Weapons of War [YA Edition]

by Tracey Ward

  I stare at him in amazement, shocked by the confession that I have something he doesn’t. That I’m better than him in some small way. You don’t get information like that from Marlow. If you’re better than him, usually it means he’s going to kill you.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask cautiously.

  “Because I want you to understand the importance of why you’re going to the Stables. Those women make more money for this outfit than any of our other endeavors, and right now, they’re scared. Too scared to work. They need to feel safe and cared for. Protected. You can give them that. No one else in the Hive can.”

  I swallow roughly. “I can’t protect anyone.”

  “You better learn how.”

  “What about the fights?”

  “You don’t worry about that. You worry about you and those women and getting them back to work. That’s your job now. Nothing else.” He holds the ring out to me in his palm. “And I want you to take this.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I don’t care,” he replies coolly. “You’ll wear it and you’ll remember.”

  I bite my tongue as I reach out to take the ring from his hand. “Remember what exactly?”

  “What happens to men who don’t follow orders.” He kicks Lucio’s body, rolling it off the edge of the pier. It drops into the water with a loud splash. Marlow looks at me long and hard, his face blank. His eyes fire. “Remember where betraying me will get you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Trent – Twenty-One Years Old

  Ryan is asleep. His body is sprawled out at my feet, the soft tissue of his cheek pressed into the rough rock of the roof. That’s going to hurt when he wakes up.

  We’ve been up here in the Crow’s Nest all night waiting for Kevin to come back. I’ve watched the stars move across the sky. Watched the moon wane. Gray light is growing in the east and the city is slowly coming alive. Hunters are on the move, weapons in hand. Fishermen are casting their lines into the Sound. The girl with the fiery red hair slips through the shadows like a wisp of smoke. The Hornet stumbles back to the Hive – alone.

  And still no Kevin.

  I’m starting to worry. I don’t do that much. I don’t stress over problems; I solve them. But I don’t know if I can solve this. Without Kevin, Ryan and I… I don’t know what will happen. To either of us.

  “Ow,” Ryan complains quietly.

  He’s sitting up slow, his face peeling away from the tar and stone at my feet. His skin is raw, pecked with indentations left by the small, jagged stones. He sits back on his butt, his hand going to his cheek to rub it gingerly.

  “What time is it?” he mumbles.

  I squint at the sun, checking its position in the sky. “Coming up on six.”

  “He’s not back yet, is he?”

  “No,” I blink down at him. The wan sun has flared my vision. Ryan is a blurry black shadow slowly curling in on itself.

  “He must have spent the night with Freedom at The Hive,” Ryan reasons, pulling his knees in tight against his chest. He doesn’t meet my eyes. “She was really freaked out. He wouldn’t have left her like that.”

  “No. He wouldn’t.”

  Ryan very well might be right. I’ve been up watching all night, and while I can’t see the doors to the Hive from here, I can clearly see the path Kevin would take home. He hasn’t been on it, meaning he probably never left. And while that’s good because it would mean that he’s safe, the problem is that the Hive isn’t a charitable organization. If he spent the night, he paid a price. He’ll owe them a fight for free in exchange for shelter. And if they demand a Blind, I’ll go to the next Market and sell every valuable I own to make sure he doesn’t have to go through with it.

  “Is that him?” Ryan asks excitedly.

  I sit up straight, leaning over the edge of the rooftop to follow Ryan’s eager eyes. We’re a few miles from the Hyperion Theater where we live. This building is taller, more commanding of the city below. I think it used to be a bank on the bottom floor with miscellaneous offices stacked on top. It’s huge and almost completely covered in glass; at least it used to be before most of it was broken out, making it unlivable. It doesn’t matter to me, though. All I care about is the view.

  Below the street is cleared of cars, debris, and the tall grass that grows over the rest of the city. It’s heavily trodden by pretty much every gang out there. A main vein through town, it’s used by anyone going hunting in the overgrown parks or fishing off the heavily guarded and heavily taxed piers on the Sound. It’s a very uneven split of turf between the Hive, the Pikes, and the Westies. All of the other piers along the water were either destroyed or belong to the Colonies, and no one dares to go near them since the roundups started.

  It used to be the Colonies trolled the streets broadcasting a chance at safety. Go live with them and life would be like it used to be; safe and warm and so wholesome you could smell the apple pie for miles. That siren call worked for a while, but they got all the recruits they could out of us years ago, and they clearly weren’t satisfied. Now they’ve bypassed persuasion and moved right into kidnapping. Just last week I watched from this rooftop as three old moving vans strategically surrounded a group of Westies. Two manage to escape. One wasn’t so lucky. They threw him in the back of the van and took off toward the stadiums. At the next Market, I heard the guy hasn’t been seen since. He’s caged now. A stray dog taken off the street and domesticated, whether he wanted to be or not.

  We’ve since added the Colonists to our never-ending list of reasons to stay inside and never see daylight again. As if Risen weren’t enough of a problem.

  “No,” I answer Ryan evenly, my stomach clenching tight with disappointment. “That’s not Kevin. It’s an Eleven heading home.”

  “Damn,” Ryan curses under his breath.

  “Easy.”

  He frowns up at me. “What?”

  “Your brother wouldn’t like you talking like that.”

  “He’s not here, remember?”

  “He will be. Soon. Until then, I’m in charge.”

  “Says who?” Ryan challenges irritably.

  “Kevin. When we left The Hive. Until he gets back, you’re going to listen to me, and I said no swearing.”

  “You swear all the time.”

  “Because I’m a damn adult,” I mutter, squinting into my binoculars.

  There’s movement behind The Hive. People stepping out onto the dock. I can’t make out who they are, but there’s another one coming. Three total now. They stand in a tight circle near the water’s edge, talking calmly. One of them might be Marlow, but even my eyes can’t tell at this distance. All I know for sure is that none of them are Kevin. Wrong height, build, and coloring on all of them.

  “How long do we wait before we go looking for him?”

  “We don’t go looking for him,” I answer Ryan blandly, lowering my binoculars into my lap. My long fingers curl cold and loose around the black plastic. “We wait. That’s what he’d want us to do.”

  “He might need our help.”

  “He might not.”

  “Yeah, but he might.”

  “He might also be in bed with Freedom. You wanna interrupt that for him?”

  Ryan scowls up at me. “No.”

  “Then we sit tight. We wait.”

  “I hate waiting,” he grouses.

  “Yeah, most people do.”

  “You like it, don’t you?”

  “I like quiet.”

  Ryan isn’t a kid anymore, he’s just shy of his fifteenth birthday, and he’s learning to take hints. He picks up that one pretty quick, clamping his mouth shut.

  The truth is, I don’t love silence the way I used to. At the Hyperion, I’ve learned to deal with being surrounded by people. I’ve even grown to like it. It kind of reminds me of the Farm which reminds me of Zoe, a sensation that makes me sick and excited at the same time. Anxious and comfortable all in the same breath. It’s a strange mix of emotions but it’s
a strange world and, as everyone likes to remind me almost daily, I’m a strange guy. The kind of strange that sleeps on a hammock on the roof, even in the winter, because I can’t get that comfortable with people.

  Love them all you want, but the reality is that you might have to put a blade in their eye at any moment. That’s not a situation I want to wake up to. Better to be isolated when your guard is down, like when you’re sleeping or unloading your bowels in the park.

  “There he is!” Ryan exclaims. He leans against the edge of the roof, shouting down to the street. “Kevin!”

  I follow his eyes, straight to his brother.

  Kevin looks small and tired in the shadows of the building. We’re twenty-seven stories up, nearly a football field away, but when he waves at us, his easy-going smile is obvious. “Hey! What the hell are you guys doing up there?! I thought I told you to go home!”

  I hold up my binoculars for him to see. “Crow’s Nest has a better view! I can’t see this road from the Hyperion!”

  Kevin nods in understanding, tucking his hands in his pockets as he scans the street. It’s empty. No Risen. No threats. The morning is calm and quiet in a way that belies the night we’re rising out of. The violence. The anger. The sadness. None of that is visible in the gentle sheen of dew on the windows. In the slow roll of mist over the Sound.

  “I’m hungry!” Ryan yells at his brother.

  Kevin’s shoulders shake with laughter we can’t hear from here. “You’re always hungry,” he says.

  “What?!”

  “Nothing!” he shouts back at his brother. “Get down here! I’m hungry too!”

  ***

  The Hyperion Theater was built in 1933 by an overzealous New Yorker determined to bring the big stage to the Northwest. From the pictures that look out at you from dusty, cracked frames in the lobby, you can gather that it was a beautiful building in its day. Too bad for the theater and the New Yorker, that shine didn’t last. The theater folded within six years and its founder moved back east, forgetting his dreams. Leaving them to mold over decades of abandonment.

  Things have only gotten worse since the Risen came along.

  Now the carpets aren’t just ripped and mildewed. They’re stained with blood and other fluids that are better left unidentified. Every window has been busted out and replaced with thick planks of wood filtering in slender slits of daylight that etch across the floor in haphazard patterns. They lengthen and shrink with the hour, telling time as meticulously as the grand, gilded clock crumbling over the lobby once did. You just have to know how to read it. And I do. I taught every boy in this building how to read the sunlight. I’ve taught them a lot of things they were probably never meant to know. Things my dad taught me while other boys were learning how to catch a baseball or how to mow a lawn. I know how to skin an animal. How to purify stagnant water for drinking. How to kill.

  I teach them all of that and more in the Arena. Not the one in the Hive. That’s for showboating. For gambling and gaining notoriety. Here in the Hyperion, hidden in the damp basement, is our own Arena. A space we use to train to fight the Risen on the streets. Not for fame, but for survival. Kevin marked it out for us after his first few runs in the ring. We installed benches where he told us to. We built a cage around it where Kevin commanded. It doesn’t reach as tall as the real Arena’s cage – we couldn’t manage it with the low ceiling crisscrossed by pipes that run empty under the floors like veins under a Risen’s skin – but it’s good enough for us to train in. I use the tight space inside our mock Arena (the Marena, as Ryan calls it, no matter how many times I tell him not to) to simulate the confinement of an alleyway or a cluttered room or the top of a building where every edge is a death sentence. A free-fall to the other side. My classes aren’t as fun as Kevin’s. He teaches them how to fight at the Hive. He shows them how to kill with flare, which they love, but they aren’t allowed to take his class until they’ve completed mine.

  Braun before beauty, Kevin likes to say.

  Dylan is waiting for us when we get inside. He acts like it’s some kind of coincidence but I know he was worried. He probably paced this lobby all night waiting for us to come home, wondering if we’d all make it. Worrying he’d lose more family than he already has.

  As the doors are latched behind us, Kevin turns to Dylan. “What’s for breakfast?”

  His big voice echoes off the nearly empty space, rebounding around us until it’s everywhere.

  “Eggs,” Dylan answers. He smiles with mischief. “Hope you like ‘em scrambled.”

  “Bray’s cooking?” Ryan asks knowingly.

  “Yep. And that kid has two cooking techniques; scrambled and mashed.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll eat anything.”

  Dylan grins, ruffling Ryan’s hair affectionately.

  Ryan frowns as he ducks out from under the older man’s big hand.

  “I did too when I was your age,” Dylan tells him, not offended by the brush off.

  Dylan had kids in his life before this one. He had a wife, a job, and a house in the hills. I don’t know what he did, but he was good at it. He took care of his business and his family, and when it all died away, he formed this gang. He’s the genesis of the Hyperions, the oldest member by far. A father in an orphanage full of boys growing up unnaturally fast, unfailingly proud of every last one of us.

  It’s a comforting feeling for a lot of the guys, but for me it’s a constant reminder of a night seven years ago when I put a bullet in my father’s face and walked blindly into the rain and dark. It was a terrifying time for me. I could do without coming face to face with it every day.

  “Hunting party later?” Dylan asks me with a jut of his chin.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I heard from the Westies that they saw a bear on the edge of town last week. It spooked ‘em. I think everyone is hoping you’ll take care of it for them.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Do you really think you can take down a grizzly?” Ryan asks eagerly, his eyes bright with excitement.

  Ryan doesn’t look at me the way most people do – like I’m weird. Like I’m ‘freaky’ because I’m quiet. Intense. Intelligent. He looks at me the way he looks at Kevin. Like I’m cool.

  I shrug, giving him a grin. “No way to know but to try.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Kevin answers at the same time. He looks at me over Ryan’s head, shaking his own minutely. “Let Trent scout it first. We’ll go with him when he’s ready to hunt.”

  Ryan pouts but he doesn’t argue. That doesn’t mean he’s letting it go. Kevin will hear about this again later, a lot. Probably until he gives in and lets Ryan go with me, just to shut him up. But for now, Ryan follows the warm smell of food wafting through the halls because that’s the bigger pull for him at the moment. Kevin and I are close behind him, our footsteps muffled over the carpet.

  I thought we were going to have to rip out the red and gold checkered fabric when we first moved in. Every textile felt like an enemy at the time. I saw them as breeding grounds for mold that would seep into our lungs and kill us while we breathed. But the inside of the theater is kept surprisingly dry by a large, old furnace burning everything we can find to feed it. It sits behind the stage, pouring warmth through the building. It’s not hot, not by a long shot, but it’s warm enough to burn off the moisture trying to linger in the air. The sweat produced by thirteen bodies in near constant motion.

  The interior of the theater smells like a used jock strap half the time. There’s an unlucky number of guys without regular access to soap and water for washing, but you get used to it. You get used to just about anything these days. After a while, stink can start to smell good. It can grow to smell like home.

  We cruise down the hall past the entrance to the stage and the stairs down to the Marena, heading back to the small cluster of rooms behind them – Green Room, storage rooms, dressing rooms, and offices. Some of the guys sle
ep down here in the offices. The rest of us are upstairs in the rehearsal room, three other storage rooms, and what used to be the prop workshop. There are still pieces of old costumes up there. Old dresses that glitter in the sun like fire. Dusty tuxes that somehow manage to look regal even moth-eaten and grayed by time.

  “He lives!” Gussy exclaims from the back of the Green Room.

  Kevin smiles, raising his fist in a triumphant pump to the sky.

  Six sets of eyes rise to admire him. The guys are sitting around the long, folding table in the center of the room. They’re in varying states of consciousness, either just waking up or about to fall asleep. They slur hellos, ask Kevin where the hell he’s been, but when Bray comes in with food, they become singularly focused. It’s easy for me to fade into the wallpaper, taking my plate of steaming, runny eggs to the corner to slurp them up in peace.

  We run on three shifts – four guys on, four guys off, five guys in between. Ryan, Kevin, Gussy and I are just about to start our shift. I haven’t slept all night, a fact that I keep secret from everyone but Ryan. He already knows. Odds are, Kevin does too. But they won’t say anything. It won’t matter. Me running at half-speed is me running at their speed. I’m still fully functional.

  “Is it true?” Gussy asks around a mouthful of fowl fetus. His eyes are down, his shoulders hunched high as he digs into his meal with a meaty fist wrapped tight around his fork. “What we heard about the girl? She got killed?”

  Kevin nods solemnly, his face tight with anger. “Yeah. It’s true. The Pikes killed her. Beat her to death with their bare hands.”

  “Why?” Bray asks curiously.

  He’s Ryan’s age. Inquisitive and innocent. Ignorant even after all he’s been through.

  “Because they’re douchebags,” Kevin answers plainly.

  “Is Freedom okay?” Ryan asks quietly.

  Kevin’s jaw relaxes, the rage around his eyes fading by degrees. “Yeah, man. She’s gonna be okay.”

  “Was she friends with her? With the girl?”