“They’re all betting against you,” Wren told me as we pushed through the screaming crowd. “I made sure of it.”
“Umm … thanks?”
“Don’t mention it.”
“No, that wasn’t a real thank-you. It was—”
“I know what it was. They’re going to be furious when you come out of nowhere and actually win. Or that’s what I’m counting on anyway.” She surreptitiously brushed her fingers over her pocket, where the comm link was hidden. Our pass codes to freedom.
“What if I don’t remember the rules?” I took in the sprinkling of gems spread across the Snaps table. There were only two seats. One was empty, and Calamari was sitting in the other, chatting to a woman covered in pearlescent feathers. She turned to smirk at us, tentacles curling into the air around her shoulders like open-mouthed smiles, like they were laughing too, and I would have given almost anything to dump a plate of eggs on her head just to knock her down a peg.
“Rules are hardly necessary,” said Wren. “Can you bluff?”
“On occasion.”
“Okay … well, you can read other people’s bluffs.”
I watched the nervous pale-yellow aura fog off her skin, like she was leaking sunlight. “Obviously.”
She nodded, and her nerves faded a little. “Then that’s all that matters. You’re the only one here who can beat her, so don’t mess this up.”
“Right.” I heaved a breath. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, right?”
“Are you asking for a pep talk?” Elio muttered behind me. “Because she looks absolutely terrifying. I’ve got nothing. Beep!”
The crowd pressed in around the yard, circling the table, sending the heat in the air skyrocketing. Someone was beating on one of the tables like a war drum. All I could smell was sweat and more sweat and fear. Of course, that last one was all me.
“I’m sure deep down inside, she’s just like us,” I said, the lame attempt at a pep talk dying on my lips as Calamari cracked first her knuckles, then her tentacles. “I’m sure she puts her pants on one leg at a time.”
“That’s rather presumptuous.” Wren scowled. “Who says that’s how I put my pants on?”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“No.” She sniffed, affronted. “Sometimes I like to shimmy into them backward just to see how it feels. Then I turn them around and put them on one leg at a time.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t. You’re pretending to be angry to repress your natural inclination to develop interpersonal relations. Just let the faux irritation go and let the friendship happen, Cora. Don’t forget whose ship you’ll be flying away on in an hour.”
It was a cute speech, but I frowned at her anyway. “I still can’t stand you.”
Wren and Elio abandoned me as soon as we reached the table, standing across the circle next to Anders, who shuffled away to hide amid a group covered head to toe in sharp rocky spikes. The thick gray folds of their skin obscured his red scales almost instantly.
Gravel crunched and slid beneath my shoes as I pulled out the chair and sat across from Calamari.
A hush fell over the crowd.
Calamari burst out laughing. “You? When the Earth child said she found me a new competitor, I expected someone a bit … larger.”
“Afraid my bones will be too easy to break? Don’t worry, you won’t get a chance to find out.”
She laughed again. Two of her tentacles darted underneath my chair, sliding around my ankles. With another smirk, she jerked me forward. My chest crashed into the edge of the table. Half the crowd laughed, the other half booed as I struggled to break free of her grip, and somewhere, hidden from view as the crowd surged closer, I heard Elio beep.
Her aggression lit a fire within me, and I scooped half the gems off the table and hid them behind a small partition in front of my seat. There was a board set up between us, with a circle in the middle to make plays. Despite never having played Snaps, I had received a crash course from Wren before she threw me headfirst to my death.
There were fifty gems—twenty for each player, plus ten spares in a bag to pick from if we couldn’t make a play. We took turns matching them either by color (red, blue, green, and white) or by shape (squares, circles, triangles, and diamonds). If we didn’t have a match—or if we had a match and didn’t want the other to know about it—we could pick up. First one to eliminate all their gems except for three won. And the loser would walk away with a few dozen broken bones.
Was the opportunity to board Wren’s spaceship worth the potential torture?
Yes, I thought. If the spaceship even exists, that is, I realized with a surge of terror.
But Wren wouldn’t lie about the ship, would she? She wanted to escape just as badly as I did. Of course there was a ship.
And yet … It was so easy to tell a lie. My family was in the business of lying, and I could confidently say the best lies were the ones you believed to be true. They were the ones that you wanted so desperately, they were your first breath of air in the morning and the last before you went to sleep at night. I already believed Wren was a few gears shy of a whole blaster. Maybe her ship wasn’t real.
Calamari took it upon herself to lay down the first gem—a blue square. The rock’s glow reflected off her tentacles and shimmered against her skin, making it look like she was encrusted with jewels. Most auras looked similar from person to person, but hers showed itself in shades of blue. Right as Calamari made her move, wisps of cobalt rose off her shoulders, clouding the air above our playing table. She thought this was going to be easy. She thought she had already won.
My skin prickled with annoyance. Who cared if she was underestimating me? Who cared if Wren was a little too happy to be sane? Until I knew for certain the ship didn’t exist, there was still a chance. A chance to escape. A chance to save my best friend.
I just had to win.
I set down my first gem. Blue triangle.
She made another play. Green triangle.
Red triangle.
Red diamond.
Red circle.
White circle.
I scanned my gems, hidden behind my partition. I’d need to pick up, which might put her at an advantage. But judging by the way the aura above her had turned darker, more anxious, she didn’t have another play either. I reached for the velvet bag full of spare gems. Across the circle of spectators, I noticed Wren give me a thumbs-up.
Uncurling my fingers, I looked at what I had chosen. White diamond. That seemed significant. I just wished I remembered the rules better to know why.
And then … The white diamond is the highest color and shape combination you can get, Wren had told me on the way to the yard. If you both get down to three gems in the same round, whoever has the best combination is named the winner.
I could have set the white diamond down as my next play, but I had a feeling I would be better off keeping it. Pouting in fake disappointment, I pushed the gem to the side with my others and picked up a second time. Calamari grinned in triumph.
“Not doing very well?” Her tentacles found my ankles again and squeezed. The crowd cheered, and I noticed some rush over to Wren to place more bets.
I shrugged. “It’s still early. I can turn things around.”
Calamari tsked. “You would be surprised just how fast these games move.”
Then she used her tentacle to slam another gem on the table.
She was right. After that, I barely had enough time to breathe as the game moved around me. Colors and shapes blurred together, clashing with the growing cloud of Calamari’s triumphant aura. Inmates cheered. Even some of the Ironside guards stomped their feet as the pile of spare gems began to dwindle. I had twelve remaining behind my partition. And if I was counting correctly, Calamari only had ten.
I made another play. Green diamond. Calamari was forced to pick up. The crowd erupted in anger.
Her aura flickered, grew more confident.
Crap.
; We each laid down two more before she was forced to pick up again. I was in the lead, but only for a moment before I picked up twice more. The bag of spares was empty, and she had one up on me.
I saw Wren grimace. Elio nibbled on his fingertips. Anders was noticeably absent.
After four more rounds, she was still winning. Then, something miraculous happened. She studied the table, tentacles coiling, then stretching like springs about to snap, and her aura took a nosedive. Frosty blue tendrils of fury rushed toward my throat, but her face remained completely serene. The biggest lie if I’d ever seen one.
“I can’t make a play,” she said calmly.
My breath hitched. “Do I win?”
“Of course not.” She rolled her eyes. “You get to lay down two.”
But, as I examined my pile of gems, I found that I could only lay down one. A red square.
And that made us even. Six gems to six.
The crowd around us pushed forward once again. Their sweaty bodies were flush against my back, their smelly breathing heavy in my ears. The temperature surged, and above us the Andilly sky seemed to grow even redder, as if it were overheated too.
Calamari set down another gem. Green square.
Green diamond.
Blue diamond.
Cupping my hands around the gems I had left, I looked for my best option. If Calamari could read auras, I knew she would see mine plummet. I found that I had only one move.
My coveted white diamond.
Wincing, I set it in the center of the table, and the crowd cheered. They jumped forward, knocking into my chair, and my chest slammed against the table. Behind Calamari, Wren’s hands were clasped over her mouth. More inmates were trying to make bets with her, but she waved them off. Elio was beeping, and I wanted to tell him that it would be okay. I wanted to yell at Wren that this was a stupid plan to begin with, that there had to be better ways to escape Ironside. Calamari’s tentacles slithered across the ground, winding around my legs, my hips, locking me in place against the table.
She set down one final gem. A red diamond. I had a red circle, and then we were both left with three.
A tie.
“Before we reveal,” Calamari drawled, “and before I inevitably kill you, I’ll offer you a trade. Switch places with your Earthan friend, and I’ll let you walk away. Refuse … and I’ll crush you both when I win.”
“You’re that confident your hand is better than mine?”
She relaxed back in her chair. “I am.”
I cut a glance to Wren. Her jaw had gone slack, beads of sweat dripping down her chin. She really thought I was going to give her up. And I guess I hadn’t given her a reason to believe otherwise, but I needed her. And she needed me too. So did Elio.
Elio. I found his eyes as he was jostled by the restless crowd. I just hoped he had enough sense to run when this plan went up in flames.
Looking back at Calamari, I shook my head, sealing my fate. “No deal.”
A bored sigh left her mouth. Her tentacles gleamed in the sunlight. She pushed away her partition to reveal her final three gems.
Two green diamonds. One blue triangle.
Not a bad combination, according to Wren. Diamonds were the highest shape, but green and blue were the second and third highest colors. I didn’t even bother acting surprised. Despite Calamari’s calm façade, I’d read her aura loud and clear. For the last three rounds, I’d known she was far less confident than she was letting on.
I pushed aside my own partition. Even though I’d given up the highest white diamond, I had something nearly as good. And sometimes, nearly was just enough to win.
Three green diamonds winked in the sunlight.
“No!” Calamari jumped to her feet, shoving the table away from us into the crowd. “I don’t lose!”
Around us, spectators yelled furiously, pushing and searching for Wren, who had vanished as soon as I revealed my winning gems. My stomach lurched. Where was she? Where was Elio? Calamari was closing in on me, her eyes as hard as ice chips, her tentacles winding around my torso, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. It didn’t matter that I won. She was going to break me anyway.
The crowd grew deafening. The ground rumbled underneath the beat of their angry footsteps. Calamari bared her teeth, tightened her hold, and I started to feel something in my spine pop—
And then a heaping pile of eggs and meat smacked into Calamari’s face and slipped down the front of her jumpsuit.
“What?” Slowly, she turned … and noticed Wren standing on the fringes of the crowd, armed with trays from the cafeteria. “What did you do?”
Wren shrugged. And that was when I unequivocally knew she had lost her marbles.
Because no sane person would ever scoop their hand into a bowl of mushed-up mystery meat and fling it at their enemy, yelling, “FOOD FIGHT!”
The meat got lodged in Calamari’s hair, some of it slipping down her cheek, leaving a muddy streak on her skin. Wren flung three more globs of meat into the crowd, pelting two inmates and one guard. That was all it took. The spectators either dived for cover or rushed to grab their own ammunition as, all around us, food went flying into tables and faces and fences like we were in the middle of a war zone.
The guards tried to quell the inmates, but they were caught up in the frenzy too. One man took a moldy hunk of bread to the face. Another woman slipped on a stream of vegetable pods and landed face-first in a pile of mushed-up fruit.
What the—? This was Wren’s big plan? This was the element of surprise she neglected to mention? I couldn’t deny it was effective. Calamari had grown so distracted by the onslaught that her tentacles had started to loosen their grip on me. Reaching for my chair, I beat them away, and the suckers detached from my skin with a sickening squelch. I ducked under the arm of a passing inmate as he aimed a glob of eggs at my face, and rolled behind a table that had been flipped on its side as a shield.
I found Elio hiding behind it, shaking.
My first fear was that he was glitching, but no. “The food! It’s being wasted!” With a shrill beep-beep-beeeep, he scooped up handfuls of dirty vegetables and clutched them to his chest like they were precious pearls.
“Elio!” I snapped my fingers to draw his attention. “Leave it! Where’s Wren?”
“Cora!” Wren dived behind the table with us, an aura of exhilaration brightening her face. “Great idea, right?”
The Snaps game and the dozens of bad bets were long forgotten. An inmate with glittering gold skin aimed a handful of meat at a second woman with smooth black antennae on her forehead. The meat trailed through the air like a comet’s tail, hitting its mark with a thud. Antennae Girl giggled and chucked a handful back.
“Come on! This is our chance!” Wren grabbed my shoulder as more guards spilled into the yard. They were caught up in the fight and were quickly distracted, jobs forgotten. Wren rolled out from behind the table as the crowd swelled and more food went flying.
I hurried to follow but was cut off by another inmate jumping through the air to avoid being hit by a bag of bread rolls. He crashed into my hip, and I slammed into the ground, my knees aching with the brunt of the fall. The man didn’t even apologize. He picked up a roll with his long trunk and launched it across the yard.
“Oh, no! Excuse me! I’ll just get out of your way next time!” I gave him a mock curtsy as he crawled behind a table before turning to Wren. “Okay, let’s—”
She was gone.
Spinning in a circle, I searched through the chaos. No. She wasn’t gone, I was just missing her somehow. Didn’t all Earthan kids play hide-and-seek?
But as my heart rate accelerated, I knew I was lying to myself. She wasn’t going to fight her way back through this mess to retrieve us. She had the pass codes, her way to the docking bay was clear. She had no need for us anymore. If she really intended to bring me and Elio onboard, she would have made sure we were with her before she ran.
Anger flared in my chest, deep and burning. I wished I
had a blaster handy. I suddenly had a passionate need to destroy something.
Dodging another flailing inmate being sprayed with a vat of milk from the kitchens, I ducked behind the table again. A woman tried crowding in beside me, but I elbowed her out of the way. Wren or no Wren, I just had to make it to the docking bay before she did, hack the pass codes again, and then Elio and I would have her coveted ship all to ourselves.
Easy-peasy.
“New plan. Get up.” I tugged Elio’s hand, but he didn’t budge. I looked down and— “No. Not now. Not now.”
He was glitching, twitching silently on the ground. With the horde of bodies surrounding us, it was impossible for me to find a good angle to lift him up. Even if I managed it, I knew I wouldn’t be able to carry him more than several yards.
Maybe I was imagining it, but I swore I could hear the engines of Wren’s spaceship firing up, leaving us trapped on Andilly forever.
Suddenly, an unfamiliar voice intruded on my pity party, tentative but with an undercurrent of laughter. “Your friend appears comatose.”
“He’s not comatose.” I grunted as I tried to lift him. “He’s glitching. He—Andy?”
The big guy leaned against the table, examining a comm link that he must have taken from a guard. His hair was dusted with crumbs, and the leathery red skin of his cheeks was streaked with some kind of pink jelly.
His upper lip curled. “Don’t call me that.”
“Don’t call you—wait, can we back up a millennium? You talk?”
His voice was rough as sand, his accent a staccato rhythm, like he was chewing up each of his consonants and spitting them out after finding the taste unsavory. But the fact remained that he was still talking. Why he had decided to play Silent But Deadly earlier I didn’t know.
“You’re truly observant.” He looked up from his stolen comm in disgust. “For your information, I also walk, eat, and expel gas from various orifices, most of which I’d rather not disclose while in present company. I promise, I’m multitalented.” He even had the gall to wink.
Idiot. “Leave me alone. I’m in the middle of a crisis.” I tried to lift Elio again, to no avail. Around us, the food fight was starting to die down. I didn’t know how many guards were out here, but I preferred they didn’t catch up with us.
The Good for Nothings Page 7
