by Jeff Sweat
The King interrupts, not by clearing his throat or speaking but by looking at Grease until he stops talking on his own. “So … what is it, Grease?”
“The kid knows how to read,” Grease says.
“Good,” the King says. “Keep him, and kill his friends.”
“No,” Grease says, unfazed. “They know more than that.”
That’s what they should have told, Jemma thinks, not her rushed lie. The truth about why they were roaming the Wilds, why they’d left the Holy Wood. No stories.
“Yeah?” the King says.
“Tell him, prisoner,” Grease says.
Pico climbs off the bike, and Jemma sees that he’s jittery. But Pico knows when to be dramatic.
“Sir, we been learning stuff, and we know how it works. How the End—how the End starts. We know a kid who ain’t Ended.”
Everything about the King changes then, from anger and boredom and bemusement to alertness, as if he’s watching over the wall for an attack. He looks around the crowd, and Jemma follows his eyes—to Jemma, to Lady. To the tall girl rider, to the Round Table, to Tommy. To the little Biter who knows they can read and knows how the End came. The King says, “Let’s take this inside.” And the rider and the goggly kid and all of them follow the King.
They push through the double doors of the castle, whatever that is, and Jemma blinks. She’s expecting something on the other side—a fort, maybe, or a building like the Zervatory. But it’s just a passageway with a room or two on each side, and then more sidewalk. It’s fake, she thinks. As far as she can tell, the castle has never guarded a thing. Why would they have built it, if not for war?
On the other side she sees girls. There was that rider outside, Lady’s rider, but none of the Muscle were girls. Inside, there are dozens: cooking, cleaning, holding babies to their boobs. One of them catches Jemma’s eye, short hair and baby on her chest, and glares. Jemma’s glad to see girls, then wonders: Why aren’t they outside?
A few more steps and they’re standing in the middle of giant teacups, faded purples and pinks. The Kingdom uses them for tables, but she sees pictures of kids in them. What is this place?
At the base of the little mountain, a pair of sturdy cows is tied to a wheel set horizontally in the ground. She thinks of the water pump for the Great Field in the Holy Wood, drawn by donkeys, and realizes almost immediately that is sort of the same thing. The wheel turns other wheels, smaller and smaller, until they turn a chain in a train track.
In those tracks are little train cars. They point up the hill. They look more skyplane than train, created for speed: low, three seats stacked one behind the other, painted white with what must have been a red stripe.
“They used to be run by Lectrics. Or fire juice. I don’t know,” Grease says. “So I set them up with the only thing we still got: hooves.”
They climb into the cars, and a cow driver clicks his tongue at the cows. The wheel slowly turns, and the train cars begin to climb straight up the mountain. Gears clank below them, and the cars jerk toward the top. She’s sure the track will give way at every click of the gears, and they’ll plummet back to the ground.
“We’re on a mountain,” Lady whispers, and Grease hears her.
“It’s called the Horn,” Grease says.
“Why?”
Grease shrugs. “Maybe it’s shaped like one? I don’t know—it’s always been called that.”
The cavern opens up for a moment to their left. Was that … some kind of snowy monster? It looks like a human but isn’t. Still they climb.
“These things go down?” Pico says.
“Oh yeah. The rollertrain? Down is what they do best.”
The cars reach the top and roll left around a gentle curve on the section of track closest to the peak. A gate swings across the track and holds them in place; the cars seem to have no brakes. They get out onto the tracks. The track is no higher than the Lectric tower Jemma climbed, but it feels taller. Jemma can see south and west. Is San Diego that way?
Pico hasn’t talked much since he got off the bike, and his face has a reverent quality. As if he’s finally seeing the things he knew must be true but had never seen.
“It’s just—full of wonders, isn’t it? And you brought it back to life?” Pico says to Grease, who seems to flush.
“There’s nothing like the Kingdom, in this life or our last one,” Tashia says.
“What is it, though?” Pico says.
“It’s more fun if you figure it out yourself,” Tashia says.
“More fun for us, anyway,” Grease says.
“If we live,” Jemma says.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE BEGINNING
The snow is fake. It’s paint on rock. Lady wanted it to be real. The moment she saw that snow, she thought of the ice and the ice cream and everything the Parents had taken away forever, and thought that it might be coming back. But when she climbs out of the rollertrain at the top of the track, she can feel the painted snow under the fingers.
Othello nods toward the tunnel where the track goes into the Horn again. There’s a door built into the wall of the tunnel, meant to look like rock. Lady can barely see the seam. They climb a short, winding flight of stairs into a cavern of a room. She sees the girders of the Horn, a web of wood and steel that supports a concrete skin. Holes are punched throughout the walls, and boys with telescopes are watching through them.
A large round table—Ah, she thinks, now I get it—fills the center of the room, and above it, a ball hoop. She’s seen them attached to houses and schools, but not in a place like this. Why would you build a hoop in a mountain?
A better question: Why would you build a mountain?
A wooden staircase climbs even farther up, and they climb it now. The last section is a ladder. They climb up it and push outside through a door onto a platform only six feet by six feet wide, jutting out from the very tip of the Horn, exposed to the air. There wasn’t a railing around the platform originally, but someone has built a sturdy one of steel. On it rests the longest rifle Lady has ever seen, with a telescope.
Lady drifts closer to the edge, and a moment of vertigo makes her flail. She brushes the gun’s tripod, and—
A hand slaps her cheek so hard that she reels backward into the hatch and just catches herself on the rail. “Stay away from the gun,” Othello says.
“I wasn’t touching your gun, puto,” Lady says.
“I don’t know what that word means,” he says.
“I bet you can figure it out. Puto.”
Othello lunges at her, but the King is there. He doesn’t touch Othello; he doesn’t have to. He just holds his hand in front of Othello, who backs down as if he’s been struck.
Lady watches the King and his Round Table. The King lives in his own skin, Othello is stretching his, but the others seem to quiver and burst with energy, ready to explode at any moment. In the Holy Wood, boys like these would have been Exiled long ago, too full of rage to be safe in the tribe even as a Muscle. But these have been pulled into the King’s inner circle.
She’s aware that she’s watching a completely different kind of tribe, and it’s one that makes her guard her every motion. This tribe is run by boys.
“This your village?” Jemma says, pointing outward.
“No, not my village,” the King says. “My Kingdom.”
“That don’t mean nothing to us,” Lady says, because she really doesn’t know what it means and because she wants to take the wind out of the King and his gasbags.
“There’s nothing like it in this life or our last one,” he says, echoing Tashia’s words. “Imagine your village, and then think of something so big and powerful that it could fit a dozen of them,” the King says.
Your head, she almost says, but remembers they only recently almost died here.
She can see all of the Kingdom from there. All the world, it feels like. She tries to take it in but can’t. Her head can’t put it into the right buckets. The Kingdom is di
vided up like spokes in a wheel, centering on the castle. Each section of the Kingdom seems to have a different life. The quiet street they walked through, the castle, and the Horn. To her left is a place seemingly made of skyplanes, white towers, and smooth metal. To her right is desert and painted rock, followed by a small lake. Next to that is a jungle.
On the perimeter of the Kingdom is a thick berm, an earthen bank maybe fifteen to twenty feet high. It’s so regular that she thinks it must have been built by the Parents, but on top of that is a patchwork of fences and walls—steel plates salvaged from streets and sheds, sharpened wooden poles, barbed wire—that must have been built by the Children over generations. Huge buildings make up the rest of the defense, their blank walls making it impossible for invaders to climb or get through. They have to feel so safe here.
The buildings all remain, but the rest of the Kingdom has been suited to the Children’s needs. The streets are turned to the green of vegetables and fruits. A couple dozen cows are penned next to the soaring white towers. Kids fish in the lakes. A little girl milks a cow tied to a rocket, and a boy is carrying a heavy bucket of milk toward the castle.
“You’ve seen what we have,” the King says, motioning back down the ladder. “Now let’s see what you have.”
* * *
“What’s with the cows?” Pico says. They’re standing before the Round Table back inside the Horn, where the King and his Knights sit in rolling chairs. Jemma is still stupefied by the sight of the Kingdom and isn’t sure where Pico found a voice to speak.
The King doesn’t change his expression, just swivels his chair and settles in. “The story of the cows,” he says, “is for people who are going to live.”
“Tell us that story, then,” Pico says.
“Tell me your story first, and we’ll see,” the King says.
“My name is Pico, and I’m from the Malibu tribe of the Angelenos,” Pico says. “I never met my Mama, and my Dad was the Dad of half the village.”
“Start later in your story,” the King says, amused. “A lot later.”
Pico tells them the story of Leong, hit in the head and still living.
“How?” Grease says. “How would that stop us from dying?”
“I think…” Pico looks around the room, gauging how much truth he has to tell to leave the room alive.
“Pico.” Jemma puts a hand on his arm and nods. “Tell him everything.” They don’t live if he holds anything back.
“Send the Palo away, though,” Pico says. Even though he uses the wrong name, the King nods, and a Knight leads Tommy back out of the room.
When the room is clear of the Biter, Pico says, “I think the End hits the brain.”
“Brain?” Grease says.
“The thing in your head that does the thinks. The End hits your brain when you get old. But Leong will always be eight in his head.”
“How do you know this?” the King says.
“He read it,” Grease says.
“Something the Parents left behind, some papers. They thought the End attacked the brain. And—” Then Pico pauses.
“And they got killed before they could fix it,” Jemma says.
Lady continues the story, and she seems to believe what she’s saying. “And we, the three of us, we wanna figure out what they couldn’t figure out. We wanna know why we End. And we wanna know how to—how not to End.”
The King doesn’t say anything, just watches her until she stops, then starts.
“Why do you keep calling it the End?” the King says.
“It’s two kind of Ends,” Pico says. “It’s when the Parents all died. And it’s the end of our lives.”
“We don’t call it the End,” he says. “We call it the Beginning.”
“That’s … really weird,” Lady says.
The King swivels back and forth in his chair, his toes pushing lightly off the floor to set the chair in motion. “It depends on how you view the changes. What do your stories tell you about yourselves before the Beginning—before all of this?”
“Not much,” Lady says, remembering the wall in the Casa de las Casas.
“We remember all our stories,” the King says. “We were many peoples before we became the Kingdom, just like you—pinks, browns, Mexcans, Veets, island people. But we all were, even before the Beginning—we were warriors. We were kids, and we were warriors. We were a gang.”
“A what?” Lady says.
“Lots of gangs, I guess. A group of kids,” the King says. “We were the ones shut out, the ones they made poor. We were beaten and jailed and murdered for walking down the wrong street. So we fought back, we killed, we took. We stuck together because the Grown-Ups were gone or against us; we fought because the whole word stunk and we had nothing to lose. Like—”
“Like the Last Lifers,” Jemma says. That’s what it must have been to be in a gang. To be freed of consequence. To let go of the world. Sometimes, like right now, she can see the appeal.
The King just nods and keeps talking. “We fought the laws, we fought each other, we fought the Grown-Ups who still tried to control us. Until they all died. The world went bad, and we were the only ones who knew how to live in it,” he says. “The gangs were mostly kids already, we were organized, and the young ones just stepped up and took over.”
“Took over the gangs?” Jemma says.
“Took over the world. We started with the police places because that’s where the guns were. Then things were fine enough, but we were exactly the way we were before, only no one to fight but other kids.”
“Just like now,” Jemma says.
“No, not like now,” the King says. He points to the inside of the Horn. “This didn’t come from a gang. No—one day one of us realized we’d been fighting the world, and now we owned the world. We were fighting the Grown-Ups, but we were the Grown-Ups now. Time to become the Grown-Ups.”
“The Philosopher King,” Grease says.
“Fill a what?” Lady says. “Pico, what’s that?”
“I have no idea,” Pico says. That must hurt.
“It’s a thinker,” Grease says. “Not just about eating or staying alive, but how we live. The Philosopher read a lot when the Kingdom used to be able to read. He thought we should be more. When he took over, we changed how we lived.”
“He loved a story, about a king and a knight and a Round Table,” the King says. “We found this place, and it was already a legendary Kingdom. It even had our castle. We took it over and made it our home. The Philosopher King said you could be strong and save the world. So he started the Round Table. All us colors used to fight each other, but we took the best warriors of each gang and made them into the Round Table.”
Jemma thinks about this—about erasing the fights between peoples, and about creating a new one. How the Mamas of the Holy Wood must have done the same thing, but with a different Story.
“He start the cowboys, too?” Jemma says.
The King nods. “Ell Aye was city, but the Philosopher King’s peoples were from the land. They had been farmers, far away. When they came to Ell Aye, they brought the land with them, and some of it survived the city. Some of the gangs learned to ride horses, they were taught about goats and cows.”
“Cows ain’t from Ell Aye,” Pico says.
“The Philosopher found them at a place that taught kids about farming,” the King says. “There were only a few of them, maybe twenty, and they were starving. You can go to the telescopes if you want to look how many of them there are now.”
She doesn’t have to. There are dozens of cows inside the walls of the Kingdom, hundreds more in the lot outside the gate. Enough to feed the Holy Wood for a year. Enough to feed the Angelenos for a year. They had built something here.
That was the King’s point.
“So now you know why we don’t need your help,” the King says. “The little one can become part of us because Grease says he knows things we can use, and anything Grease doesn’t know is worth letting you live.”
Pico doesn’t let his relief show if he feels it at all; he just watches Jemma and Lady until they know what their fate is.
“The Biter will die when we’ve learned what he has to tell us. But you girls—” The King shakes his head. “I have no use for more girls.”
It takes Jemma a full second to understand what the King means. And she sees Tashia’s outrage before it closes up again.
“But I’ll give you a chance. At the feast of the new moon in three weeks, in twenty-two days, you can enter the Kingdom the way all our people do—by hand combat inside the Night Mountain. If you win, you become a part of the Kingdom. If you lose—well, then you die as our enemies.”
“But we can help you beat the End!” Jemma says.
“There’s that word again,” the King says. “Look around you, Holy Wood. None of this would have been possible without the Beginning. We went from gangs to the greatest people in the world. We became who we were supposed to be. So … why would we want the Beginning to end?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE FAKE PLACE
No one will talk to them after the King’s sentence; no one will even tell them more about what the King’s sentence means. Jemma looks for the rider Tashia, but she has disappeared. So instead they wander around the Kingdom, trying to make sense of the place. The people of the Kingdom look curiously at them but then seem to float away as they draw closer.
The first place they look for is the Night Mountain. It’s the arena where all the fights are held. It doesn’t look like a building. It doesn’t even look much like a mountain. More like a temple, maybe—a round white shape like a bowl turned upside down, with a dozen great ribs climbing straight to the summit to a dozen spires.
They creep in through a long tunnel, and Jemma understands why they call it Night Mountain. There are no windows. What they can see from the light of the outside is a sand floor over concrete. There are steel girders everywhere, as if the side of a skyscraper were blasted off and the skeleton still remained.
Running through them is the same kind of rollertrain that they rode into the Horn—but this one doubles back and forth on itself, stacks on layer after layer, until the entire building is filled with track. She sees a rocketplane-looking car that must have tumbled off the track years ago, still smashed on its side against the floor, as if someone were holding it down until it said mercy. Loose steel bars hang off the scaffolds and lie on the ground. So many places to hide, so many potential weapons.