The Combat Codes

by Alexander Darwin

  Combat was alive here in the Underground, and Cego was born to fight.

  *

  Though it hurt to stare at the wisp for too long, Cego was fond of the little thing. It appeared on routine in the corner of his cell, hovering and pulsing as if trying to communicate with him.

  “There are many more of you, aren’t there?”

  Cego had gotten in the habit of talking to the wisp. Though it never replied, it felt good to use his voice after keeping silent for so long.

  He made sure the guard was out of earshot before he started up his one-sided conversations.

  “I saw your kin everywhere out there. It hurt,” Cego admitted.

  The memory of the blinding light from thousands of the wisps under the open Underground streets was seared into Cego’s mind.

  “Why aren’t you flying around? Why come here?” Cego asked.

  Only now could he start to remember what he’d seen when he stumbled into the Underground. Vast ceilings so far up that they looked like craggy grey skies. Buildings towering above him and strange mechs whirring past him. Thousands of folk strolling by and ignoring Cego’s bloody and crumpled body on the pavement.

  Perhaps this little wisp was his only friend down here. Though the guard took a particular interest in swearing at Cego from outside the cell door, he didn’t think that was a likely sign of friendship.

  “Why aren’t you with the rest of your kin?” Cego continued to question the silent wisp.

  Amidst the blinding light, Cego could remember seeing swarms of the wisps hovering at every corner and wafting toward the arrays above. He had not seen any solitary ones; they always seemed to be clumped together.

  “If I were you, I’d go back to my family,” Cego said as he swept his hand at the wisp as if trying to shoo it away.

  The wisp didn’t budge—it pulsed in the corner stubbornly.

  Cego halted his conversation as he heard footsteps echoing down the corridor outside of his cell. The wisp blinked away.

  There were several footfalls this time, two men. He listened to the dull thud of their boots on the stone. One of them was large, probably near two hundred fifty pounds.

  Cego squeezed his eyes shut and sat up on the wooden plank as he heard the door rattle.

  “Lacklight scumslagger, yer time’s come!”

  The door opened and rough hands grabbed his shoulders. Cego’s muscles tensed.

  They pulled him up and dragged him out of the cell.

  “Kid smells like a Deep rat nest.”

  “All asses can’t be as clean as yours, Aldo,” the other replied as they pulled Cego down a long hallway.

  “I’m tellin’ you, shower spouts is the good stuff. None of that cold bucket of water o’er the head Deep-native shit for me anymore.”

  “Who says I put any water on my head?” the other man said. “Soap-eaters got you talkin’ like them, smellin’ like them, even. Clean. All the Shrine girls smell like soap and flowers now. Rather my woman smelt like dirt and blood. Natural, like a real Grievar.”

  The one called Aldo snorted. “Whatever. Boss wants us to clean this blind freak up, whether you like it or not. Gotta get ’em processed.”

  They continued on until he felt the guard’s grips tighten on his shoulders. They shoved him through a doorframe, and the stone floor under his feet was replaced with a cold metallic surface.

  “Let’s get you processed,” Aldo said menacingly.

  They pushed Cego onto a metal table. He didn’t struggle.

  Cego heard a whirring noise getting closer to his head. Something cold cut into him and he felt a chunk of his hair drop to the ground. They were shaving him.

  “This gonna hurt a bit.” One of the men chuckled after Cego’s head was shaved clean. They held him down tightly. He clenched his teeth as something seared into his scalp. He could smell his burning flesh, but he didn’t cry out.

  They made Cego strip his dirty clothes off and step into a large vat of cold water. They laughed as they forced his head down beneath the water, his raw scalp stinging as he went under.

  After Cego came out of the vat, dripping wet, the guards weighed him and measured his height. They scrubbed a layer of skin off his body with a wire brush. They provided him with a pair of white pants with a pull-string to keep them up, before pulling him out of the room.

  The guards were quiet as they pulled Cego into an adjacent room. The two were suddenly bereft of their routine cackles.

  Cego felt a bulbous hand grab his face, lifting his chin to the air.

  “He’s not blind, you idiots,” a toad-like voice croaked. Cego could feel someone’s rotten breath close to his face.

  “What?! Boss—the cego can’t even piss straight in his cell pot, we’re sure he’s—”

  “He’s not blind,” the one called Boss interrupted the guard.

  “But, but how about his fights? Why’d he…”

  “That’s what I’m wondering too…” Boss said. “See the movement under his lids? He’s shut his eyes but they’re still trying to see. The eyes of a real cego would have given up long ago.”

  “The little shitstain, foolin’ us like that…” one of the guards murmured.

  “Open your eyes,” Boss commanded Cego flatly.

  Cego didn’t respond. His feigned blindness was the only advantage he had over his captors right now. The only technique he had hidden in his back pocket.

  “Open your eyes or I’ll have Aldo here stick a knife in them to see if you care that they’re really gone.”

  The tone of the Boss’s voice made Cego believe the threat.

  The old master’s voice echoed in Cego’s head. Know when to hold on to your position tightly and when to let go. Grasp for too long and you’ll end up in an inferior position.

  Cego opened his eyes.

  The man in front of him was immensely fat. Rolls of his blubber poured out from his chair’s sides. He looked at Cego like a piece of vat meat on display, smacking his lips.

  “Hmmm. Golden eyes. Haven’t seen that one before. He’s Grievar brood for sure, but I can’t tell what sort,” the Boss said.

  He looked Cego in the eyes and spoke to him condescendingly. “Who’s your mammy, little gold-eyes? What sort of line are you from? Got some Grunt in you, maybe?”

  Cego stared at him blankly.

  “Just another street boy, then.” The man turned to Aldo. “You said you found him down by Lampai? Are you sure he isn’t one of ours, or maybe escaped from Saulo’s Circle across town?”

  Aldo shook his head. “Neither, boss. We scanned him, checked the archives—nothing in there. Real strange. Usually got some light trail on these kids.”

  “Where did you come from, boy?” The man continued to eye Cego.

  Cego met his gaze silently.

  “Always such anger from some of these boys.” Spittle flew from the man’s lips as he spoke. “You don’t realize that pappy Thaloo here is helping you, little gold-eyes. I could throw you back on the streets. Let you end up sweeping the floors or serving food on a platter for some bit-rich Daimyo. You’d go through life with a hole in your heart, always feeling the pull of the light, not knowing why you felt so empty.”

  The man called Thaloo paused, licking his lips. “You can fulfill your lightpath here, your destiny. Fighting is what you were born to do, little gold-eyes. I’m helping you; can’t you see it? If you do well, you’ll be treated well. Maybe end up even getting bought by a patron, serving a family or business with honor. Doing some good in this world! Don’t you understand?”

  Cego’s gut told him to stay silent.

  “They never see.” Thaloo sighed, a horrid croak of a noise. “You’ll thank me some day, little gold-eyes.”

  Thaloo swiveled his chair and started to thumb through images on a handheld lightdeck. “Put him on a crew. Let’s see how he does with Tasker Ozark, shall we?”

  Thaloo turned back to Cego as the guards began to pull him out of the room. “Keep your eyes open this ti
me, boy. You’ll need them.”

  *

  The yard had tall stone walls with high grated windows that opened up to the Underground’s street level. Trails of faintly glowing moss ran along some of the walls, crawling up toward the light of the street. The yard’s ground was made up of compacted red dirt.

  Eight boys with shaved heads were running in a circle around the perimeter of the yard. They were tied together with a knotted rope looped around their waists.

  When one boy at the end of the line tripped, he was dragged along the dirt floor by the other boys, who kept moving, unknowing or uncaring of the fallen. The boy running in front looked like an ox, his leg muscles bulging and a vein in his forehead pulsing as he dragged the rest of the line forward.

  A man stood in the center of the running circle. He yelled in a gravelly voice at the boys to move faster, to pull harder, and to get up off the floor. He did not seem like a pleasant man.

  The guard pulled Cego over to him. “Tasker Ozark. Got a new recruit here for your crew.”

  “My crew is already full; must be a mistake,” Ozark replied without taking his eyes off the runners. Cego could see Ozark had a strange audio device implanted in his throat where his grating voice vibrated from.

  “Boss’s orders, Ozark; he says this boy here is to be placed in your crew for acclimation and training,” the guard pushed.

  “If the Boss says so, fine. That means these boys will be splitting their food for nine instead of eight.” Ozark turned his faded yellow eyes on Cego. The man’s face appeared to be locked in a permanent frown. “Other boys won’t be happy about it, though.”

  The guard nodded and left Cego standing in the yard with Ozark.

  “Whoever you think you are, or think you were, forget it now, boy. What you now are is the property of Thaloo, and as his property, you are now my property. I’m your Tasker, meaning my word is your task. When I say crawl, you crawl. If I say swing, you swing.”

  Ozark stopped to yell at the boy at the end of the running line. “Get out of the dirt and start moving again, you little maggot! Move or you’ll end up doing sloth carries until blackshift!” The little boy looked like he was about to pass out. He had tears running down his dirt-streaked face as he was dragged behind the line. He managed to barely pull himself up with the rope and started moving again.

  Ozark continued, “I have one task, and that is to make you strong enough to win in the Circle. You winning means I did my job. You winning means you are worth more for Thaloo loo loo loo loo loo—” Ozark’s voice box was stuck in some sort of loop. He slapped the back of his neck and it stopped repeating.

  Cego couldn’t help but crack a smile at the strange occurrence.

  Ozark’s frown cut even deeper, which Cego hadn’t thought possible until he saw it. “Halt!” the Tasker called out robotically, and the eight boys came to a sudden stop, panting with relief. Some keeled over and others fell to the ground in exhaustion.

  “Circle Crew Nine! You have a new member. I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is…” Ozark waited.

  Cego looked up from the ground at the eight boys. “Cego.”

  “Cego! Your new friend here, Cego, thinks what you’re doing is funny. He was over here laughing at you, telling me that you looked like a bunch of halfwits running around in circles. Says he could do twice the job of any one of you.”

  The boys glared back at Cego. The big, heavily muscled one in front of the line flexed his shoulders and stomped the dirt like a bull ready to charge.

  “How do you think we should welcome Cego to Circle Crew Nine? After all, he’ll be spending every minute with you now, training alongside you, eating your food, pissing in your pot. He deserves a fair welcome, no?”

  Ozark tugged at the scruff on his chin, made up of several long, wiry hairs. “Ah, I know. In honor of Cego’s welcome, we’ll continue your training for an extra two hours. You’ll probably miss your dusklight meal and go to bed hungry, but I think we should put Cego’s interest in catching up first.”

  A visible slumping of shoulders shuddered through the crew. They already looked worn as it was.

  “Let’s get our friend Cego right onto task. Back to rope runs,” Ozark barked.

  Cego was tied in toward the middle of the pack. The rope had small metal hooks on it, which latched directly into the loops on Cego’s pants. Ozark tightened the rope to decrease the slack between each boy.

  The boy in front of Cego with a scar running across his jaw turned around and whispered, “You be slaggin’ us bad. Crew’s gonna make you pay.”

  The big ox at the front of the line turned back toward Cego before surging forward with a jerk, causing a chain reaction of boys bouncing into each other. One boy at the front of the line stumbled forward and Cego turned to see a boy behind him fall to the ground, immediately getting dragged in the dirt without any chance to get back to his feet, which created even more work for the entire group.

  Ozark sat back with a dirty grin on his face, watching the entire ordeal, yelling at the crew to pick up their pace.

  After Ozark was sufficiently pleased with the crew’s fatigue from rope runs, most barely able to stand, he screamed, “Sloth carries!”

  Each of the crew was to lift and carry another boy around the room until he fell to his knees.

  Cego was paired with the scar-faced boy, who glared at him and refused to cooperate. When it was time to pick him up and run, the boy made it extremely difficult for Cego to get under him, shifting his weight and falling like a sack of turnips.

  Cego breathed out, frustrated, while the boy stood back up with a smug grin on his face. Just as the scar-faced boy turned away, Cego shot at his legs in a quick motion and threw him onto his shoulders—classic entry into the kata guruma shoulder throw.

  The boy let out a grunt of surprise. He settled in to let Cego jog around the room with the rest of the crew. As he ran, Cego had a vivid memory of the old master making him drill kata guruma over and over for hours.

  These boys were using a variety of inefficient methods to carry their partners. The ox was sweating profusely as he carried one of smaller boys under his arm.

  Ozark’s final task was called “last boy hanging.” There were a series of ropes draped from the ceiling around the perimeter of the room. The boys were to climb to the top of a rope and hang there for as long as possible.

  “The boy who falls first has piss pot duty for the next week,” Ozark threatened.

  Cego didn’t exactly know what piss pot duty was, but he knew he didn’t want it.

  He scaled his rope in nearly a second, using his hands and feet in unison to crawl up it like a spider monkey. He knew he could hang there for longer than the rest of the crew, perhaps well into the night.

  From the top of the rope he could see the street’s light filtering through the window grates. It cast crimson shadows on Circle Crew Nine, each boy hanging from his rope, muscles shuddering from hours of hard work.

  Why shouldn’t he beat them? Cego could certainly hang until the rest fell to the ground. He could show them he was strong. Perhaps then they wouldn’t turn on him.

  Cego looked to his right at the small boy hanging next to him, the same one who was dragged at the back of the rope line. The little boy’s body shivered with strain and Cego could see tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.

  Another of the boys, one with haughty yellow jackal eyes, taunted the crying boy. “Weep! Weep! You might as well drop now; you know you’ll be the first anyway. You lacklights were made to clean piss pots.”

  Cego could see the little boy’s arms trembling. He wouldn’t last more than a few moments longer.

  The old master’s voice echoed in Cego’s head again, this time louder than he’d ever heard it before, as if he were standing in the yard. We fight so that the rest shall not have to.

  Cego dropped to the ground, landing nimbly on his feet. He was the first boy to fall.

  His golden eyes gleamed as he met Ozark’s
stare.

  *

  Cego’s plan didn’t work out as he had envisioned. By showing weakness, he thought the crew might forget the extra hours of training and shared food rationing. Instead, like a pack of wolves that smelled blood, they went after him.

  After the grueling training session, Tasker Ozark held Cego back to drag all the equipment from the yard into storage for the night. Cego’s stomach rumbled as he finished the work. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

  Cego finally returned to the Crew Nine bunks and found himself without any place to rest.

  Although there was an extra cot for him, a strange assortment of metal cans lay strung together on top of the bed. The scar-faced boy popped his head out from the bunk above. Using his finger, he spooned a glop of green sludge out of a can and let out a loud burp. “That there be Modek’s bed.”

  “Modek?” Cego asked.

  “Right there, that be Modek,” the scar faced boy replied, nodding to the pile of tin cans on the bed. The boy had an accent that Cego couldn’t place. “Crew decided he gets your greens tonight.”

  The ox from the front of the rope line chimed in from the bunk across from them. His voice sounded like Cego thought it would, like a hollowed-out log. “Modek probably could’ve held onto that rope longer than you, weakling! That’s why he’s got your bed and you’ve gotta sleep on the floor,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Another of the boys slowly walked over to Cego with his arms crossed and his lips pursed. Cego recognized him as the jackal-eyed boy who had taunted the crying little one in the yard.

  “Ah, now, Dozer, Knees, let’s see that our new crew member has a better welcome than this, as Tasker Ozark instructed.” The boy spoke like a snake, with a hiss following every breath. “No need for childish games. After all, we all will be tasking with… Cego here, for who knows how long.”

  The ox named Dozer interjected, hooting, “Till I get a patron!”