About the Dark

by helenrena

Riled up and clearly not caring anymore what Horgreth might think, the god loosed his fist at my face, but it didn’t hit me because Fox, who’d been watching the god vigilantly, had stepped in front of me. Rig’s fist landed on Fox’s chest, and at once there was a flurry of movement and clicks as the guards took their guns off the safety. Fox slowly raised his hands.

  “Rig, her staring means nothing,” he said, stressing every word. “She’s blind, and you know it.”

  As one, Fox and I looked at the god. Much taller than me, Fox was also standing not directly in front of me but a little to the right, and his head was angled forward rather than held straight like mine, and yet none of that bothered me. After years together, I had grown so used to adjusting the images that I borrowed for my height and point of view that I almost forgot I wasn’t the one who did the seeing.

  Rig stared back at us—at the spot where my cheek was pressed to Fox’s arm—and his face twisted with rage.

  “Mr. Rig,” the woman doctor called out, “Mr. Rig, are you capable of focusing on my questions?”

  The man exhaled heavily. “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Rig, last year you beat this child so violently you fractured her skull. She nearly died. Is it so surprising that she gives you her full attention now?”

  “But she deserved it, Doc,” Rig protested. “’Cause she’s evil. Sure, she looks all nice and sweet, but she’s the devil. When I’d come, she wouldn’t talk to me or touch me or take the candy I’d bring. And she can see. I don’t know how, but she sees.”

  He glowered at me, his face ashen and tired, his mouth dry and scabby, a smudge of dirt running across the stubble on his chin, as though he’d been too busy to sleep, drink, or wash up. I hastened to lower my eyes—anything to pacify the crazy beast.

  “Don’t you dare to look away from me!” Rig snarled, lurching toward me.

  The doctor’s voice stayed him. “Mr. Rig, do you find yourself thinking about this girl when outside of the store? Do you ever feel an urge to visit her instead of performing your other duties? Do you ever dream of her?”

  The god’s face reddened. “So what? You wouldn’t understand. You aren’t a guy. She’s beyond—you can’t—” He paused, and his next words came out in a barely-there whisper, “What’s the point of looking at anything else when she exists?”

  Dr. Liddell trailed her pointy chin at Bones. “Do you find this child attractive?”

  Bones, still shaky, gawked at me as if seeing for the first time. “N-n-no, not really, Doc. I mean she’s not ugly…now that I look at her. Yeah, you can call her pretty. Though if you asked me about pretties, I’d tell you the other chick’s much hotter.”

  He ogled Demi.

  The woman doctor glanced at the statuesque Demi too, but only briefly, then turned to Horgreth. “Sir, as you can observe, the heart child has made Mr. Rig completely obsessed with her. If we wait any longer before executing your plan, she may walk out of this cell tonight.”

  Through one guard’s eyes, I watched how the woman closed her folder, pressed it to her chest like a shield, and carefully stepped backward again. By now she was nearly out of our bookstore, and I wished I could ask Fox what he thought about the woman’s odd behavior.

  “Doctor,” Horgreth said. “I’m not convinced. The age of the young lady in question makes her a fairly inappropriate pick for Mr. Rig, yes, but otherwise she is a decent looking girl, and Mr. Rig’s choices here are very limited.”

  “But, sir—” Dr. Liddell began.

  Horgreth held out his palm to silence her. “Nor did she sense my aura or try to influence it when we came in. I waited, but felt absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Except perhaps more boredom than usual.”

  “Of course, sir,” the woman said, “but—”

  Once more Horgreth stopped her with a gesture. “But you can go ahead with that scheme of mine. The one you suggested. See if you can turn this girl into a full-fledged heart as soon as possible, in a controlled environment. I have waited long enough, haven’t I?” He curled his lips into what seemed like a perfectly good-natured smile, but right away the corners of his mouth hardened. “Oh, and another thing, Doctor. You do understand that if anything goes even remotely wrong, I want you to kill the heart girl. And the time boy. He’s too devoted to her.”

  Without waiting for any kind of response, Horgreth turned to the door, and Fox slightly leaned on me, pushing me in Rig’s direction. I felt my jaw go slack with surprise. What? We were still going ahead with the Plan? With Horgreth and his goons in the room? Pointedly, I shuffled from foot to foot, trying to communicate that we should wait until tomorrow. Fox nudged me again. Demi too cleared her throat, and even Sinna sighed. Oh, fine, I’d do it.

  Arranging my lips and eyebrows the way I’d been taught, I turned toward Rig. Since it was noisy—Horgreth’s guards were stomping after their boss—I decided to skip the chatting-up part. Instead, I moved to Step Two of the Plan: mincing ahead, I prepared to fake a stumble so I could grab onto the god as if to stay upright and thus give Fox a chance to pick Rig’s left pocket. Yes, the god kept the key to our door in there along with the stinky, misshapen chocolate candies he was always trying to feed me.

  Rig watched my every move. The moron had figured out that I could see, yet he seemed to forget all about it now that I was approaching him. He wasn’t thinking, ‘Hey, the blind chick, who isn’t really blind, is walking toward me. She must be doing it on purpose. And what purpose can that be?’ Yes, I knew he wasn’t thinking this because his forehead stayed as unclouded as a blank page. Instead, when he realized I was just a few steps away from a full-frontal collision with him, he smirked and thrust his crotch forward.

  At once I knew a much better way to distract Rig. I stopped. My smile was very sincere now. I grabbed a ribbon that used to be part of a frill on my dress and ripped it clean off. Rig frowned. I grinned harder, crumpled the white shred into a ball, and chucked it into his face. It hit him squarely between the eyes.

  For a moment the god just stood there, blinking, reddening in the face, and breathing in my direction. The chemical stench of his mint mouthwash burned my nose, and somebody must have quickly informed Horgreth about this new development because the king of traffickers popped back into the room. It became very, very quiet. In this silence, Rig swore and lunged at Fox. This he did at such a mind-boggling speed that at first I thought he was simply mistaken. It was me he was trying to reach. Yet the god paused just before hitting Fox, a miniscule pause during which his face became a snapshot of vengeance: he was getting at me through Fox. Then he struck Fox in the mouth.

  “Rig, no!” I shouted.

  His lips split and bleeding, Fox inhaled sharply, but didn’t move to protect himself. Instead, he raised his arms while Horgreth’s posse surrounded us once again.

  Rig leveled his fist at Fox’s cheekbone, the one with my name on it, but didn’t hit Fox, just watched me, enjoying my suffering. “Happy now, bitch?”

  “Rig, please don’t do it,” I begged, but I knew it was useless. Distraught, I tore through everyone else’s head, hoping they were looking at Rig, shaking their heads, maybe even moving to stop this maniac, but no, they were all staring at me. Some focused on my face, others on my hands, and at least two on my entire frame, from my toes to the stray hairs on the crown of my head, trying not to miss my tiniest move. It was as if they all expected something grand and menacing from me. Before I could decide what it was, my mouth felt full of ice, and I knew—not sure how, but I did—that this ice was their fear incarnate, cold, sharp, and paralyzing. And it was me they were scared of—yes, all of them—and the gods, who had stopped advancing; and the woman doctor, who by now was out of our bookstore; and Horgreth himself, who had pulled out a gun and hid behind the guy in the fedora. They all dreaded that to save Fox, I would overcome whatever was stopping me from becoming a heart and channel the pain I had threatened them with.

  Emboldened by this reaction, I strained to send out some anguish—I felt a lot
of it right now—but my nerves lay helpless. And Rig must have decided I wasn’t suffering enough because he struck Fox in the face. Fox moaned, and I launched at Rig, scratching his cheeks and socking him in the nose so hard I split the skin on my knuckles…and for a second he just let me, I wasn’t sure why. Then he hurled me away. As I slammed into the wall, the view of the room I’d been getting from Fox went dark, but I felt no pain. In a flash I got back to my feet. I could hear Rig pummeling Fox while Fox—the darkness before my eyes dissipated—was not defending himself. He was just standing there, his lower lip caught between his teeth. I leaped in front of him.

  “Dem,” Fox ordered.

  She seized my elbow and, with every show of distaste, pulled me out of the fray. I clawed at her hands, but it was like fighting a brick wall.

  Rig scowled at me. “Wanna get back to your lover boy? Not on my watch.”

  He grabbed Fox’s shoulder in one fist while hitting him in the stomach with the other. Again and again and again.

  “Mr. Horgreth!” I shrieked. “Please stop him!”

  But the king of traffickers—I glimpsed him through Bones’s eyes—didn’t move. He only pouted at me, and this time I had no idea what was behind this expression. In a moment, Horgreth flicked his hand. “This is all too pathetic. She is not going to turn. Take this moron away.”

  But even before this command, Bones, perhaps fearing that Fox would collapse and that Demi would get hurt, seized Rig around the shoulders. Rig cursed. Suddenly, while he was still fighting Bones, Rig began to shrink, return to his human size, so that by the time two gods from Horgreth’s retinue holstered their weapons and caught Rig’s arms to drag him away, the god was not an inch over six feet. There was shock on his face, and I knew that he’d shortened not of his own will, but I didn’t care about him. All I wanted was to be with Fox, to help him, to hug him, to tell him how sorry I was. For everything.

  With a ferocious screech, the door crawled closed after the gods, the lock clicked shut, and we were left alone.

  Fox leaned back against the wall—carefully, but with no wincing or moaning. “Hey, why sour faces? Cheer up. We’ve just survived a visit from the worst bunch of psychos ever. Their last visit.” And, grinning, he held up the key he’d stolen from Rig in the scuffle.

  Chapter 3

  For breakfast, each of us had a portion of brown mush we’d scraped from the insides of the paper bag. I think it was bread, cheese, and maybe dry cereal, but everything of course tasted like the chicken soup whose container Bones had crushed earlier. Then we set to making foot protection for tonight.

  The first time we’d managed to pick the lock on our door had been five years ago. The gods naturally caught us, beat us, then took away our shoes. We picked the next lock. They caught us and spread glass outside the bookstore. We ripped our blankets into pieces, wrapped our feet, and tried to escape again. The gods went berserk that time. They pummeled us till we blacked out. Then they took away everything we had: blankets, towels, spare clothes. They even talked about shaving our heads, fearing that we’d pull out our thigh-long hair and wrap our feet with that, but they quickly snapped out of it and let us keep our hair, the clothes we wore, and the books. They saw nothing dangerous in the books.

  “Now your left leg,” Fox said, gently patting my left ankle.

  I nodded and placed my left foot on the somber gray cover of The Guide to Your Child: How to Raise an Obedient Kid from Day Zero to the Teen Years. There was a picture of a skinny, frightened girl under this heavy title, and the book itself, a massive cloth-bound tome, had been Fox’s pillow up till this morning. Today he insisted my soles be made out of this book’s cover because, in his opinion, the cardboard there was the thickest and strongest in the store.

  “Don’t slouch,” Fox reminded me.

  I sat up straighter on my bed of books and magazines.

  “Good,” Fox murmured, pushing my long skirt up over my knees and repositioning my foot a quarter of an inch closer to the book’s spine. Then, using the metal trip lever from inside of our toilet tank—we’d sharpened one end of it against a cement wall—he began to scratch an outline of my foot on the book’s cover.

  Since he absurdly feared that I would move my foot while he was doing it, he held me down by the ankle. He also kept on reassuring me that he was almost done. When he reached behind my heel with his lever, his face came close to my knee, and suddenly, Fox was pressing his swollen mouth to my skin. I sobbed. Ever since the gods had left, I’d been fighting my tears, but I could no longer. Large, scorching drops fell on my hands, my thighs, and the shreds of the ruffles I’d been ripping off my dress so we would have something to tie the cardboard soles to our feet with tonight.

  “Crying!” Demi scoffed. “That’ll work miracles for us when we’re escaping and Fox can’t fight. No, really, Ev, would it have friggin’ killed you to stick to the Plan and feign a stumble and let Fox quietly lift the key from Rig? Five months Fox was learning to pickpocket. Five months we starved ourselves for tonight. Five months we—”

  “Demi,” Fox said evenly, “if there’s anyone who could be stewing right now, it should be me, but I’m fine.” He kissed my knee again.

  I turned away from him, and my tears splattered the July issue of the Gifted Times magazine that lay next to my thigh. Nobody was looking at it, but its cover was etched in my memory. It was a portrait of a laughing teen girl. Her red lipsticked mouth was pulled taut over her sharp teeth, and her dark, slightly narrowed eyes glimmered with malice. A black-lettered title cut her in two across her waist: “Young, Gifted, and Dangerous.”

  Demi made a guttural sound. “You’re fine? How could you even forgive this slut for what happened before the gods showed up?”

  Fox raised his eyebrows. “Slut? Didn’t Sin admit he started that kiss?”

  “Yes, but she kissed him back.”

  Fox smiled unpleasantly. “Well, that makes them both slutty, doesn’t it? But that’s beside the point. What I want you to understand, Dem, is this: if Sin touches Ever again, I will find a way to break his neck no matter how carefully you protect him. Are we clear on that?”

  The echo from his last words reverberated in the room. After it went quiet, Fox lovingly tapped on my foot, meaning I was allowed to move it off the cover so he could cut the sole out, following the outline he had made. He also glanced at my hands to help me see what I was doing, and I felt divided between gratitude and annoyance: I could tie pieces of polyester together blindly.

  Cr-r-rack. Demi stripped a book of its cover. Picked the next volume. Crack. We didn’t need any more cardboard, but she kept on ripping books, her blond curls clinging to her sweaty face and her blue eyes—unlike mine, they matched perfectly—glowering at me.

  Sinna gently stacked the damaged books against the wall.

  Demi hurled the covers that had accumulated in her lap onto the floor. “And of course now Rig’s curious. Any dimwit would wonder why Ever’s always wiped out here, in two friggin’ rooms with supposedly nothing to do.”

  I balled my fists.

  “And naturally,” Demi raged on, “Ever can’t pretend to be feeling swell. Dang it, I’ve never seen anyone who could fake stuff worse than Ev. The only thing she can passably do well is to look empty-faced, like she’s missing half of her brain.”

  The fabric scraps flew off my lap. “You know what? I wouldn’t be anywhere near this tired if you didn’t make me do all those body contortions from that sadistic Martial Arts Bible of yours for ten hours every day!”

  Demi curled her lip. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have bothered teaching you to fight. You’re nothing but a burden—weak and blind—and tonight—”

  Fox rapped his lever against the floor. “Dem!”

  She held his gaze defiantly, but redness crept up her cheeks. She picked up one of the ties I had made, wound it around her forefinger, unwound it, then muttered guiltily, “Nice knots, Ev.”

  Since I’d made enough ties for tonight, I stood up
.

  “Where are you going?” Fox asked, his fingers coiling around my ankle tenderly, but firmly.

  I blinked. Actually, I hadn’t been going anywhere—I just wanted to give my speech standing. The whole of the last night, I’d been organizing it in my head, and by morning I’d nailed them: five reasons why we shouldn’t try to escape. Except now Fox had scattered my thoughts with his question. Annoyed, I waddled in place, straining to reassemble my reasons, but the only thing I clearly recalled was that I had decided to deliver my address standing to sound more impressive.

  I sat back down. After everyone returned to the sole-making, I flipped open a miniature chess set, the only game we had, and started shuffling the pieces. The way their magnetic bottoms glided along the board—smoothly, almost swimmingly—focused me. I began to remember what I’d wanted to say.

  I’d planned to start by pointing out that we had no idea how the world outside worked. Yes, Rig and sometimes Bones had chatted with us, telling us things. That’s how we learned that it was NYC outside this mall, and that it was the twenty-first century, and that people had thought it would be paradise on earth after it had been discovered that everyone had a talent. Only it wasn’t a paradise. Instead, a new crime had arisen: stealing and selling gifted kids. Gift trafficking. At first only older kids had been snatched, yes, the ones who’d already come into their talents, but then some particular jerk—Rig had called him “that bro”—had surmised that if you looked into a baby’s dreams, you’d see what talent he’d been born with. And that’s how it had been done ever since: dreams, people who could peek into other folk’s night visions, would check out newborns’ talents, then sell this information to the highest bidder among the gift trafficking gangs, who would then hasten to kidnap the children with talents useful for theft and murder. Only, of course, the stolen kids would be useless for many years, so they locked us up to be raised by guards, who were exclusively sadists, pedophiles, and psychos. Nobody had told us the last fact, of course. We’d figured that out on our own.