Kill School: Slice

by Karen Carr

  The gym takes up an entire building on campus. The polished wooden floor is painted with dividing lines, numbers, and circles. Basketball nets are on both sides of the court and a row of bleachers has been pushed up against the wall.

  Messier is happy to see me, so happy that he gives me a giant hug. I give out a little yelp as he crushes my ribs and reminds me of my injuries. I see long thin swords next to helmets and other gear on the floor.

  Messier explains to us how we are going to do some warms ups first before we get our weapons.

  “Everyone, get your partners,” Messier says. “Aria, you’ll be partnered with Jane today.”

  I stand across from a girl with straight black hair that looks somewhat familiar.

  “Hi, I’m Aria,” I say. I step forward to shake her hand.

  Jane ignores my outreached hand.

  “You don’t remember me.” Jane folds her arms across her chest. “We go to school together.”

  I did it again. Jane. That’s how I know her. The girl in the waiting room at the post office. The girl with the emerald token. If we had switched places, she would be stuck with amethyst and I would get to kill an old person.

  “Sure,” I say. “Jane. We go to school together. Sure.” I don’t sound so sure. “It’s been a long couple of days.” I say.

  “I know,” Jane says. She glares at me. “I visited Erwin in the infirmary. He’s really broken up.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I say. “He attacked me.”

  “That’s not what he told me,” Jane says. “He says you attacked him and then got your boyfriend to finish the job.”

  “My boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  Jane puts her hands on her hips.

  “Well, I do and his name is Erwin,” she says.

  I now have to fence with someone whom obviously hates me because she thinks I beat up her boyfriend.

  Messier blows a whistle and tells us to gather around. He takes us through some simple movements, like bending knees, jumping, switching weight on our feet. We do this for another half an hour. The stretching actually makes my ribs feel better. I’m beginning to be able to breathe naturally again.

  Messier blows his whistle again.

  “That’s enough. Let’s get suited up.”

  Messier hands me a mask, a front zipped jacket and some gloves. He hands Jane the same. After Jane and I are suited up, he hands us our swords.

  “Go easy on her,” Messier says to Jane. “She’s missed a few classes.”

  Before we begin to fence, Messier takes us through a few lunges and then sends us to practice with our partners.

  It turns out Jane is not very good at fencing. Even though I’ve missed a few classes, I easily master the moves. After ten minutes of lunging, I’ve hit Jane six times. Every time I touch her jacket, a light flickers and she lets out a yelp, as if I’m hurting her. Each time, her yelp gets louder and louder. Finally, she throws her sword on the floor and storms over to Messier. I storm after her.

  “She’s cheating,” Jane says.

  Messier’s eyebrows raise in astonishment. He presses a hand to his forehead.

  “Well, that’s a first,” Messier says. “Cheating in the lunge. I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

  “It is,” Jane says, sounding even more pathetic. “She’s lunging too far. She’s so much taller than me that I can’t reach her.”

  “Oh, she’s cheating by height,” Messier says. “I’ve heard of that. Well, it’s time to switch weapons.”

  Messier calls attention to the rest of the class.

  “We will spend the rest of class on the short bladed attacks. Return your weapons.” He picks up an inflatable dummy. “Your partners will be rubber. Don’t be afraid to cut them. They’ll deflate little by little. They will also repair themselves.”

  We return our uniforms and Messier hands out small daggers and dummies. Jack lines up next to me and we take turns watching one another shred our dummies. Jack has named him Cutie Pie after a favorite toy of his sister’s.

  “Cutie Pie is going to die,” Jack says as he stabs the stuffed figure in the gut. “Uppercut.” He smiles and bows.

  Messier comes over to give us some tips. He points to the most vulnerable places. Below the ribs. The neck between the collarbones. The back, near the kidneys. I slice and lunge and slice some more. I slice so much that it becomes natural.

  The rest of the day passes in a blur. After slice, we have some free time and then dinner. I eat a salad and then skulk back to the cabin, ready to collapse. When the day is over, I’m relieved. I crawl up into my bunk and immediately fall asleep.

  I wake up hours later, unable to get back to sleep. The scientist’s words swirl in my mind. Organ donation. Burke said she was gossiping, but he wasn’t there. My eyes sting when I think of Burke dying.

  I need to find out more about Barstow and the tokens. There must be some way of stopping the killing without having to regenerate Burke’s body. The book that Burke stole from the library must have some answers. Hopefully, he still has it tucked away in his bunk.

  I open my curtain and jump off my bed, practicing my stealth moves to Burke’s bunk. Everyone appears to be sound asleep, breathing softly, or snoring. No sniffles or whimpering tonight.

  I walk down the narrow space between table and the girl’s row of bunk beds to Burke’s bed in the back. The heavy curtain is closed. I touch the velvety fabric while I try to work up the courage to open his curtain. No one likes to be woken up in the middle of the night.

  All at once, hands emerge from behind the curtains, and pull me onto Burke’s bed. Burke presses his body against mine. I feel the blade of a knife under my chin.

  “Burke,” I whisper. I don’t move.

  “Aria?” Burke pulls the knife away but he doesn’t remove his body from mine. “What are you doing?”

  “Practicing my sneaking,” I whisper. “Can you get off of me? You’re crushing my ribs.”

  Burke rolls off me, closes his curtains, and turns on a small light.

  “You hesitated at the curtain. That was your mistake,” he says.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you,” I say.

  The soft light follows Burke’s profile. I resist touching the scab that has formed on his jaw. It would be too inappropriate. It’s bad enough that I’m lying in his bed.

  Burke pulls me to the back of his bunk and opens a panel revealing a small space behind it.

  “My secret room,” Burke whispers. “Go on in.”

  “More like a closet,” I say. “Are you sure we can both fit?”

  “Just go,” he says.

  I squeeze through the small panel, which is a foot and a half wide and two feet tall. Burke follows me into the three by five foot carpeted room that is no more than an extension of his bunk. He closes the panel, turns on a lantern, and gestures at some pillows on the ground.

  “Have a seat,” he says.

  I sit on some pillows and he sits down next to me.

  “You are full of secrets,” I say.

  Burke touches my lips. I taste salt on his fingers.

  “We still have to keep our voices low,” he says. He keeps his eyes locked on mine. “You were right about Krish. I didn’t want the others to know.”

  “He wants to kill you?” I ask in a tone that comes out more like a siren.

  Burke puts his finger to his lip to shush me, and nods at the same time.

  “I had my suspicions,” he says. “He’s been trying to virtually duplicate my organs. Every time he fails, he gets more frustrated.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” I say, controlling my voice better. “I’ll use my token against him.”

  “That’s an awful idea,” Burke says.

  “Should I let him kill you?” I ask.

  Burke shakes his head.

  “I don’t like that idea either,” he says. “He’s not the worst of the Regulators, Aria. The only one you can trust is Azarian. Remember that if anything
should happen to me.”

  “What about Thorn?” I ask. “Apparently, she’s my grandmother.”

  “You can trust your mother,” Burke says. “There are reasons she doesn’t talk much to Thorn anymore. Reasons I’m not going to get into right now. There’s not enough time. We need to figure out how to break the algorithm. I think it’s our only chance.”

  It bugs me that Burke knows more about my mother’s family than I do and I’m not letting the subject drop that easily.

  “You think my mother would want me to kill Thorn?”

  “No, of course not,” Burke says.

  “I want to kill Krish. He has to go. I have to do it now.”

  “Relax, Aria,” Burke says. “You’re not going to kill anyone right now.”

  Vanessa’s words flash through my mind I don’t want to die. That’s why I have to die. I feel the same way. I don’t want to kill a Regulator, that’s why I have to do it now. I want to kill Krish so bad because I don’t want to have to kill anyone.

  Burke pulls a book out from under a pillow, Kalstein Barstow‘s biography. Trying to relax, I settle in next to Burke and look into the pages of the open book.

  “Find anything?” I ask.

  Burke’s side touches mine, from his arm, all the way down to his leg, as if we are glued together. It feels good and helps me relax.

  “Barstow was a bit of a freak,” Burke says. “He was married four times and never had any children. I don’t think he liked kids very much.”

  It turns out that Barstow’s favorite color was purple. He was a bit of a recluse until the old government asked him to help come up with a solution to the termination issues.

  “Before the token system, people had to report to termination centers,” Burke says.

  “I know. My mother told me,” I say. My tone must have been pretty acidic, because Burke stares at me.

  “Your mother will tell you much more,” Burke says. “I promise.”

  I break Burke’s stare and look back down at the book. His intensity is making my skin prickly.

  “They turned the old termination centers into control,” I say. “I can’t imagine being locked up in the same place people ended their lives.”

  “I am sure it is awful,” Burke says.

  I stare at a photo of Kalstein Barstow wearing a purple scarf wrapped around his neck. Deep wrinkles on either side of his eyes make him look happy, as if he has lived a life with a perpetual smile on his face.

  “Why do you think Barstow created an algorithm that forces people to kill kids?” I ask. “Was he that much of a monster?”

  Burke flips through some pages and stops at the dog-eared page.

  “I don’t think so,” Burke says. “This is the page Krish was reviewing in the library.”

  We are so close that I can feel the breath of Burke’s words on my ear.

  I scan the page. The history of the algorithm.

  “There weren’t ruby tokens in the beginning,” Burke says. He points to a picture. “Sapphire, emerald, and pearl were the only ones. Barstow created an algorithm that learns. He says it here. Shah was right.”

  I read the passage that Burke points out. Barstow developed the algorithm to learn from the data. It makes changes to itself depending on how many children are born. It recognizes patterns in the data and evolves to fix overpopulation issues.

  “The algorithm created the colors on its own?” I ask.

  Burke nods. “There are references to all of the colors. He seems to have worked out the categories beforehand in the event of another population problem. But Aria.”

  Burke turns to me to make sure he has my full attention.

  “I don’t think there’s a population problem. I believe one of the Regulators is feeding it the wrong data. And, before you use your token, we need to find out who it is. He or she should be your target, not Krish.”

  “How do you know?” I ask. “What if you are wrong? What if you wind up dead in Krish’s lab?”

  “I don’t know for sure, Aria. Promise me you will wait. Don’t do anything stupid. You are not even allowed to kill before you graduate.”

  “I promise that I won’t do anything stupid,” I repeat in a sarcastic tone.

  Burke and I stretch out on the pillows and continue reading Barstow’s biography. Leafing through the pictures, I see many illustrations from our history. Barstow lived in Greenland before the first great migration. It was his idea to bring everyone here after the weather changed. He built the camp in the same location as his original home. He used the credits he received from creating the token algorithm to build the camp, including the science building and the auditorium.

  Finally, I yawn.

  “You should go back to your bunk,” Burke says. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

  We squeeze through the panel and I climb across Burke’s bed, and sneak back into my bunk.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Burke’s shouts wake me in the middle of the night. His tone is loud and serious. Desperate. I’m vaguely aware of an alarm blasting across campus. A warning siren similar to the one they use for storms in the city.

  “Get up,” Burke yells. “Get out of bed. Now.” He pulls open my curtain. “Get to your feet. Put your galoshes on. Grab your brightest turquoise jacket. They won’t want to kill you if they see your color.”

  “Is this another prank?” Demi asks.

  “No, this is life or death urgent,” Burke says. “We’re being raided.”

  Within seconds, we’re all dressed and ready to go.

  “Listen up,” Burke says. “They’re here to kill. They want to get you before you finish camp. You are easy kills corralled in the cabin. We don’t know how many of them are out there. We have to get away from them as fast as possible. Follow me. Be swift. Don’t stop for anything. Those of you who have weapons, grab them now.”

  I scramble up my bunk, open my drawer, and take out the switchblade, the pocketknife, and the long pine needle that Vanessa gave me. Vanessa grabs a bag of her own. Shah joins Demi and Mateo comes to Vanessa’s side.

  Burke leads us out of the cabin. We pause for a moment on the porch. The cabin next to us is on fire. Kids are running all around. Other kids, ones in black and white camouflage tracksuits, and masks covering their face, run around and chase the campers. One of the kids has curly black hair, just like my brother. It can’t be him. Why would he come here to kill us?

  “Move, now,” Burke says. “All of you go to my special place where we did our stealth test. No one will find you there.”

  Most of the campers run off.

  “I’m not going,” Demi says with Shah next to her side. “I’m finding my siblings. I need to make sure they are safe.”

  A girl runs across the lawn toward the lake. Flames follow her as if she is on fire. Then I realize she is. Her shirt is on fire. Her hair is on fire. Her shrieks pierce the cold night air.

  “I’m helping Demi,” I say.

  “Me too,” Mateo says.

  Vanessa, Mateo, and I stand together. We are not going anywhere.

  “Fine,” Burke says. “Demi, you, and Shah go after Lily. Vanessa and Mateo see if you can find Matthew, he’s right next door. Aria and I will go after Jack.”

  Demi runs off followed by Shah hollering for her to wait up. Vanessa and Mateo run over to the neighboring cabin.

  Burke guides me to the side of the cabin. The eaves shadow us from our surroundings.

  “Time to practice your stealth,” Burke says. “We are going there.” He points to the cabin that is half in flames.

  Suddenly, several kids run toward our cabin.

  “Get back,” Burke says.

  I flatten myself against the wall. Several hooded figures with guns and torches run by. Their moving is rhythmic and practiced. More torches bob across the lawn to the far cabin.

  Burke grabs my hand and squeezes it.

  “Come on,” he says.

  Two more cabins light on fire. The flames s
ound like rushing Maglev trains. The air is thick with smoke, blotting out most of the stars. Sparks soar high up in the ever-darkening sky.

  Kids are running everywhere. A boy screams in pain as his shirt burns from his body. He drops and rolls on the ground. A hooded figure comes up next to him extending a knife in his hand.

  I freeze as I watch the hooded figure stab the burning kid in the kidneys. My stomach boils as if a knife has slid into it.

  The kid stops moving. The hooded figure removes his mask. I recognize him. It’s Chopstix.

  “He’s mine,” Chopstix yells. “See it, world.” He grasps the dead boy by the hair. “See my token trophy.”

  “Come on,” Burke says.

  My feet no longer work. My lunges burn with hot air.

  Burke drags me away. We arrive at the rear of Jack’s cabin before I am shaken back into reality. The front of the burning cabin sends clouds of black into the dark sky.

  Burke climbs onto the ledge above the showers and then helps me up. He tries to open the long and narrow window and curses when he can’t budge it. We search for something to break the window. Burke finds a mallet wedged between the wall and the showers and smashes the window.

  Smoke billows out, burning my eyes and almost making me lose my balance.

  “Stay here,” Burke says. “You’ll need to help them down.”

  “You can’t go in there,” I say. “There’s too much smoke.”

  “I have to,” he says. “Jack is in there. I can’t let him die.”

  Burke disappears into the smoke filled cabin. I wait a few grueling seconds before Burke reappears with a gasping Jack.

  “There’s more,” Burke says as he hands me Jack. “Get him down.”

  I help Jack down from the showers. He’s coughing and hurt, but alive.

  I help Jack move away from the cabin, into the snow. I want to get him to the woods, but they are still far away. Suddenly, I hear the unmistakable click of a gun.

  “Turn around slowly,” someone says. “Hands in the air.”

  I turn to see a boy pointing a shaking gun at me.

  “What color is your token?” he asks.