by Shade Owens
Everyone turned my way, expecting me to take a stand.
Pick your battles, I thought to myself. I contemplated telling her to piss off, but she’d already threatened to get the Northers involved. The last thing we needed right now was more heat. So instead, I got up and signaled everyone to follow me, which they did but while grunting and moaning.
The moment we stepped out from underneath the safety of overhead trees, the water came pouring down on us as if being dumped by the bucket.
“This is bullshit!” Coin shouted, water splashing off her lips.
I looked back at her, glaring to keep water from getting into my eyes. “I know, I’m sorry,” I shouted. “But like I said, we need to keep our heads low.”
A few other women came trudging out from the sleeping area, their bare feet slipping and sliding in brown gunk. Along with them came Olga, the old Russian woman. She was old and frail, and Alice Number Two should have let her stay in the forest. But Olga and those with her were the other half of the Food Station, so they needed to be out here. They looked as annoyed as we were.
Aside from the rain coming down hard, no other sound came from the city. Instead, everyone remained safe within the sleeping area, covered by thousands of leaves and angled tree trunks. We, on the other hand, shivered as we moved to our post.
I clenched my teeth, imagining where the Northers were right about now. They’d probably gathered inside their fancy wooden cabins to stay warm and dry.
Something suddenly splashed behind me, and I turned around to spot Tegan lying in the mud, her entire face glistening and her limbs frantically moving around to gain traction. She looked like a fish flapping in water.
Poor Tegan.
Hammer rushed to her side and grabbed her underneath the armpits.
“I got you,” she said, pulling her up.
Why was Alice Number Two doing this? Why couldn’t she have waited for the storm to settle?
Arenas was the first to approach our daily workload—a massive pile of fruits, vegetables, and nuts that had begun rolling overtop one another due to the rain. Shells and skins glistened, and the sand all around them turned into a mud pit.
This job was like a never-ending cycle—like working on an assembly line. No matter how hard we worked, food kept getting dropped in the mud. But we kept cleaning, cutting, peeling, and sorting. Maybe eventually, we’d finish the pile since no one was out gathering resources to add to it.
Arenas almost fell coming back with two coconuts in her hands. I had no idea how she planned on cracking them open in this rain.
The rain persisted up until around lunchtime, and by then, we were all quivering and feeling sick. But Alice Number Two didn’t care. She told us to shut our mouths and keep working, so that’s what we did.
It wasn’t long before I realized that keeping my mouth shut was a lot harder than speaking up. When the rain finally stopped, the city returned to normal and it became even harder for me to stay quiet. Every few minutes, we were either being harassed by Alice Number Two or by hateful Peasants walking by, shouting insults, or telling us to go back to wherever we came from.
And every time this happened, I closed my eyes, took in a long breath, and slowly let it out. Everyone stared at me, expecting me to finally snap, but I didn’t. I’d meant what I’d said to all my women—we had to keep our heads low. There was a bigger goal in mind here, and I wouldn’t allow my emotions or my pride to get in the way of that.
The evening went by as it did most nights, only, without a fight this time—without my getting us into trouble. I was quiet, for the most part, aside from a few groups of women who laughed out loud with fingers pointed in our direction.
What was wrong with them? Why were they treating me like the enemy when the real enemies were living a somewhat luxurious life behind that giant wooden gate, spending their days eating, sleeping, and training Fighters. In the meantime, we were out here, suffering from exhaustion, hunger, and cold, all to ensure the Beasts had a comfortable life.
These women had been brainwashed into believing this was the safest life for them—under the protection of the Northers.
I stared at the sky that evening, watching as it darkened from a powder blue to a midnight blue filled without thousands upon thousands of stars. I couldn’t see them all from here, but every few meters, I caught a crack between a multitude of leaves and the stars I did manage to see looked like little diamonds floating in the sky.
Maybe one day, I’d get to appreciate the sky again.
We had to get out of here.
I turned over in my hammock, still cold from being forced to work in such horrible conditions that day, and all I kept thinking about was Ellie and the warmth of her body against mine. Picturing her there kept me warm a bit.
She was okay, I kept telling myself. I’d get out of this nightmare of a prison and find my way back to her. I closed my eyes, the sound of whispers fluttering around me. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, but it was something I’d gotten used to—there were always women chitchatting even after everyone was settled in their sleeping arrangements.
Some lay in the dirt, others on sheets of cotton, while my women and I, along with Quinn and hers, lay in hammocks Quinn had constructed and allowed us to use. It was far more comfortable than the ground and much less cold.
So I held on to this speck of positivity amid a sea of negatives and slowly, the voices began to fade away. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, listening to beetles, frogs, and insects I’d probably never see on this island until I disappeared from reality for only a few hours—long enough to get away from the anger, hatred, and despair.
CHAPTER 8
I felt like a robot—like a piece of machinery built for production and nothing else.
The days began to bleed into one another, and my exhaustion was getting the best of me. Every night, I spent hours staring into nothingness, waiting for the voices to subside, and by the time I fell asleep, it seemed as though morning had just arrived.
After a few weeks of repetition, the bracelet around my wrist lost meaning.
Everything lost meaning.
No one looked at me as their savior or hero anymore. I wasn’t some rebel who’d stormed into the Northers’ city to save these women. I was a nuisance who’d gotten people killed. As for the women who did stand at my side, I felt sorry for them. I wasn’t doing anything to console them out of fear of getting someone else killed.
A clammy hand grabbed me by the forearm one morning, and I cracked my eyes open.
“D-d-did you th-th-think about it?” Tegan said.
I wiped gunk from my eyes and mouth, sat upright, and stared at her with tired eyes. “Think about what?” I whispered.
Women were still asleep, and a morning fog covered the forest floor.
Tegan raised a hand beside her mouth as if this would somehow keep her words safe.
“Running,” she mouthed.
Running, I thought.
No, I hadn’t thought about it.
Why hadn’t I thought about it?
What was wrong with me?
I was losing my mind.
Hadn’t Tegan brought this up a few days ago? Or had it been a few months? I rubbed my forehead, creating little pieces of oil and dirt underneath my fingertips. When had I last cleaned myself?
God, I missed the Waterfall. I missed being able to dive headfirst into water, the salty warmness caressing every inch of my body. Here, no one showered. At least not the Peasants. Once per week, we were given the privilege of using the community water buckets to clean our skin.
In other words, the Northers placed a dozen big cauldrons of water near the wooden gates and allowed us, the Peasants, to circle them like vultures. The few times I attempted to use it, the water was brown by the time I got there. Other times, they were empty. Oftentimes, some Peasants dumped the entire bucket on themselves, leaving nothing for the others.
“B-B-Brone?”
I looked down, realizing tha
t Tegan was still standing inches away from me. The freckles on her face looked like they’d tripled underneath all the filth. I couldn’t tell her skin apart from the dirt.
“D-d-did you… D-d-d you th-th-think ab-b-b—”
“No,” I snapped, not wanting to hear any more of her stuttering. She cowered back like a helpless, beaten dog, and I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. It’s a great idea, Tegan. Let’s chat about this later, okay? When it’s”—I looked around to make sure no one was listening—“more private.”
She smiled at me, which was something I hadn’t seen her do since I got here. In fact, I realized then that I could see the entirety of her face without her hair draping over it.
She twirled on her feet, but I quickly reached out and grabbed her arm. She flinched and pulled away but seemed to calm down when she realized it was only me.
“It’s nice to have you back,” I said.
She nodded fast and scratched the side of her head, obviously not yet comfortable enough to talk about anything she’d gone through.
The moment she disappeared from the sleeping area, I sat upright and stretched my neck.
Why hadn’t I thought about it? Although a bit risky, running away seemed like our best option, especially if orchestrated correctly. And especially since the Hunters, my people, still hadn’t come for us. We couldn’t sit around and wait, either.
Besides, a few Northers wouldn’t have the means to stop dozens upon dozens of women running out from the city.
“Ahhhh, fuck,” Hammer growled.
I turned sideways to find her lying in the dirt beside my hammock. She held a white-fingered hand against her cheek, and squinted her eyes so tightly they looked like little caterpillars.
“What’s wrong? You okay?” I asked.
“My… My f…ing tooth,” she mumbled.
Hammer wasn’t the first woman to complain about a sore tooth, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. In the Village, we’d been careful about oral hygiene for the most part—chewing on peppermint leaves, using wood to scrape away plaque, and even creating little brushes out of weird, dry plants found in Tegan’s shop.
But here, none of that mattered.
We had no rights, and hygiene didn’t matter to the Northers.
I licked the front of my teeth, feeling a thick, grimy layer against the tip of my tongue. My breath, too, was something I’d learned to ignore. Mornings were the worst—sometimes, almost enough to make me gag.
But it was part of the package—part of the cruelty we were being forced to endure.
“Yo, what’s up with your girl?” someone asked.
I looked up to find one of Quinn’s women standing in front of me, her hands on her waist. She had wiry blond hair like a helmet made of hay. I didn’t know her name, but she wore one of our bracelets around her wrist. I had to trust this meant something.
“It’s… S’my tooth,” Hammer mumbled again.
“See that?” the woman asked, pointing through the trees and straight into the market.
Hammer followed her finger, as did I, though I had no idea what she was pointing at.
“The shack on the right,” she added. “It has a cloth roof with a hole in it. See it? And right beside it”—she jabbed her finger in the air as if trying to touch it—“is a sign. It looks like a three-year-old scribbled something on it, but it’s supposed to be a tooth.”
I almost scoffed, but I wasn’t even in the mood to fake laugh. “Let me guess… the town’s dentist?”
The woman nodded. “Not much of a dentist, but she’ll rip it out for you.”
Hammer’s eyes went huge and she pulled her face back until the back of her head hit the tree behind her.
“You don’t have much of an option around here,” the woman continued. She then pulled her right cheek away from her teeth, revealing several black holes. “You’ll have more problems if you let that cavity get out of control.”
Hammer’s eyes were still popping out of her head.
I didn’t blame her. Who the hell wanted some uneducated woman to pull out their teeth? And without proper equipment, it would hurt way too much.
The woman must have noticed the horrified look on my face, too. She laughed and said, “Ya won’t feel it. She’s good friends with Mashi. She’s got all you need to numb that shit.”
I remembered that name—Mashi. Sumi had told me about her. She was the one who snuck drugs into the city while gathering resources.
Hammer, not looking any more convinced than earlier, stared at the woman like she was insane.
“Hammer,” I said, “it’ll be fine. Didn’t we have someone in the Village who used to do that?”
She swung her head my way. “Lilac? S-she… She was t-the swe…st thing. Ev…everyone trusted her.”
The woman gave Hammer a solid smack on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Ripper’ll take good care of you.”
“Ri—” Hammer tried, but the woman started laughing and walked away. Hammer’s big eyes rolled my way and although anyone else’s jaw would have dropped at this point, her teeth remained clenched together tight, like she was afraid that if she breathed, her teeth would fall out.
“I’m sure she’s only messing with you,” I said, though truthfully, I wasn’t entirely sure. “Come on, let’s go before Alice Number Two starts yelling at us to get to work.”
CHAPTER 9
The sign overhead looked like someone had tried to carve a troll or a disfigured goblin. How the hell was that intended to be a tooth? It looked old, too. With a doughy-looking texture and stained edges, the wood looked as though it had endured hundreds upon hundreds of storms.
The building had no walls per se, other than cotton sheets that hung from loose hooks on wooden poles. There was, however, an entryway built of wood that resembled a doorframe. It almost looked like this alone was what supported the entire structure.
Hammer glanced sideways at me one more time before we bowed our heads to fit through the entryway, suddenly wishing we hadn’t.
* * *
“Mom, do we have to come here?” I asked, staring at the building’s front door.
I was due for a dental checkup, and being that our usual clinic had caught fire a few weeks ago, my mom decided to take me to this new place, 99 Dental. It was the cheapest place in town. At ten years old, I didn’t have much say.
It looked incredibly cheap, too. Maybe that was why it was called 99 Dental.
The windows were all foggy, but not foggy on the inside due to the weather—rather, a buildup of condensation either from the inside of the building or in the windows themselves. The front door, something that looked more like a white slab of wood than anything else, had peeling paint all over the place, revealing big brown patches.
“Come on, sweetheart, let’s go inside,” my mom said, reaching for my hand.
I was so disgusted, I almost pulled away. But I knew it wasn’t her fault, so I didn’t. Working night shifts in a hardware store wasn’t exactly the best-paying job, and because of her fibromyalgia, she constantly missed some of those shifts, which cut her pay in half.
I’d gotten pretty used to being poor.
A little bell rang over my head as I walked in, and the woman behind the reception desk looked up at us, her bright eyes hovering over the crusty-looking counter.
“Hi there,” she said, almost too happily. It was like she was forcing it, knowing that if she didn’t, we’d walk out.
My mom walked up to the counter, eyeballed the woman’s name tag and said, “Hi… Josephine. I booked an appointment for my daughter Lydia.” She stretched over the counter like she was trying to read right off Josephine’s paper. “Lydia Brone.”
“Ah, yes,” Josephine said. Her perfectly straight teeth looked like they’d been bleached twice a week for an entire year. “Please, have a seat.”
We sat down on green leather chairs—the only two at the back wall that didn’t have long cracks in them. Even the television overhead was old—a r
egular flat-screen TV from my mom’s time. No one carried these anymore, and you never saw them in public spaces. The cool thing was to have the holographic televisions: two small speaker bars distanced from one another that projected a screen inches away from the wall.
I was five years old when they first came out, and my mom wanted nothing to do with them. At first, you had to buy some special paint to put on the wall behind it to ensure the image quality shone through, but over the years, they’d developed better technology, allowing the screen to be viewed anyplace, anytime, and under any condition.
This place was obviously too poor to afford a TV like that. But then again, so were we.
It seemed like we waited hours in that place, and every minute of it, my stomach churned. What would the dentist be like? Would he or she cause me pain? This place was so filthy. What if I caught an infection?
I stared at the children’s books on the coffee table, wondering how many germs were crawling all over them. I hated school for that—teaching all of us the importance of hygiene and the effects of bacteria. I was only ten years old and I hated opening doors in public without a napkin. My mom seemed pretty happy about this, though. She’d said something along the lines of “It’s about time people become aware.”
Aware, or paranoid?
She kept insisting it was awareness.
“Brone?” came a sweet woman’s voice. “Lydia Brone?”
I looked up and caught the eyes of a tall, thin black woman. She had silky-looking hair that hung over her shoulders and a smile on her face that instantly made me feel better. I was strangely at home here, and every preconceived notion I had about that dental clinic disappeared.
“I’m Dr. Lina,” she said, her hand holding a wooden door open. “Come on in.”
* * *
“Mmm,” the woman grunted.
She was no Dr. Lina—in fact, she wasn’t a doctor at all. She looked like she’d once lived on the streets of New York City: ragged clothes, dirt-covered skin, a hump on her back, and gray hair that almost looked black because it was so dirty.