by Corrie Wang
How could we not keep him? Even if my Canada story were true. Even if he hadn’t been Majesty’s. As much as Su and Liyan, hill, as much as my Grand Mati, I wholeheartedly, fiercely loved that little beast. Even as I waited for the day he began exhibiting some kind of violent tendencies. Instead, to my surprise, he simply loved me back equally as much.
First thing when we get home, I’m taking Two Five before the common council, telling them everything, and petitioning that he be granted immunity from the ban on beasts. Once everyone sees how sweet he is. How kind. How not beastly. They’ll fall in love with him, too. They’ll let him stay. I hope.
Beside me, Sway unzips his coat. It’s about thirty degrees warmer down in the tunnel. Underneath, he’s wearing fitted pants, a black hoodie, and an orange T-shirt all in pristine condition. A thin yellow tie completes the look. Yet for all his finery, Sway is slim, on the border of underfed. One of his collarbones becomes visible as he adjusts his ensemble and for some reason I can’t stop looking at it.
“Still staring.”
I finally avert my eyes, flustered.
He continues, “I mean, you have a child on the island. I’m surprised fees aren’t coming over here in droves. Doesn’t, like, everyone want one?”
“Oh, most fees don’t even know he exists.”
The words are out before I can stop them. Sway is so surprised, he slips off the track he’s standing on. Thanks be that Su is not here. The bruise she’d inflict would be monstrous. Sway shakes his head like there are keloid scars in his ears. From the subway platform a sluglike sleeping-bag shape suddenly sits up on the couch.
“Some of us are trying to sleep,” it shouts.
“How is that possible?” Sway whispers as we hurry on.
“No more questions.”
I walk faster. He jogs to keep pace. Up ahead the tunnel glows.
“No more questions.” He is lightly out of breath. “Heard.”
He trips on an aluminum can, then immediately gets tangled up in a plastic bag.
“Are your eyes even open?” I ask.
“Hey, question: When you said you know all fees, did you actually mean that?”
Once more we stop walking. I’m not only imagining the tentative hopefulness on Sway’s sweaty features, now I can actually see it. Hanging from the ceiling is a thin string of twinkling red lights. Even from our cul-de-sac, I’d seen the faint nighttime glow that meant beasts used more electricity than we did, but I’d never imagined they were using it continuously.
I click off my headlamp.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” Sway asks softly.
Back home, power is our most precious commodity. Grand said that even pre-Night Buffalo was infamous for its cloud cover, but now the near-constant gray skies make our solar grid unreliable at best. We have a few windmills on Grand Island, but that energy is routed straight to the labs. As a result, we wash all our clothes manually and have strict dusk curfews, which, in the freezing months, means being inside by the late afternoon.
I’ve always thought it was weird we hadn’t figured out an alternative source of energy, especially considering all the classes we took in water, wind, and solar power, but when I asked Liyan about it, she said it wasn’t that we didn’t know how to produce energy. It’s that we didn’t have the supplies to produce energy. The beasts did. And over the years, regardless of who the mayor was, they made it abundantly clear that if we wanted to share in any of their power, we had to give up ours and move back across the river to do so. A choice that hardly made individual refrigerators worth it.
“Wasteful is more like it,” Su’s gruff voice says from the left side of the tunnel. “Illuminating an empty tunnel like this.”
I jump. Sway squawks. Normally, I would have heard Su waiting for us a full minute out. I quickly realign my expression to match my friend’s. Because for a moment there, I’d agreed with Sway. Despite the color, the twinkling lights remind me of fireflies. Twofer would love them.
“First of all,” Sway says, “it’s not an empty tunnel. Second, you have to think of them more like a trail of bread crumbs.”
“Who would leave bread crumbs lying around?” I ask. “You’ll get roaches.”
“Ha! Not actual bread crumbs. It’s an expression. The lights are like a signpost.”
“Yes, but what does the signpost say?” I ask.
“Right this way to the mob.”
Only then? The mob comes to us.
One second there is not a giant, decapitated head floating in front of us and the next second there is. Rationally I know the blinking, breathing face in front of me can’t be real, because it’s nearly the size of me. Yet it looks as lifelike as Sway. It’s so huge, I can see every weird half-grown face hair running along its jaw. Each tiny bead of sweat near its temple. A level of detail I do not appreciate, considering its left eye socket is empty and looks like it was hacked out by Mama Bear.
Su, however, does not rationalize the head.
Hatchet out, she immediately slashes it in sixteen different places, then ends with a perfect roundhouse that sails her through the beast’s cheek.
Sway points at the head. “Um, that’s a hologram.”
And then he starts to giggle. Soon he’s laughing and then coughing harder than a generator on its first start of the year. This does not prevent him from talking.
“They used to be for subway ads, but the mob repurposed them when they moved down here. What did you think it was going to do? Burp on us?”
“It could have head butted us,” Su says seriously. “Or, like, bit us.”
A tiny whiff of laughter escapes me as Sway begins to outright cackle. Really, it’s rude. I have to stop looking at him. I run a hand through the beast. The image doesn’t even flicker. Liyan once mentioned that beasts still used pre-Night technologies, but she never got specific.
“You’d think they’d find a less damaged spokesperson,” I say.
“And completely defeat the purpose of being an antiestablishment, terror-spreading gang that strikes fear in the hearts of every norm?” Sway hiccups. “Nah. All the mobsters self-mutilate. We think it’s an initiation thing. I mean, what says you’re more committed to a cause than carving out your own eye?”
“When you ignore the minority,” the head rumbles in a low voice, “you get mob rule.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sway mumbles, then says louder, “Mob rules. Quick, you have to say, ‘Mob rules,’ too, or it’ll go into alarm mode and scream in angry Japanese.”
“Mob rules,” Su and I say together.
The head nods. Up ahead, I can make out market-style stalls. Sway zips back into his orange parka and flips his hood up. Su pulls her face mask on. I pull my own homemade mouth mask from my bag and loop it over my ears. Then I bend down and untape a wad of bills from my calf. I put another in my pocket for Rage and also slip Baby Bear out of my boot and tuck her up my sleeve.
“Oh right, thanks,” Sway says when I hand him his cash. “Yes. This is where I’ll be leaving you, then. Once y’all get your info, you can leave out the mob’s subway platform. I think I’m gonna head back to that floor display platform and negotiate my way…”
Su doesn’t wait for him to finish. She simply keeps walking ahead.
“Hey, a bit of advice,” Sway quickly says. “The way you walk, all tense like that, you two practically scream Jump Me and Take All My Money. So try to be chill. Keep your heads down—they don’t like when you stare—let your money do your talking for you, and don’t suplex anyone without good reason. Oh! And for bumps’ sake. If you’re gonna pass here at all, you can’t be calling males beasts all the time. It’s derogatory.”
“And nag is any better?” I ask.
Sway’s eyebrows lift in surprise. His head jostles back, the way it seems to when he’s had a realization.
“Oh snap,” he says. “Heard. Okay then. I guess this is goodbye.”
I knew he wasn’t coming with us. Still I feel weirdly disappointed that we’re leaving th
is quirky, fidgety anomaly behind. I envision bringing Twofer and Sway home. Stunned awe shining out from every fee’s expression. Except fees tried that once before at the divide. Matricula Rhodes brought a group of young males with them to Grand Island. Those beasts ended up being loyal to Fortitude and horrifically maimed a number of teenage fees. No one much talks about it, and yet, it hangs over every beast-related decision that fees make.
“Good riddance is more like it,” Su says.
Then, without further ado, she spins on her heel and continues down the tracks. I hold up a hand in goodbye. Sway slaps it with his own, realizes that’s not what I meant, and laughs. He laughs almost as easily as Twofer. I’d always thought my brother learned that from me. Then Sway pulls his bandanna up over his nose and, with one last over-the-shoulder glance, disappears into the dark.
“Officially on our own again,” I say, catching up to Su.
“You sound worried. We don’t need Sway, Glor. Based on what we’ve seen so far, how bad can this mob really be?”
Rows of stalls line either side of the tunnel. Dozens of strings of lights, all red, crisscross back and forth along the ceiling. Fire spits out of metal drums behind every merchant, half of whom are still asleep under their tables of wares. It is hot and smoky, like a cast-iron skillet left too long in the flames.
Back home, fees would normally be waking up, sharing breakfast, walking in to their careers at the labs, hydroponic farms, libraries, schools, co-ops. (That is, if we weren’t on lockdown because of a beast attack.) Right about now, the fees of my household might be finding a brief note left on the kitchen table. Or maybe we still have a few hours before that happens. Regardless, here it looks like everyone just went to bed.
Another old subway platform is a few yards past the stalls. Faint dawn gloom creeps down from the outside entrance into the tunnel as a beast—male, I guess—blows into his hands and stomps down the stairs trying to dislodge snow from his boots. While all the vendors are either heavily tattooed or mutilated in some way, this male’s face and body seem completely unmarred.
Mob versus norms.
Got it.
The norm male hurries directly to a stall where a giant stock pot is on a grate over the metal drum. The mobster who runs it is missing both eyelids and ears. Carcasses hang along the wall behind him. What species, I can’t deduce. Cat, maybe. When the male orders, the mobster turns and carves off a hunk of meat, tosses it into a metal bowl, then spoons hot soup over it. The norm crouches next to the stall to eat.
I glance at Su. “You have to admit, that smells delicious.”
“You mean the dead endangered animal flesh that would give us mild radiation poisoning? Yum.” But her stomach gurgles. Loudly. Her eyes cut to me. “Shut it.”
Sway was right. It isn’t hard to spot Rage. His stall is in the middle of all the others, right across from the subway platform. Only there is no “not staring” at this beast. I’ve seen smaller houses, shorter trees. And every inch of him is inked. On his neck, chest, and arms, males are being hung, tortured, and burned. On his right cheek is a graphic and bloody torso. On his left is an equally gory lower half, as if Rage’s mouth ripped it in two. He seems about Majesty’s age, and I briefly wonder what he was doing when the Night hit. If he was something innocuous like a bus driver. I wonder which lifestyle he prefers.
For all his bulk, he sits on a tiny stool, hands crossed over his king-size-bed chest, sleeping.
“What’s the play?” Su asks.
“Ask if he knows where Twofer is, then keep adding money until he tells us. All we need is a name or a location. Oh, and you should do the talking.”
Above her face mask, Su’s eyes grow large with concern. “Why me?”
“Your voice is beastier.”
I palm her a wad of cash. She discreetly peels off a one-hundred-dollar bill, then puts the rest in her pocket. What was it Sway said?
“Be chill,” I murmur.
Su cracks her neck side to side. Taking deep breaths, we step up to Rage. I clear my throat.
It all rests on this.
Just as Su is about to speak, Rage, eyes still shut, points to a sign above his right shoulder that has two kittens on it waving. CLOSED. We pivot. Our backs to him.
“What now?” Su hisses.
“I guess we browse until he’s open,” I whisper back.
I expected a mob leader to sell weapons or drugs, but Rage’s wares more resemble a makeshift pharmacy. His tables are filled with everything from socks to homemade bars of soap to only lightly used-looking razors. At the very end, even more unbelievable than the still-packaged toothbrush, is a stack of pre-Night children’s books. I play with the paperclip necklace that Two Five made me as I sift through them and stifle a happy murmur when I see one titled Plucky and Lucky Go to the Park.
I read to Two Five from the same children’s books I grew up on. They were all non-gender-specific about vegetables or colors or animals. His favorite was also mine. It was a story that my grand must have overlooked, about two ducks that went out to play in the rain. Their names were Plucky and Lucky. They were brother and sister.
“How come Plucky and Lucky get to live together?”
“Well, because they’re animals.”
“And I’m a beast? That’s why I’m kept separate from everybody else?” He sighed, world-weary. “I wish I was a duck.”
“No you don’t, Twofer. All the ducks are dead.”
Grand was always adamant about the truth. Half truths did no one any good, she said. We kept Two Five because Grand thought raising him might help Majesty heal. (It didn’t.) And we kept him hidden because we couldn’t have the males knowing fees were fertile and we couldn’t have fees falling in love with one of the very creatures they’d been raised to fear and despise.
“And what do we do when Twofer isn’t a baby and starts asking questions?” I asked.
“Hopefully, I’ll have figured out a solution before we get to that point,” Grand replied.
But she hadn’t. Or if she did, she never told me.
“Kore wa toshokande wa arimasen.”
Jarring as a hail storm, Rage’s voice shakes me from my reverie. Yet I secretly feel a little thrill. Japanese is my favorite of the surviving tongues. Thanks to Itami, I’m fluent.
This isn’t a library.
Funny. I thought libraries were a fee-only creation. And that’s when I look at the book in my hands and realize the tattooed hulk is speaking to me. Rage still appears to be sleeping, yet now the kitten sign behind him reads: OPEN.
“Suze?” I murmur, taking money from my sock. “I think I’m buying this book.”
I can’t imagine the look on Two Five’s face when he sees it. A grimy sticker on the cover reads $120. Instead of putting two hundred-dollar bills on it, I lay down five of them. I also let Baby Bear drop into my hand, then nod encouragingly at Su.
“We’ll take the book and some information about that boy,” Su says gruffly.
“Anata to hokanohito.” You and everyone else.
Itami always said Japanese was the perfect post-nuclear language. It used the fewest words possible to get a point across. Yet now there was so little left, we barely needed any words. Except Su slacked off in her language classes. Her eyes flick to me in panic.
“I said, it will cost you more than five hundred dollars for that information,” Rage says, then adds, “Sono naifu o oku ka, watashi wa sore o tsukatte anata no kanzo¯ o kirudeshou.”
His eyes open, then close. He told me if I didn’t put away my knife, he’d carve out my liver with it. I tuck Baby Bear back up my sleeve.
“Will this do?” Su asks, and lays down her entire big stack of cash.
Her fingers have barely left it before Rage swipes the money from the table and puts it in a fanny pack that’s clipped to his stool. Just like that. A quarter of our cash is gone.
He refolds his hands over his chest and closes his eyes.
“Hai. Thank you very much.”
> “You were supposed to pay him in increments,” I say under my breath.
“It wasn’t impressed by increments.”
I take another wad from beneath my pant leg. “Otokonoko,” I say, dangling the stack.
“Speak English. Your Japanese is offensive to my ears.”
“The boy. All we want to know is who has him.”
Rage cracks his knuckles. It sounds like a car backfiring. Sighing, he readjusts in his seat and opens one eye.
“A male, I’m guessing.”
“Which one?” I ask. “And what are they going to do with him?”
A shrug. I hand him the money. When he reaches for it, I jerk it away. Now he is fully awake. His midnight eyes gleam in the red lights.
“I imagine,” he says, “they’ll do whatever they please.”
With a swiftness a beast his size shouldn’t be capable of, Rage grabs my wrist. As fast, I jab him in the throat. For a second, we simply stare at each other. If I did that to a fee, she’d be gasping for air right now. Rage smiles and takes the cash from my hand. I desperately try to jerk out of his grasp, but he holds on tight. I can bench 225 pounds, but there’s no getting away from this beast. His bicep weighs 225 pounds. He yanks down my mask and tilts my head back.
“Suppressed your apple, did you, little swan?” he asks, inspecting my throat.
“A little help,” I call to Su.
“Yes, thank you,” Su replies urgently.
Her back is to me, hatchet out. From tables and stalls, mob beasts have formed a loose half circle around us. Rage stands up and dangles me in the air, turning me this way and that, like I’m a sweater he’s considering trying on. I desperately reach for my leg.
“Īe,” Rage muses. “Soredewa nai.” No, that’s not it.
Rage’s eyebrows go up with mild surprise as he considers the better reason my throat wouldn’t look like a beast’s. My fingers touch duct tape. Ripping it from my calf, I fling our last stack of money into the air. The paper bills waft down like dandelion fuzz caught in a thick, hot breeze. The tunnel is stunned into silence.
Then?
It’s mayhem.