Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Tommy’s eyes widen. Tashia doesn’t wait for their questions. “The Mono,” Tashia says. “It sat there my whole life, but Grease got it moving. It carries food and stuff between the Kingdom and our sleeping place.”

  To their right is a huge hotel. When their beds wore out, Parents would buy new ones in these buildings, hundreds of people at a time, and stay there until their beds were fixed again. The Children of the Kingdom have taken it over; there are clothes and bedding drying out the windows and the shouts of Toddlers from the courtyard below. An entire village or three could fit in it. It looks as if they do.

  Another sweep to the left, toward the mountain. They’re facing a wall maybe ten feet high, stretching to the right and left as far as she can see. The original wall was a spiked fence, but now it’s backed with paving stones and concrete chunks. The gate is another kind of train, with rubber tires, covered with heavy metal plates in a sloppy patchwork. The closer she looks, though, she can tell that the patchwork works—there isn’t more than a finger’s gap between the plates. She sees bullet holes and spear scratches in the steel.

  “Bring the cows in,” Tashia says to three of her riders. “Tell them we’re six short, one of them killed by these fools. We’ll go look for the rest tomorrow when our herd gets counted.” And the riders take the cows through the gates behind them, into a parking lot ripped up and replaced by pasture. A broken scaffold of steel—some kind of train track that went in a loop?—rises above the pastures, where she can see hundreds of cows.

  Tashia and the rest of her riders stop at the gate. Rifle barrels poke through slits in the gate. On three of the poles on the fence behind are heads with white skin and blond hair shaved on one side. She spares a look at Tommy to see if he reacts to it—and he doesn’t—but mostly she thinks about herself and Jemma. A person who will put a head on a pole probably doesn’t care what color it is.

  The barrels swivel to point at them. If she thought she lost hope when she felt the ropes tighten, she knows she’s really losing it now. She instinctively jerks her hand to touch the pin in her hair, but they’re tied.

  “Cowboys at the gate!” Tashia calls, never turning her head to look at the guns. She carries herself with a surety that Lady can’t imagine. “Cowboys at the gate, with prisoners for the King.”

  “Name yourself, cowboy,” a voice booms from behind the gate.

  “It’s Tashia, jackass. Are we going to do this every time I come to the gate? Because if we are, I can make sure you’re not getting any more meat.”

  “So hard to get good help,” Lady says.

  “Sorry, Tashia.” The voice is smaller this time. “Who are your prisoners?”

  “Two cow thieves. And a Biter.”

  “Good. I’ll take them to the King.”

  “No, I’ll take them to the King,” Tashia says. “There’s no way you’re getting credit for this.”

  “Okay.” There’s silence behind the gate, and no movement.

  “You want your dinner?” Tashia asks. “Open the damn gate!”

  There is the sound of latches being thrown, the creaking of wheels, and the gate slides slowly to the right. When the opening is five feet wide, Tashia rides through and the other riders follow her. Lady can’t quite make them all out, but the rider pulling the cow is right behind her, followed by Jemma’s rider and Tommy’s. Jemma’s eyes are open. That’s one less thing to worry about.

  As they trot past the gate, Lady sees how the gate works. Four sturdy kids push the train from a waist-high bar attached to the train at each end. Gunners sit inside the train itself, protected from incoming fire by the narrow slit and thick iron plating bolted to the fence. Who taught them how to make these things?

  In front of them is a stately building of red brick. People and gun barrels are silhouetted on the roof line. She takes a closer look at the gunners on the gate, the sentries on the buildings. These people are at war against the Biters. The only question is, have they always been, or is this new?

  The riders duck to the right under a small overpass—it, too, ready to be closed off with a gate if someone breaches the first wall—and then they’re in a plaza in front of a small city street. The top floors of the buildings get shorter as they go, as if someone wanted the street to seem longer. She hears babies crying above one of them.

  At the end of the street is … a castle.

  Pico showed her a picture of a castle when he was trying to explain the Kingdom, but even he didn’t know what it was. It was just a Long Gone story, old even in the Parents’ time. The building has heavy stones, a tall spiked roof. It doesn’t belong in Ell Aye.

  Tashia laughs when she sees her expression. “What, you think we had a Kingdom and no castle?”

  The plaza and the street have been torn up, the ground turned into soil. Horses and cows graze nearby. At the center of the plaza is a patch of peas, protected by an ornate steel fence, and in the center of that is a statue of a man holding the hand of a child-size mouse. She’s seen that mouse before, in the houses where she’s Gathered, but she doesn’t know what it means.

  Except for the hooves and the strange buildings, the compound feels a lot like an Angeleno camp. Little ones race past on tricycles. Middles tend the crops. Tweens sneak away to kiss behind a sign. Everyone stops what they’re doing to stare at Tashia and her strange cargo. Lady feels a pang of homesickness. So good to see so much life.

  “You don’t get a lot of visitors, huh?” Lady says.

  “We usually shoot them before they get to the front gate.”

  They clatter to the front of the castle, across a bridge flanked by two ponds. The ponds are full of fish. Girls—not boys—are dipping in with nets to catch them. Two heavy doors, studded metal, block their way.

  “Cowboys at the gate!” Tashia says again. “Prisoners for the King!”

  Lady hears a shout back, but the doors don’t open. They wait for what seems like an hour. Tashia shifts from side to side next to her.

  Then hands are on her, loosening her legs but not her arms. They untie her from the saddle and yank her to the ground. She’s standing almost without noticing it, and feels needles racing into her legs.

  Lady is stamping the life into her legs when she sees Jemma slide down the side of the horse as if she were poured, all limp and liquid. She hits the ground hard.

  Lady bolts toward Jemma before she has a chance to think it through—what would she do without hands, anyway?—and is stopped by a gun butt to her shoulder. She drops to the ground, two feet from Jemma. Jemma stirs, lifts her head, and Lady starts to lift her own.

  It’s Tashia who crouches between them. “You have to be more careful,” she says. “People are gonna think you’re trying to escape.”

  Tashia pulls them both up. Jemma wobbles, but this time she’s able to stand. She looks around her uncertainly but catches Lady’s eye. How’d we get here? her eyes ask.

  “The Kingdom,” Lady says, quiet.

  “You’re about to meet the Round Table,” Tashia says. “Time to stand up real straight.”

  Suddenly the front doors bang open, pushed by a clot of kids carrying swords. They look similar to the Holy Wood Muscle, maybe a little taller and broader. They wear their hair short, shaved along both sides.

  A tower of a kid leads the way, six feet tall with a scar from left eye to scalp. Lady thinks he’s the leader, but he’s only the tip of the spear. The rest of the boys walk close together, guarding something in the middle, but she can’t see what. Or who.

  When they reach the captives, the spear formation opens and a boy steps forward. He’s smaller than the boys in front, but his knuckles are split with the scars of many fights. His cheekbones are sharp, his eyes are sharp, and everything seems to flash when he speaks.

  “Tashia,” he says, his voice higher than Lady expected, but with a scratch in it, “who are these trespassers? Why are they bothering the King?”

  “They killed a cow in the King’s forest,” Tashia says. Lady notices
how carefully Tashia is keeping her tone free of accusation, even as the words accuse. She also sees a flash of anger that seems to be directed at the King.

  “We didn’t know it was your cow,” Lady says. “We didn’t know it was a cow.”

  The tall kid puts his sword to her chest, faster than someone that big should move. His voice is deeper than she’s ever heard. Maybe he’s about to End. “You don’t talk to the King. Not until he talks to you first.”

  “I want to hear this,” the King says. He’s angry already, she can tell, but curious.

  “You gotta name?” Lady says. “Or we just call you King?”

  The King’s boys—the Round Table, she guesses—glower at that, but if anything the King’s face relaxes. “I see the High Tongue has escaped your people,” he says. “But in our nation, the King forgets his name. He is only the King.”

  “Is it Sam?” Lady says. “Just feeling lucky.”

  The King nods to the tall one. “Othello, if you would?”

  “Where are you from, and why are you here?” Othello draws a sword.

  “Easy, Gigante,” Lady says. “No pointy things. I’m Lady, from the Holy Wood, from the Angelenos.”

  “We don’t know the Angelenos,” the King says.

  “From the hills below the mountains, from the land beyond the Towers,” Jemma says. “I’m Jemma.”

  “I’ve seen the Towers,” the King says.

  “Why are you here?” Othello says.

  “We just wanderers from the Holy Wood, looking for a way south,” Lady says.

  “Wanderers. You didn’t think I’d notice that you brought a Biter with you like a pet?”

  “See, they use ‘Biter,’ too,” Lady says in an undertone to Jemma. Lady looks back at Tommy, quiet and pathetic next to Tashia. He’s as threatening as a mushroom. “The Biter is a prisoner.”

  “You’re at war with the cannibals?” the King says.

  “We heard they was building in the south, so sent a raiding party to look for them,” Jemma says, mirroring his formal speech. “We captured this one. We saw more of them, lots more, heading south with an army of Last Lifers. We heard that the Kingdom was the Palos’—the Biters’—greatest enemy, so we wanted to bring this prisoner to you and warn you, with the hopes that we could join forces to fight the Biters together.”

  “We have nothing to fear from the Last Lifers,” the King says.

  “Unless they’re getting guns from the Biters,” Lady says.

  “You were coming to warn us,” the King says, “and yet you were found on the eastern fringes of our territory, killing our cows like thieves.”

  “We didn’t know where you were—and we didn’t know you had cows,” Jemma says.

  “You knew we hated the cannibals, yet you didn’t know about the herd?”

  “No, I—”

  “Let’s assume you’re telling the truth. You sent an armed party of warriors into the Kingdom. You say it was to find the Biters. I say that a party of warriors from the lands of the north is a threat to my entire Kingdom.”

  “That ain’t true,” Lady says. “We didn’t know—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the King says. “Here’s what I know: You killed a cow. You harbored a Biter. Either of those things mean I can kill you. I’ve had a pretty long day. So…”

  The King turns to Othello, with his sword. “If you would, Othello.”

  He turns and walks back toward the castle, stopping at the door to watch. Othello leads them to a Long Gone slatted bench. Blood stains the concrete below the bench. Without ceremony, he forces all three of them neck-first to the bench. Lady wonders for a moment if he could cut all three heads off with a single stroke.

  “Sir,” Tashia says, “we could learn from them for the war. They have to know things. It’s a shame to waste them without asking.”

  “Kill them,” the King says, and walks back toward the castle. The Round Table stays, watching Othello.

  That’s when Lady hears the noise.

  She’s never imagined anything like it. The Children’s world is almost completely silent, except for birds and laughter. This tears that world open. Bigger than thunder, bigger than waves, bigger than gunfire. A steady roar that gets louder and louder, as if it’s tracking them. She holds her ears. She thinks if it gets any louder, she might go insane.

  None of the Round Table notices it, though. Tashia just looks annoyed.

  But most important, the King stops at the doors and turns around. “Hold up, Othello,” he says. “Let’s see what Grease wants.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE BOY AND THE MOCYCLE

  Pico has nothing left in his legs, not even to pedal Lady’s bicycle. All he can do is listen to the cows fade into the distance. So he thinks about where they could have gone.

  He finds the trail of the herd easily enough. He smells it first. Then, big piles of poop in the middle of the street, tracks in the dirt, dust still lingering in the air where the cows have kicked it up.

  They can’t be going that far away. The Kingdom must not be able to keep the cows in their village because they would eat all the grass. So they let them loose in the surrounding streets and parks, maybe under the watchful eyes of a few riders.

  The riders would have wanted to keep the cows closer to home. If they were too far away, they couldn’t watch the cows. Even with their horses, they would have to travel too far to get to them.

  The map. Tommy guided them around the northern border of the Kingdom in a sort of circle. Their village has to be somewhere in that circle. I should have asked Tommy where it was, he thinks. I shouldn’t have let my anger get in the way of my curiosity.

  Pico sits down in the dirt next to the street and digs out his map. He finds the center of the circle quickly enough, but their base can’t be there. Too many streets, too many buildings. Cows need a lot of grass and a lot of room. He needs to find the emptiest spot on the map. That’s where they’d put the cows.

  A minute or two of studying, and he finds a possibility—the biggest hole on the map, marked by the word “Kingdom.” Could it be that easy?

  If he’s right, the base where the riders came from is about ten miles away. Time for him to catch them, even going as slow as he is. Time to think of something to save them before they get killed.

  If only I could move my legs. He lays down in the dirt, with his head in the shade. And then he’s asleep, without meaning to fall asleep.

  He’s at the lake where he fished with Jemma and sees the biggest koi he’s ever seen, pale gold with lazy whiskers. It looks up at him with liquid eyes and flicks toward the surface. As it does, it opens its mouth, wider and wider and closer and closer until it’s the biggest fish he’s seen, the biggest anything. It closes its mouth, and when it opens it again a sound comes out. It’s louder than anything, than the cows, than the monsoons, than the wildfires. It splits open his head.

  It splits open his head, and when it does Pico opens his eyes and there’s a boy riding up the street toward him. He’s on a bicycle—but not a bicycle. A mocycle. Its wheels are fatter, it’s thicker and heavier. Smoke belches from two long pipes. There’s an engine shaking the frame and it’s shouting out thunder.

  Pico sits up while the boy stops his cycle. The boy is tall and gawky, with short hair shaved on the sides. “That’s an internal combustion engine,” Pico says.

  The mocyclist looks surprised, but it’s hard to tell because his eyes are hidden behind two windows of glass attached to his face. The frames are something that the Parents would have worn so they could see better, but the glass looks rough, as if the rider had shaped it himself.

  “It might be,” the mocyclist says.

  “It is,” Pico says. “How’d you get it going?”

  “It might be,” the mocyclist says. “How did you know what it was?”

  “I can show you,” Pico says. “If you can take me to your camp.”

  “I don’t let anyone ride my bike,” the mocyclist says.


  “I can show you a lot more than that, even,” Pico says. The truth. The only hope the three of them have now is telling the truth. “Like why you gonna—wait, how old’re you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Like why you gonna die in two years.”

  “If you can show me that, I can give you a ride,” the mocyclist says.

  * * *

  There’s no fighting their way out, Jemma can tell from the moment she wakes up. This is a tribe built by war. And so the only way out is by talking to a group of kids who don’t feel like talking. That’s why they’re kneeling at the bench.

  Jemma has failed. She’s sorry that she led her friend to this bench. But she stops being afraid. When you live that close to death your whole life, it’s almost an old friend. She thinks about Apple. She thinks about her Mama, the tall one. She thinks maybe she would like it better with them.

  The sword is about to drop when the sound splits open the sky.

  Pico could probably explain it—especially since he’s on the back of the thunder bike as it roars into camp. A goggly-eyed tall kid is on the front, and Pico has his arms wrapped around him. Wrapped is not the right word, though. His arms are so tight the other kid probably can’t breathe.

  The goggly kid skids in front of the castle, the way the little ones did in Daycare when they were showing off on their bikes.

  “Grease,” the King says. “You picking up prisoners now?”

  “Yeah,” Grease says, “but one thing, sir. I’d humbly request you don’t kill him.”

  “Hmm,” the King says.

  “Or my friends,” Pico says.

  “Or his friends.”

  “Grease!” Othello says, and Jemma gets a long history of exactly this kind of conversation by the way he grinds his teeth at Grease. “You can’t keep stopping the King’s executions.”

  “If you kill them first, then I can’t hear what they have to say. Listen, then kill.”