by K A Riley
“And we’re outnumbered about a million to one,” Sara points out, sounding almost gleeful and with what I swear is a happy twinkle in her eyes.
Is she actually rooting for us to die?
Despite her constant porkies and pissing around, she’s the least combative of all of us, so I can’t imagine where this casual smugness of hers is coming from. She’s either suicidal, naffing crazy, off-the-charts-indifferent…or else there’s something else going on, and shame on me for not being able to figure it out.
Taking a split second to center myself, I do my best to connect with Haida Gwaii. She’s out there. She’s tracked us down. It’s not wishful thinking. I can feel it. I don’t need advice at the moment. What I do need is the opportunity to channel her abilities. We might not have our weapons, but Haida’s speed, agility, relative strength, and heightened senses surging through me can more than make up for my confiscated Serpent Blades.
Ever since I was a little girl, I always felt more confident amid chaos, like I could take on an army if it came down to it.
It looks like it just came down to it.
Haida’s consciousness trickles into mine, and I curl my fingers into fists, bracing myself for the surge of strength and adrenaline I’m about to feel. But then the trickle fades into a slow, drippy leak. And then, it’s gone.
Ignacio’s right. There’s something affecting us here, and I don’t think it’s just the stress of captivity, the constant bumpiness and noise, or even the choking swirls of wind and sand that make simple things like talking and breathing a draining challenge. It’s almost like there’s a psychic energy hanging over this place. We all know about the Unsettleds’ notorious Systems Diode Dampener, their go-to tool for stopping mechanical energy in its tracks. Could there be some sort of mental equivalent out there? Have they found some way of inhibiting our Emergent abilities? If so, we may be in more trouble than I thought. (And I already thought we were in the most serious trouble of our lives.)
“If we have to fight,” Ignacio whispers, “we might as well go all in.” Turning to me, he asks if I have any inspirational last words.
“I do,” I tell him. “But our last words are going to happen a long time from now and far away from here.”
“If only optimism were an Emergent ability…,” Arlo chuckles, without a trace of amusement or humor and absently dragging his fingertip along one of the wavy scars running from just below his jawline down to his collar bone.
“Maybe we can get out of this without fighting or dying,” Matholook suggests, barely loud enough for us to hear. He loops his fingers around my wrist and raises my arm up to his mouth so he can lean into my microphone. “We would like to invoke the Appeal Decree.”
I get a pang of jealousy and embarrassment when his voice, belting out through the squat black speakers, sounds so much more confident and authoritative than mine did during my failed Debate to the Death.
What is it about guys that gives their voices such legitimacy? Are their deep, authoritative voices the reason why they keep winding up in charge of the world? Then again, Angel Fire has the voice of a slightly hoarse baby bird, and he seems to be running this entire desert army. So who knows?
As Matholook’s poised and self-assured voice fades into the ether, the crowds go weirdly quiet, and Angel Fire’s eyes grow comically wide. He’s got the build of a malnourished, nine-year-old boy and the thin bones and small facial features of a spider monkey. So it’s sort of hilarious to see his eyes expand into two white, perfectly round casserole dishes.
After the bug-eyed stare, he squints his confusion, which I share, and asks Matholook, “How—how do you know about the Appeal Decree?”
I was about to ask the same thing! Just when I think I’ve got Matholook figured out, he unveils some new knowledge or some new way of seeing the world and of understanding things no one out here has any business understanding. The mystery of him confuses, annoys, and attracts me in equal proportions.
Matholook is leaning over the microphone like he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t.
The caravan is still chugging along with all of us swaying with the oceanic motion of the flatbed. The desk, lights, score-keeping clocks, and speakers are rattling as loud as before. But the silence of the once-cheering crowds seems to have dropped the total decibel level down about a hundred notches.
Angel Fire clears his throat. Twice.
“Are you invoking your right to a Forgiveness Hearing, here and now on the Trial Barge?”
“We are,” Matholook says into the microphone, his lips close enough for me to feel the heat of his breath on the back of my hand. “As outsiders, it’s the only way to exercise our rights to the Appeal Decree, correct?” He’s asking a question, but it still sounds just as much like he’s stating a fact.
Angel Fire walks all the way over to us, lowering his own microphone to his hip as he approaches. Matholook straightens up and smiles down at the slim, younger boy, who doesn’t return the smile.
Angel Fire pushes up the sleeves of his oversized blazer. “You are a Caretaker.”
“I am.”
“Not a strategist or a warrior?”
“No.”
“And yet you seem to know your enemy.”
“I know a little bit about a potential friend,” Matholook smiles.
Angel Fire leans in close, so his head is right between mine and Matholook’s. His voice is a penetrating, serpent-y hiss. “The two of you don’t fool me.”
“No one’s trying to fool you,” I tell him. “We’re just trying to get back home.”
“Now that your spy mission has failed, you mean, right?”
“We’re not spies,” Matholook tells him. “We are survivors, like you. We have hope for a better future, like you. Branwynne and her fellow Emergents want to end the war before it starts. Just like you do.”
“And what makes you think we want to end the war as opposed to win it?” Angel Fire asks.
Shrugging, Matholook asks, “Am I right?”
Tense and baffled, I snap my gaze back and forth between Angel Fire and Matholook.
“You’ve been sentenced to death,” Angel Fire says at last, stroking his jaw and chin like he has a beard, which he most definitely doesn’t. Slightly pimply, he’s got to be another couple of years away from being able to boast facial hair. “And since you’re dead,” he drawls, “why should I bother negotiating with a ghost?”
“I’m not dead yet,” Matholook says with a charming, brotherly smile. “And neither are you. Now…about the Appeal Decree…”
Angel Fire smiles back, and I expect him to be bitter or angry or something. But he grins and says, “I’m impressed” before turning back to face the curious, restless audiences surrounding us.
“The invocation of the Appeal Decree has been invoked,” he announces into the microphone. When the audiences murmur their dissatisfaction, Angel Fire makes a pumping-the-brakes motion with his hand and tells the crowds how proud they should be. “Making and living by our own laws is easy. The sign of a community’s success is when the enemy knows them and lives by them as well.”
He’s answered with a chorus of reluctant muttering, grumbling, and an assortment of headshakes and a few equally vigorous head nods.
In the audience, a girl with her head shaved on one side and a light-brown braid of hair on the other thrusts herself to her feet and calls out, “Appeal Decree!” Her voice is barely audible, but it has the desired effect. Her chant spreads like a desert brush fire until everyone in the two flatbeds is chanting it, and I’m doing a round of mental head-scratching as I try to determine what Matholook just did, how he did it, and if doing it is going to result in us being magically freed or, more likely, hacked to pieces by these nutters and left in the desert as a midafternoon snack for the vultures.
Laughing, Angel Fire gestures for the two crowds to keep it going, which they seem more than happy to do. Stomping hard enough to shake the steel bleachers under them, the crowd
s in the grandstands keep calling out “Appeal Decree!” until Angel Fire finally shouts out, “Okay! Okay!” into the microphone before turning his attention back to us. Well, back to Matholook, actually.
“You know our laws,” he says, his hand cupped over the top of his microphone so it won’t pick up his voice. “Some might say that makes you dangerous. Or a spy. We say it makes you aware enough to be given the benefit of the doubt.” He scans Matholook up and down like he’s a prize horse before raising the microphone back to his lips. “The Appeal Decree has been invoked by our enemy and accepted by our spectators. I hereby declare it will be done. The prisoners will be pardoned!”
Before I realize what I’m doing, I hurl myself into Matholook’s arms and kiss him full on the lips. He loops his arms around my waist and lifts me a little until I’m on my tiptoes in front of him, my chest pressed to his, my arms draped over his shoulders with my hands clasped around his neck.
For a second (okay, more like ten glorious, heart-skipping, skin-tingling seconds), I forget where we are. I forget about the rest of my Asylum, Angel Fire, and the crowds of the Unsettled with all their guards and their yellow-clad, twelve-person jury. As far as I’m concerned, the world can finish going to Hell.
Just let me enjoy this moment of relief with Matholook!
I don’t know which one of us pulls back first, but—with the Unsettled audience “oohing” and “aahing” their cheeky delight—I wipe my lips with the back of my hand, clear my throat, and turn to Matholook,
I almost say, “I love you,” but I chicken out and go with an alternative that I hope is just as true. “You saved our lives!”
The burning sensation in my cheeks isn’t from the sun.
Without taking his eyes from mine, he grins and reminds me that he’s always happy to help.
“So…how does this work?” Libra asks, her eyes darting in suspicion. “Do we have to plead our case to a panel or something?”
“Or prove how we don’t deserve to die just for being who we are?” Ignacio adds.
“Or…,” Arlo drawls, “can we maybe just go?”
Angel Fire waves his hands back and forth. “No, no. Nothing like any of that.”
“Then what—?” I start to ask.
“By our own rules, you are free to go.”
“Really?”
“Well, no. Not really. There’s a caveat.”
“A what?”
“It’s a set of conditions,” Matholook explains.
“What conditions?” I growl, glaring at Angel Fire.
“To prove your worth,” he responds, “and to satisfy our doubts, you’ll need to prepare yourselves for combat.”
At the word “combat,” Ignacio taps me on the shoulder. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Arlo thrusts himself between me and Ignacio, his arms draped across our shoulders, the scars around his mouth stretched back toward his ears along with his wide smile. “Don’t be so glum. Freedom is the only thing worth dying for.”
It’s not the only thing worth dying for, I think, as the sweet warmth of my spontaneous, moderately embarrassing public kiss with Matholook continues to tingle on my lips.
18
Mind Appeal - Libra
Angel Fire scans us all once. Then twice. And then a third time.
He beckons with his finger for the first and last in the line of the twelve hooded ducklings to step forward.
Holding onto the guardrails of the small bridge extending out between their flatbed and ours, the small boy and the tall girl—she’s got to be Ignacio’s height plus another six inches—shake and wobble their way across the space between the two rigs.
As if they’ve never done this before, the boy and the girl approach Angel Fire with the delicate caution (bordering on quivering terror) of two field mice passing by a rattlesnake’s burrow.
Agitated, Angel Fire hurries them over with a flurried back and forth wave of his hand.
Gathering up their yellow, gown-length robes, they scurry over to him.
He motions for the girl to lean down and for the boy to come closer and has a private, three-headed discussion with the two Arbiters, who gesture wildly with their hands and cast shaded looks at me and my Asylum before nodding and taking up flanking, straight-backed positions at either side of their boss.
Tucking his microphone into his belt and with ceremonial flourish, Angel Fire puts one hand on the shoulder of the smaller boy and reaches his other up to land on the shoulder of the much taller girl. The flatbed is the standard fifty-three-foot length, which is just long enough to prevent me from being able to make out much of the details of the girl’s face at this distance. And her hood obscures most of her features, anyway.
But there’s no hiding the stage fright she’s got etched in her eyes.
With bored, sagging eyes, her smaller counterpart doesn’t seem as openly frightened, although he’s now chewing on the skin around his index finger with enough ferocity to make me think he might gnaw off his own arm if this little moment of Angel Fire’s doesn’t end straight away.
Angel Fire tilts his head back and closes his eyes like he’s saying a prayer in church. The audiences to either side of us and many of the kids in the dense crowds walking along next to the flatbeds do the same.
His eyes darting side to side, Ignacio tugs on my jacket and asks me what’s happening.
Before I can tell him that I have no idea, Angel Fire shoos the two Arbiters away. The two of them gather their yellow robes around themselves and lurch back across the swaying, bowed metal bridge between the two flatbeds to join the rest of their fellow ducklings.
“After consulting with the One and the Twelve,” Angel Fire announces into his microphone, we have decided to make a slight adjustment to our Standard Operating Procedure.”
The crowd murmurs, and a few of the kids in the audience let out some disapproving grunts we can hear from here.
“The Appeal is usually a single-step process,” Angel Fire continues, “a test of mind or body. Since we have six minds and bodies to deal with, the appeals process will be adjusted accordingly. Because Branwynne lost the Debate to the Death—”
The two crowds hoot and holler, but I honestly can’t tell if they’re booing or cheering.
Are they upset because I lost, or are they upset that I’m still alive?
“And since Matholook, a confessed member of the Cult of the Devoted, has been determined to be an enemy of the Unsettled…” Angel Fire elaborates before swinging around to face us. “That leaves four of you who are eligible to participate in the Appeal.”
One at a time, with showy exaggeration and to the delight of our flanking audiences, he points a stabbing finger at Libra, Arlo, Ignacio, and Sara.
Libra’s cheeks go dusky red. She bites her lip and locks her worried eyes onto mine. Sara is casually preoccupied with picking at a freckle on the back of her hand. Arlo takes a half-step back like he’s expecting Angel Fire to whip out a machine gun and mow us all down right here on the back of this flatbed and dance naked around our lifeless bodies. Ignacio takes a bold step forward, his hands cupped around either side of his mouth.
Brassy as a tea kettle, he comes off as unintimidated and unafraid.
I know him well enough to know it’s partly real but also partly an act.
“We can take anything you throw at us!” he boasts to Angel Fire and then turns to us for confirmation we can’t possibly hope to offer. “We can, can’t we?” he mouths in my direction, his eyes narrow and pleading.
What can I say? I’m so far out of my depth here, I’m likely to get the bends just thinking about coming up for enough air to answer him.
“Are you prepared?” Angel Fire asks.
At the same time, Libra, Arlo, Ignacio, and Sara—recoiled in a linked-armed cluster—answer with a resounding, “No!”
Come on guys. Don’t embarrass me in front of the evil warlord!
“They’re ready!” I cry out to Angel Fire.
&
nbsp; They might not have faith in themselves, but I trust their abilities and expertise. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? I already failed my test. If they fail theirs, the uncertainty of our predicament will be over, and we’ll know exactly where we stand. Of course, that apparently means our certain death, so I guess that’s the answer to my question about what’s the worst that could happen.
I need to stop asking myself questions whose inevitable answer is, “death.”
“The first appeal,” Angel Fires announces, “is the Mind Appeal. We are an army of intellectuals and problem-solvers.”
They are?
“Prove that you, likewise, are an individual of intellect and problem-solving.”
As my four friends look back and forth at each other, Angel Fire takes five big steps toward us and aims his finger like a gun right at Libra. “Are you ready to prove yourself?”
“And how…how do I do that, exactly?” Libra stammers.
“You must discover the four pillars of the Army of the Unsettled.”
“Four…?”
“Pillars. Each pillar represents a primary bastion of our philosophy.”
“What’s a ‘bastion’?”
Angel Fire freezes, his eyes in a deep squint, and I think maybe he’s trying to use some sort of laser-powered telepathy to burn a hole in Libra’s face. Reeling himself in, he tells her that a “bastion” is “a foundation and a cornerstone of our philosophy.”
“And how are we supposed to know your philosophy?” Libra asks.
“You’re not. That’s the mystery for you to solve.”
I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but my guts aren’t too happy, either way.
“Are you prepared to solve the four pillars?” he cries out.
Around us, the crowd chants, “Give them the riddles!”
Riddles? Is that all this is?
I nudge Libra and give her my best and biggest smile of encouragement. “I think all you have to do is solve a few riddles. That is your thing, right? Solving things. Figuring them out.”