The Gauntlet

by Megan Shepherd

  Dane pointed to a shadow on the horizon. Cora looked out over the wasteland but only saw the same monotonous stretch of scrubby bushes and parched soil she’d seen since they’d landed.

  “That shadow?” she asked. “That’s it?”

  “It’s the entrance to the mine,” he said. “Well, more of a quarry, really. A giant pit. You’ll see for yourselves.”

  The path was well trod, marked with footprints of the slaves who had walked in bare feet this way earlier in the day. Almost all the prints were larger than hers and Rolf’s, and more than one was bloodstained. In the two weeks they’d been in quarantine, she hadn’t made any friends among the other slaves in the tent, thanks to Dane. Most of the slaves were much older anyway—gaunt women and hulking men who kept their distance and looked at her with no kindness.

  “What kind of root do you mine, exactly?” Rolf asked. His twitchiness had returned since they’d landed, and he blinked extra quickly.

  “Marron root,” Dane said. “This moon’s soil can only support that one crop. We boil the roots down for food; it’s the main staple, along with nutrient capsules the Kindred bring on their supply drops, but Ellis keeps a tight fist on those.”

  They approached a small hut at the edge of the gaping chasm. It was little more than a shade tarp, really, housing a handful of deputies who nodded to Dane. He went to them and exchanged a few words Cora couldn’t quite make out, but she recognized his joking tone, the way they slapped him on the back. In the Hunt, she’d heard about the way Dane had weaseled his way from the bottom to Head Ward. Charming, manipulating, placating. Clearly he was trying to do the same thing here—and apparently succeeding.

  “Ellis.” One of them spit in the dirt loud enough for her to hear. “That bitch.”

  “Keena’s no better,” another said. “And all the tent guards. They act like they’re so superior to us, guarding over a bunch of wife slaves in those fancy tents, while we’re out here sweating our asses off. They’re hoarding supplies, I know it.”

  They continued to talk, until their grumbling died down and Dane turned and signaled to Cora and Rolf. “Get over here. Stop dawdling.”

  Cora took a deep breath and stepped up to the edge of the chasm. She had never been great with heights, from the time she was a little girl, climbing trees with her brother, Charlie. What she wouldn’t give to be back there again. On Earth. With Charlie. Sadie barking at them from down below.

  Was Earth even still there?

  A pang clenched at her heart, and she closed her eyes. It was. It had to be. According to the Kindred’s algorithms, there was almost a 70 percent chance that Earth still existed, a number she clung to desperately.

  She thought of her family. The truth was, even if the Kindred were right, even if Earth was there, humans were still living on borrowed time. The humans and animals on Earth needed her just as much as the ones scattered throughout the universe did, even though they went about their lives with no knowledge of the Kindred or the Gauntlet. Earth wouldn’t be there forever. Rainforest destruction, air pollution, warfare, biological weaponry, oppressive dictatorships, melting ice caps: sooner or later, humans would destroy their planet. She had to prove humanity’s intelligence so that they would have a chance for autonomy off their planet.

  She opened her eyes and approached the edge of the mine. Her stomach churned in an unsettling way, but she forced herself to look down. The chasm plunged dizzyingly deep and made her vision telescope in a light-headed way. Hundreds of slaves balanced like swarming ants on rickety scaffolding, picking at the exposed ground, monitored by mine guards stationed at the ends of each scaffold. The bottom of the pit was a slurry, sulfurous mix that released a noxious gas. Bile rose in her throat.

  She pulled back, dry heaving into the scrubby bushes, sick with the fumes and the strain of weeks spent in the quarantine tent. For so long she had been furious at the Kindred, and yet for all their sins, the Kindred hadn’t done anything this awful to them. What was it Cassian was always saying? The Kindred don’t enslave. The Kindred don’t incarcerate. The Kindred don’t kill. Those are uniquely human practices.

  And now, looking out over the swarming ants’ nest of a mine with the smell of sulfur thick in her nose, she realized he was right.

  She felt Dane’s presence beside her. “You two are on tier eight.” He handed them work assignment papers. “Give this to the guard there. The quota is fifty marron roots a day. Once you’ve mined them, you turn them in to those deputies, and they’ll release you back to the slave barracks. No picks or shovels allowed, only bare fingers. Ellis is smarter than to arm her slaves.”

  She flexed her fingers. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  He smiled flatly. “Don’t worry, songbird. You won’t last long. Neither of you.”

  It took Cora and Rolf ten minutes to navigate the rickety ladders down into the chasm’s belly. It seemed that the highest-value slaves got choice slots near the top, where the air was fresher and the dirt looser. By the time they had descended below tier five, then tier six, then tier seven, Cora realized that the newer or weaker the slave, the closer to the sulfur-sludge they were stationed. Tier eight was second to last. The only slaves below them, at the very lowest rung, were Armstrong’s criminals, who were chained to their individual slots. And below them, half sunk in the sludge, floated a few decaying bodies.

  A deputy stationed at the end of the scaffolding held out his hand for their work assignment papers.

  “Slots ten and eleven,” the deputy read, and then handed them each a roughly woven basket and pointed along the rickety row toward two open stations. “Go on. Move.”

  Cora and Rolf balanced precariously on the swaying scaffolding as they passed the other slaves on the tier. None of them spoke or acknowledged Cora and Rolf, just like in the quarantine tent. Their faces were hollow and sunken. When one woman slipped from the tier above and crashed to theirs, Cora hurried to help her stand. The woman, empty-eyed, just crawled to the ladder, returned to her slot, and kept digging with bleeding fingers.

  “This must be what humans become,” Rolf observed, “when all hope is lost.”

  Cora gripped the scaffolding railing. “Yeah. This is why the Gauntlet matters. The Gauntlet is hope. The Gauntlet is how we create a safe world for your baby. For Sparrow. Like we talked about with Lucky’s journal.”

  “Not if we’re trapped here for the rest of our lives. How many days until it begins?”

  “Twenty-six, I think,” she said. “Maybe twenty-five. It was hard to tell in that tent.”

  “Either way, that’s not a lot of time to stage an escape and get all the way to Drogane,” Rolf said.

  “Keep moving!” the deputy yelled.

  They continued past slot number seven, then eight . . . and Cora stopped in surprise. Slot nine was occupied by a child. Or rather, by the abnormally short slave she’d seen watching them from the shadows. Standing, the slave seemed even shorter—barely four feet tall. The slave had its back to them, facing the wall of dirt. What Cora had thought, in the shadows, was a cloak was actually a dusty jumpsuit with a hood and long sleeves. Cora couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman.

  She stepped closer and set down her basket.

  “Hello?” she said. “I’m Cora. This is Rolf. I think we saw you in the tent—”

  The slave slowly turned. A hairy face looked out from beneath the hood. Huge brown eyes. A wrinkled, leathery forehead. Cora nearly leaped in surprise.

  A chimpanzee.

  Of course. The hairy arm. The gnarled hand. The chimp was bigger than ones she’d seen at zoos, and it carried itself more upright. It peered at Cora almost suspiciously, unnaturally cognizant, and then returned to its digging.

  Cora was too stunned to speak.

  She turned to Rolf and whispered, “You said the Axion experimented on animals to make them more intelligent. Do you think this is one of them?”

  Rolf blinked. “It’s possible. It’s clearly more advanced—maybe even
halfway to being intelligent.”

  The chimp flinched, then kept digging.

  “I think it heard you,” Cora whispered, and then cleared her throat. “Can you understand me? Do you speak? Are you intelligent?”

  The chimp reached out a long toe and scrawled in the dirt:

  ARE YOU?

  The chimp threw them a look Cora swore was sarcastic and then dropped another marron root into its basket.

  “You two! New slaves!” yelled the deputy stationed at the end of their scaffold. “Get digging. You have to reach quota before nightfall or you sleep out here. And stop bothering Willa.” He adjusted the cloth over his nose, but from the look on his face it didn’t do much to cover the sulfur smell. Cora briefly wondered who he’d pissed off to get assigned so deep in the pit.

  Reluctantly, Cora and Rolf took their slots, but Cora kept throwing glances at the chimp, who the deputy had called Willa. The wall of soil was extremely compact, nearly as dense as concrete. She had to crumble it away with her fingernails, and by the time she’d exposed half a marron root, two of her nails had split. The oversized sun shone directly into the pit, baking them. They worked for an hour, then two, then three. Sweat soaked through her clothes. Into her basket the marron roots went, one by one, as the day dragged by.

  “Willa,” the deputy called. “Time for your water break. Let’s go.”

  The chimp pushed back her hood and jumped straight onto the edge of the scaffolding. Instead of squeezing by the other slaves, she simply swung hand over hand to the end and then scaled the ladder to the water bucket.

  As soon as she was gone, Cora glanced at the chimp’s slot. The digging was well organized—far more meticulous than Cora’s own sloppy work. “How do you think she ended up on Armstrong?”

  Rolf shrugged. “The Axion must have dropped her here.”

  Willa returned, eyeing them as though she knew they were talking about her. She pulled her hood up against the sun and returned to digging.

  Cora kept throwing glances toward her as she worked. It was incredible to see an animal with such focus and patience. Lucky would have loved to meet this chimp—he, more than anyone, had believed humans and animals weren’t so different. A pang of grief hit her at the thought of Lucky, and she squeezed her eyes closed and pressed a hand to her back, where his notebook was still tucked into her waistband.

  God, she missed him.

  When she opened her eyes, the chimp was watching her. She returned to digging, but not before Cora had noticed Willa’s eyes resting on her waistband. The chimp dropped another marron root in her basket and dusted off her hands.

  And then Cora noticed the pattern the chimp was using to dig. Even squares, staggered three across and four down. The particular shape struck her as strangely familiar. She’d seen that pattern before, hadn’t she? Where?

  And then it struck her.

  The Gauntlet.

  She gasped—yes, it was identical to the Gauntlet model that Cassian had shown her. But what did this chimpanzee have to do with the Gauntlet? She remembered something Cassian had said about the lesser species who had tried to run the Gauntlet:

  Other species have not been as successful. The Conmarines. The Scoates. A half dozen others, in sectors very far from here. Even a chimpanzee tried to run it once—the Axion had experimented on it to give it higher intelligence. But they all failed the perceptive puzzles.

  Cora felt a tingle of excitement in her limbs as she dared a closer glance at Willa. Could this be the same chimp? Mali had said that all the previous human runners of the Gauntlet had been killed in its dangerous puzzles or had gone insane from the mental strain, and so there was no one who could coach Cora.

  Yet maybe there was someone who had run the Gauntlet before, who could teach Cora its secrets. The fact that it was a superintelligent chimpanzee hardly fazed her—she’d seen crazier things since the Kindred had abducted her.

  “Hey,” Cora whispered to the chimp, nodding toward the twelve-squared pattern. “That shape. I’ve seen it before.”

  Willa ignored her as she moved on to digging out the next square.

  “I know you can hear me,” Cora said. “And I’m not stupid. That shape is the Gauntlet. I know it and I think you do, too.”

  Willa’s head slowly turned, her brown eyes wide. For a second Cora thought that this would be it. Willa was the answer to their problems. Willa knew the secrets of the Gauntlet, secrets not even Cassian knew. She could help train Cora. She could ensure that Cora won—if they got off of Armstrong, that was. Soon.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Cora whispered.

  And then Willa threw a clod of soil in her face.

  Cora sputtered out dirt.

  “Slave in slot ten!” the guard called. “Water break!”

  Cora wiped at her mouth, coughing, as Willa calmly returned to digging. Rolf gave her a questioning look.

  “Isn’t it early to be making enemies?” he whispered.

  “Not an enemy,” Cora said as she passed by toward the water bucket. “Our new best friend, though she doesn’t know it yet. And the only hope we might have.” She coughed out more dirt.

  Rolf flicked some soil off Cora’s shoulder. “I’d say we have a long way to go to convince her of that.”

  6

  Nok

  FOR THE LAST TWO weeks, Nok had been isolated in a small quarantine tent, made to sleep in filth, and given only some reeking bland soup once a day.

  But everything had changed that morning: they’d let her take a bath.

  She reveled in scrubbing the grime from her limbs, in plunging her head underwater, in rinsing her hair. It was a magnificent indulgence, though the water was only tepid.

  “Hurry up in there,” a deputy called through the tent’s flap.

  She sighed. All good things came to an end. She stood and squeezed the water from her hair, pulled on a robe they’d set out for her, and smoothed a hand over her belly, barely hidden by the folds of the robe. The best she could figure, she was twenty-two or twenty-three weeks along. She wouldn’t be able to hide it much longer. And then what? Even if by some miracle they could get off Armstrong and to the Mosca planet, she certainly didn’t trust Bonebreak. He’d already betrayed them once. What was to keep him or one of his Mosca friends from grabbing Sparrow and selling her to some private owner?

  Nok scrubbed a towel once more through her hair. She’d kill for some conditioner. Hell, even soap. And yet the wish was fleeting—she had bigger worries now that quarantine was over.

  She leaned closer to the tent flap, listening to the conversation just outside between the two deputies guarding the tent. They were talking about American football. It sounded like they had both grown up in America, one in Boston and the other in a town she’d never heard of, and they were speculating whose team was kicking whose ass now on the field.

  She rolled her eyes. Earth was gone for all they knew, and they were still talking sports.

  “Is she finished?” said another voice, this one female.

  The tent flap opened and an older woman with threads of gray in her dark hair came in. She gave Nok a quick, inspecting gaze. “Nok, right? I’m Keena. I oversee the female wives’ tent.” She started coughing and took out a handkerchief. “Feel better after a bath?”

  Nok cinched the robe. “A little more like myself,” she said neutrally. Despite the woman’s kind words—the first kind words she’d heard here—Nok didn’t trust her. She’d had two weeks to imagine what happened in the wives’ tents, and each thought was more disturbing than the last.

  Keena coughed again as she motioned for Nok to follow her through the den of tents, and Nok did so hesitantly, taking in every detail. They entered a ramshackle canvas corridor lit by candles that connected various tent rooms. From the noises coming from within the tent rooms, Nok could guess what was happening within. Her stomach tensed. As if sensing her apprehension, Keena cleared her throat.

  “The wives’ job is to keep Ellis’s deputies distr
acted,” she explained. “The more distracted they are, the less likely they are to try to stage a mutiny.” Keena spoke so bluntly that Nok realized a mutiny must be a very real possibility. “This is her way of appeasing them. There’s a separate tent for male and female wives. You clean up after the deputies, cook for them, do their washing, serve them drinks, laugh at their jokes, and . . .” Keena paused.

  “Sleep with them,” Nok finished flatly.

  Keena’s face darkened. “Yes. Unfortunately, Ellis permits that.”

  Nok pressed a hand on her belly protectively, then looked toward the other tents. “Where are my friends?”

  “The blond girl and the skinny boy have been taken to the mines. The other one, the big guy, has caused quite a stir. Ellis wanted him as her personal wife, but he wasn’t too keen on it. Didn’t want to wear the shiny pants and cook her dinner.”

  From the way the woman’s voice took on an edge of disdain, Nok got the feeling Keena wasn’t Ellis’s biggest fan. She smiled to herself. Maybe Keena was more trustworthy than she’d first thought.

  “Leon can take care of himself,” Nok said. “And so can I.”

  Keena smiled sadly. “I admire your bravery, but I fear it might be misplaced. The life of a wife on Armstrong isn’t a pleasant one. I’m not sure which is worse, being a slave here or the mines—at least here there’s a longer life expectancy. As long as you don’t get the sand-cough, like me.” She turned and kept walking, the rumbling cough deep in her chest. “I’ve seen so many girls where you are now, shipped here when they turn nineteen. Young and brave and hopeful. They believe all those ridiculous rumors that it’s a paradise.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t so naive. The Kindred took me on my thirtieth birthday and, after some tests, determined I wasn’t worth putting in their enclosures, so they sent me here. A sheriff named Randall was in charge then. He was mad for power too—the sheriffs always are. I was enslaved, like you. I worked in these tents for five years. Then Ellis rose to power. She made me a deputy and put me in charge of the female wives.”