Renegade Red

by Lauren Bird Horowitz

  But Arik didn’t even look at the boy. He just slapped his hand to his chest as if swatting an irksome fly, and the boy’s back spasmed awkwardly as popping noises electrified the air. The shallow water of the bank funneled upward, along with rocks and weeds and sludgy mud, and spiraled toward the bank. It spread, breeding outward into something like an amoeba, then resolved itself into a horse, pawing and snorting onshore. Arik flung the boy down; his knobby adolescent knees made a faint splat as his body careened into the shallows. Then Arik strode to the horse and mounted. The Guard who had produced the boy picked him up like a dripping sack of potatoes and flung him over the back of Arik’s saddle, tying him down with cargo cables.

  Without another word, Arik rode away.

  The remaining Guards closed in, the captors all tightening their grip.

  Judah’s eyes were flickering as he fought to remain conscious. Noa looked at Callum: Interrogation … Review … recycling … none of it sounded good.

  Not to mention that wherever they were being taken, there would absolutely be alarms. Which meant Callum’s disguises were soon going to do more harm than good.

  Callum’s face was furrowed deeply; Noa knew he’d realized it, too. She barely had time to pray that Callum could work out some amazing plan, some way to save them—

  —when green mist fogged around them all, and the world shimmered away.

  • • •

  Noa came to in the dark. She was lying on something hard, and her hands were still bound behind her. But the hard surface was also moving, jostling from side to side, and the air was pungent and stuffy, a little like it had been in the shed where she and Marena had hidden. It smelled like decomposition, like rotting fruit.

  The floor jolted upward, and Noa crashed onto her side and realized she was in some kind of vehicle that had gone over a bump. With her hands bound, she couldn’t break her fall, and her shoulder took the impact.

  Noa groaned quietly in pain—not wanting to alert any Guards that might be lurking in the dark nearby—and heard a tiny moan echo beside her. She twisted herself around using her legs and blinked rapidly, willing her eyes to try to adjust. Finally she saw the shadow of Judah’s shape, also bound and toppled on its side.

  Noa strained to look around: they were in an enclosed square, like the back of a loading truck. She didn’t see Guards, but behind Judah’s lump, Noa saw long, lean legs sprawling, tangled and awkward.

  Callum.

  “Judah?” Noa whispered. “Are you awake?”

  Judah didn’t answer; his unconscious body rolled over limply as they jolted up again. Another moan pinged off the compartment walls—and Noa realized the sound wasn’t from him; it was coming from behind her. She rolled herself over again, biting back a yelp as she pressed down on her bruised shoulder and looked for the source of the noise.

  She saw the source of the smell instead.

  There was a pile behind her, a heaping mountain of figments resolving in the dark. It had knobs, and sticks … Noa bit back a cry of terror: not knobs and sticks, but arms and legs. It was a pile of dirty bodies, skin and bones and rags—all unmoving. All dead.

  The little moan sounded again. It seemed to come from the bottom of the pile.

  “Is someone alive in there?” Noa whispered.

  The buried voice moaned again, but this time it sounded like a word: “Cuffs…”

  Noa breathed through her mouth, forced herself to squint more closely at the pile of bodies. The truck jolted and Noa slid right into the hanging arms and legs, clammy and damp against her skin. She heaved, gagging, twisting away—and came face-to-back with a pair of handcuffed arms.

  The rotting smell invaded her, but she swallowed it to examine what she saw. The cuffs were twined alarm tubes, almost welded to the wrists.

  The ground suddenly stopped moving. Noa froze in panic as the back wall of the cargo bay slid up. The sudden light blinded her; she flinched but made out the silhouettes of two Guards outside—

  Then green fog clouded all around her again, and everything blurred away.

  • • •

  This time, Noa’s ears woke up before her muscles, before she could even lift her eyelids. She could feel that she was being dragged over ragged land, like gravel, but though she couldn’t struggle, she could hear voices fading in and out.

  “Overcrowding…” one said, annoyed.

  A second, squeakier voice chuckled. “Enough to finish the alarms…”

  “Serves them right.” The first voice again; a woman’s. “…treated us before. Watch the gate.”

  The ground under Noa changed from rocky dirt to something smooth and cold. This lasted for a while, then she felt herself pulled across a little ledge with a metal lip, followed by rougher ground, stony but uneven. Here the dragging stopped, her arms released, followed by a clanging noise.

  “Hey, these look different to you?” The woman’s voice, this time a few feet farther away.

  “Nah. You’re just not used to seeing cullies clean,” Squeaky laughed, voice fading into the sound of retreating footsteps.

  Finally, much fainter, as if from down a long hallway, the woman again: “All unloaded. Tell him we’re running out of room.”

  After that, silence. Just the hard, pockmarked ground, the taste of stale, thick air, and the pain of being heaped on her sore shoulder.

  Later—hours or moments, Noa couldn’t tell—a tingling of pins and needles spiked through her limbs, followed by a dragging feeling of muscles waking after having been asleep. Noa tried to flex them tenderly, then pushed herself slowly and awkwardly into a sitting position. She blinked her heavy eyes. It was dark again—not pitch black, but dank, lavender-gray, as if outside it was nighttime.

  And she was in a cell.

  One of a line of cells, facing another line of cells, in what appeared to be a dungeon.

  “A pixie, just my luck,” a scratchy voice croaked from right behind her.

  Noa turned her tingling body painfully. She wasn’t alone in her cell: a toothless, wrinkled man smiled from the corner.

  His smile shook Noa to her bones.

  “Who are you?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even as she moved her hands slowly backward, hoping to feel some kind of makeshift weapon on the floor. Her manacles had been severed, though each wrist was still circled by its own alarm-tube bracelet.

  “Free hands won’t do you any good,” the old man laughed, eyes glinting.

  “Who are you?” Noa repeated, more firmly. Dimly she remembered reading that in prison, fear was seen as weakness.

  “Cullies have no names,” the old man replied. “Trying to trip me up?” His tone was friendly, but Noa flinched. He’s just some geezer, she told herself, hoping the name would make her brave.

  Geezer smiled again, this time showing broken, rotting teeth. “I was alive when those Clears were nobodies, powerless vermin. But this Otec.” Geezer chuckled. “He’ll have the last laugh, won’t he.”

  Geezer leaned toward her, into a pool of moonlight. “Welcome to the Place of No Return, pixie.” Noa shuddered despite herself. He slowly hunched his ancient body upward, got creakily to his feet. Noa was reminded unpleasantly of Kells, the curmudgeonly Harlow groundskeeper who’d turned out to be a Banished Fae—and who’d lived so long out of Aurora that he’d rotted from the inside out.

  Geezer grinned a chilling Kells-like grin. “I haven’t had a cell mate in a while, and certainly not a pixie.” He began to limp toward her from his corner. “They must really be running out of room. Prince Arik, such an overachiever.” Noa scrabbled sideways until she hit a wall behind her, but Geezer had somehow closed in quickly. A jagged birthmark split one cheek; his wrinkles were so black they looked like mold instead of skin. Noa didn’t know what he intended, but she could feel his fetid breath, could taste its rot—

  —and the wall behind her
clanged terribly, startling them both.

  “Get back, old man,” Judah’s voice growled from somewhere across the wall. Noa spun, stumbled to her feet: Judah was in the next cell, alert, seething through the tiny, square barred window in their cells’ shared wall.

  Something in Judah’s face made Geezer back up slowly, hands up, but the old man didn’t drop his smile. He shuffled back into his shadowed corner, and Noa had the terrible feeling that he wasn’t so much intimidated as willing to bide his time.

  In that moment, though, she didn’t care.

  Noa whirled to clutch at Judah’s hands through the small square of bars. She had never been so happy to see his face—

  “Oh no—your face!”

  Judah put his hands to his face. “What?”

  “It’s … it’s yours again.”

  “Noa?” It was Callum’s voice, also from that cell, but from somewhere behind and below. It was very groggy and confused.

  Judah glared accusingly behind him toward the ground, where Noa assumed Callum must be lying. “You idiot!” he hissed.

  “What?” Callum murmured, clearly dazed.

  “We’re us again! Put back the disguises!”

  “Callum, are you okay?” Noa asked, straining on tiptoe, trying to see around the back of Judah’s neck.

  “How’d we get here?” Callum muttered, slurring.

  Behind Noa, Geezer chuckled throatily.

  “Zip it, old man,” Judah warned, his fierce face filling the frame again.

  Geezer sneered, showing those rotted, hole-filled gums, all pretense of friendliness now gone. “So one of you’s a Blue. Be grateful they hit you with the Smoke when they did, boy, or whichever of you is the Mask Master would have set off the prison alarms.”

  “The Smoke?” Noa asked.

  Geezer picked at his fingers, drawling. “This Otec is so innovative. The alarms, the Smoke…”

  “What’s the Smoke?” Judah demanded.

  Geezer smiled his Kells smile again. “Powdered Green Fae of course. Knocks your limbic system right out.” He moved toward Noa again, eyes glittering. “Wanna know how they make it, pixie?”

  Noa recoiled instinctively, hitting the wall again. Judah was somewhere in his cell, jostling Callum. “Get up and help and figure this out, Cal—” He cut off, covered quickly. “Blue.”

  Noa heard Callum heave to his feet, then his face wobbled to the small square window. Judah’s popped up next to him, shoving him to the side.

  “Back off,” Judah warned Geezer, who shuffled back again, muttering darkly.

  Noa turned back to the brothers and stifled a gasp. She hadn’t noticed before, but they were both terribly gray and wan. She hoped it was only a side effect of the Smoke.

  She swallowed, whispered through the opening, “I think I heard the Guards who brought us in talking…. I don’t think they noticed your faces—”

  “But if Arik comes—”

  Geezer snorted from the corner: “Arik dirty in the slaughterhouse, that’d be the day.”

  A high, shrill voice—not one Noa remembered—exploded down the hall. “Stop all that screechy!”

  “Here comes Crazy,” Geezer muttered, slinking deeper into the shadows.

  Noa looked through the sliding door of bars that opened to the cell hallway. Across the aisle, in the first cell facing hers, an almost-deranged pixie prisoner was glaring right at Noa. The pixie wasn’t old like Geezer, but her body looked desiccated: her red hair was gnarled and matted into filthy dreadlocks; her cheeks were sunken holes that seemed to swallow light. Her gray rag-shirt was torn across the front in five slashes—probably, Noa realized, from her own long, curling yellow fingernails.

  “Come back, come back, it’s okay,” a soothing voice said from behind the pixie. A tired, male Fae stepped from the shadows and put a calming hand on Crazy’s shoulder, bowing his forehead tenderly toward hers. This Fae looked like the young man he was: his hair was inky black and thick, luxurious even in the dankness of the dungeon. He was classically handsome, like a silent-movie star.

  “Too long, too long, too long,” Crazy muttered, fidgeting impatiently from his touch. She curled her spidery fingers—with those nails—around the cell-door bars and rocked herself against them, back and forth. “Puddles and muddles, puddles and muddles, puddles and muddles…” she muttered, each hiss building in hysteria.

  “Come back and rest,” Movie Star urged her gently, calmly. He put his hands on her shoulders, light and slow, as she rocked and muttered. Finally she turned to him in surprise, as if just realizing he was there; her bony shoulders curled toward him like a little girl’s, and she let him guide her back into the darkness.

  Noa retreated from the cell door, crossing her arms and her hands up and down her arms.

  “Been here a while, those two. Not as long as me, but my mind is strong,” Geezer told Noa from the shadows. “Take a peek into your future, sweetness. Ain’t no way outta here.”

  • • •

  The scariest part of prison, Noa decided, was that there was nothing to do but wait. Wait for sleep, wait for morning, wait for Crazy’s shrieks into the night. Wait for Callum and Judah to drift in and out, still not recovered, wait for Geezer to make his move. Wait in silence, in cold, in the whisper of shadows….

  Then seamlessly, a new kind of waiting began: wait for the Guard with the mustache to walk down the row at sunrise, dragging his nightstick past the bars. Wait for that staccato thunking to repeat, reverberate, every ten minutes when he made the trip again. Wait for the squeaky-voiced Guard to clean the strange glass room at the top of the Ward—some kind of watching station, Noa assumed—whose windows had to be kept perfectly clear. Wait for the Guard with the tattoo on his eye—a spider, his pupil the fat, black body—to shove a piece of hard bread at every prisoner, cell by cell, six intervals into Mustache’s rounds. Wait for evening, for Crazy to hurl her stone of bread—always uneaten—toward the ward’s jaw-like gate. Wait for those metal teeth to sense the movement and crash down, pulverizing the bread to dust.

  Wait.

  Noa would have given anything for pen and paper. She felt her mind becoming numb, caught between the spokes of prison-pattern, prison-routine, like some relentless metronome. Were the bars what locked her in, or these repeating rituals—precise, perpetual—that wore more deeply with each day? Her spirit strained; she ached for wild freedom—not of her body, but her mind.

  “Marena,” Noa murmured. The pixie who’d lived among the cages, but somehow never been confined. Noa was slumped against the bars in the late afternoon of her sixth imprisoned day, staring out into the hall; it was one of those endless moments—after Spider-Eye but before the next shift change—when daily monuments were far apart, and only nothingness remained. Noa longed to see the ghost of Marena’s face—or Isla’s, or Sasha’s—but they didn’t visit here.

  Noa was not being a girl-beast, and they knew it.

  Stop whining you dolt! Only a gob would need paper and pen!

  Noa closed her eyes. She couldn’t see Marena, but she could conjure her voice. And Marena was right. Noa was better than this. Marena hadn’t sacrificed herself for Noa to waste away, to become—like her mother had in that home so far away—the moon.

  So Noa kept her eyes closed, made her mind a canvas, her thoughts the pen, and wrote herself back to fullness with Marena as her guide:

  Mar is the sea

  but not this sea

  not these predictable currents

  not these precise, breaking waves.

  Mar is a riptide

  the flow under the flow—

  she sinks where they rise,

  retracts where they push.

  Beware swimmers, who use only your eyes

  hypnotized by peaks cresting

  and neat lines of foam.

  Mar’s
fingers are seaweed, the deep and the dark,

  Mar’s whirlpools are hidden

  spinning down coral shoals.

  Seagirl stop stroking

  in peak, crest, and fill—

  See instead with your skin

  with your scales

  with your gills.

  When Noa opened her eyes, she felt, for the first time since waking in this place, that she could breathe.

  Evening was falling. Like clockwork, Crazy began to moan with the dark. It had been ten hours since Spider-Eye had opened the silver supply chute, retrieved the day’s sack of dry bread, and doled out rock-hard lumps with his signature sneer. Ten hours of Movie Star quietly urging Crazy to eat—and, like every day, failing.

  Reaching her coda, Crazy slammed herself into the bars and screeched, hurling her bread toward the ward’s front gate. Sensing motion, the gate’s teeth raised and smashed down upon it, pulverizing the ‘insurgent’ instantly to dust. The thundering echo rattled every bar in the row, mixing ominously with Crazy’s endless, looping “Puddles and muddles!”

  As the echo slowly dissipated, Crazy collapsed into a whimpering heap. “Puddles, muddles, puddles, muddles…” Movie Star knelt by her side, stroked her tangled red hair, the way he always did.

  Noa sighed softly. The inevitability felt like dangerous quicksand. She longed to talk to Judah and Callum, even if only through the tiny cell window, but she could hear the silence in their cell. The brothers had suffered a much more protracted withdrawal from the Smoke. Exhaustion still flattened them unexpectedly, knocking them out cold sometimes even in the middle of a sentence.

  Noa cast a wary eye toward Geezer’s shadowy corner. He’d been unnervingly silent these days—sleeping too, or so it appeared. But Noa could feel something thrumming beneath all this silence, this lulling routine. She repeated the lines of her poem in her head, willing her mind to remain sharp, but beyond her, Crazy’s whimpering was winding down to silence, right on schedule, the pattern concluding, continuing, anesthetizing—

  And then it exploded.

  “You can’t do this to us!”

  Noa ran to the bars. The screech hadn’t come from Crazy. It was Movie Star, no longer silent. He was howling like an animal, handsome face contorted in rage, fists shaking the bars.