know she won’t stop, not now.
“Listen,” Ro whispers.
It’s quiet. Too quiet.
“We’ve got time,” she says, climbing kind fingers up my arm. Her hands. Her steadying hands. “They don’t know what we’ve got down here. They won’t waste bullets. They’ll wait it out.”
