The Boy I Am

by K. L. Kettle

  My body moves and I follow. The energy comes up from the earth. Every last bit of being alive that the Chancellor mocked me for being proud of; it’s made of soil and sweat, blood and tears, face paint and dust. All the wounds in the world wouldn’t stop me.

  Did you hear the story of the boy who danced? He never knew the moves but he refused to stay still.

  The Chancellor is calling for the Lice to take me away, I guess, but they haven’t come. No one in the audience has gone to fetch them. She’s almost screaming, that calm, soft voice cracking in her throat.

  And then, instead of voting, a pair of hands in the audience claps together and another woman joins in, another.

  “You’d rather he fall then? Like the rest?” she challenges her women, calling for her Lice again. Still no one comes. Where are they?

  My jacket is too heavy so I take it off. Find the music in the breath of the audience, the creaks of the lights, the stamp of my feet on the floor.

  “A hundred merits!” a woman shouts from the dark.

  She should be voting but instead she’s bidding. It’s not enough to buy my brothers. She’s bidding for me, I think. But she’s giving away her merits, any power, even if it wouldn’t work, to vote against the Chancellor, for what? I’ll be dead when I’m done. Can feel it with every step, the wound inside me stretching, tearing.

  The Chancellor barks at them to wait: I’m not for sale – I’m broken. But I don’t stop. I’m not dancing for them or their bids. I’m dancing because I still can. There are moments when I hear Walker counting out time, moments when it’s as if there are a thousand bodies onstage lifting me, twisting me, throwing me. Picking me up again. But with every move I keep my eyes on you.

  “Two hundred!” adds another voice.

  “He’s meant to go to the infirmary – he planned to kill me,” the Chancellor croaks at Madam Glassey, who moves out of the way as I spin round the stage.

  You point to your waist and then mine, with a twitch of your head, telling me to look down. I put my hand to my soaked side and feel my shirt heavy with sweat and blood, but I died long ago.

  I take off my shirt, discarding Walker’s armour on the stage because I don’t need it any more. I keep moving, now with the space to stretch my shoulders, as the women point and whisper.

  “Really?” the Chancellor shouts. “This is ridiculous.” But she knows I’m not going to play the game by her rules. If she wants to pinhead my brothers, me, it won’t be because I gave her an excuse.

  “Five hundred!” bids a woman from the circle.

  Six … seven … nine… The numbers climbing, over and on top of each other, each voice rising, more women jumping to their feet now. They may not live our lives but they’re hungry too, I guess, trapped, controlled, angry. Even if it’s only a small change, standing up to her, it’s enough.

  Another spotlight joins me from the rafters. Music too – the band in the pit striking up strings and drums and swells of sound.

  One thousand! Not enough to beat my reserve. Maybe the Lice will take those women away too. Maybe we’ll all be dragged off together. But still the Chancellor screams, still they don’t come. I kick off my new shoes: it’s better barefoot. My feet squeak as I twist. My eyes on you, your eyes on me. Daring you. You thought I was the good boy but I wasn’t. You’re the one who’s trapped by the rules. You forgot – there’s always another way to be free.

  As I trip on the curtains, my body lands on the stage with a clap. You laugh. But this is how I won you your life when Walker saw me dance. He’s here now, watching in the dark, applauding.

  I drag myself up. I’ll move until my body gives in and maybe the audience will tell the boys that follow – that’s what keeps pulling me to my feet.

  “Five thousand?” Glassey shouts at the audience, joining in with defiant glee. She even winks at me from behind her mask. “We can do better than that!”

  My body is heavy. It stumbles and drags, this way and that, from the edge of the stage, catching the light, letting it chase me. The string inside whips and tugs and jumps until parts of me begin to go numb but I won’t let that stop me. I’d move my little toe if was all that was left. I’d dance with my body glued to the floor. Even if my brothers don’t survive, the stories the audience tell will. Put on a show, Walker said. Tell them a story. It’s what I leave behind that makes my life worth living.

  Madam Glassey can’t keep up with the bids now.

  Despite the blinding lights, I can see the faces of the women in the dark. No more masks. They’re out of their seats, massed up against the stage. Over the music and cheers and bids and applause, I can hardly hear the Chancellor shouting. She’s the one on her own. And in those grey eyes, for the first time, there’s something like fear.

  The gash in my side is on fire as if someone is reaching inside, up through my ribs and squeezing my heart. I grunt through the pain, pushing out the last of my energy, and I jump, I spin and land on my back, smack.

  I hear shouts, tens then hundreds of thousands.

  Just one push, Walker said. He meant the Chancellor but maybe that’s all the women needed too. Every bid against her, defying her. They climb so high I can’t follow. I’ll let the stage swallow me whole.

  High above, the lights burn like the desert sun. With my eyes closed, I can go back to that. I can lie here and slip into dreams of it, of the rain hitting my face in the dark. The Lice probably went to stop Ro and the Hysterics but in my head they’re safe, and free, and I’m Outside, running, fighting monsters, with Ro, with my friends, with the friend I thought you were.

  “Six hundred thousand? Your very own rebel to tame!” Glassey laughs. The bidders have beaten the Chancellor’s reserve. I’m not hers. Never will be.

  “Any more? Going, go—” Glassey begins to close the bid as the Chancellor snatches the gavel. The music stutters to a halt.

  “He’s not for sale,” she spits.

  Pain sears through me in a scream as a foot presses down on my side, over my knuckles where my hand holds tight to sticky split stitches. The pain is like cold water crashing through me. Your shoes are polished white, perfect, except where they smear through my blood.

  “Are you done?” you say to me.

  “No!” The Chancellor tries to stop the bidding but the women keep shouting. “I have the reserve and he’s broken; he’s going to the infirmary,” she insists. “Mad. Mad from the desert. You saw, in the atrium, you all saw,” she says, quiet now. Not shouting for her Lice. Not pretending. Her plan hasn’t worked, no one voted, but she isn’t done.

  “Fine. Let’s do this another way. How much for the all the rest?” the Chancellor says. The sheen of her falls away, exposing the real her, underneath. Calm. Powerful.

  The audience stops. Silent.

  “The rest?” Glassey asks quietly. “But you can’t … there are rules…”

  “I wrote the rules. I own the House of Boys – I just need to cover their reserves,” the Chancellor snaps back at Glassey as if she’s an idiot. “The other boys’ reserves – all of them. How much?”

  Get them out, Aye-Aye said. All of them. In the dorms, are my brothers being rounded up, are they being taken away, are they fighting back? She’d planned this all along. They’re probably already in the infirmary.

  The Chancellor turns to the wings. Her doctors are waiting there.

  “Jude, I said are you done?” Vik asks again. It’s the first time you’ve said my name in years. It doesn’t sound right. The Chancellor’s silvery gun is in your hand, the one that shot the Gardener. Meant to stop me if I attacked the Chancellor, I guess. I was meant to attack, you were meant to save her and her vote would pass without debate.

  The women operating the spotlights don’t know where to point their beams. The Chancellor clicks her fingers but their beams land on me, not her.

  “Don’t you care about the others?” I ask.

  “They can be better,” you say.

  And then I’m laughing and can’t
stop. Because in the dark the audience are shouting, protesting. She’ll have to pinhead every woman in High House.

  “Stop it,” you say. Your fist comes out of the dark with a solid thud. You’ve been waiting a year to hit me that hard.

  “You’re meant to fight!” you shout.

  The Chancellor goes quiet as he follows with another hit. He’s strong, like the Roids, but I won’t hit back. “I’m sorry,” I manage to say and I mean it. I wanted a friend and when you weren’t that I hurt you.

  “Hit back!”

  I take each punch, each blow trying to drive me through the floor, through the concrete dorms, the dusty tunnels we grew up in, and into the mines.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again and again until you stop. And there you are, the boy you were, before I let you down.

  I’m dead already. You know it too. We both knew it the second the stitches in my side burst.

  The Chancellor hands the gavel back to Glassey. “Call it,” she says. “Now.”

  Silence drips through the stalls. Even the ancient chandeliers are still.

  “Call it!” the Chancellor orders.

  There’s a cough. “Excuse me?” a voice shouts and the room catches its breath.

  Finally. I’ve been waiting for that voice.

  The house lights go up, flooding the Great Theatre, showing every flaw in burning white light. The auction guests are surrounded by hundreds of dust-covered Hysterics, men and women, their weapons ready to fire as Ro steps up on to the stage.

  Ro addresses the crowd. “No need to panic… Ladies. Ladies, settle down!” she shouts until Glassey hands her the mic. “If we can all contain ourselves – sit, sit – you’ll soon be happy and at home. Let’s keep this peaceful, please.” Ro sounds like Vor. Her face fixed, no smiles.

  Despite the loud complaints of the crowd, Ro’s army of Hysterics surrounds the Chancellor. She doesn’t run as they troop up the aisles, come in from the wings. What does she know that they don’t?

  Where are you? You’ve gone.

  “We’ll find him,” Ro says, catching my eye. “Cora?”

  Cora waves at me before she disappears with a few of her friends into the wings to arrest you.

  “My brothers?” I ask as Ro reaches me.

  “Safe,” she says. “Otherwise we’d have got here sooner. We went straight to the dorms, the infirmary. There were Lice guarding them – it took some time.”

  “Ms Vor.” The Chancellor smiles and then sees the Chief ’s badge of office on Ro’s collar. “Or should I call you Madam Vor now?”

  “Call me what you like but it’ll be a waste of your last words,” Ro says as she points her gun at the Chancellor. “This is justice. For Walker, for my aunt, Vor, my mum … for everyone you’ve blackmailed, starved and killed, and lied to, for years of blaming. Call it a mercy.”

  Vor didn’t want anyone else to die. I try to stand but my head is so light it’s like I’ve drunk a gallon of Eli’s hooch. “She wanted a trial,” I fight out. “Vor.” Every breath is a struggle now.

  “Vor’s gone, Jude,” Ro reminds me, straightening as she says it.

  They say we’re killers. They say we started the Last War. They say we need protecting from ourselves. They say we’re dangerous. But we’re not that different.

  The Chancellor shakes her head, amused, as if I’m some animal that’s learned to speak. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “This is ridiculous, Romali. Shoot me and it’s you who is committing the crime. In front of all these people too. Not clever.” The Chancellor appeals to the audience. “A million merits and the position of Chief of Peace to the first to end this childish display.”

  Ro checks her weapon.

  “Ro,” I beg. “Don’t.”

  What the Chancellor is offering her women – merits, freedom, power – it’s more than any boy could dream of, even you. It’s enough to cover my debt … enough to cover yours. It’s a deal anyone might take a life for, I think, as you aim the Chancellor’s gun at Ro. I watch it flash as you fire.

  I’m already dead when I push Ro out of the way.

  Air catches in my throat, sour with smoke. I hear the bullet before I feel it. Can smell it too, that gunpowder, the cooking coppery blood. After the shot, the silence is a wound.

  Somewhere Ro’s army is wrestling you from the creaking wing staircase to the ground. You keep firing but in vain. The Chancellor only gave you one bullet. I wonder if she planned to have you pinheaded too.

  Somewhere the Chancellor is buckling with anger as my insides burst. Somewhere Ro is catching me. She won’t let me fall.

  “Don’t you dare…” she says. “Don’t.” But it’s not up to her what I do. I took the bullet because I wanted to. Because I could. I’m glad that the last thing I get to see is my friend. She knows I’m more than the skin I’m in, more than the blood in my veins. I’m the things I do. Did.

  “Who bid on Jude?” Ro asks Glassey. “The auction, who bid? How much?”

  “We didn’t close,” Glassey says.

  “Take everything, every merit. My bid, it’s enough for him, right?” Ro asks Madam Glassey.

  I try to argue. I don’t want anyone to buy me. I don’t need her to save me. But I can’t talk.

  Ro stiffens her jaw. “All of it. Check the books, my mum, Aunt Lorri … Vor too.” Those merits were meant to stop the vote, I try to say, but there’s not been a vote. “Everything!” she insists.

  “But that would mean—” Glassey protests.

  “I know,” Ro says. “Do it.”

  “No, I don’t want—” I try to say.

  “Shut up, Jude. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

  “Sold!” Madam Glassey sings.

  As the gavel hits, Romali Vor, my friend, my guardian, lifts her gun and puts a bullet in the Chancellor.

  One shot. Done. She doesn’t even look back.

  The House of Life doctors operated for days. Good doctors, Jai says when he comes to visit. The infirmary doctors are under arrest. I’m now missing something called a spleen. Nerve damage too. They tell me I’ll limp for the rest of my days and dancing won’t be so easy. “We can fix it for you,” they say, behind their surgical masks. I tell them no so fast they jump.

  The House of Life isn’t like the infirmary; no one cares about luxury here. These doctors are scientists, they say, interested in how my insides fit together not the shape of my nose. Everything seems to beep. Seventeen years ago, I was an egg in a dish up here. Feels right to be back as today’s my birthday. I’m a man now but I don’t feel like one.

  “It’s a shame,” Father Jai says, trying to be nice. “You weren’t that bad a dancer.”

  Father Jai snuck in a dictionary and a book that translates our dark-text into their letters. He says I’ve earned it. He’d been given it years ago by a woman who had favoured him. The first thing I look up is spleen. My reading is improving every day.

  “You don’t need a spleen, you’ve got plenty to go around,” Jai jokes.

  Spleen: an abdominal organ for the production and removal of blood cells. Part of the immune system.

  Or

  Bad temper.

  Father Jai is sort of funny, I guess. Nice to see a familiar face, even though he’s been behaving strangely since the auction. Not afraid, not mean, friendly even. They say he was the only one of the House Fathers that fought to keep the doctors from coming into the dorms. It’s probably thanks to him that my brothers didn’t get their heads spiked before Ro’s army intervened. The Chancellor started the process before she’d even got on to the stage, while I was getting pampered, preened, prepped to play my part. They lost a good dozen boys, Jai says.

  The second thing I look up is every swear word I’ve learned. That passes the time. Not enough time.

  I need to know what happened to you, to Ro, but no one will tell me. Beyond the windows of the House of Life, the sun rises and sets. I won’t ever tire of it.

  *

  Without a mask, Madam Glassey
’s face isn’t what I expected. It’s as round and bright as the moon. She flips through a big book with my name written on the spine. Licking her fingertips to turn each page, she shows me the last entry. My eyes bulge at the size of the number at the bottom. The book is my namesakes’ merit ledger.

  Glassey is almost excited. “Quite frankly, Mr Grant, you’re more merited than half the women in High House. If you were a girl, you’d be eligible for my job. Maybe even that will change now,” she says hopefully.

  I run my fingers over the bumps of the tattoo on my ankle and wonder how much debt is left against my name. “But what about my debt?”

  Glassey sighs. “Oh, my dear boy, you don’t understand. You have no debt. Quite the opposite. Romali Vor paid the Dunn family’s entire fortune for you. I have all the paperwork if you need to see it.”

  “But what does that mean?” I say, scratching at the stitches in my back. “Where is she? Aren’t I her ward now?”

  Madam Glassey rubs her warm cheeks. “It means … a big change. We’ve never had a free man in the Tower.”

  “I don’t have to go to the mines?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “No!”

  “Would Mr Walker’s rooms do for you, when you’re ready? The rent is surprisingly affordable for a top-floor apartment. Unless there’s somewhere you’d prefer?”

  There isn’t.

  “You’d be a good candidate for Head of the House of Boys too,” Glassey adds.

  I try sitting up straighter. “What about Vik?”

  “The mines… Since you survived, the Council agreed that the crime should be downgraded.” Madam Glassey leans in. “If you’d like, the House of Peace can overturn the decision?”

  “No,” I say. I don’t want you dead. “He only did it because of the Chancellor.”

  I’m not sure Glassey agrees. “Madam Lay offered him a defence – she heads up the House of Law. Argued insanity.”

  Even though you shot me, tried to kill Ro, it wasn’t insanity; you weren’t some broken toy. But I guess they need stories too.