by Joel Ross
Bea and Swedish followed Hazel, but when I started after them, the foghead grabbed my wrist. My pulse rocketed and I raised my boot to stomp on his foot as he searched my face.
“Wait!” he blurted, releasing me. “Are you—are you him?”
Hunching my shoulders, I started to follow the others.
“The boy with Fog in his eye?”
My stomach dropped, and the night suddenly felt cold and unfriendly.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, ducking my head.
His gaze softened a little with recognition. “Your name is Chess, isn’t it?”
“What do you want?”
“You’re more important than you know,” he said, sidling closer. “Your eye isn’t a sign of shame, but hope.”
Sharp needles of fear pricked my skin, but I didn’t move. A stranger knew my secret. How did he know? It was impossible. And what did he mean, a sign of hope?
I swallowed. “Wh-what are you talking about?”
“You’re marked by the Fog, Chess. You belong to the Fog, and maybe the Fog belongs to you. But you’re in danger. Grave danger. And we are to blame.”
“You are? Fogheads?”
He pursed his lips. “The Subassembly. You came to us for help, months ago—you and the girl.”
My breath caught in my throat. “I—what if I did?”
“One of us saw your eye.” The man bowed his head. “And he mentioned it—in public. The rumors are our fault. . . .”
“Hey!” Swedish yelled, stepping from the alley. “Get away from him!”
“Kodoc knows,” the foghead whispered to me. “Kodoc knows you’re alive.”
16
THE DARKNESS GATHERED AROUND me, and nausea rose in my stomach. Kodoc. The name sounded like a death sentence. I steadied myself on a dingy wall, dizzy with fear. One of the fogheads saw my eye? What else did they know about me? What other secrets had they spread—
“You!” Swedish roared, stepping closer. “Foghead! Back off!”
For a moment, the man stood there staring at me. Then Hazel joined Swedish, and he slunk away into the shadows.
“Are you okay?” Hazel asked me.
I swallowed. “Y-yeah.”
“What was that about?”
“I don’t know. That guy, he . . .” I shrugged, still jittery and afraid. “I don’t know.”
“What did he say?”
“Uh, he told me . . .” The truth caught in my throat. “He mostly rambled.”
I ducked my head and slouched toward the alley. Why had I lied to them? If Kodoc really knew I’d survived the cage, I needed to tell the crew. But something strangled the words before I could speak them. Fear, I guess. Like if I said Kodoc’s name out loud, I’d summon him. Like if he knew I was alive, he’d come and claim me.
His creation. His creature. His freak.
“Chess!” Hazel touched my arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. He just . . . I guess he saw my freak-eye.”
When I was younger, if anyone spotted my eye, I’d claim that the white shimmers were floating scars. Sometimes they’d still give me a thrashing, just for being ugly. It stopped happening when I’d gotten older and more careful, but the memories still hurt.
“Oh,” Hazel said.
“I like your eye,” Bea said loyally. “It’s cool, like clouds reflected in a puddle.”
“So now you’re saying I’m a muddy puddle,” I told her, trying to sound normal as we headed away.
“A cool muddy puddle,” she insisted.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “That’s like an awesome toenail clipping.”
“Fogheads.” Swedish spat. “They give me the creeps. If they like the Fog so much, they ought to live there.”
“They’re not so bad,” Hazel said. “You’re just mad we lost the raft.”
“There’s no way we’re getting to Port Oro now,” he grumbled. “They saw to that. We have to use the . . . rock to repay the bosses for the raft.”
Hazel shushed him. “Let’s talk about that when we get home.”
The slum shifted underfoot as a breeze swirled through the Fog, and the miles-wide patchwork of floats and balloons and hoverfans heaved and creaked and popped.
I didn’t mention the foghead again, even though I knew I had to tell them what he’d said. Kodoc knows you’re alive. Those weren’t just rumors we’d been hearing, they were rumors about me. I kept trying to say the words aloud, but I couldn’t. I was too scared. Sometimes I thought that when Kodoc had made me a freak, he’d also made me a coward.
So I kept my head down, feeling ashamed as we picked our way through a thicket of chains tethering balloons to the slum platforms. They clattered so loudly that we had no warning. We had just turned the corner when we found ourselves facing down a street gang playing bootball in the dusky light.
A boy missing his front teeth grabbed a sharp-edged brick and snarled, “What’re you doing here? This is our patch.”
“Just passing through,” Hazel said, her voice almost steady.
A scar-faced girl touched the pipe strapped to her leg. Gangs like this battled over food and turf and money. They fought over insults and respect, and sometimes just for fun. That was life in the slum—life and death.
I felt the others tense behind me. We were salvage rats, not street fighters, but I didn’t see any way out of this without bloodshed. For once it didn’t scare me—anything was better than worrying about Kodoc.
Even this.
17
SWEDISH STEPPED IN FRONT of me and glared at the toothless boy. The gang tensed and reached for their weapons. When Swedish scowled, he looked pretty mean, and he was bigger than the biggest of the gang kids.
Then Swedish toed a bootball from the ground into the air, catching it on his foot.
He bobbled the ball from his foot to his knee, caught it with his ankle, then kicked it above his head. He hunched his shoulders, and the bootball landed on the back of his neck, balanced there for a second, then plopped to the ground.
The gang kids laughed, and relief bubbled through my chest.
Swedish popped the ball straight upward, then smacked it with his forehead toward the goal.
The goalie swatted it away, and his team cheered.
“What do you play?” the scar-faced girl asked.
“Goalie,” Swedish said. “Or fixo.”
“You’re kind of big for it.”
“He used to be smaller,” I told her.
Hazel gave a quick smile and nudged Swedish, “Well, we’ll get out of your way,” she told the gang kids, and started across the clearing.
“If you’re ever looking for a game,” the first guy called after Swedish, “you know where to find us.”
Halfway down the next alley, Swedish started grinning like a goon. “Did you see that?” he said. “If everyone played bootball, there’d be no problems. No hunger, no fighting. Bootball—I’m telling you—it’s the solution.”
“To what?” Bea asked.
“To everything!”
“In the old days,” I said, trying to take my mind off the foghead, “they played a game called ‘golf.’ You knocked a ball the size of an egg into a little hole in the ground, using a club.”
Swedish cocked his head. “You couldn’t use your feet?”
“No, just the club.”
“What’d they call it?” Bea asked.
“Golf,” I repeated.
“Not that,” she said. “I mean, what’d they call the club?”
“Oh. Just a club, I think.”
She giggled. “They did not call it a club! Might as well call it a cudgel or a beating stick.”
“Well, that’s what it says in the scrapbook.”
“Huh,” Swedish said, scratching his cheek. “So each team had a hole? It sounds too easy to guard. You just put your foot over the hole.”
“Until the other team starts beating you with their clubs,” Hazel said.
�
�Oh!” Swedish nodded, satisfied. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Bea made a face. “Golfball sounds pretty violent.”
“And it’s not just the other team you had to watch out for,” I told her. “The field also had sand traps and hazards and windmills.”
“Windmills?” Hazel asked, quirking an eyebrow.
“I’m not sure where those came in,” I admitted.
“Maybe they milled grain while they played,” she suggested. “Makes more sense than whacking an egg with a cudgel.”
We started walking faster as we neared our neighborhood, following a trash-ridden trail around the Spew—the river of sludge that seeped from mounds of garbage, winding its way around the slum before cascading into the Fog.
Finally Bea sang out, “We’re home!”
She disabled the booby trap we always set when we left Mrs. E alone, then flung open the narrow door. The entryway was cluttered with splintery crate shelves and baskets of plastic bags from before the Fog. Whenever we weren’t on salvage runs, we wove the bags into sheets and sold them for handfuls of rice flour or lambs’ feet.
“I’ll check if Mrs. E’s awake,” Bea said.
Swedish grunted. “Not likely.”
“She was fine when we left!”
“That was yesterday,” Swedish said. “And she wasn’t fine, she was awake. There’s a difference.”
Bea glared at him. “Well, I’ll check if she’s—”
“Hold on a second,” Hazel told her.
“What?”
“First we need to talk.” Hazel rubbed her face. “We lost the raft. That’s seriously bad news. We can’t—”
Mrs. E’s voice floated from the main room. “Children? Is that you?”
Bea squealed and shot into the shack, with Swedish close on her heels. Hazel and I exchanged a hopeful look. Mrs. E was awake and didn’t even sound confused!
The main room was slightly higher than the cramped entryway, with a rickety table, a woodstove, and a catch barrel for rain. Chopsticks and plastic bowls cluttered the cabinet, along with what Mrs. E called a “milk jug.” She insisted that people used to drink cow’s milk, which always made Bea giggle.
Everyone knew that milk came from sheep and goats and camels.
Once I saw Mrs. E sitting at the table, I forgot all about the foghead. She almost never left her bedroom these days—she almost never left her bed—so I felt myself smile at the sight of her. The scent of the four slices of honey bread on the table didn’t hurt, either.
“Mrs. E!” Bea hugged her fiercely. “We’ve got so much to tell you! The muties boarded us and they shot the cargo tether and—wait! First Chess went diving, and you’ll never guess what he found!”
“Mutineers?” Mrs. E’s clouded eyes narrowed. “They boarded the raft?”
“They wanted to kidnap me,” Bea said, “but Hazel stopped them, and then a balloon popped, but we kept the raft afloat until—”
“Slow down, sweetie.” Mrs. E smiled, her voice gentle. “Have a bite of honey bread. Swedish, where are you? I can’t see you.”
“I’m here.” He took one of her frail hands. “How did you afford the bread? You know they’re watching us—”
“Stop fretting,” she told him. “A friend brought it.”
“Who? You don’t have friends. You’re afraid friends might . . .” Swedish trailed off, glancing at me. “Y’know.”
“Expose our secrets,” Hazel finished.
“He’s a very old friend,” Mrs. E said with a strange note in her voice. “He just found me again, after many years.”
Hazel twisted a braid around her finger. “Is something wrong? What is it?”
“Stop thinking so much,” Mrs. E scolded Hazel. “I’ll tell you everything after we eat. Now where’s Chess? Lurking in the background?”
“I don’t lurk,” I told her, stepping forward. “I skulk.”
“Then we’re all here,” she said. “Now sit down and eat.”
Swedish grabbed two slices. He gave one to Bea as I started wolfing down a third. The sweetness melted on my tongue and warmth spread in my stomach, but Hazel just toyed with her slice, eyeing Mrs. E.
“Did your friend tell you something?” she asked, taking a bite. “What happened?”
“He brought news.”
“What kind of news?”
Mrs. E took a shaky breath. “Terrible news.”
The sweet bread in my mouth turned to mud. “Is it . . . Kodoc?”
Mrs. E nodded. “Kodoc heard that one of his ‘test subjects’ survived the cages as an infant—he’s on the hunt for Chess.”
“How?” Swedish demanded while Hazel gasped, “No!”
“He’s suspected for weeks,” Mrs. E said, swaying in her seat. “Because of the rumors. He’s been scouring the mountain, checking every child between the ages of ten and fifteen. And once he’s done there . . .”
“After he finishes the Rooftop,” Hazel said. “He’ll start searching in the slum.”
“He’ll find Chess,” Mrs. E whispered, her face paling. “You need to hide, you need to run. . . .”
Her voice faded, her head dipped, and she slumped sideways, falling toward the floor.
18
SWEDISH CAUGHT MRS. E as she fainted, and the rest of us jumped from our chairs.
“C’mon,” Hazel told Swedish. “Bring her to bed.”
She followed him through the traffic-sign door while I picked at a crack on the tabletop. I thought about Mrs. E climbing into the Fog to save me, about my mother dying, my father being handed a baby with one freakish eye. And about being Kodoc’s creation: not just born a freak, but made a freak.
Now he was coming for me.
“At least we’re already planning to leave,” Bea said. “I mean, Kodoc knows about you, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“Except that there are a thousand roof-troopers hunting for us now.”
“Other than that,” she agreed. “But we were trying to get to Port Oro anyway.”
“Which would be easy if we could sell the ring. But we owe the bosses for the raft, and they won’t let us leave without paying. Our only way to pay is—”
“The diamond!” she blurted, brightening. “Show me, show me!”
I almost smiled at her enthusiasm. But when I reached to unsnap my boot pocket, Swedish and Hazel returned to the main room, looking grim.
“Is she okay?” Bea asked them, her brightness fading.
Hazel fiddled with her braid. “She’s not great.”
“Not great?” Swedish rubbed his face. “More like ‘terrible.’”
“Yeah, well . . . at least she’s sleeping comfortably.”
“For now,” Swedish said.
Hazel nodded. “Let’s talk in the workshop, so we don’t bother her.”
We went into the front room, where Swedish opened a hatch in the floor. Inside, a rope ladder dangled down a shaft that led to the shadowy underside of the slum, beneath the platforms where fans roared and sludge dripped, fifty feet above the Fog.
The workshop was bolted under the platform, a square room with telefoam poles for a frame, tightly woven cables for walls, and scraps of alumina drywall for a floor. It was where Bea tinkered, designing and building the thoppers that Swedish flew in drag races.
When she fiddled with a knob, a soft glow shone over dinged tools, scratched dials, and a battered foggium compressor. A workbench sat against one wall, with tidy racks of bolts, wire, and old lenses, and a large rectangular hole opened in the middle of the floor. The thopper—about the size of an overgrown camel, with three wings on each side and a wide fantail—dangled below, hanging from sturdy chains. There was nothing between the thopper and the Fog but empty air.
“We have lots to talk about—” Hazel started.
“Wait,” I interrupted. “I need to say something.”
“Stop talking and show us the diamond!” Bea said. “Let’s see that purple rock!”
“Yeah,” Swedish said
with a tired smile. “We’ve been waiting for hours.”
So I leaned against the workbench and pulled the box from my boot pocket. I waited a moment—enjoying their excitement—then lifted the lid. The diamond caught the dim light in the workshop and cast rainbow sparkles onto the wall.
Bea gasped, her big green eyes shining. “Is it really real?”
“Definitely fake,” Swedish said in a soft, awed voice.
Hazel carefully lifted the ring from the box. Silence fell. That diamond was worth more than everything we owned, more than everything we’d ever owned.
“Give me your hand,” she told Bea.
“Sure,” Bea said. “Why?”
Hazel raised the ring toward her finger. “I want to see how it looks.”
“Oh, no!” Bea squeaked, and stuck her hand behind her back. “You should wear it, not me!”
“Go on, Bea,” I said.
I knew that for Hazel, the diamond was like a window into the world of the upper slopes, with silk dresses and rolling parks. And she didn’t just dream of that life for herself, she dreamed of it for all of us—especially Bea.
After Hazel slipped the ring on her finger, Bea wrinkled her nose. “It looks dumb on my dirty hand.”
“Nah,” Swedish said. “Nothing goes better with a diamond than an honest smear of grease. Well, except roast goose. Everything goes better with roast goose.”
I threw a rivet at him, then Bea climbed onto the workbench and locked the ring in a hidden compartment in the ceiling. “Why’d you promise that slipway guy money?” she asked Hazel, hopping down. “And why’d you tell me to shut up?”
“Hold on.” I looked at my scuffed boots. “Let me go first.”
“You’re the Prince of Diamonds, Chess,” Hazel said. “You can say anything.”
“Remember that foghead who grabbed me?”
“What did he say?” Bea asked.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Uh, he kind of told me why Kodoc knows I’m alive.” I explained about a young foghead blurting the truth in public. “And that’s how the rumors started.”
“But you didn’t say anything,” Bea said, sounding confused. “You didn’t tell us.”