Escaping Eleven (Eleven Trilogy)

by Jerri Chisholm

  With a deep breath, I turn and face the Bowl myself, and my eyes sweep over the largest room in Compound Eleven, one that spans the second and third floor, even part of the fourth. The only room where the ceiling isn’t directly overhead. Black-and-white pendants hang from the rafters, along with large banners advertising upcoming matches—matches between well-known professional fighters.

  But this one must be just as well attended as those will be. Row after row, tier after tier, the seats are full. Except nobody sits. They all stand, stomp feet, clap hands. Scream.

  I bounce up and down and stare at the raised ring in the center of the Bowl. It is surrounded by blinding white lights that remind me of Preme lights. Lower Mean lights are dim, lone bulbs strung across a low ceiling at too-long intervals, strands of wire hanging between. The bleached Preme floor glitters by comparison. Powerful jobs, elaborate schooling, lavish living quarters. All a far cry from Lower Mean life.

  But sport fighting is a Mean game, and most of the fighters are second-floor Lower Means like myself. This is my turf, not his.

  I slap myself and relish the feeling of my heart hammering in my throat. I let the screaming crowd fill my ears, the thumping boots fill my veins. I stare at the glowing ring until my pupils tighten, until my muscles twitch.

  The ref puts down the loudspeaker and motions us forward.

  Chapter Three

  Immediately the crowd notices: We’ve left the confines of the tunnel. We’ve been released into the wild. If they were loud before, it is nothing compared to now. Their screams meld into one, and it fills my eardrums like liquid lead. It is so loud I can hear nothing at all.

  The glaring lights of the ring are still eighty paces away—I know the walk well, too well. A shoestring of space slithers before us, and fingers snatch at me with every step. Some yell, most boo. It is the Preme they are booing, not me. He’s the guest fighter, and an elite one at that. It is too bad I will disappoint them in the end.

  I will be disappointed, too. I don’t like to lose. I wonder, as the faces wash into a blur around me, whether it is a good trait or bad. My mother would say it is bad, that it is petty. Everything is petty, I suppose, when you’ve been to hell and back. But my father would think it’s good, a killer’s instinct.

  I find Maggie’s face in the crowd, and her lips are pressed into a tight line as she watches me. She doesn’t smile; she doesn’t yell. But she is strong-minded, and she knows I am, too. So she claps and nods encouragingly as I pass. Emerald cheers loudly next to her, and her hand clenches into a fist once our eyes meet. She believes in me.

  It is a shame she didn’t get paired with the Preme. Muscles ripple under her brown skin like she was born for this. She loves it—the fight, the crowds, the pain. She is one of the best, and she might even have a chance against the Preme.

  Hunter is next, and his face is paper-white. He doesn’t clap; he just gazes uneasily at the Preme. He is fearful for me, and it makes my insides squeeze so hard that I need a distraction.

  So I set my face into its most disinterested expression and glance over my shoulder at my opponent. Arms jostle me, but I barely notice, just as he seems not to notice the hands that paw at his chest. I can see it in his eyes. Danger. But something resembling fear, too. They sweep over the crowds too quickly; that is his tell. When his gaze meets mine, I smile. “Scared, Preme?”

  He says nothing. His eyes simply tick away, back to the masses. But his lips press together ever so slightly…

  The disinterest on my face isn’t just for show. It runs deep, and right now it courses from the chambers of my heart through to my extremities. The first punch will hurt, yes, just like the sting of lemon juice. Then I won’t notice.

  We climb into the ring and face each other under the lights. The ref has yet to follow, but once he does—once he climbs into the ring—the fight will begin. I shake out my arms and jump up and down.

  But the Preme just stands there, staring to the side. And once again, he distracts me.

  Finally I can take it no longer. “Wake up!” I shout from a foot away. I remember his words from inside the tunnel. “This is a fight, did you know?”

  His eyes narrow as they meet mine. “You feel like joking around right now? What’s wrong with you?” He shakes his head, and I stop bouncing. My arms drop to my sides.

  I take a step closer so he can hear every word. “Are all Premes this pissy? Oh, wait—stupid question.”

  “Do all Means think it’s normal to beat up girls?”

  I am silent. Now I know what is bothering him. He must have signed up for today’s fight on a whim, having no clue as to the rules—or lack thereof—that surround this most violent entertainment.

  “I can’t fight you,” he adds.

  I resume bouncing and smirk. “Who says you’re going to beat me up?”

  He gives me a look. “Come on.”

  Something inside me recoils at this unusual boy. At his gentlemanly nature. At his kindness. I liked it better when he was calling me a waste of his time. When he refused to listen to the ref. That is the kind of thing I expect from a Preme.

  So my arm twitches, and I punch him. I punch him hard, a right hook to the middle of the face. It is a hard smash, completely unprotected. A sucker punch, and the crowd goes wild.

  There are no rules, not here. The fight is on.

  He stumbles back a pace, his hand moving instinctively to a nose that now bleeds. I wanted to draw blood, and I have. My next goal is to stay on my feet for as long as possible. Do maximum harm until he knocks me out cold.

  I do not accept his refusal to fight.

  My next punch is knocked away, and it makes my forearm sting. Our eyes meet, and I see he is mad. He meant for that block to hurt. I swallow a smile and attack again, manage to land a hit to his ribs before I’m pushed backward with shocking force. He is strong. The moment he decides to fight, I am done for.

  “Stop it!” he yells. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  I kick the outside of his thigh and see him grimace. “No quitters allowed.” I launch another attack, but this time he stirs. His eyes flash, and he punches, lands a firm strike to my cheek before I can land one on him.

  It rattles my skull and lights fire to my skin, but then the sensation is gone and there is nothing left but dull, aching bone. I raise an eyebrow. “Looks like you can hit a girl after all.”

  “It didn’t feel that bad, either,” he snarls.

  He punches me low in the ribs, and I keel over, but only for a second. I force my spine to straighten.

  “I might feel bad,” he continues, “if you were even the least bit pleasant.” He launches forward, and a small bullet of panic streaks through me, but instead of hitting me, he grabs my arms and forces them behind my back. He pushes me against the ropes. It is an unusual thing to do and one I don’t resist, not yet.

  “You can’t move—it’s over!” he yells in my ear over the chanting of the crowd. “Tell the ref it’s over.”

  Instead I drive my knee up, making him groan loudly, making his head knock backward with pain.

  A heartbeat later, he cracks his skull into my face, and my eyesight is lost in a sea of red. My face is warm and slippery wet. The cheering fans sound a million miles away, and my brain sizzles from the impact. My neck feels like a wet noodle.

  He is cruel, I think.

  It was a cheap shot, a dangerous one. But I suppose I set the tone, punching before the fight began.

  Before I can see again, he releases my arms and hits me square in the stomach. It sends bile to my mouth, and for an instant I’m transported back in time, to when I was just nine years old. It was my first fight, and my opponent was a thirteen-year-old boy, seemingly twice my size and with a fierce temper. The terror is what I remember. The twist of his lip as he toyed with me. I shook with fear, enough that vomit started up my throat, tasting
just like now. And then he clobbered me. Strangely enough, I don’t remember much about the fight itself. Only the fear before it.

  I give myself a shake, force my mind to the present. Relax, Eve. The lemon juice has spilled. The first jolt of pain—real pain—has arrived. The rest doesn’t matter. Not really.

  I block his next punch with my wrist and ignore the stinging of bone on bone, instead landing an elbow under his chin that I know must jar his brain. Then I kick him again, full impact. Guys don’t often kick, so they never expect it.

  Another punch of his finds me, this one to the jaw. This one hard. It knocks me down, and before I can pull myself up again, he is over me, his chest rising and falling quickly like he has sprinted across the Bowl instead of tossing me around ten square feet of it. Even with blood coating his face, he is handsome.

  It makes me like him even less. I try another punch, but he grabs my fist and squeezes it until I wince. Danger streaks loudly across his eyes, much louder than before.

  “Stop!” I shriek before I mean to. But my bones will buckle soon.

  He freezes. “Stop? Is that what you said?” His head turns to look for the ref. He is desperate to be finished—I can see that. More desperate than me.

  I use his momentary distraction to my advantage. My loose fist connects with his eye socket, forcing him back. It makes my knuckles scream, even through the wrapping. But it hurts him more, I am sure of it.

  The crowd howls. It is a good fight; I am doing Blue Circuit proud.

  “Stop fighting!” he screams at me. Instead I launch myself at him.

  He punches me so hard I find myself on the floor before I know what has happened. When I open my eyes, there is only blackness. My palms feel the coolness of the ring floor, and though every cell screams with unbearable pain, I push. Up. Up. Keep fighting. At all costs.

  But something hits me on the back of the head. Something hard. It feels solid, cold. Like metal. Are there weapons allowed in here? Maybe it was the Preme’s foot. Maybe it was his fist. Maybe it was his head. Maybe I should let sleep take me because that is all I really want to do right now. Get away from his flashing eyes.

  If I could just lay my head down.

  But it is down, I can feel that now. My cheek is pressed to the floor. Has it always been there?

  Perhaps the fight hasn’t started yet. Maybe the day hasn’t, either. Yes, that’s it. I’m in my cell now. Go back to sleep, Eve.

  I let my eyes fall shut, or maybe they already were. Next I let myself fall sideways. Down and away. Gone.

  Chapter Four

  I turn right. Ten paces, left. Seven paces, right. Fifteen paces, left. There is no need to count it out. I know this route like the back of my hand; it will be the thirty-fifth time. This is the corridor where the fluorescent light shudders overhead; it always does. Turn right. This corridor has doors leading off it, important ones, ones I must be mindful of. Everything is important up here on the fifth floor. The Preme floor. Turn right. Another right. I stand before a brushed metal door and enter the code. 11000535. I turn the handle, but there’s no give. It’s locked; it didn’t work. But I already knew that. I have tried that code before.

  Now my eyes are awash with light. Sunlight. It is the first time I have seen it, and it squeezes out everything else in my field of vision. It is blinding. I must have found a way into the Oracle after all.

  “Why are you smiling?” comes a voice many miles away. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can’t place it. But I have heard it before, I am sure of it.

  Slowly my eyes pull open, but I see nothing. No light, no darkness. Nothing. I close them again. Where am I? I am not trying to break into the Oracle on the fifth floor, I realize that now. And I am certainly not inside the Oracle. I have been sleeping. Dreaming. I open my eyes again and lift my head, but it is too painful. It thumps with blood, and my neck screams.

  Moving my hand, my fingers—it’s no better. Pounding throbs, sharp aches. All over, in every joint and tendon.

  So I am still, except for my eyes that blink and blink, again and again, until slowly vision returns. A lone lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, and a wire dangles from it. So I am on the second floor. That is good. That is my floor. My Lower Mean floor.

  But I am not in my cell. The air is different. Thinner. The smell of cleaner lingers.

  “How are you feeling?” comes that voice again. I frown. I can’t place it no matter how hard I try. I will have to lift my head to see who the speaker is. I take a deep breath and squeeze my stomach muscles, pull my neck. The pain makes me grit my teeth, but right now I don’t care who sees.

  Until I realize who it is.

  The Preme. He sits on a chair beside me, his arm resting easily on his knee. A black T-shirt stretches over his chest.

  I draw in a breath and force myself to sit the rest of the way up. Every muscle, ligament, and tendon rallies against my movement, but I am determined. And this time I don’t let the pain show on my face. Because I don’t know why he is here, with me, and I don’t know where here is. Two things that put me at a disadvantage.

  Straightaway I ask, “Where am I?”

  “You should probably lie down.”

  My eyes slide to his. There is no malice there, not from him. But I can feel it froth in my stomach. Not for putting me in so much pain. He had to. And by the looks of his bruised face, I put him through some pain of his own. A sharp purple line rides under his eye where the skin has split. And a yellow bruise runs alongside his nose and under the chin.

  Not bad work, Eve.

  In truth, I don’t know why I feel so much malice, aside from the fact that he is wearing jeans and looks clean and relaxed, and I am still in the clothes I wore during the fight—blood-splattered and coated in sweat—and in a foreign place with this foreign boy who until now has been watching me sleep.

  “Where am I?” I ask, louder this time.

  “Nurse’s station.” He shrugs. “I’m guessing by the way you fight, you’ve been here before. Am I wrong?”

  “And let me guess, you came to gloat. Typical Preme.”

  His eyes narrow. “You know…” His voice trails off, and he shakes his head.

  With some effort, I lie back down on the well-worn mattress. I stare at the ceiling. I don’t care what he was going to say; I’m not interested. He is a Preme. I am a Lower Mean. It is ingrained in us not to like each other; it has been ingrained in us since civilization first moved down here all those years ago. Since the wealthiest and most powerful families aboveground established themselves on the fifth floor, and those less fortunate were slotted down here in our own slice of hell. So instead of thinking about him for another second, I think about what I am going to do.

  The last place I want to be is the nurse’s station. Only losers wind up in the nurse’s station after a fight. If word gets around… I need to go. It’s bad enough I lost, but to lose to a Preme? I need to go now. Except my insides scream in agony every time I move, and it will be a far walk back to my cell unassisted. My head pounds so hard I can barely keep my eyes open, the lighting too much for my warped brain, though it is dim. Lower Mean dim.

  Time to ignore the pain.

  I shove one foot off the mattress, then the other. I pull myself to sitting, breathing through my teeth as my feet dangle to the floor. Bare toes skim its cool surface, and I focus on this sensation alone.

  “Are you kidding?” His back is straight now, and his arms are folded over his chest. “You need to lie down. You need to rest.”

  “I’m fine,” I snap. “And I certainly don’t need you telling me what to do. Just get out of here, okay?” I let my head fall forward until it rests in my palm and dry scales of blood curl under my fingers. My long blond hair hangs over my shoulder, and it is twisted with burgundy.

  He stands abruptly and then sits again. He is strange for a Preme. I can’t put
my finger on it.

  “Here’s the thing,” he says, and I can hear his low voice tense up like a coil. “When I threw my name in to fight, I didn’t know.” He stares at the floor, eyes flashing darkly.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “Nobody mentioned that I’d be paired up against…”

  I watch him closely as he runs a hand through his hair. His discomfort is thick between us. It feels good to watch him sweat.

  “A girl?” I finally offer.

  He looks at me and shrugs. “I had no idea,” he says plainly.

  I frown. I don’t know how to feel. Offended that he thinks I am weak just because of my gender? Touched by his chivalry? I decide on the former. “Don’t do me any favors, all right? I fight guys all the time. Usually I beat them. Today I didn’t. No big deal.”

  His voice darkens. “I tried to get you to stop. I kept telling you to stop fighting. But you just wouldn’t give up. I had no choice…” His voice fades away, and his gaze licks at my wounds, trickles down the bloodstains.

  So this is what it’s about. He feels guilty because he beat up a girl. Something they don’t do on the fifth floor, evidently. Where they are civilized. And now he needs me to tell him it’s okay. That I’m fine. No hard feelings.

  Only I don’t want to appease him. But I also don’t want him to think I am weak. “I hope I get the chance to fight you again,” is all I can think to say. My voice is calm, earnest, my face once again disinterested. “Now that I know what kind of cheap shots you Premes take.”

  Quickly his eyes narrow into a scowl. “You punched me before the ref was even in the ring.”

  I have the sudden urge to burst into laughter. But I hold it in. “Just watch your back, okay? Us Lower Means fight for the fun of it, in the Bowl and out. Preeminates like you are delicate.”

  He leans forward, and I see anger dart across his eyes. “We’re alone right now. Want me to finish you off?”

  A hot rush of anger spreads through my chest, but before I can raise a fist, he laughs.