Prince in the Tower

by Stephan Morse

  It worsened as time passed. Days later I stood out in the yard, unfocused on the skyline. The emptiness and swirling air distracted my senses and calmed me. Water might have been better but swimming activities were frowned upon.

  Spike stood on one side, watching everyone. He didn't seem to have any specific malice for me over anyone else. Leo was near me. His stance and attitude felt strangely protective and distant at the same time. Working at Bottom Pit as a bouncer should have helped him learn to be ready for danger, and still be distant enough that people could have a good time. Plus Roy's tribe was both distant and protective of the ladies working there.

  The teen’s eyes were closed as his body twisted from one strange posture to another. Those movements stirred memories and reminded me of evenings in Tennison’s park. Other people had tried to haze him the first few times but the hulking teen had ignored them and eventually the taunts died down.

  The bell sounded for everyone to hustle inside. Our shift in the yard was ending and another group was being allowed outside to play.

  I wasn't even sure what happened exactly. One moment Leo was walking in peacefully just to the front of me. The next he'd shouted, punched a man in the throat, back elbowed another in the face, and finally spun and grabbed another man with his arm locked across the human’s throat.

  My side also hurt.

  "Down on the ground!" a voice blasted across loudspeakers. Noise bounced off walls, rippled through bodies, and sank into weights. I felt each vibration.

  Most people hit the ground fast. A few were simply calm and knelt as if this were a standard day. I stood there, confused. Trying to understand what had happened. My mind had been reliving a mixed mash of moments from Bottom Pit. I pressed one hand against a throbbing pain in my abdomen.

  Authoritative voices shouted. Footsteps hustled downstairs, through hallways and across the yard. Heavy objects of metal were leveled and pointed in our direction. Leo had pushed away his victim and backed up, hands in the air, but he refused to lie down.

  I slid my shirt to the side and noticed a shallow, barely bleeding wound. On the ground an object glinted.

  My brows creased in confusion. I'd been in a daze but hadn't been completely unaware, had I? Somehow I'd missed the hostility and attempted gutting.

  Two fellows glared in my direction. One wore an equal amount of confusion on his face. The other looked upset. I recognized him as Spike. I'd thought he was just generally mad at the world, but he hadn't let it go. He had gotten too close.

  And both seemed surprised at my resilience. The mean repetitive shouts closed in. Leo was forced onto the ground and two others tried to get me.

  My mind had been lost in the clouds and memories of years gone by. Now, far too late, I started to get upset over the attempt to hurt me.

  "Silver?" I asked. The shiny metal lay on the ground.

  The voices were close enough to understand. "Down now!" a chorus repeated.

  "You tried to stab me with silver?!" I struggled to push past the two guards who wedged between me and the other man.

  "Down, or that's a strike!" the guard demanded.

  "I'm not a fucking wolf!" I broke through and kicked the man on the ground in his side. The brief flare of anger coupled with my abilities sent him rolling across the yard.

  Other humans tried to stand but by now there were too many guards. Rifles bashed into heads, cuffs clinked on wrists, and more orders shouted.

  By the end of it we were all on the ground while the prison’s medical team examined the man I'd kicked and my wound. I was okay, increasingly so as the minutes passed. My side hardly hurt but my pride was aggravated. He hadn’t been so lucky.

  Men with guns cleared the yard quickly. People stood behind one set of bars, nosing into our group’s activities. Bringing up the rear was me and the man I'd kicked. He lay on a stretcher and I was ignored for an hour. Finally the male nurse took a few extra minutes analyzing the hole in my shirt and lack of obvious wound on my side. He shrugged and declared me healthy.

  Guards escorted me back to the cell. I tried not to glower but it was hard. Being stabbed, being mistaken for a wolf, poked and prodded while they took my temperature and men who trained their guns on me. Everything was an insult.

  They hustled me back to the cage and locked me in. Leo looked slightly worried. I shook my head to clear the latest round of memory induced fuzz. Every moment, every half seen object, triggered more recollections.

  The nurse reminded me of the first time I'd been to a doctor at the age of twelve. I'd kicked the man in his balls and snarled at the nurse who tried to draw blood. It hadn’t gone well.

  Guns being pointed at me triggered flashbacks of standing in the middle of a downtown gang, one where I held a man by his throat in complete defiance of the ordinance raised against me. He’d owed only four thousand dollars.

  Jeers and shouts brought up memories of standing in Bottom Pit, opening night, throwing my hands up against the protests of an electrified crowd. I threw them up again and rattled the cuffs still on my arms.

  I looked past the worried face of Roy's son and checked my hiding places for tampering. The urge to canvass my belongings was habit, almost ritual.

  "You all right?" the teen asked.

  I finished my studying glare around the room and settled on Leo's face. I nodded, then sighed.

  "I'm not a wolf,” I said. As if that one statement justified kicking another man so hard he’d been carried off on a stretcher. My mind had devolved to a train wreck.

  Leo shrugged. The motion lifted his thick shoulders and I saw his face overlaid with Roy’s. He said, "It happens to all of us. The trinkets fill in certain blanks. My girlfriend keeps, kept, asking to meet my pack."

  "My trinket was destroyed." I barely registered the idea that Leo had a girlfriend. He was a teen with a built body. Of course he had someone.

  Leo paused and digested the response.

  I paced.

  "Is that strike two?" he asked.

  There were no good answers to that question. I barely registered the first offense, where I’d defied Warden Bennett. "Probably. Not officially."

  The silence stretched. We could hear people whispering to each other. Some outright yelled. I struggled to rein in my senses and not feel their noisy vibrations trail through the air.

  "Are you getting a new trinket?" Leo asked.

  My head shook immediately. "No. Nothing like what I had before. It’s…" Messing with my memories had repercussions. Muni herself had said so.

  Leo tilted back and stared at the top bunk. I sat and waited. No one had taken off my cuffs and breaking them would probably be a third strike. I had to retain some options at this point just in case staying here on the friendly side was worthwhile.

  Hours later and the cuffs hadn’t been removed. I dared sleep, and the past once again stole my senses.

  The place Daniel’s father drove to filled the entire corner. This building was tied into a string of rundown places. Had my senses been stable I could have identified the entire row of businesses as deathtraps and near condemnation. It was a step up from the near abandoned train yard I'd been squatting in.

  Men were inside. Daniel's father herded us toward the far corner where an older man coached a much younger person. The person punching a giant bag couldn't have been past twelve or thirteen. An age older than me, but still just a child. His shoulders already curved with early muscle. His movements were rigid and disciplined.

  The old man watched every swing and punch. His eyes studied the movements while checking for mistakes. He stopped the younger man, corrected a foot, said some disapproving words, and went back to the punching bag.

  Other people talked. They were too noisy for me and I tucked my head against a shoulder to block the sound. Vibrations from feet pounded the floor. Weights clinked with a disjointed rhythm. Everything issued forth noisy madness. It was nearly as bad as that pile of metal things had been. Cars, I think.

  Words wer
e said that didn't make sense above the hum of background sounds. I couldn’t control my senses enough to separate them out correctly. The lack of understanding set me on edge. I scooted toward a wall and searched for the exits.

  Daniel’s father would have none of my attempts at shrinking away. He grabbed me by the shoulder and guided us to the punching bag. The older man looked over, grunted, and stepped away, leaving the younger one on his own. The boy kept punching, barely missing a beat.

  "Crumfield,” the old man said. There was displeasure in that greeting. No hands were offered for shaking, no hugs. Their cold attitude and skipping of social pleasantries confused me.

  "Forge.” Daniel’s father was equally cold. He used the same gaze upon the old man that he’d used on me. They sized each other up. It felt like watching two creatures get ready for a fight.

  I couldn’t remember where I’d seen that sort of tense stance before. I also didn’t understand their glares at that age. But now, decades later, it was easier to see it was a desire to fight. Something between these men screamed battle, the kind ending in blood.

  "Who’s the runt?" Forge asked.

  "It's complicated. You got somewhere to talk?"

  Knocking on the bars shattered my recall.

  "Warden passed the verdicts down. No strike. You’re headed to solitary instead."

  I grunted, unsure if that was good or bad.

  "You've got one minute," the guard said. Western Sector agents here weren't overly hostile. I had yet to see any of them get into inmates’ faces, or do much of anything other than give orders and patrol.

  The inmates weren’t pushing their luck either. Not with the three strike system. I'd started to realize the brilliance of having capital punishment in a place like this. No matter what the inmates experienced or did, there was a certain amount of care and support given for those who got along.

  Those who didn’t would go to the other side of the island, where no one gave a shit about their survival. There would be no nightly safe haven, no interaction with other people. Instead they'd be hunted by feral vampires and wolves or extreme humans.

  Why should the guards get upset? Do better and get to go home. Exist in a strange sort of limbo. Or go to the island’s other side in a modern death sentence. Those were our choices as inmates.

  The guard sighed as I ambled over. He asked, "You faking a mental disorder to get on the warden’s good side? Because it seems to have worked."

  Vampires were notoriously kind hearted to the mentally infirm. To them an unhealthy mind was a thing to be cared for, because it meant a loved one would never be able to join them in eternity.

  I shook my head.

  "Well it turned your outburst from disregarding orders into self-defense," the guard said.

  I shrugged.

  It didn't matter. The situation was just proof that even a three strike system wasn't enough to prevent an attempted stabbing in the yard. Murder only counted as a single strike out of three. If that wasn't a measure of this place’s preferences, then what was?

  I turned to Leo. He looked unhappy but kept quiet.

  Hopefully he'd be okay. His reactions were quick and strong, but he was still half a child. Roy and his kind were tough, but not like me. They didn't heal like a wolf or vampire might. Being stabbed would be deadly to someone like him and that worried me.

  "How long?" I asked.

  "One week," the guard responded.

  That'd put me at five or six weeks since assaulting the order headquarters. Time moved funny with my messed up memories.

  The door opened and the guard gestured for me to move on. "Let’s go," he said.

  We walked down the row of cells. People from our group were out and doing their tasks. Work hadn't stopped for most of us. Spike glared from a floor above. He'd been locked up too but wasn't going to solitary like me. The human hadn't kicked another man or disobeyed an order to hit the deck.

  Farther we traveled, around a security checkpoint, and another.

  "Any word on my hearing?" I asked. I hadn't gotten an official sentence yet, or had my charges addressed. The law had shipped me off to Atlas as soon as possible after my bedside confession.

  "Not my business," the guard responded.

  "Will anything happen while I'm in solitary?" Only a few of Western Sector’s employees were visible. Most stood at the end of our hallway by double doors. There were multiple closed down this walkway with heavy doors and latches on the outside that covered their windows. A few presences walked around in their cells. Some were heavy or agitated; others almost comatose.

  "Visitations and hearings are postponed. Your lawyer should know. It's fairly standard for anyone at Atlas."

  I didn't have a lawyer.

  We traveled for another ten minutes to a different wing. Everything looked the same inside, so visually it was hard to tell. From my muddled senses, we were about a quarter mile away from my original cell, and a few floors down. We were still above ground level.

  "In you go," he said.

  At least the man acted decently to me.

  I stepped inside, taking in the freakishly white coloring. Nearly everything was polished. There was no mirror but in a corner sat a shower stall, sink, and cot. No television or form of entertainment. Some bars ran across the ceiling though, maybe to workout with.

  The cell was fifteen feet in length. Just enough room to stand and pace for the next week. The joke would be on them. Solitary was how I liked my life and sleeping away a day was little effort. Hibernating like a bear was one of my many ‘abilities.’

  That thought caused Julianne’s face to flash in my mind. The dark skin, amber eyes, and half smile as she joked with me. She’d died in order to help me. She could have been saved. God, I’d fucked up so many times.

  7

  Again!

  Roy, though I didn’t know his name then, stood punching the bag. His movements would slow briefly, then the boy shook them off and kept hitting. I’d found myself huddled against one wall while Daniel rambled mindlessly.

  “How old are you? What are your parents like? Do you have a cousin? I have a cousin and she’s stupid.”

  The lack of response hardly slowed him.

  Roy kept training. His stamina was incredible, even then. The rhythmic punching combined with other noises. One man held mitts up near the ring. Another was jumping rope. Punch. Punch. Click. Click. Thump. Thump. Punch. Punch. The noises drowned conscious thought.

  “Hey, man, it’ll be okay, okay?”

  Daniel’s words slipped by my enthralled state. Eventually they faded away and the older larger man stepped into view.

  “Runt. Stop and go cool down.” Some words were clear, others weren’t. Runt, stop, and go were almost perfect.

  “Yes, sir.” Roy’s words fit his features. His young voice sounded abnormally firm. He lacked flab or childish fat, like so many kids I’d seen at the restaurant.

  All my observations were almost passive. A sense of unease crept over me as the room’s rhythm changed again. There was more thumping which made my heart rate speed up. I looked to see the old man motioning me toward another room.

  “Come here.”

  Tal’s sudden presence sent me scrambling further down the wall and away.

  “Retreating is only useful when there’s something to be gained,” he said.

  My only anchor since free falling into this strange existence had abandoned me. I panicked and tried to recall what he’d been saying. Had he told me what to expect? What the rules were?

  The older man’s face was so hard. It felt like tempered iron, though I didn’t have the words for such an idea at that age. Not because of his oddly tinted skin, not the crow’s feet around his face, not the already peppering hair.

  It was his eyes. They were frighteningly firm and unwavering. When he looked at me, he looked nowhere else. There was nothing else in existence.

  Tal, the muddled name came through. It was a strange mix of my modern mind interjec
ting thoughts into a memory. He frowned slightly and repeated, “Come here.”

  He implied there were no other options. I could delay, waffle, beat around the bush, and avoid eye contact for as long as possible, but I would end up in that room eventually.

  I hadn’t been inside any place but my broken-down rail yard. I hadn’t even gone inside the restaurant.

  The thumping of my blood increased. Noises from the others in the gym beat a disharmonious cadence. I tried to break from the memory and remember how a group of people could perform the same movements while breathing in time.

  My head shook but no words came out. Tal took a step in my direction and nearly scowled.

  “Inside, runt.” He paused then pointed at me. “Now.”

  The teen kept hitting his punching bag. Other people inside the main room minded their own business. No one seemed to notice or take offense at this treatment.

  He stepped forward and it felt like the world lost track of a beat somewhere. A second step and the older man got behind me, then twisted and locked my arms. My heartbeat hammered desperately. I yelled and struggled to get free.

  My protests were useless in the face of his motions. My arms bent in a way that robbed all strength. Moving wrong shot pain into my joints, which encouraged cooperation. He pushed me inside the room and toward a stiff chair.

  I was freed and moved away from the iron wrought man. Not that it’d be enough. My vision darted around the room. I put the chair between us and stood near a wall. My back pressed into cool wood.

  Tal ignored the posture and paced slowly. “Now. There are rules to living with me, runt,” he said. “I will feed you, I will clothe you, I will teach you how to survive in this world.”

  I barely registered the words while searching for an escape. This room seemed to be an office of some sort with no other exit. The material next to me felt brittle and thin. Windows were still new to me, but at the same time I’d known them for years. My mind was having trouble existing in two moments at once.