City of Savages

by Lee Kelly

  And even though I’ve been hunting for the past in the rubble of this city for as long as I can remember, I’m not sure I want to hear any more. “What . . . what do you mean, see?”

  “I never meant to do so much damage,” Wren starts stammering. “I just wanted Elder Tom to feel the awe and the terror of God again. I must have given him too much, I . . .” The Master of the Standard collects himself. “He was broken, Sister Skyler.”

  Broken.

  “I tried to keep him alive, but he was a lunatic, untamable . . . too dangerous, in such a dangerous world. I had to put him down.” Wren grabs my hands in his, knocking into the tray, and a tinny echo screams through the lab. “But now you’re here. Don’t you see? I’ve been praying to God for years for an answer, for him to assure me that I’m still the chosen, that your father’s death was a sacrifice, not a tragedy. And he has.” He leans in close, the candlelight distorting his features. “And everything I couldn’t give to Elder Tom, I’ll give to you. Your family is my redemption, Sister Skyler. You’re my second chance.”

  I think of that young man on the book again, the picture of the hopeful preacher tucked into my nightstand drawer. Then I look at the monster in front of me. This city turned him inside out, like the monsters in the subways, like the warlords in the Park.

  The more I hear about the history of this island, the more I feel like it’s drowning me. Like it’s just a dark current, rising slowly, steadily, pulling me under.

  But I can’t show Wren anything. He’s studying me, waiting for me at a crossroads. Will I follow him down his dark and twisty path, will I say what he wants to hear? Or will I question him, like my father?

  “Thank you”—I choke on the words, but I manage to get them out—“for the Standard, the lofty Standard. The only Standard.”

  Wren bursts into a smile and cups my face with his hand. “You will make such a wonderful wife for an Elder one day.” He strokes my arm, and I swear, I nearly vomit. “Although wouldn’t it be nice to keep you in my harem with your mother? We’ll decide. But in due time.” Wren takes my hand and pulls me out of his lab. “Like everything, Sister Skyler. In due time.”

  37 PHEE

  I’m a thick, fiery ball of madness. In fact, I’m burning alive. And it’s the fault of the red, blue, and green faces. They’re attacking me, inch by inch. They haven’t left me alone.

  Click, click, click and a door is opening. Then three visitors stand above me.

  “All the faces,” I plead with these visitors. “All the faces are trying to rip me apart.”

  One of the visitors comes towards me with a knife in his hand—wait, I know this guy. It’s Francis. And Francis isn’t holding a knife, I see, as he gets closer. It’s some kind of small, thin piece of paper. A tab.

  I lie down to block out the faces, but the little guys are now everywhere. They’ve somehow escaped out of my eyelids one by one and are now marching all over the bed, poking and scratching me.

  Francis says, “You must be ripped apart. To be broken and rebuilt.” He shoves the tab into my mouth.

  “Just give her one extra dose,” says another guy who’s with him. I can’t open my eyes to see who it is or I’m going to throw up, but I know the voice. Robert. “The first one must have taken effect already.”

  “Keep an eye on her while I find Master Wren?”

  But soon I’m alone. Robert and Francis have left me with the faces. They’re growing legs and advancing. They’re becoming an army. They’re getting stronger. They’re not going to leave me alone. Maybe ever again.

  38 SKY

  I’m sick, nearly paralyzed, with anger. About everything. Not just about the fact that my mom’s being hollowed, or that Phee might be next. That my father’s life was stolen from him right inside these smothering walls.

  I’m furious with Ryder. I picture him running across the classroom, embracing me like I’m his whole world. And meanwhile he’s making out with my sister, getting her caught while he walks free? What, has he actually accepted the Standard? Plans on keeping both of us on his chain, helpless, lost girls—until he decides?

  There’s no clock in my room, so I spend the better part of the next few hours staring angrily out the window, willing the moon to hurry up and rise. I count the minutes to what feels like midnight. I fall in and out of a superficial sleep, thinking only of Ryder’s face when I tell him off tonight.

  * * *

  I wait until the night is so black that the downtown buildings have faded into the midnight canvas. I carefully open the door and glance both ways down the narrow, abandoned hall. I turn right and tiptoe to the stairwell at the end of the corridor and head down, then duck under a landing and wait.

  Ryder doesn’t arrive for what seems like a long time—so long that I’ve started to doze off again, and only wake to the rushed scuffling of feet on the steps. That warm, antsy feeling I often get when I think about Ryder crashes over me like a wave. It’s even stronger, now that I sense he’s so close. But I try to remind my body how angry I am with him.

  To be safe, I don’t speak, and instead raise my fist and knock on the steel staircase below me.

  Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum. Five knocks.

  “Skyler.”

  I hesitate. Finally, “Ryder.”

  His footsteps migrate to my voice.

  “Did you happen to bring a light?” he whispers.

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  His face starts to materialize in the darkness, not fully, just hooded features.

  “Who cares?” he says. “It’s enough to almost see you, and know you’re really here.” Ryder breathes deeply. He reaches for me, but I dodge his grasp. I watch him balk, then recover. “We could run out of here right now, you know,” he says. “No one knows we’re gone.”

  “Just the two of us?” I ask, but he doesn’t catch my bitterness, or else ignores it.

  “That’s how they keep us here, isn’t it?” he whispers. “Dividing and weakening us. Keeping us all tethered to this hotel with isolated chains.” He stays silent for a while, and when he next speaks, his voice cracks. “I haven’t seen Sam since we got here, Skyler. They just keep saying he’s gone to the heavenly blue.”

  An image of my mom, hollowed, drugged up, defeated at dinner, flashes through my mind. And even though I’m angry with Ryder, I don’t have the heart to tell him what the heavenly blue means for Sam.

  “This place is a gateway to hell, I’m sure of it,” Ryder growls. “So they just brainwash and bully everybody? Why is no one fighting back? How do all these people just . . . accept it?”

  His question oddly brings me back to Phee’s words, the ones that I’ve been using as a compass through this hotel of horrors. Who cares how things should work? she’d said about the rules of the Park. What matters is how they do. Maybe dissecting everything, dubbing things as right and wrong, is a luxury. Maybe it’s only possible to judge when you’re not in the trenches, fighting each day to survive. “They’ve been fed the Standard doctrine so long, maybe they don’t think there’s even a choice,” I whisper, still lost in thought. “And when it got darker, and deeper, it was too late to climb out of it.”

  “Oh, please. The Standard is just evil, run by evil, terrible people. Plain and simple,” Ryder says. “And I’m floored you think any different. You’re the one with all the bright-line rules on right and wrong. You’re seriously going to give this place—Wren and Robert and all these Standard monkeys—a free pass?” His voice has grown louder, a little more heated, and it reminds me that I have some bones to pick with him, too.

  “Stop twisting my words,” I snap at him. “I hate this place for what it’s doing to my family. And to yours.”

  I collect myself, take a few big, shaky breaths, and try to level out my voice, drain all of the heat out of it, so I can serve the next sentence icily cold.
/>   “I’m just surprised you take such a black-and-white stance on the Standard,” I say. “Since your own moral choices are pretty damn questionable.”

  I feel him recoil from me in the darkness. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t. Enlighten me, Saint Sister Skyler.”

  I’m trembling before I can even get the words out. “My sister,” I say. “If you’re hooking up with my sister, I don’t know why you’re meeting me in the dark.”

  “What?”

  “You got her in trouble, you know that? You got her locked up and punished by Wren himself. So you can stop thinking you’re playing both of us.”

  “Wait, no. Skyler, stop. Listen to me—”

  “I thought you were different. But you just show up and turn everything upside down.” I know this isn’t fair, to blame Ryder for existing. For coming into Phee’s and my world and altering it forever, just by being who he is. But it’s far easier to blame someone in front of me than to retrace the small steps and missteps that got us here. “Just leave me alone, all right? Good luck to you and your million wives.”

  I stand up quickly and start climbing the stairs.

  “Skyler!” he says, and in a quick tornado of a moment, grabs my wrist and pushes me against the stair rail. He looks like a shadowy, haunted monster, only his pupils shining in the darkness. “I want you. Not your sister. And she knows that. At least she should—and so should you.”

  I’m livid, still don’t believe him. But I want to. “Wren said you kissed her, in the bathroom. Why?”

  “She kissed me.” Ryder pulls away from me a bit. “It all happened so quickly, and the psychotic Standard girl I’m paired up with saw the two-second peck and made a huge deal of it. I’d never lead Phee on, least I didn’t mean to—she’s a friend, plus she’s your sister.” He sighs. “I would have stopped her sooner if I had known what was coming, Sky. You have to know I’d never put any of your family in danger. They’re too important.”

  I don’t answer him, even though his words are the right ones.

  “Sky, please. You’ve got to believe me. I swear it. I swear it on my mother’s life.”

  Then his hands cross the threshold between us, his fingers carefully finding their way across my stomach in the dark. I both shudder and warm at his touch.

  “I’ve been intrigued by you from the minute I saw you. In the Park. Through the woods.” His fingers find their footing, dance carefully on my abdomen and wrap around my waist. And I know he’s waiting for me to pull away, to tell him to stop. But I can’t breathe, let alone speak.

  “This hauntingly beautiful girl, wishing on a moon,” he whispers. He moves his hands from my waist, then runs his fingers up and down my arm cautiously.

  “You’re a student of the old world. A crusader for a moral future,” he continues, nothing but hot whispers against my shoulder. Then he dares to place his lips gently underneath my ear. Touching, taunting—the effect is ripples through my entire frame. “And I can’t say good-bye to you again. I won’t. We’re getting out of here, Skyler—together.”

  And even though part of me wants to stay here, buried in his arms, and just forget the world and all its monsters for a minute, a raw, almost primal ache for my family pulls me away. “I’m scared we’re never going to find them, Ryder.”

  “Stop, Skyler, don’t say that. We’ll figure out a way.”

  39 PHEE

  The angry little army of red, green, and blue faces hasn’t let me go. If anything, they’ve advanced farther—taken up permanent tents in my ears and mouth and mind.

  It’s time to get out of here, they whisper. We need to seek redemption on our own.

  The army pulls me up, towards the entry, takes over my arms and pushes against the door. I don’t know what black magic they use, but for the first time since I was thrown in here, the door just lazily stretches wide to the hall.

  I don’t hesitate. I don’t question them. I stumble into the hallway, my mind just as unsure and untrustworthy as my footing.

  To the stairs, the army cries.

  We crawl towards the stairs, each step shaky, hesitant, like we’re combing through a minefield. I stumble into the stairwell, grip the handrail like it’s the only thing keeping me upright.

  Two forms float out of the darkness, on the stairs. I can’t see who these people are, but they’re tangled. It’s intimate here, and I feel like I’ve stumbled onto something sacred. I shouldn’t be here.

  Reverse course, I tell the army.

  The army answers, But there is no going back.

  The forms mold themselves out of the dark, like clay, it’s—

  Sky and Ryder, on the stairwell.

  But it can’t be.

  Are they free? Are they together?

  Did they forget all about me?

  Did they leave me locked in that room?

  Betrayal spreads like fire, singes my arms and legs.

  “Phee!” Sky rushes. She untangles herself from the knot of limbs. “Thank God, where’ve you been—”

  “Don’t pretend like you care!” Get me out of here, I’m serious, I tell the army.

  “Phee, stop—,” Ryder says.

  “No, you stop! Just leave me alone!”

  “Phee, come on!” They surround me, try to pin me down. But something’s snapped in me, and I can’t stop moving.

  “Phee, are you on something?” Sky says, as she gets a good look at me. “Ryder, Wren said he was going to drug her. She’s on something, I know it. Help me, please.”

  Ryder looks deep into my eyes, tries to figure out what secrets I’m keeping. But I’m empty. The two of them have just gutted me clean. “Leave me alone.”

  “Phee.” Sky’s crying now. “Oh my God, what have they done?”

  She reaches for me again, but I’m broken, and I can’t control myself anymore. I slap her hand away, then bat at the walls, the air, the windows. It’s all closing in on me. I want to go home. No, I want to go back, to the way things were. When I knew who I was, and who she was. When there wasn’t anything between us.

  Now the whole world’s between us.

  “Ryder!” Sky cries. “Ryder, we need to do something!”

  “Phee.” Ryder’s voice grabs and shakes me in the dark. “Phee, please, please, are you in there?”

  But I hate him right now. I don’t want him. Not if he doesn’t want me.

  I close my eyes and will myself back in time. And the army listens. They carry me there. I don’t know how, but they do, and then I’m lying in the middle of a green open field.

  I smell the stew cooking, the thick scent of meat in the air.

  And Sky’s beside me. Not this Sky, but the one who gets me. The one who would never abandon me for a guy.

  And then I know where we are. “The Park,” I whisper. “Sky, the Park.”

  The army has grown louder and more restless, is angry that I’ve spoken. Let us handle this, they say. They are screaming from the inside, telling me to give in.

  So I do. It’s just too much. I can’t hold them back any longer.

  I let the army finish me off, collapse me piece by piece until I’m nothing but a void.

  A black hole once known as Phee.

  40 SKY

  Phee’s eyes go blank, dead. She’s still trembling under Ryder’s grasp, but the light in her eyes has been extinguished, pinched out like a flame.

  My sister. My young, strong, beautiful little sister is quivering like a hollowed ghoul. She looks like Mom. New Mom. Empty Mom.

  I fall to the ground. I can’t catch my breath. I can’t—I can’t stitch my heart.

  Ryder gently shakes Phee’s shoulders, tries to wake her carefully, then he whispers again in her ear. “Phee. Phee, c
ome on, Phee. We know you’re in there.”

  But she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t do anything. “Is she breathing?”

  Ryder listens to her chest and gives a nod. “Yeah, yeah, she’s breathing. She must’ve passed out. Sky, I don’t”—he looks up at me, helpless—“I don’t know what she’s on.”

  “I do.” I hesitate. “They’ve given her a hallucinogen . . . called the heavenly blue.”

  A slow wave of realization passes over Ryder’s face. But before he can answer, we hear footsteps. A hurried, panicked scuffling on the stairwell above us, maybe three, four pairs of feet.

  “We need to go,” Ryder says. He tries to pull me down the stairs, hide me behind the next bend, but I can’t leave Phee.

  “Sky, we need to leave,” he whispers. “If they find us, we’ll both end up like this. We’re not going to help anyone by getting caught. Come on.”

  He’s right. But my guilt keeps me hammered to the ground, wiggling against his grip.

  I hover over the blank, frozen face of my sister. “Pick her up.” My voice is high and strangled. “We’ll move her.” I start to pull her arm, but she’s deadweight. “Help me.”

  Ryder tightens his hold around me. Then he pulls me off my feet, twists me over his shoulder, and carries me down two flights. He muffles my cry of surprise as the footsteps stop shuffling, and voices above begin speaking.

  “There she is!” a familiar voice bellows above us.

  “You better thank the Standard there she is, Robert. How could you have left the door unlocked?” another, mostly definitely Wren, answers.

  “I ran back to my quarters,” Robert sputters. “It was a minute, maybe two, I swear. She was out cold when I left her.”