by K A Riley
Matholook’s fingers curl into white-knuckled fists at his sides. “I didn’t do that.”
“I’m sorry. Perhaps it’s my misunderstanding. Didn’t you just agree that you’re Devoted?”
“I am. But I didn’t do that.”
“So you distinguish between yourself and your people?”
“Of course. I’m an individual, not an entire community.”
“I think the leaders of your Cult would disagree. Or do you pick and choose when you’re going to be a ‘you’ and when you’re going to be an ‘us’?”
When Matholook doesn’t answer, Angel Fire writes something on another sheet of crinkled paper and hands it to Silver-Scruff, who, clenched-jawed and tucking his gun under the lapel of his bathrobe, turns and passes the sheet to a second, shorter man—this one stocky, bare-chested, and hairy as a bear—standing next to one of the banks of lights.
“You are being charged with murder and will be held as a prisoner of war,” Angel Fire declares, turning back with dramatic grandiosity to face Matholook.
I’m tempted to step forward and correct him. Despite what he and the Outposters claim, I still say there’s no way the Devoted would have killed all those people like that. And they sure as frack didn’t kill Mattea.
I think?
But I can’t imagine that raising my hand and pointing any of that out would go over very well.
“That’s Matholook,” Ignacio growls. His voice full of impatience and annoyance, he toggles his thumb between himself, Libra, Sara, Arlo, and me. “He’s Devoted. What about the rest of us?”
I want to tell him to shut it and let this play out. His bravado is amusing in the Academy and helpful in battle, but this is a delicate situation that calls for a bit more discretion and self-control.
“We have something special in mind for you,” Angel Fire announces with what I think is supposed to be a cheeky grin, but from here, it just looks like he’s got a bad case of gas. “You are nameless. Unable to hear yourselves. You are on the run from Death. It’s a race you can’t hope to win, and it’s the trying to do so that will ensure your loss. Do you have the power to live?”
The power to live?
Sweating and still huffing for breath in the steaming, enclosed trailer, we can only answer with blank stares. While we mill in place trying to figure out what the frack this baby-faced chabbie is talking about, he raises both arms in the air, his oversized plaid jacket bunching up around his ears.
With even more emphasis the second time, he shouts out, “Do you have the power to live?”
He pumps his fists in the air a few times, but then stops and whips around to scowl at the woman behind him. “That’s your cue, Zephora!” he barks.
Flustered and blushing, the woman called Zephora—her bathrobe falling partly open before she manages to clutch its panels together around her chest—says, “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” and springs into action, grabbing the hand of Silver-Scruff as they both go bolting backward behind the bank of lights.
As the two of them disappear behind a heavy red curtain, Angel Fire turns back to apologize to me and my friends. “Don’t mind Zephora,” he grins. “She hasn’t been the same since she got her head stuck in a radiator grill of a military utility jeep a few years back. Still, she’s loyal, and nobody’s better than her at running our enemies through the Death Games.”
I’m about to laugh, but then the weight of what he just said hits me.
Um…Death Games?
15
Selected
The woman called Zephora and the silver-scruffed man return right away, each wheeling an angled, seven-foot tall lollipop-shaped object covered in a glossy black cloth.
The man positions one of the tall objects on the floor to one side of Angel Fire’s desk and presses his boot to a silver bar on the wheels, locking it upright and into place. The woman does the same with the second covered object, repeating the man’s motion of standing the round-topped post upright and locking it down to the floor of the trailer.
Looking like a pair of tall, swarthy ghosts, the two, black-clad stanchions sway with the rocking motion of the trailer.
At Angel Fire’s direction, accompanied by an overly dramatic roll of his hands, the man and the woman slide the black sheets off of the twin objects to reveal two crude-looking clocks, each attached to the top of a metal pole.
Except instead of twelve like with traditional clocks, these clock faces are numbered in a circle of lightbulbs up to six with the oversized numbers scrawled in yellow chalk in what looks like the handwriting of a small child.
While we’re taking all this in, Zephora ducks down behind the big desk and draws out a silver, ice cream cone shaped microphone from one of the desk drawers and slides it into Angel Fire’s waiting hand.
Tapping the head of the cordless microphone three times, she breathes into it and whispers, “Angel, Angel, Angel…Governor Angel Fire,” her voice bouncing off the trailer’s steel walls and ceiling and echoing in haunting waves from behind, in front, and all around us.
Thanking her, Angel Fire gives another head tilt and gestures to the shorter, bare-chested, hairy man standing in the shadows back by the red curtain.
There’s an explosive grind of metal on metal that has me and my friends, startled, scrunched down, and clamping our hands over our ears. To our shock, the steel roof over our heads magically starts to peel back, sardine-can style. With the steaming hot lights turned off now and folded into recessed pockets in its panels, the truck’s long rooftop rolls open, a single section at a time and with a grating clunk-thunk-chunk, until the blazing sunlight from overhead fills the steel-walled trailer.
As we put our arms up against the burning sun beating down on us, the trailer’s four walls roll down as well. Grinding down in rolled-up sections, the walls disappear into fifty-foot-long metal storage lockers running the length of the trailer’s sides until we’re exposed on the open platform of what has morphed from a boxed-in trailer to a wide-open flatbed.
As if it’s being chaperoned, the flatbed is flanked to the left and right by a pair of similar, open flatbed trailers. Only these two escort vehicles are loaded with steep, steel bleachers, filled with cheering and jeering members of the Unsettled.
Together, the three trailers chugging along, side-by-side-by-side, form a sort of rolling amphitheater among the rest of the roving city.
With us smack dab in the middle as the main event.
The whole thing is deafeningly loud. Libra still has her hands clamped to her ears and her chin tucked down to her chest in a futile effort to turtle herself away from the throbbing, bone-rattling clatter.
“You live in a school,” Angel Fire announces into the microphone. Peppered with static and feedback, his amplified voice pounds out from a dozen clunky black speakers—square as a nightstand and squat as a knot of toads—set up facing in and out along the four edges of our trailer and held in place with a combination of rope, black tape, and heavy links of silver chains that rattle against the sides of the trundling rig. “I’m sure you have all kinds of fun activities to go along with your classes. Well, here’s one you might enjoy. We’re going to play a game.” He turns to Zephora. “Give them an intro.”
Zephora, easily old enough to be Angel Fire’s mother (and, with their thin bones, oil-slick hair, and pouty lips, they even sort of look alike), shuffles forward, eyes down. With trembling fingers, she takes the microphone from him like it’s a live hand-grenade.
With the crowds murmuring on either side of us from their bleachers or from the ground around us, she casts her eyes to the floor for a full five seconds before raising her head to address us. “You have been selected by Angel Fire, Governor of the Unsettled, for execution,” she announces. Sad-eyed, sallow-skinned, and doing her best to hold her bathrobe shut with one hand while she grips the microphone with the other, she says the words robotically and by rote. Her facial expression barely changes as she speaks. “You have been consumed by the Unsettled, the Purifiers of the Plains.
Lords of the Lowlands. Disinfectants of the Deserts. However, in his great and magnificent mercy, Angel Fire, Governor of the Unsettled, has agreed to allow you the chance to settle your debts. Let it not be said that the Unsettled are savage or without mercy or reason. This game will end with a winner and a corpse. Which you end up as is up to you. You may select one of your group to represent the rest.”
Angel Fire snatches the microphone from Zephora’s hand and shoves her backward. She staggers into the arms of Silver-Scruff, who delicately escorts her into the backstage darkness behind the heavy, blood-red curtain separating the now-open flatbed from its smoke-belching cab up front.
It’s odd seeing the kids in charge and the older Unsettled treated like kids. I thought that kind of reversal would sit well with me, but it doesn’t.
Angel Fire lowers his head for several seconds while the crowds around us mumble and buzz. The few dozen spectators in the flatbeds on either side of us are joined in their murmuring by what must be a few hundred more teenagers, packed ten-deep and walking alongside of us.
“It’s called…,” Angel Fire drones for dramatic effect and then pauses. With a big, looping arc, he tilts the microphone out toward the escort trailers and their dozens of teen and pre-teen rowdy riders and the walking crowds around us, who all scream in unison over the roar of engines and the thrum of tires, “Debate! To! The! Death!”
“That’s right!” Angel Fire cries, tilting the microphone back toward his mouth. “A game of fun, a trial for truth, and a debate to the death. You’ll love it!” He promises. “Or hate it,” he adds from behind his hand and to the whoops and cheers of the seated and marching spectators. “It all depends on how you do! Let’s have some fun!” Turning to us, he adds, “If you’re going to die, you might as well die playing a game, right?”
“How about if we don’t play the game and we don’t die?” Ignacio mutters from behind me.
“I doubt that’s an option,” I mutter back.
Angel Fire hands the microphone to a stringy-haired girl who can’t be much older than ten or eleven years old. Her dress is a burlap sack cinched at the waist with a length of braided wire. She’s barefoot, and the skin on her legs is patchy with ashy scales. Her voice is strained and mousy as she cheerily blasts off a list of rules, halting here and there as she struggles to pronounce some of the bigger words.
“The Governor hereby challenges your…repro…representative to intel…intellectual mortal combat. A Battle of the Brains. The Governor will present a topic for consideration.”
(She badly botches the word “consideration,” and it takes me a full three seconds to figure out what she said.)
“Your repro…representative will debate the topic with Governor Angel Fire,” she struggles on. “Every point you win will get you closer to freedom. Every point the Governor wins will get you closer to being a snack for the vultures.”
When I hear the word “snack,” my heart does a little jump. We’ve heard about how the Unsettled sometimes eat people, so knowing our dead bodies might wind up in the gullet of a buzzard instead of chopped up as dinner for the Unsettled is a strange sort of relief.
“And now,” the little girl announces with a grand squeak like a carnival barker on helium, “let the Debate to the Death begin!”
16
Debate
The hooting kids on the trailer to the right of ours part way for twelve teenagers dressed head to toe in yellow robes with baggy sleeves and deep, oversized hoods.
One by one, the yellow-clad figures hop up onto the moving trailer and take their seats in the front row, stooping under a canvas shade-awning as they go and plopping down one at a time onto the long steel bench.
The girl in the lead is a tower of height, with traces of wild, purple and black hair bursting out in a frizzy mane from under her hood. Like motherless ducklings, the twelve teens waddle up, apparently arranged by height, with the last of the brood a wisp of a boy whose oversized robe seems to envelop him as he takes his seat at the far end of the silver bench.
Governor Angel Fire, microphone in hand, paces back and forth and prowls the edges of our flatbed, calling out to the assembled crowds all around us as he goes. “The Arbiters,” he cries, pointing to the twelve ducklings, “are prepared to judge. Are you all prepared to bear witness?”
The seated crowds and the ones walking on the ground roar their confirmation.
“Debate!” Angel Fire shrieks into the microphone.
“To the death!” the audiences holler back.
He does this a whole whack of times, skulking back and forth on our flatbed like an undersized panther with a pelt of fur too big for his adolescent body.
He whoops the Unsettled on the two flanking rigs into a frenzy. (Except for the twelve hooded ducklings. Like all of us, they shift and jostle with the motion of the flatbeds, but otherwise, they stay stone-faced and stock-still.)
Angel Fire’s voice competes with the grumbling engines, grinding gears, the whooping Unsettled spectators, and the thrum of thousands of treads and tires from countless vehicles spread out over miles of barren, red desert.
The speakers convert Angel Fire’s thin, flimsy voice into a crisp, metallic roar.
“Today,” he announces to the assembled crowds, “we will be debating the idea of Emergents. Not their existence, mind you. That’s a fait accompli. A given.”
The crowds boo and hurl pellets of crumpled aluminum foil at us. It’s harmless, but disproportionately annoying, and I’ve got half a mind to leap across the few feet of space from our flatbed to one of the ones next to us and single-handedly separate the heads of a few of the obnoxious chuffers from their jostling, trash-throwing bodies.
Microphone clenched in both hands and pressed to his lips, Angel Fire continues to skulk around our flatbed. “Emergents have been rumors. They’ve been myths. They’ve been experiments. They’ve been a weapon in Krug’s arsenal and a thorn in his side. And they’ve been hailed and feared as the harbinger of human extinction.”
The boos and jeers of the crowds turn into a few light claps followed by a round of scattered, tepid applause.
“What Emergents have not been is judged.”
Now, the crowds burst into a full-on, fist-pumping hail of rowdy shouts.
Angel Fire wags his finger. “Today, that will change.”
He does a one-hundred-eighty degree pivot on his heel, toggling between the two flatbeds accompanying ours and then scanning all the fist-pumping spectators on the ground, who are shuffling along and pushing themselves up onto each other’s shoulders to get a better view.
“Before the Port Grandstand,” he says, facing the open trailer on our left, “and the Starboard Grandstand,” he adds, facing the trailer on our right, “I will be arguing that Emergents—no matter how glorified—are more of a bane than a boon. More devil than angel. And more of a danger than they’re worth. I will be debating for fun. The accused will be debating for their lives.”
The crowds filling the so-called Port and Starboard Grandstands break into a coordinated chant of “For—their—lives!” and rain down another volley of aluminum foil balls at us.
Growling, Ignacio takes a step toward one of the flanking rigs. Even though he’s not impulsive or dumb enough to try to take them on, Arlo clamps a preventative hand onto his collar and drags him back into our huddled group, just in case.
I slip my own hand into Matholook’s before I even realize I’ve done it. His fingers curl around mine, and he draws me closer to him so my shoulder is pressed snugly against his upper arm. Although the flatbed continues to pitch and toss and despite Angel Fire sounding like he’s about to sentence us all to death, I feel oddly secure.
Angel Fire trots over toward the Starboard Grandstand where he motions for the twelve hooded ducklings to rise.
Spinning back in a dainty pirouette to face us, he announces, “You will hereby be judged by the Jury of the Unsettled. They will ensure fairness throughout the debate.”
; “Right,” I mumble. “Totally fair to get judged by the same people who’ve already condemned you.”
Angel Fire paces perilously close to the edge of the flatbed with a gap of only a few feet of empty desert space between him and the twelve yellow ducklings. “Matholook is charged with murder,” he informs the hooded jury. “The rest of the prisoners you see behind me are being charged with being Emergents.”
“He’s no murderer! And being an Emergent isn’t a crime!” I shout across the space between us.
Angel Fire whips around to face me. “No,” he grins. “It’s multiple crimes.”
He slaps the microphone onto his palm three times before raising it back to his mouth, puckering his lips like he’s about to give it a sloppy kiss. “You have been accused of a crime. That makes you, by definition, a criminal.”
The crowds around us boo and hiss. Some of them throw more foil and smooth white pebbles at us until they’re told to stop by the guards of the Unsettled flanking them on either side.
Watching over the crowds, the guards are all adults—male and female and a few whose gender I can’t tell at all—and are all olive or mocha-skinned like most of the Unsettled. Robust and muscular, they’re all topless but are wearing rainbow-striped haram pants. They each have a black leather strap running diagonally across their bare chest with a three-foot machete hanging from their hip. Male or female or androgynous (in London, they’d be called “Sexbrids”), they’re also all completely hairless. No head hair. No body hair. No eyebrows. It’s hard to tell from here, but I don’t think they even have eyelashes. Like the duckling jurors, their stoic focus stands in stark contrast to the rowdy crowds of teens around them. Their colorful pants scream fun and frivolity. Their knives and faces scream death.
Angel Fire paces in front of me and my five friends. He pauses in front of Ignacio and inspects him head to toe before giving him an impressed nod. Shaking his head, he plants himself directly in front of me. “You are violations of evolution and of technology.”
