by Katie French
I say nothing. These people are cattle to him, or toys. It's just like when little boys played with plastic figurines. Only Merek plays with human beings.
“Well?” Merek asks me, looking annoyed. “How will you stand up to Mister?”
Mister shoots me a venomous look. He licks his lips, waiting for my answer.
“I don't have to stand up to Mister,” I say, letting the corners of my mouth curve up ever so slightly. “All I have to do is outlast him.”
Mister flashes teeth like an angry animal, but I just turn away. Let Mister be angry. Let them all be angry. If I've learned anything from being on the road these months, it’s that cool heads prevail over burning hearts.
Nada and I don’t speak as we wash up for the night. Everyone else around us is speculating on the tournament at the sinks, talking about which games might be involved and who might win. Nada hasn't said a word since she volunteered, and I don't feel like talking to her either. My belly is full of eels tonight, cold and wriggling and making me want to hurl up my lunch. My name is inked on the parchment. I picture a medieval broad sword slashing through my stomach and wince. What was I thinking? What kind of wit does it take to swing a sword? I'm dead. Nada's dead.
A hand on my bicep startles me. I whirl around and there's Doc in the shadows.
“This way,” he breathes, nodding.
“Are we going to see the midwife?” I ask, suddenly remembering I asked him this favor.
Doc puts a finger to his lips. We turn to walk away, but Nada puts a hand on Doc’s arm.
“You can’t come,” he says, anger in his voice. This is the first time I've heard him talk to Nada that way.
I tiptoe after Doc into the dark. Once Doc sees that the coast is clear, he leads me around the wash house and across the shadowed courtyard. There are guards out and about, but the majority of them cluster around the washhouse and the bunk house. A few are on wall duty, but they stand near the gate with their guns aimed at the road.
“Where we going?” I whisper. My eyes flick toward the six-foot high wooden wall. I don’t want to see Annabell again.
Doc glances back at me. His face is locked in nervous anticipation as he scans the moonlit courtyard and then nods at me to follow him.
We slink around the side of the wooden fence until we come to where the fence meets Lord Merek's quarters. A small door is nestled in there. The knob turns in Doc's hand and he disappears into the dark interior.
I have no choice but to trust him. I follow him into the dark.
Doc shuts the door behind me with a quiet click. I expect him to lead me down the nearly black hallway, but he makes no move to do anything. I can see his dim outline in front of me. He rests against the wall and leans his head back.
“What're we doing?” I whisper.
He slides toward me until his breath puffs against my cheek. “We have to wait here until I get word that the coast is clear. Relax a minute. Consider it a smoke break.”
“I don't smoke,” I snap. I don't like waiting in the dark. I want to see Auntie now.
Doc sniffs as if my comment is mildly amusing. “You're just like Nada, always giving me a hard time. Maybe that's why I like you.”
I blush a little at this comment. Is Doc flirting with me? Leaning back against the wall, I change the subject. “Nada didn't sign up for the tournament to piss you off. She really thinks she'll die like Shali. I watched that bender burn. It was…awful.”
“I know.” He pauses. Somewhere deep inside the building a baby's crying. “Nada's just so damn stubborn. She's gonna get herself killed, and I'm probably going to die trying to stop her.”
“Here's one thing I don't get,” I say, shifting position on the wall. “How are you two brother and sister, or…” I pause, trying to figure out how to say this. “I know you're not technically her brother since you're a bender, but…”
“It's okay,” Doc says. I can hear the amused smile in his voice. “We're not related by blood, but we were both adopted by the same father when we were young and we grew up together. She's the only family I have left.”
I lower my head, knowing full well how it feels to want to protect your loved ones. I bite my lip and try not to picture Ethan's tender face.
“Our dad was a doctor at a Breeders way station in Mexico. Traders from Mexico would kidnap girls and bring them to my dad. He'd make them healthy, take care of them, and keep them until the Breeders would come to collect.”
“Don't get me wrong. He wasn't one of the bad guys,” he says, rubbing a hand up and down the back of his neck. “He had to hand the women over to the Breeders or they would've killed him.”
“I know how the Breeders work.” My fingers find the ankh brand on my wrist.
“So he did what he could for the girls while he had them. He'd treat their ailments, feed them, talk to them. Then when one of them showed up with a baby in her arms—”
“That'd be you?” I ask. The baby down the hall whimpers quietly.
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “My dad said I was always bawling and red in the face. Constipation.” Doc chuckles again. “When the Breeders came for my mother, she begged my… father, my adopted father, to hide me, keep me safe. He did.”
“Nice,” I say, thinking about how Clay mentioned I have a father out there somewhere.
“I grew up in a tiny way-station in the middle of the desert with my dad and his medical books. It was a great childhood, really, except when I had to hide in the crawl space when traders or the Breeders came. That part was…terrifying.”
I picture a tiny Doc tucked in a cobwebby crawl space, clutching a binky while Breeders guards prowled around his home overhead. Not too much different than my own upbringing.
“When did Nada come into the picture?” I ask.
“When I was seven,” Doc says. “She was a dirty, wide-eyed two-year-old a trader delivered in a potato sack along with her mother. Nada's mother died three days later. I helped my dad treat the poor woman’s wounds. She…she had been brutalized.”
I swallow hard and say nothing.
“Nada wouldn't trust us for weeks. She tried running away, but we found her in the middle of the night huddled under a cactus. There was nowhere for her to go. Finally, when the Breeders came to collect her mother, Nada let me hold her as we hid. She didn't cry when they took her mother's body away. She never cried.” Doc's voice is wistful and forlorn. He sighs. “She only decided to trust me when our father died.”
“What happened to him?”
Doc shakes his head and shifts in the darkness. “A trader killed him for medicine when I was twelve and Nada was seven.” Doc goes quiet again. “We lived in the trading post for a year on the supplies my dad had hoarded. After that, we were on the road. Life was rough.”
“I can imagine.” I look over at Doc's silhouette. “Nada said something about free colonies.”
Doc turns to me again. “There's rumors, but I can't believe they’re much more than that. Everyone wants to believe in free colonies just like everyone wants to believe in Heaven. I'm not sure either exists, but it's nice to believe they do.”
“But what if they do exist?” I ask, my heart thrumming.
“What difference does it make? We're stuck here.”
I open my mouth to argue with him again, but boots thud down the hallway, headed our way. We freeze and turn toward the sound.
A figure pauses in the dark. “Doc,” a female voice whispers.
Doc's hand slips around my wrist. I stumble forward with a lump in my throat.
When we reach the main hallway, I see the faint outline of the woman. A small candle flickers in her hand, sending a warm glow over her soft features. She's older than I am, maybe twenty-five with wavy brown hair swept back in another of those princess hairstyles. She has a gold crown settled above her brow. Her gown is sheer and flowing like Annabell's and I can tell by her big breasts and sagging stomach that she's recently given birth. This must be—
“Mina,” Doc w
hispers. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she says, smiling with full lips and even teeth. “Last night with the delivery—”
“It was nothing,” Doc says, waving a hand.
“The baby was breech,” Mina says to me, placing a hand on Doc's shoulder. “He's a miracle worker. That midwife, too.”
“About the midwife,” Doc says.
“I know.” Mina turns, her candle fluttering. “This way.”
We tiptoe down the hallway behind Mina. My nerves stack up until I can barely take a step without hyperventilating. What if we’re caught? We'll be killed? Beaten? What will happen to Auntie? I keep my eyes on Doc and Mina in front of me. They seem nervous, but not petrified. But then, they aren't likely to be dragged into the courtyard and shot.
Mina leads us down the hall to a closed door. Slowly she turns the knob and pushes in. When I'm able to follow her, I see a crude nursery with a wooden crib and rocking chair. On the wall is a cracked mirror and a very old painting of a rubber duck. A woman leans over the crib where a baby sleeps. Long gray braids trail down her back.
“Auntie,” I whisper, my hands clutching together. Is it?
She turns.
“Puddin' head,” my Auntie says as she spots me. She smiles and holds her hands out, a tear sliding down one cheek.
But, her face looks…wrong. I haven't really seen it since I left her in the basement of the Sheriff’s house when she told me to go after my mother. She'd been beaten in town, that I knew, but this…
A healing scar cuts down her left cheek, and on top of that new bruises are greenish-yellow and puffy. One eye socket is closed and stitched shut. Her eye is gone forever.
They took her eye?
My hand slaps over my mouth to stifle a gasp. “What did they do?” This can't have happened. Her eye. They took her eye.
Doc's voice behind me draws my attention. “We'll leave you two alone for a moment.”
I barely notice the door closing behind them.
Auntie stands at the crib and looks me over. “Punkin’, you look all right. They treating you okay?”
I take a step forward, still shaking. “Who did this?” I point to her eye. The forever-shut lid looks sunken and gives her face a misshapen appearance.
Auntie's hand travels up to her eye socket. “Sheriff,” she says without emotion. She touches the scar on her cheek. “This is courtesy of that rotten pig eater, Warden. I gave him balls the size of grapefruits for it, though. Bastard couldn’t walk straight for a week.” She smiles ruefully.
I take another step on legs that will buckle any second. “I…I'm so sorry. I never should've left.”
Auntie folds her hands in front of her, dimpling her clean cotton dress. “Balderdash. I made ya go. And you found your ma, I heard.”
A hand clamps over my heart at the mention of my mama. “Auntie, I—”
She holds a hand up to stop me. “Hush, darling. I already know.”
I nod, neither of us saying that the woman we loved best in the world is buried and gone.
And suddenly I'm running to her and falling into her arms and she's holding me and rocking me like a babe. I feel like I’m back at home, safe. I want her to hold me and rock me until the wounds stop hurting, until the pain of my mama's death can no longer find me, until all of this falls away.
I force myself to step back and look into her face.
She runs a finger down my tear-streaked cheek. “Never was a great beauty me,” she says, sighing. “Don't mind my scars, Ri. Don't fret your pretty head.”
“The Sheriff's dead, but I swear to God I'll kill the warden for what he’s done to you.”
She waves a dismissive hand. “That toe-sucker can rot for all I care. Town's a mess now that Sheriff's gone, and he can barely contain it. Any minute now they'll all mutiny and hang his arse.” She lifts a disgusted sneer and chuckles.
From the crib the baby lets out a little gasp. Auntie turns and rubs a hand down the tiny baby's bare belly.
“This one's name is Arthur after some famous king. Merek loves his sons to be regal.” Auntie smiles down at the once again sleeping babe. “It's nice to be taking care of little ones again.” Then she turns and looks at me. “Ethan?”
“I don't know where he is,” I say, my voice trembling. “I had him, Auntie. I had him, but then Nessa Vandewater…”
“That goddamned harpy,” Auntie says, looking ready to spit. “She's one I wouldn't mind putting in the ground.”
“Me neither,” I say. “She has Clay. I know that much. I'm willing to bet she took Ethan along to keep Clay in line.”
“Just as like,” Auntie says, still stroking the little babe. “That woman’s vile. She was in town a couple of days ’fore you all arrived. Had fun ordering me around. She’s got something big up her sleeve, too. Overheard the warden and her talking about it. Something about an army.” Auntie’s one eye goes wide. “A rat with an army ain’t a good thing.”
I shake my head, watching her hand stroke the baby’s brown cap of hair. It’s hard to look at her face with the stitched eye. “I can’t worry about Nessa until I can get you and me outta here.”
Auntie shakes her head and reaches out to grab my arm. “I stay. I won’t be a burden.”
“Stop,” I say, looking into her good eye this time. “I won’t leave you again. Never. We both go or neither of us do.”
She opens her mouth to protest, but as she studies my face she sighs. “You’re a mule of a girl, you know that? Stubborn as cement shoes.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.
“It means, okay fine, take this old bag of bones with you.” She walks over and sits down in the wooden rocker that creaks under her slight weight. “It means,” she says looking up at me, “good luck. No way to bust out of here as far as I can see.”
“There’s a tournament in two days. The winner gets freedom for herself and another slave.”
Auntie folds her wrinkled lips into a frown. “What kind of tournament?”
I shrug, trying to decide how much to tell her. “Games of skill and chance. I can outwit these idiots.” I look up to see if she’s buying it.
Her arms, folded across her chest, suggest she’s not. “I heard the girls talking about it. The games won’t be fair. Merek’s brutal. Heartless. The girls tell me if they deliver a bender baby they’re forced to drown it or leave it outside the gates for the coyotes.”
I shiver at the thought. “It’s too late,” I say, trying to sound confident. “Already signed up. Once it’s done, it can’t be undone.”
“Hells,” Auntie says. “Then tell them you’re a girl and you’ll be slotted to be one of Merek’s wives. He won’t let you compete then. You’ll have to…” She looks up at me. “You’ll have to do your wifely duties. Won’t be pleasant. I won’t lie and say it is, but—”
“No,” I say, placing both palms on the smooth wood of the crib. “I belong to Clay.”
“You belong to Merek,” Auntie says coldly. “One way or the other.”
“You can’t talk me out of this,” I say, turning. “It’s done.”
Auntie fiddles with her dress for a moment. I wonder if she’ll scold me. In our old life, she would’ve given me a tongue-lashing, maybe a spanking for good measure, but a lot has happened since our life at the farmhouse was blown to pieces. She clutches her knees and won’t look at me.
“Do what you see fit,” she says through tight lips.
“Auntie—”
She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. “Don’t explain. You’re a woman now. No reason to listen to an old, used-up hag like me.”
“Auntie.” I take a step toward her, but stop.
She rises, smoothing wrinkles out of her dress. “Riley, I’m not mad at ya, just…worried. I can’t protect you anymore and Clay’s not here, either. You’re gonna have to puzzle this one out for your own self.”
Although it was exactly what I planned to do all along,
hearing it from her makes it rock solid. Win or lose, this is all on me.
When a bell begins ringing, it takes me a long time to register where I am. I wake slowly, letting my sand-crusted eyes flutter open. The bunk above me squeaks with Nada’s weight. I’m in my bed in the bunk house. Merek’s compound. I’m a slave.
I’d been dreaming of Ethan moments earlier. He was hiding in an abandoned building, much like the ones we stayed in with Clay and the Sheriff back in Albuquerque, old houses gone to rot, homes for birds and vermin now. Ethan was running ahead of me down a sand-filled hall. I could see his shoeprints and hear his footsteps, but nothing else. I’d scream his name and try to run, but the sand was deep and my legs useless. Every corner I’d turn, I’d see a flash of his leg before he disappeared deeper into the house.
Now, as I lay in bed staring at the springs above me, my panic clings to me like my sweat-drenched T-shirt. My throat’s raw as if I really have been screaming for my little brother. I want to roll over and press my face into my mattress and cry. Instead, a bleary-eyed Doc shakes my mattress with one hand as he pulls up his pants with the other.
“Up,” Doc says urgently. “This can’t be goo—”
The doors burst open. Guards pour in with batons already out. “Get up, you lazy scrubs. We got us special entertainment this morning.” Bukowski strolls through the bunk house, clanging his baton on beds as benders jump down.
I glance to the barred windows. It’s not even dawn. They’ve never woken us up this early.
“Get up!” a guard yells at me, leaning into my bunk.
I stand as Nada is climbing down. She lands beside me, flicks me a worried look and glances to Doc. He shrugs.
Once all the benders have assembled, standing at attention at the ends of their bunks, Bukowski walks by, swinging his baton.
“Got something for you to witness this morning,” he says, his tone serious. His baton gives a punctuated whack against the bunk bed. “No talking, no moving, no messing around of any kind. Lord Merek wants you to witness so you’ll know what the consequences are. Rule breakers will be punished.”