Through Your Eyes ( I Am Alive Series Book 1 Episode 3 ) (I Am Alive serial)

by Jace, Cameron

  “But of course,” says Timmy. “We don’t expect you to kill Carnivore with a five-star frog splash, or a five-finger death punch.”

  “And a pocket knife.”

  “You got it.”

  “And you should know I will take a couple of those buzzing syringes with me.”

  “Sure. Planning to tickle the tiger to death? That I would love to see. By the way, a friend wants to see you.”

  My door opens, and Ariadna comes in.

  I run to her in my robe and hug her. I think I hug her so hard she’s choking.

  “They said I could see you if I bring you this,” says Ariadna, showing me the traditional red dress I am going to wear when I play the games. “I am sorry, but it was the only way to see you.”

  “A red glossy spaghetti string dress,” I muse, looking at it. “Dressed to kill, baby. Dressed to kill.”

  Ariadna utters a painful laugh, as if she is a little shy laughing around me in this situation.

  “This is the first time it’s a dress,” says Ariadna. “The last nine times, the Monsters were boys.”

  “That explains why Carnivore wants me so much,” I say. “I’ll be his first girl. How about—”

  Ariadna shushes me instantly. I was going to ask her about if they found out about the call she made behind the Summit’s back. How foolish of me. She nods. I guess she got away with it, or how would she be here with me?

  Ariadna checks on the cut on my arm. “This is bad.”

  “They medicated it as much as they can, but I think I can still shoot with it.”

  “That’s why I brought you this.” Ariadna shows me a bottle of pure honey. “Trust me. It’s proven that this can heal the wounds.” She pulls my arm and starts pouring some of the honey on the wound. “In the Amerikaz, they were on the verge of finding out that honey can heal wounds. Now we know.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “The Summit doesn’t want us to know these things,” Ariadna whispers in my ear.

  “Hear that, Honeybee?” I talk to my bee friend. She buzzes twice.

  “All you need is to cover it with some huge medical plaster now.” Ariadna looks around for one.

  “You don’t a need plaster,” I say. “Bring over one of those thin towels. The honey is sticky by itself—“

  Then suddenly I stop. A thought shoots through the wires of my brain.

  “Are you all right?” Ariadna wonders.

  “I am. Don’t worry about me.” I keep a mental note in my brain of that thought.

  “So,” Ariadna sighs. “Big hug again?”

  We hug for one last time. This time she hugs me harder. There are tears in her eyes.

  “Come on,” I say. “It’s not like I am going to leave you and go to college in another town. I am just going to kill a tiger.”

  Ariadna sniffs and smiles. “You promise me that.” She points a finger. “That you’ll kill it.”

  “I promise you,” I say. “It’s just a tiger.” I show her to the door. As she walks out, I slap her on the butt lightly.

  “Move your butt with grace, princess,” I whisper to her.

  It was the last time I saw Ariadna in my life.

  Chapter 41

  Woo

  I lay back on the bed in my room with closed eyes. I need a moment of peace before I enter the games, but I find myself looking into a memory. One that I have always remembered vaguely. Now that the receptor in my brain was removed, it’s clearer.

  I see myself helping my dad with fixing the roof of our house after the heavy rain the night before. We were poor enough we couldn’t afford hiring someone to fix the house. Dad loved fixing the house to clear his mind, and I loved to help him.

  I see myself hammering a nail next to my dad, wondering if he knew about the big secret in our family. And if he knew, how could he just be so calm about it?

  My mother cheated on my dad, ending up having my brother Jack. But then again, of course he must have known.

  Jack looked a lot like my mom, but not like my dad. I didn’t look like either of them, but somehow I was sure that Jack wasn’t my brother. Not just because he was a predicted Nine while no one in my mom and dad’s family had ever been more than a Seven. And not just because Jack was always favored over me in the family – at least no one wanted to kill him. But because I didn’t feel like Jack was my brother. It’s hard to explain but I always knew he wasn’t. I think mom must have slept with a Nine to save the family after I arrived. It must have showed on me that I was going to be a Monster, and that the family needed rescue with another child that could not have come out of mom and dad’s Seven and Six genes.

  Did dad just accept that? Was this part of a bigger deal that I didn’t know about?

  I didn’t care. I never felt related to Jack like my parents never felt really related to me. I was a black sheep and I almost didn’t mind since I had no choice, thinking that one day when I get ranked I will leave this family for good and create a real one for myself.

  Protecting my family in the game was more of a duty than heart-felt love. It was ironic how I never even looked like them, even when it was Jack who was an imposter. In Faya, we didn’t trust our logic and instincts. You only trusted the iAm.

  If my mom had cheated, it still puzzled me how another parent gave up on his child who was a Nine. But like the soldier boy, Bellona’s friend, had told me: this is Faya and it’s nothing but a big joke. It’s like Wonderland. Alice was trying to learn the rules and the logic of it while there was none. It’s all nonsense.

  So I was a pre-Monster when I was Seven, but with Woo’s chocolates and training I became a Seven. Why Woo did that and how it all started still escapes my memory. I guess you don’t remember everything at once when you get your receptor removed. But I remember the suspicious way my mother looked at me the day Woo found me in the homeless neighborhood my dad had sent me to and brought me back home. I had been eating his chocolates for a months as he took care of me in the that little boat by the shore. That was before he had decided to live in a tree house of an abandoned garden nearby. Even though Woo was eight years old, he fished and ate from sea by himself. But he was too young to fully take care of himself – although he took care of me – so he still lived with his mysterious dad. I had never seen Woo’s dad, and Woo didn’t allow me to visit his house. Ever. He was just the mysterious rebel boy who found me in gutter and taught me how to fool my parents into following the rules so I can get home.

  I never forgot that look on my mom’s face when she checked my iAm a month later with results of a Pre-Seven. It was as if she didn’t want me to be a Pre-Seven, or as if she suspected Woo’s manipulation although she never met him but briefly many years later. That was when her looks started easing up. The features on her face were like saying, ‘don’t mess this up, Monster, or I swear this time I am really going to kill you.’ Then she would feed Jack the best food she could buy.

  What I remember clearly is joining Woo in the tree house he lived in. It was moonless night but the sky was clear. As usual, Woo was listening to his favorite song ‘Follow the Sun’ by the Beatles. He was also fumbling through old books and papers that meant the world to him while Carnivore’s picture was hung on the wall.

  I didn’t have anyone who cared for me but Woo at this time of my short life. We lay next to each other on the tree house’s floor, watching the sky above.

  He was fifteen that year, I was fourteen. I gushed all night about how beautiful the stars looked like, and he laughed. He believed that everything in this world looked ugly, and although the stars were of the rare beauties they were far away.

  My eyes were one of the rare beauties, he said, and they were never far away. That’s how he always wanted to see through them because I was capable of seeing the good in the world while he claimed he couldn’t.

  I remember the bruise on his face that night. Was it his dad? Was it the Pre-Monsters he insisted to hang out with? I didn’t know. Woo was always wounded and barefo
ot, and I doubted I could change that. He once told me he wanted to be like a boy named Peter Pan who rebelled against the world and had his own followers, the Lost Boys. Peter Pan owned a place called Neverland. Woo owned nothing… yet.

  “You’re messing things up, Woo.” I told him, staring up at the sky. “You don’t follow the rules, have bad grades in school, and insist on spending time with those Bad Kidz who are going to be Monsters. I don’t want to you become a Monster.” I didn’t know I was brainwashed by the chocolates at the time.

  “Maybe it’s my destiny to become one,” he said, also staring at the stars.

  “Don’t you ever say that,” I turned to face him and he turned back, looking at me as if crying with those grey eyes. “You promise me!”

  “Promise you what?” he wondered. I could sense he was keeping tons of secrets from me.

  “That you never let me go,” I sighed and held his hand.

  “That,” his eyes smiled to the thought. “I can promise you.”

  “It means you will work hard this year so you become the Seven you always dreamed of,” I assured him and he nodded.

  “I promise,” he shrugged.

  “Promise me what, Woo?” I insisted that he said the words.

  “Never let you go, Tender,” He nodded and stared back at the stars.

  ***

  By the end of this memory, I feel like my life is a pile of confusing moments and actions. I can’t really say who I am because I haven’t had a full chance to become who I really am. If that makes any sense.

  For God’s sake, I am only sixteen, and I had my first kiss in a battlefield. In order to know who I am, or who I want to be, I need time, a precious amount of quality time so I can decide who I want to be and what I am made of. Not because I am pressured by the idea that I am going to die sooner than I think, but because I made up my mind to be who I want to be and no one else. I guess that I, and my friends who died today, were driven by the moment of inertia. It’s a concept I learned in school. If I would it apply to my situation I’d say that it basically means that once someone is pushed to fight for their lives, they might end up doing wrong things like killing other innocent people, still driven by the power of that first strong nudge. And when your life is nudged into the wrong path, all that follows is just a set of random and illogical actions.

  At a young age, we were driven to stay alive no matter what. All our actions in between were only filling the void. They were not really decisions.

  I am saying this because although I am a sixteen year old girl, there is one thing I know for sure right now – and thank God that there is at least one thing that I am sure of. I know that I am not fighting Carnivore to win this game. I am not fighting it to become a Ten, and I am not fighting it for Leo as I have persuaded Xitler. I am here, fighting Carnivore, for Woo.

  It’s hard to believe that after all that I went through, I can’t give up on wanting to find Woo for the silliest reason in the world, to ask him why he broke his promise. But it’s true. Deep in my mind, the longer the game runs, the longer I survive, I still have a chance to find Woo and ask him: Why did you give up on me although you promised me to never let me go?

  Because if Woo had no reason to let me go, who am I here for? Or with? I am not particularly enjoying this world alone.

  If I die, I won’t have a chance to ask him, and that would kill me much slower and painful than Carnivore itself.

  So what was all that about with Leo, insisting on knowing if his kiss was true while he was dying on the cliff? I guess a girl always wants to know why she was kissed, especially if it’s the first. And again, I am not sure that everything between me and Leo was true. I mean if we had met out of the Playa, things might have been really different. In the real world, in my school, boys like Leo don’t even look my way.

  You put a girl in a death game and put a hot guy next to her when both of them are destined to die within hours. How do expect them not to want to fall in love before they die. Whether Leo’s emotions are true or not, I can’t neglect that I wasn’t here for him. Ironically, he was here for me, sent by lunatics who think that I am special.

  Another reason for wanting to find Woo might be that I need to win to go back to my life – or what’s left of it without a family. I need to live normal days and weeks, not pressured by screaming that I am alive in some machine. Maybe then I can know who I love and who I don’t. I mean the way I was attracted to Leo from the beginning was weird. Even though I don’t know many girls who could resist such a hot – and pretty much good guy – like him.

  So here I am, hours away from fighting a one-eyed tiger who might have killed Woo. If you ask me if I know what I am doing, I will say no. If you ask me how I plan to do it, I’ll say I don’t know. If you ask me why I am doing it, I’ll hesitate and think it over, but I’ll tell you it’s because I am planning on one thing, only one thing is on my mind: staying alive.

  Chapter 42

  The Cage

  I am inside a cage, swaying above the Monsterium. It’s pulled with chains, dangling down from a military Zeppelin made of steel with rotors like a helicopter.

  Looking down between the bars of the cage I already feel disoriented by the large amount of white sands. There’s one single tall silver pole in the middle that I could use to shoot the Carnivore from, or take a rest at. The pole has metal, ladder-like rods made of steel, sticking out of it on both sides. But if I climb up there, how long can I keep hanging on? The pole seems to bend slightly at any breeze, which makes it look unsafe. It’s not like it’s the stairway to heaven. It’s just a tall pole in the middle of the sands. It reaches for nothing. The real game is played down on the dunes.

  Where there should be a tier of seats for the audience surrounding the battlefield of the Monsterium, there are contour lines of sand, sloping up as if it’s a mountain made of sand. The slope is steep. I don’t think I can get up there to touch the blue sky. At the tip of that slope, there is a tall barred cage-like wall, encompassing the Monsterium. The tips of the bars are sharp and deadly. Behind the bars, there are soldiers. This reminds me of what Dad used to call maximum prison security for the most dangerous criminals in the country.

  Zeppelins are circling in the sky above the steel bars. Not that they can see anything by being so close since they will watch me through the ClairVo. It’s just that the tickets for these Zeppelins are the most expensive. Some people like what is expensive, however irrelevant. Higher prices mean better products mean better prestige.

  Numbers here, numbers there, ia ia oo.

  I am dressed in red, with thousands of people waving at me from their balconies in the Zeppelins before I disappear into the white underneath. I still don’t understand this audience-contestant relationship.

  Watch me, love me, kiss me, kill me.

  My arm feels much better now with the honey cure from Ariadna. I make sure the ten bottles of honey I have ordered are in my backpack. Yes. I ordered ten honey bottles, the plastic bottle type you can squeeze the honey out from like mustard and ketchup. And yes, when you squeeze, it makes that funny sound: fwwwwweeeeeeerrt.

  I didn’t order the honey because I want to feel sweet before I die — although that would be cool. When that man dressed in black comes to you and asks for that one last wish you want to be granted before you die, you just say make me feel sweet.

  I ordered the honey because I have a plan. Not sure that I can pull it off though.

  Today the world is watching me to see if I can kill Carnivore. Today I am playing to know who I am. Am I a Ten? What is the number of the human spirit?

  I clap my hands and rub them together, igniting a surge of courage in my soul. I jump up and down and stretch my shoulders like boxers do. I have my backpack strapped and my bow gun in my hand.

  I try to think of this like Prom night. Me and you, Carnivore. Prom queen and Prom king. Let’s dance.

  “Seventy million viewers worldwide.” Prophet Xitler announces this game himself. “Watch
ing with one pair of eyes.” So he stuck to his marketing slogan after all. They write everywhere on the iAm screens: Seventy million viewers watching with one girl’s pair of magical eyes.

  Men, women, kids, and everyone worldwide are putting on their ClairVos. I haven’t put on mine yet. I am the queen bee today. I wear it when I want to. The world is going to know what it’s like to be me.

  I’ve never seen seventy million people agree on something, not one religion, not one land, not even the fact they we could live on this planet in peace without killing each other. Look at these monkeys, agreeing on the ClairVo.

  “One girl,” says Xitler. “One girl’s eyes. One girl’s feelings. One girl’s fears. One girl’s coming of age. One girl’s angst,” I hear the audience hail. This is a world ritual, not a game. “One girl’s hopes.” Xitler’s tone of voice changes into a surprisingly happy tone as if he really wants me to kill Carnivore, as if he really wants me to be a Ten. “One girl’s power. One girl’s strength.”

  “Now I am a girl?” I mumble alone in my cage, fisting my hands. “Not a Monster anymore?” I open one of my fists and look at the scissors in my hand. I have a plan.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  “Are you ready?” Xitler asks and the world goes crazy.

  My cage starts lowering. I am ready.

  “Wait,” says Xitler. They stop the cage from lowering further. “Is there something you want to tell the world, Pixie?” He knows I am Decca. He just wants to provoke me.

  I look at the Zeppelins all around me, looking at me, waiting for me to speak. Pleading, so I would wear the ClairVo.

  “My name is not Pixie. My name is Decca,” I say, signaling to the steel Zeppelin above me to roll the cage down. “And I don’t have time for you.” I say that to the whole world, putting on my ClairVo.

  Chapter 43

  The Monsterium

  The cage descends down into the Monsterium. The voice of the audience is deafening after putting on my ClairVo.