by K A Riley
“Um…I mostly deal with mechanical systems and things like that. I like puzzles and stuff, but I don’t want to die doing them.”
“You won’t die.”
Overhearing us above the ruckus from the crowd, Angel Fire wags his finger at Libra. “You will if you fail.”
Libra tries to swallow, but I think her mouth is too dry and her brain is short-circuiting, so her attempted swallow turns into a gagging gulp.
Angel Fire rounds on her, ignoring the rest of us as he stands, small but powerful, in front of her. Speaking into his own microphone and gesturing for me to pass her mine, he says, “Here is our first pillar: ‘He speaks without a mouth, and he hears without ears. He has no body, but he surfs in the air.’”
I’ve never been good at this kind of mind-bending puzzle stuff, so I’m glad I’m not eligible to be the player. To my brain, riddles are gibberish with an answer I know is there but can’t see or understand until it’s explained to me. Which makes me feel twice as dumb as I did before I even heard the riddle.
(My reaction to the answer to every riddle I’ve ever heard is, “Oh! I would’ve gotten it if you game me more time.”)
Why is it sometimes so easy for me to lie to myself?
In front of us, Libra paces like a prize-fighter, anxious to step into the ring. With all of her sweet and optimistic bubbliness, I sometimes forget that she’s getting the same intense training as the rest of us at the Academy. She’s taking most of the same classes, and War is her mentor for her personalized training sessions. Plus, she lived in a Processor and had to deal with any number of tortures and indignities before she got freed by Kress and her Conspiracy.
Could she be more of a proper tough than I ever imagined?
Libra stops, both feet together and her head on a steep tilt like she’s been blasted by some sort of dry-ice cannon and frozen, mid-step.
She says something I can’t hear at first and then, nodding her head in agreement with herself, she raises the microphone to her lips and calls out, “An echo.”
An echo. Speaking with no mouth and surfing the air. Okay. That makes sense. So how come I couldn’t have figured it out in a million years?
“An echo!” Angel Fire echoes into his own microphone.
“An echo!” all of the spectators echo back.
Angel Fire looks more happy than upset about Libra’s correct answer, and I get the sense that his scrunched brow and slightly sinister squint are more for show than anything else.
Does this pint-sized, ankle-biter-warlord actually like us?
The crowd calls out for the second pillar, and Angel Fire nods to them and adjusts his fat-knotted tie like he’s preparing for his wedding photos. Holding two fingers up in a “V,” he pivots back around to stand nearly nose-to-nose with Libra. “Here is our second pillar: I belong to you, but everyone else uses me far more than you ever will.”
Ugh. I hate this stuff. Riddles aren’t fun. They just make you feel two levels short of a double-decker.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good mystery as much as the next person. But riddles are different. You solve a mystery. A riddle is given to you by someone who already knows the question and the answer. It’s a stacked deck, and they’re holding all the cards with a couple of extra aces up their sleeve for good measure. And the whole point is to make you feel like a daft, grade-A tosser.
And then I feel even dumber when Matholook leans down and whispers to me, “At least this one’s easy, right?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. Easy-peasy.” I’m trying to sound casually confident, but Matholook’s skeptical squint tells me I’m not fooling anybody.
Libra paces again and then stops, her finger in the air like she’s checking the direction of the wind. “Libra!”
Angel Fire does a half spin away from the audience and toward Libra, dropping to one knee at the end of his little maneuver and taking aim at Libra with his finger and thumb in the shape of a gun. “Excuse me? Is that your answer?”
“The answer is, ‘My name.’ It’s mine, but everyone uses it a lot more than I do!”
Matholook nudges me with his elbow and says, “Easy, right?”
“Yeah,” I answer with an eyeroll I hope he doesn’t see. “Easy-peasy.”
In front of us, Angel Fire leaps back up and turns to quiet the increasingly rowdy crowds.
Did he just smile?
He holds up three fingers and twirls in a set of three slow circles in the middle of the flatbed before skipping, school-girl style, over to Libra until he’s standing a foot in front of her. “Used to threaten, used to defeat. Sometimes it grows, sometimes it shrinks. Used to conquer, used to protect. It marks your downfall and marks your wins. The true god of war, the creator of sins. What is it?”
Libra holds up a finger and mutters, “Give me a second.”
“I’ll give you five seconds,” Angel Fire says with his hand up, his fingers splayed wide, and through a crooked sneer that I’m almost sure is just a poorly disguised smile.
One at a time, he starts curling his fingers down, one finger per second, until only his thumb remains, held aloft like he’s about to hail a flying taxi.
As his thumb begins to drop to form a closed fist, Libra beams wide enough for the corners of her mouth to inch perilously close to her ears. Her perfect teeth are shiny, white, and symmetrical as blocks of ice in an igloo. The answer she gives is an answer I’ve heard a million times but never thought much about until now. It’s an answer that Krug built his world around and that forms the fertile ground that enabled Emergents to exist. It’s an answer encompassing everything Kress has been fighting against and training us to attain in a new, different, and more empathetic form.
Libra’s voice is silky and completely static-free when she bends over her microphone and says, “Power.”
Sensing Libra’s success after my miserable failure, I slip my arm into hers and tell her she’s doing great. Arlo and Ignacio aren’t quite as subtle with their encouragement. Shoving me out of the way, they hurl their arms around her and call her their hero.
“That remains to be seen,” Angel Fire admonishes, pumping the brakes on the boys’ celebration. “Here is the fourth and final pillar: ‘Some try to hide, some try to cheat, but time will show, we always will meet. Try as you might, to guess my name, I promise you'll know, when it’s you I claim. Who am I?’”
“Do you know who the frack he’s talking about?” I ask Libra out of the corner of my mouth.
She looks like she might cry when she nods and says she does. “We’ve seen him up close and personal, and I’m not eager for another meeting.”
“Who…?”
Turning away from me and toward Angel Fire, Libra leans into her microphone. “Death.”
There’s a second of stunned silence from Angel Fire and the audiences trundling along next to us. All I can hear is the grind of the chugging city on wheels, which is a lot, but right now, with all that’s going on in my mind, it sounds more like the delicate, background hum of a bank of fluorescent lights.
Angel Fire’s squeaky, almost-masculine voice breaks the silence. “She has identified the four pillars!”
And then the crowds go balls-out crazy with the earth and air-shattering celebratory exuberance of a stadium full of football hooligans.
“Echo, Name, Power, and Death,” Angel Fire rattles off as the cries die down, “are the four pillars of the Army of the Unsettled. Like all of us, you are the echo of Death’s voice. It comes for you. It takes you. And it sends you back. You may not return as you were, but you will return.” And then he looks down at the long, riveted floorboards of the flatbed between his feet and adds, “We’re never the same, we’re always in motion, and we always return.”
The quiet confidence from the way he says this makes me almost start to cry.
In a flash, my mind whips me back to my childhood in the Tower of London. I see myself meeting Kress, leaving my parents behind, and coming with her to this country with nothing but Ha
ida Gwaii and the clothes on my back. I see Kress and her Conspiracy, our challenges, our victories, and our losses. I see Manthy and Cardyn vanish hand-in-hand into the Lyfelyte on the rooftop of the Academy, and I watch as their friends—my teachers and mentors—suffer a collective heartbreak that I suspect may never fully heal. I see Mattea dying again right before my eyes. And it’s all there, just like Angel Fire said: The Echo of my Name on Mattea’s lips as she surrendered to Death and the Power the rest of us needed to summon in order to keep moving when it would have been so easy to stop.
Combined, the four pillars of the Unsettled, reveal our place in a world where we can shrink into helplessness or else grow into hope.
Is that what the Army of the Unsettled is actually all about? The power to keep moving, knowing they can never outrun Death? Is that what they mean by, “The power to live”? Is it possible the Unsettled aren’t the enemy I thought they were?
Unlike Angel Fire’s riddles, this time, I think I know the answer.
19
Body Appeal - Arlo
Setting aside his carnival barker voice, this time, Angel Fire speaks into his microphone with conversational ease.
“The second appeal is the Body Appeal. This is the appeal to your physical being. Billions have perished in the chaos and wars of the last twenty years. The ones who survived did so because of intellect, luck, or brute strength. Is there a brute among you? Is there someone unsheltered and unafraid?”
As if to stick the knife in deeper and emphasize our predicament, Angel Fire reminds the audience that we’ve already failed the first trial, the Debate to the Death.
Okay. I failed it.
On the other hand, Matholook’s knowledge of the Unsettled and their rules opened the door for our appeal, and Libra succeeded in her challenge, so maybe there’s hope?
“The Emergents have passed the first appeal,” Angel Fire begins. And then, dousing my meager glimmer of optimism, he adds, “No one has ever passed—or even survived—the second.”
Great.
“And what do we call those who fail?”
A repeated chant rises from the audience: “Buzzard bait!”
Doing another graceful pivot on his heel, Angel Fire returns his attention to us. “So…who’s it going to be? Who is prepared to know the sensation of being digested?”
Arlo half-raises his hand. “Um…I guess I’ll go?”
Ignacio stops his attempt to step forward with a wide-fingered hand slapped firmly to the center of Arlo’s chest. “I don’t think so. I’ve got the highest marks of all of us in War’s Exercise and Fitness class. If this is a physical challenge, I should be the one…” Ignacio turns to me. “Right, Bran?”
I put my hands up in surrender.
No way I’m getting between these two guys. They’re old enough to figure out for themselves which one of them has the biggest death wish. I’d take a shot at this appeal, myself, if I were allowed. But since I’m not…
“What about Sara?” Libra asks, turning to our perpetually aloof and annoyed classmate.
Sara looks up and frowns in response. “What about Sara?” she asks through an acidic hiss.
Backing down, Libra stammers, “Nothing. I just thought maybe you wanted to…”
“Volunteer to die? I don’t think so.”
“No one’s dying,” I promise, my voice low so Angel fire won’t overhear. “Libra figured out those four pillars. And besides, I don’t think these people really want us dead.”
“Are you willing to bet your life to find out?” Sara asks. “Or are you happier betting mine?”
“I’m not betting anything,” I say, my fingers in fists, my defenses fully up. “We’re a team. An Asylum. We have to work together.”
“By working separately?” Sara laughs. She gives a little flick of her head, tossing her short blond hair and taking one giant, very deliberate step back. She scans Arlo and Ignacio, licks her lips, and slips one of her arms into the crook of Arlo’s arm and the other into Ignacio’s. “It’s called the ‘Body Appeal.’ I say we let the boys with the appealing bodies take care of this one.”
The Unsettled might not want to kill her, but I’m starting to consider doing it for them.
“It looks like you’ve selected a champion,” Angel Fire announces, his hand out flat and aimed squarely at Arlo.
“We sure as frack have,” Arlo calls back. “Don’t worry,” he assures us, “I’ve got this.”
“Welcome,” Angel Fire belts out, “to the Body Appeal!”
I can’t speak for the others in my Asylum, but I get tense and start looking around, waiting for whatever is about to happen.
When nothing does, Angel Fire blushes and waves his hands at us. “Oh, sorry. Stand back!”
The audiences laugh as we move away from the back of the trailer and gather in a clump in its middle.
Over on Angel Fire’s desk, Zephora presses a button, and a large wooden panel rises from the floor like a drawbridge being raised. Snapping into place, the impromptu wall looms ten feet high near the rear bumper of the trailer.
It’s peppered with small holes and stained with blood. A lot of blood.
On a signal from Angel Fire, Zephora waves her hand at the twelve teens in the yellow hoods.
Six of the ducklings, numbers two through seven this time, stand with ceremonial swagger. In a tidy queue, they approach the narrow steel bridge and make their way from their flatbed to ours.
“The Sniper Squad of the Arbiters will administer the Body Appeal.”
Wait. The same kids who condemned us are now going to oversee this part of our appeal? I guess they don’t believe in impartial juries.
Arlo brushes his palms along the sides of his combat pants, pulls his fingers back in a stretch, and tilts his head from side to side. “I guess I’m up.”
“That’s great,” Matholook says to me. “But up for what, exactly?”
Sneering, Ignacio tells him, “I doubt they’re going to set up a tea party to test his social etiquette.”
“Too bad,” I mutter, my eyes on Arlo, who is standing alone in front of the high wooden wall. “I could go for a good cuppa right about now.”
Zephora and the adult man whose name I still don’t know disappear behind the red curtain and re-emerge seconds later pushing a rack of polished black and gray weapons.
“Those are compressible carbon-compound hunting bows,” Sara says from behind us, clearly impressed. “Overdrive binary cam system. Exchangeable modules. Dovetail mount. Split limb. Single pin sight. Fixed, triple-blade broadheads…”
When we all stare at her, she acts like we’re a bunch of daft cows. “Granden’s been teaching me.”
As if he’s whispering sweet nothings into the ear of his invisible lover, Angel Fire—his eyes closed, a playful smile on his lips—purrs into the microphone. “Will our Sniper Squad please approach to gather their weapons?”
One by one, Zephora and the man distribute the six compound bows, one to each of the six ducklings.
At the same time, four of the hairless guards—two men and two women—cross over from their flatbed to ours. They surround me and my friends and herd us behind Angel Fire’s desk, leaving Arlo standing alone in front of the blood-stained wall and facing a queue of the hooded archers.
With a half-curious, half-sadistic grin tugging the corners of his mouth, Angel Fire calls for the Body Appeal to begin.
From here, all we can see is their backs as the archers draw their bows and, one after the other in rapid-fire succession—without fanfare, warning, or a single word—fire their volley of deadly arrows.
I shout out, “Wait!” but no one is listening. Every scrap of everyone’s attention—from the audiences in the grandstands and on the ground to Angel Fire and me and my Asylum on the Trial Barge—is locked onto Arlo.
Before our astonished eyes, the arrows slow down. At first, I think I’m imagining it. But from here, I can actually see the ruffle of the arrows’ flight feathers as the shaft
s push their way through the soupy air. They’re still moving fast. But not with the near-invisible velocity a well-shot arrow should.
With the graceful, half-speed of a ballet dancer practicing his routine in the empty, open space of a studio, Arlo slides left, right, forward, and back, as he allows each arrow to go streaking harmlessly past.
One by one, each of the arrows plunks into the big wooden wall behind him.
Except for the last one.
That one proves to be one too many for Arlo to avoid. And even a slightly slowed-down arrow is plenty fast and deadly enough to do damage.
Which this one does.
Arlo has just slid down to allow the fifth arrow to zing past his ear.
But the sixth and final arrow finds its mark, piercing his throat just to the side of his Adam’s Apple. The arrow lodges in place, the arrowhead-half of its shaft sticking out the back of his neck, its flight-end quivering in the front.
The simultaneous gasp from the audience is so loud I can barely hear my own breath of horror escape my lips.
I was just about to celebrate—not only Arlo’s victory but what looks to be the return of his Emergent abilities. And now…
Arlo drops to one knee. A small river of blood pumps down his neck, staining his shirt, and I’m nearly knocked backwards from the memory of what happened to Mattea.
Are we all cursed to die in the most gruesome way possible?
Down on all fours now, Arlo coughs up a glob of blood, and a shudder ripples through his body.
Libra tries to run toward him, but one of the guards latches onto her wrist hard enough to make her cry out as he twists her shoulder on a weird angle.
Side by side, Matholook and I charge forward and start to clamber over Angel Fire’s giant desk, but the guards grab us by the collars of our jackets and sling us backward. We slide on our backsides and plow into the heavy red curtain at the cab-end of the trailer.
In front of us, Sara is just standing there, although she takes the time to put her chin on her shoulder and look back at us with a disdainful, “you’re wasting your time,” eyeroll.