by Jim Heskett
Stolen from their homes when they were too young to know how wrong it was.
Yorick decided he’d had enough.
And so when Rosia jumped past the guard and stepped onto the platform to point a finger and shout at Wybert, Yorick joined her. And, he wasn’t surprised when the guards cracked rifle stocks on their heads, sending them to the floor.
When the bag came off his head, Yorick immediately craned his neck around to locate Rosia. He didn’t have to look far. She was in a chair next to him, her hands bound behind the chair, a rope around her waist to keep her seated. Seething, pressing against her restraints.
Yorick blinked and found himself opposite Lord Wybert himself, flanked by two of his elite guard. Standing a meter away. Small gray room, with no markings and only a single heavy metal door leading in or out. The guards stared at the wall, holding their rifles across their chests, fingers hovering above the triggers.
Yorick had never been this close to the plantación owner before. He had never come close enough to notice the fake tint of beige to his skin. Cheeks with hints of red circles on them, lips more red than normal. Had he colored his skin somehow?
A flash of memory hit Yorick. He looked like the women on the covers of the paperback fiction books, with their painted faces. Makeup, that’s what it was named. The lord painted himself like a paperback model? How strange.
But, with his wild hair and makeup, Wybert’s sneer seemed even more menacing.
“My name,” the older man said through gritted teeth, “is Lord Roque Beauregard Wybert. I am the master of this plantación, and you are my serfs.”
Obviously, this was not new information. But, given that Wybert’s guards held fingers a centimeter away from the triggers of their rifles, he opted to keep his mouth shut.
Wybert drew a breath to say more, but he paused. He took a few steps around the room. Then, he chuckled to himself. “Yes, I know you already know all of that.” He waved a hand in the air and tilted his head from side to side. “But, I do like the theatrics of it. I consider myself a showman.”
He cleared his throat as his expression darkened again. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the pressure I’m under, running this plantación. The pressure I face from outside sources, every single day. That’s the gift I give to you; your ignorance. You train in your nice gymnasium and eat well-balanced meals and sleep in your comfortable beds, safe within these walls. But you have no idea. No idea what’s outside in the real world. No idea the juggling act I have to play just to keep everything running smoothly.”
“What’s going to happen to Hamon?” Rosia said, practically spitting the words.
Wybert approached and knelt in front of her. Yorick reacted, straining against his bonds.
Wybert held up a hand toward Yorick. “Easy, my fierce guerrero.” Then he turned his attention back to Rosia. “What happens to those at the bottom of the rankings is not your concern. Hamon will no longer be a Blue, and we will suspend the games for a day while a new leader for your team is chosen. Then, life will go on as normal. Babies will be born, old men will die, and the seasons will continue to change. That’s the size of it.”
Rosia bared her teeth, and Yorick knew what was coming. He tried to shake his head at her, but she wasn’t paying attention.
She launched a glob of spit right into his face. The guards raised their rifles, and Yorick strained again against his bonds.
Wybert raised a hand to keep his guards in place, then he lifted a handkerchief from his back pocket. He wiped his face.
He opened his mouth to respond, but the door behind him creaked, and a woman peered in. Someone Yorick had never seen before. She flicked her head, and Wybert followed her out of the room without saying a word.
Only the two elite guards remaining to watch them. Rosia and Yorick sat in silence for a moment, then Yorick said, “How do you feel about untying us? I mean, Wybert is gone, so it sounds like he’s done with this whole thing. We can see ourselves out.”
“Lord Wybert,” corrected one guard, without breaking his gaze, still fixed on the wall behind them.
“You could at least loosen these ropes,” Yorick said. The guards made no motion and gave no hint they’d even heard the request. He shrugged at Rosia. “I tried.”
“It’s pointless,” she said. “These aren’t thinking creatures. They’re statues with guns.”
The previously verbal guard sneered at her, but he made no reply. His stare soon returned to the wall.
“I doubt they even have brains,” she said.
“Watch it,” the guard said. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re in. Maybe you think you’re going to die anyway so you can say what you want. But you don’t know how bad things can get for you. I’ll give you a hint: worse than the cages. Worse than going up against the wall. So much worse.”
Before Rosia could reply, the door opened again, and Wybert returned, smoothing his hair. A little flustered, but he blinked a few times and then returned to his stern expression.
“You are two of my best guerreros,” he said. "That you were both near the bottom of the ranks today is a cause for concern, but I understand. Diego often plays dirty. But I like that about him, and can’t wait to see how he grows. I like his initiative.”
Wybert held his hands behind his back as he strolled around this small room. “Your skills are the only reason you’re still alive. You stepped onto my stage without permission. You approached a lord without permission. Do you understand what would have happened to you if you had been field workers and done such a thing? You would not be here, in the air-conditioned comfort of this room. You would be slumped on the ground by the wall with real bullets in your bellies, waiting for the life to bleed out of you.”
Wybert paused his strolling and looked at them, expectantly. After a moment, he said, “a little gratitude would be nice.”
The silence in the room became deafening. Since Rosia wouldn’t speak, Yorick leaned forward. “Thank you for saving our lives, Lord Wybert.”
Wybert waited for Rosia to add her own words, and Yorick’s eyes pleaded with her. If she stood firm, she would die here today.
In the endless few seconds that followed, Yorick considered what life would be like inside these walls without her. He realized he could only withstand the awfulness of this life because she was going through it all, too. To know that no matter what happened each day, he could retire with her every night, to hold her as she cried, which she often did while she slept.
Rosia glanced at Yorick out of the corner of her eye, then she lowered her face. “Thank you, Lord Wybert.”
Wybert nodded, a satisfied smile across his lips. “There. That’s better.”
Now, he stood in between the two of them and dropped to a knee. Yorick could see the spots on his face where the makeup had dried, leaving cracks like the dried patch of land outside the gate. “But, I don’t want you to think my benevolence is endless. Just because you are good guerreros does not mean you are above the law. I can travel outside these walls and get more, just like you. Do you understand?”
Yorick nodded. New children arrived all the time, weeping and bewildered. Yorick had tried not to look anymore when they stepped off the backs of the trucks. Too painful.
Wybert did that. He stole children from somewhere out there and made them into serfs. Stole them from parents and doomed them to a new life, forever inside these walls.
Wybert scowled and dabbed his neck with his handkerchief. “Do you understand? I can’t hear you.”
Yorick licked his lips, and as his mouth opened to form the words yes, Lord, he knew deep in his heart that one day, he would shove that handkerchief down Wybert’s throat until he choked on it.
Chapter Thirteen
When the bag came off his head this time, a flash of blinding sunlight filled Yorick’s eyes. Rosia hid her face in the crook of her elbow for a few seconds.
When he could see again, he noted they were standing outside the mansion, at t
he edge of a row of shrubs. Multiple circles emanating out from the epicenter of the building. A few smaller buildings stood nearby, like garages for vehicles and other storage.
The guards slipped back indoors and left them alone. The heavy doors of the mansion swung closed, like a sharp shock to return them to the regular world. Inside the mansion was a fantasy land.
From here, Yorick could hear the sounds of the farm workers. They chanted and sang, their voices drifting across the small barrier of rolling hills that separated the mansion from the farmlands. Out there, picking fruit, fertilizing the land, tilling some over, sowing and reaping and perpetuating an endless cycle of extraction and rebirth.
When he looked at Rosia, Yorick noted how intently her jaw was set. She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand. “Not here. Please.”
She nodded and strolled to the northeast, in the direction of the dorms. He followed, his legs taut and achy from the long stretch of being seated in Wybert’s interrogation room. He couldn’t flush his mind of the image of Wybert close up, like a painted doll, but with a sneer that sent chills down Yorick’s back.
A few minutes away from the mansion, Rosia grimaced. “He needs to die. He will die, and that cheating Diego will die, and then we’ll search every room of that mansion and find Hamon if he’s still alive. Then, we open the gates, and we all walk out of here.”
Yorick laughed, not because he found her words funny but from the raw shock of it. Even though he’d fantasized about stuffing a handkerchief down Wybert’s throat, hearing such a harsh plan out loud seemed loco1.
“I can see a couple problems with your idea.”
“What?”
He held up a finger. “One: there are at least a dozen armed guards around his mansion and around him at all times.” Yorick held up a second finger. “Two: as far as I can tell, he’s the only person who knows how to open the gates, so unless he wants to tell us, I don’t see how we’re getting out of here.”
Hands on hips, Rosia’s lower lip swished around as her eyes surveyed the grass before them. “You’re right,” she said, letting out a long, angry sigh.
“Don’t do anything rash. I can’t stand the thought of you going up against that wall, and me having to continue on in here without you.”
This did seem to strike a nerve within her, and she frowned. “I’m not going to leave you. Ever.”
Yorick held up a closed fist and then extended his pinky finger. Rosia did the same, and they touched pinkies together.
“Always,” he said.
“Always,” she said. She gazed off in the distance, then lifted a hand to wave. Yorick followed her gaze to see Paulo, the young Blue guerrero, strolling along the grass just north of the fields. Feet shuffling, head down, hands in his pockets.
“Hey,” she said, raising her voice to catch his attention. Paulo lifted his head, and Yorick could see at a distance of twenty meters that Paulo had been crying. Puffy, reddened eyes, cheeks drawn down, shoulders slumped.
“Glad you’re out and okay,” Paulo shouted across the distance. His voice sounded hoarse. The kid was upset, along with probably everyone on the Blues. Hamon was gone. The whole team had loved their leader, with no exceptions. They’d looked up to him. Now, everything would change.
Without another word, Paulo turned and moped back toward the dorms, with his head down, feet sliding through the grass.
“He doesn’t look well,” Yorick said.
At first, Rosia stayed silent, walking, chewing on her lip. “There has to be a way to make this right. We have to get Hamon back.”
“And that’s the third thing wrong with a frontal assault on the mansion. I think Hamon is dead. When you end up last in the ranks, Wybert’s men take you inside the mansion. You don’t come out. Why would he keep all the battle losers alive? Think about it: each year, there are about fifty battles total during the summer, and about thirty the rest of the year. That’s eighty guerreros who leave us and go into the mansion each year who never come out. Do you think he has some giant prison inside there where he’s keeping all of them? Why would he continue to feed and house and clothe them only to keep them locked up for eternity?”
“That may be true, but the only way to know is to find out for ourselves. They took Hamon away this morning. Maybe there’s still time if we can find him soon.”
He lifted his palms to the air, about to respond, when something caught his eye. Outside a garage a hundred meters from the mansion was an angled door, the same as the one inside the locked room in the warehouse. The door had been set in the ground, like a cellar door.
“Wait,” he said, and changed course toward it.
She gasped. “What are you doing? You can’t go near there. If they see you, they’ll drag us both right back inside.”
As he edged closer, his eyes shifted to the bottom of the door, and he discovered what he’d expected to find: a small, hand-carved symbol of two circles with a cross and a triangle inside them. The same as the odd door inside the warehouse.
These two doors were part of the same circuit. Linked somehow. And someone had carved the symbols to spread the word about their connection.
Tunnels. There had to be tunnels underground. All at once, the idea hit him like a rubber bullet to the temple.
“I know what to do,” he said.
A guard on patrol strolled around the side of the garage, and when he saw them, he lifted his rifle. “Step away from the building.”
Yorick and Rosia, hands raised, moved back.
“Where are you supposed to be?” the guard said.
Yorick cleared his throat. “We’re on our way to the dorms. We meant no harm. Just trying to take a shortcut and we didn’t know this was off-limits.”
The guard flicked his rifle in that direction, so Yorick and Rosia hustled out of the guard’s periphery. Once they were back on the path toward the dorms, she asked, “what’s this plan?”
“Wybert said there would be no battle tomorrow. That tomorrow would be a training day.”
“Okay, yes?”
Yorick leaned close. “A frontal assault would be crazy. But if we could do something a little more subtle, it might work. Tomorrow morning, we’ll sneak away from the training center, and then hurry to the battlefield. There, in a warehouse, is a door. I think it leads into tunnels under the ground. I’ll bet anything those tunnels lead into the mansion, and to Wybert, and to our answers.”
1 Loco: crazy
Chapter Fourteen
Rosia splashed frigid water on her face from the bathroom sink. Heart pounding. Hands shaking as she lowered them to the rim of the porcelain bowl. As the water slicked off her cheeks and ran into the basin, she looked herself in the eyes. The face staring back at her seemed much older. Not a teenager. That might have normally concerned her, but for what she had to do today, she needed maturity. Needed calm precision and not impulsive smashing as she was wont to do. Rosia knew this about herself. She knew her mouth often landed her in trouble, and that behavior needed to change.
Yorick was her rock. A counterbalance. The one to make sure she didn’t stray too far in any single direction. But, if they were caught trying to enter Wybert’s mansion or even caught sneaking around on the grounds near it, all the sensible thinking in the world wouldn’t save them. She didn’t believe for one second that their protected status as battleground guerreros would keep them out of trouble indefinitely. She’d seen decorated veteran guerreros put up against the wall before. Just yesterday Hamon had been carried away, into the mansion, never to be seen again. Hamon was one of the best she’d ever known.
She’d met him five or six years ago when she transitioned out of the youth education program and into the battle training program. Yorick and Rosia had been among the few chosen. She’d felt so lucky at the time. Her feelings for Yorick were only budding then, the two of them barely into puberty. They’d known each other since they were little kids. Attended all classes together. Maybe they’d even arrived on the sam
e truck, but she couldn’t remember. Early life on the plantación was a big blur. And things before that were even blurrier.
But when she’d first glimpsed Hamon, she understood the future in store for her. He was a few years older, seemingly so mature at sixteen or seventeen. He was tough and smart and kind and brave and clearly liked boys, so Rosia quashed her romantic feelings for him. But she still looked up to him all those years. She wanted to emulate him and his ability to inspire and rally people. Yorick already seemed to know how to do that; how to say the right things to make everyone fall in line behind a righteous cause.
And they would need it if they wanted to live out the next few days.
On the wall next to the bathroom mirror was a poster. An illustration of Lord Wybert in the fields, farm serfs clustered around, looking up at him, adoring. A caption at the bottom read We Are All In This Together. The sun cast rays from above, highlighting the smiling faces of all the serfs. A well-made poster. Nothing but lies.
If they could pull this off, Rosia and Yorick would do something they couldn’t walk away from. They would set in motion a chain of events with serious repercussions not only for them, but for everyone inside these walls. The responsibility sat on her shoulders, anchoring her to inactivity. At least Yorick was in it with her. That helped a little.
She pulled her hair up in a ponytail and slicked water across her widow’s peak to tame the wayward strands of hair spilling out. Then she left the bathroom.
Since there was no round this morning, the guerreros had all gathered in the basement of the dorms, where the vast underground gymnasium occupied the entire floor. Weights, exercise equipment, mats for tumbling. Enough open space that the Reds and Blues could keep far enough away from each other. Not that they all hated one another. Some of her Red opponents seemed like decent kids. Some friendly enough to sit at the same table in the cafeteria.