by Jeff Sweat
“They fight here? In the dark?” Pico says. “That’s…”
Impossible. It will be impossible, unless they can train here and memorize the terrain.
“You can’t be here,” a voice says behind them. It’s one of the Round Table, but they never heard his name. “This is for fighters only.”
“We wasn’t fighters until your King made us fighters,” Lady says. “You was there.”
“You’re only a fighter when you become one of the Kingdom.”
“How we sposed to join the Kingdom if we can’t win the fight cuz we couldn’t fight at the place where we’re sposed to have the fight?” Lady says. But they leave.
“Tomorrowland,” Pico reads from a sign on the plaza outside. They silently note the strangeness around the Night Mountain: sleek lines, the Mono, rocketplanes, a pile of rusting mini cars, one of which Jemma has seen towed behind a horse. “This feels wrong,” he says. “These kinds of things didn’t really exist in the Parents’ world. It’s like they wanted to show what their future was gonna be. But they never got it.” Instead, they got this—their Mono being pulled by cows.
The Angelenos push westward, past the castle. Painted red rock spires push up out of the ground, like a desert set in the middle of a city. The Children have colonized the caves going through the rock, and laundry hangs between the rock towers. Jemma remembers Apple’s stories—of red deserts and trains that go in loopdy-loops. Was this that place? He had talked as if everything was possible, and she hadn’t believed him. But here, it was.
“They really like trains,” Lady says. “And none of the trains go nowhere.”
They move toward the patch of jungle that they saw from the platform, drawn like any Ell Aye kid to green land, because it means water and life. They soon find themselves in the middle of it. The trees there seem wrong, too—too green, too straight. Their leaves are dusty, but underneath there’s still a luster that Jemma can’t believe.
“These trees…,” Pico says. He’s hobbling but seems to be getting better. He stares at the jungle for a moment, then plucks a leaf. It resists, but he yanks it free, sniffs it—and then bites it.
“Plastic?” he says. “They grew plastic?”
“It’s all fake, dummy,” Lady says.
“That … makes no sense,” Pico says.
But it’s true. Someone built this whole world, to look like other worlds outside the Kingdom. Once Jemma knows that, she looks at the scene with a fresh eye. Bright flashes of birds, frozen on branches. The heads of huge lizard creatures, sticking out of what was once a Long Gone river and resting on iron struts. Buildings of every style. “This place looked Long Gone even before the End,” Jemma says.
One of the buildings next to the jungle is cracked open like a shell by time or earthquake. Jemma strains to see through the gloom and—there’s someone in there. A man, bearded, wearing a strange hat and carrying a sword. Jemma freezes the others.
Then Jemma realizes: He’s a man. Despite everything else she’s seen, she doesn’t believe those still exist. Something about this one, about how still he is, makes her step closer.
“Careful,” Lady says, but Jemma shrugs and looks. The beard is faded, chewed by mice. The clothes are falling off. The sword is plastic, and so is the man.
Pico runs his fingers across the plastic skin, finding a rip in the neck. He tears at it, to expose gears underneath. “Look at this,” he says. “They made people out of machines.”
“What?”
“They made machines that looked like people, anyway. I don’t know why.”
“Servants, maybe?” Lady says.
“Maybe,” Pico says. “They needed cars to drive em places. Maybe they needed machines to do everything else.”
The more Jemma looks, the more she can see the gears, the plastic, the concrete underlying this place. She just can’t see the why.
Lady is the one who figures it out. “It’s all for kids. It’s a Fake Place,” she says.
“Why do you say that?” Pico says.
“Those teacups that people rode is what made me think it. It’s the way they made the baby rooms in the Parents’ houses. Lots of colors, lots of toys. Only these’re bigger.”
“A lot bigger,” Jemma says. She shakes her head, trying to make sense of it. “They built this whole place to play?” The Children played, of course, but even their play was serious business, a way of learning to hunt and fight and Gather. If you didn’t play right, you wouldn’t live.
She marvels at the imagination and the skill that made fake castles and rocks and machine men, and thinks, What a waste of skill.
And then: If life would let me, I’d be glad to waste it, too.
* * *
The wonder of the Kingdom wears off soon for Lady, who says, “We still gonna die here.”
“Not necessarily,” Pico says.
“Just cuz you ain’t gonna die don’t mean you gotta get all snotty about it,” Lady says.
“No, we just gotta figure out how to make ourselves so useful they don’t want to kill us,” Pico says. “And if that doesn’t work, you guys gotta learn how to win.”
“Oh, that’s all,” Lady says.
“What? We got three weeks to do it.”
“Okay,” Lady says. Pico doesn’t complain about things, he fixes them, and he’s right about fixing this. “You work on that Grease kid. He makes everything go here. Get him on your side. But us—we gotta make other friends so we can be useful, too.”
Jemma has been thoughtful since they left the center of the Horn, but she slowly locks on to their conversation. “The cowboy. She liked you. Maybe she could tell you what we’re gonna be fighting. And more about the Night Mountain.”
“I got her, Pico’s got Grease,” Lady says. “What about you?”
“I can talk to the King,” Jemma says, “if they let me. Also, I think I gotta find that Biter.”
“Why him?”
“He’s been building guns to fight em; he should know em. Maybe we can learn something before they kill em.”
They circle back toward the stables, where they’ve been told to sleep, past a lake with a rotting wooden ship sunk in the middle. Its masts must have been chopped down for wood. Lady isn’t sure why they didn’t just burn the rest.
The cowboy Tashia could be at the stables. If she is, Lady could talk to her. But the image of Tashia on a horse brings a memory floating back to her from their capture. “Jemma? What did you mean in the park?”
“What?” Jemma says, blank. Maybe she really doesn’t remember, since she got hit on the head.
“You … saw the cowboy. Whaddya mean, you saw her?”
She can see two ideas at war on Jemma’s face—fear of saying whatever gets said next, and relief at being able to say it. It takes a long time for her to make up her mind. “I … see things. Before they happen.”
“Like what?”
Jemma flushes. “The Ice Cream Man. The dogs that attacked us. Pico’s case. Lots of things.” And she describes the haze, how she’s just starting to understand how it tells her things, how it connects her with others. How sometimes it misses things, but mostly lets her see what will come.
For a moment Lady’s in awe. Her friend speaks to the gods. And then—it’s just one more thing Jemma hasn’t told her. “Puta! When was you—”
Jemma puts a hand on her shoulder. “I ain’t known that long. At first I didn’t know what I was seeing, and then Apple helped me figure I was seeing true.” Her face brightens. “When I was knocked out, I saw the ones the Ice Cream Men called the Old Guys. The ones who was supposed to survive the End.” And she tells them what she saw.
“Like, real old people just … alive?” Pico says, skeptical.
“If I saw the cowboy and she was real, if I saw the dogs and they was real, couldn’t the Old Guys be real, too?”
“They might,” Lady says. “But we gotta get outta here to know.”
“You shoulda told us,” Pico says. “We coulda u
sed that.”
“I was afraid people would think I was a witch.”
“We ain’t people. We your friends,” Lady says.
“And you ain’t the only one been called a bruja,” Pico says. “They kicked me out of the Malibu for it. We woulda understood.”
“We all gonna die here anyway,” Lady says. “Seems like a real good time to have our own witch.”
* * *
Jemma finds the Biter in a yellow metal boat in an empty pond, with kids of the Kingdom jeering at him. Other boats surround him. This is their prison. In the boats on each side of Tommy are two other Biters captured in some other skirmish. These two are true warriors, with marks on their wrists for the people they’ve killed. The Kingdom isn’t letting Tommy in with them so that he can’t learn anything from them, she thinks.
All he would learn from them is how soon he can die. The metal boxes bake them during the day, freeze them at night. They seem to have sweated their muscles away.
The Kingdom kids drift away from her as they did before, as if they’re not quite sure if she’s a ghost. There’s a metal hatch at the top that seals Tommy in, but she can talk to him through a broken round window. He’s huddled at the corner to escape the sun but scoots forward when he sees her.
“They let you go?” Tommy says.
“No. We gotta fight our way into the Kingdom.”
“Figures,” Tommy says. “That’s all they care about.”
“You’re alive,” she says. “That’s a surprise.”
“Until the King finds what he wants to know.” He knows that’s the only reason he and the other Biters aren’t impaled on the gates.
“I could tell him you fix guns. He might think that’s good to know.”
“And?”
“You gotta help me figure out how to beat them.”
“Easy. Be stronger.”
“Whatever.” She turns to leave, if he’s not going to get serious.
“No,” he says. “They only care about strength. You gotta be stronger, or find some way to use it.”
“That the best you got?”
“I just got here, too.”
“Stay cool, Biter,” she says, and turns away.
Tommy calls after her. “You’re looking for the End,” he says, so low the other Biters couldn’t hear him even if they were well enough to listen.
Jemma doesn’t answer but looks back.
“If you are, I’d like to help you,” he says, even quieter.
She shakes her head, slowly, never breaking contact with his eyes.
“Who else here cares?” he says. His words go with her when she goes. Even if Tommy’s serious, if he knows something about the End, he can’t be trusted. He’s a cannibal. His help is poisoned.
Pico won’t like her talking to the Biter. But she thinks of Trina, who cared about the Holy Wood even when people hated her. Who risked her position, as long as they were safe. Trina would take help where she could find it. So will she. Jemma will find a way to use the cannibal, even if he can’t be trusted.
She won’t let her friends die in this Kingdom.
* * *
The cowboy Tashia is unsaddling a horse. The saddle is made of old carpet and tire rubber. Tashia nods when Lady walks up to the fence.
“It hard to ride em?” Lady says.
“At first. You feel like you’re sitting on a mountain.”
“We hunt em, in our village. No one knows how to ride.”
Tashia’s face darkens. “They’re the center of the Kingdom. Without them, we’d lose the cows, we’d lose the battles. You can’t hurt them here.”
“Wouldn’t want to,” Lady says. She holds out her hand, knuckles curled under, and the horse’s lips feel around them as if to make sure she’s not food.
“She don’t normally let people get that close,” Tashia says.
“Why you let me, then?”
“I wanted to see if she’d bite off your hand.”
Lady almost laughs but turns serious. “Who gets to live here?” she says. “Inside the Kingdom, I mean, not in the hotel?”
“Everyone does, in wartime.”
“But all the time?”
“The King’s people. Those who are important, I guess. The Cowboys, the Knights, their favorite girls…” But she wrinkles her lips at that. A little disgust showing?
“What’s the deal with the Night Mountain?”
Tashia pauses, as if deciding something. “Probably the last thing you’re gonna see alive. They used to have the rollertrains inside. They used to use the Lectrics to light it up, but now it’s just black in there. No windows.”
“I saw it. It ain’t so bad.”
“It is. You don’t know the Night Mountain, but the Knights do. They know every inch. They’re going to put one Knight in there for each of you. Maybe he ambushes you. Maybe you climb up the rollertracks and he throws you off the edge.”
“Why you telling me this?” Lady says.
“I don’t expect you to live.”
“It’s sposed to be by hand, ain’t it?”
“Swords aren’t the only way to get yourselves killed, honey,” Tashia says. “There’s lots of old junk in there from the rollertrain—steel bars, Lectric cables, bricks. They’ll use them as weapons.”
Lady looks at Tashia more closely and sees signs of wear—a two-inch scar above her cheekbone, a crooked left ear, a swollen ring finger, purple bruises on her skin. She remembers what Tashia said about fighting her way into the Round Table, and starts to form an idea.
Without saying anything more, Lady picks up a brush from the fence and steps closer to Tashia’s horse. The muscles jump under the brush, as if they’re welcoming the bristles.
“Stay away from her back leg. She might kick if she can’t see you,” Tashia says, and continues to put away her gear.
Lady understands how big the horse really is, how powerful its legs and teeth are.
“This thing’s so much stronger than you,” she says. “How you control it?”
“She doesn’t know she’s stronger,” Tashia says.
* * *
“How you get the mocycle working?” Pico says. He’s found Grease in a huge workshop at the back of the Kingdom. The building is littered with the parts of mocycles and cars and lawn-mowing things.
“It’s called a mocycle?” Grease says.
“Yeah,” Pico says. “But how you get it to work if you can’t read?”
“I see machines, I can kind of see how they work in my mind. This one started with the fire juice in the tank.”
The goggly kid talks as if it’s painful for him to speak to another person, but sometimes the words bust out as if escaping from a pen.
“Gas,” Pico says.
“Gas? Like the fart?”
“Different. Cars and stuff used gas.”
“Gas. I figured out it must use … fire juice … to run. And if it used fire juice, then it needed some kind of fire, and some kind of spark to light the fire.” Grease climbs on the mocycle and starts it with a kick to a pedal. It sputters once, three times, then purrs. He raises his voice to talk over it. “I found an old book that had pictures. I cleaned everything out and put it back together. It was all about getting the fuel and the fire together.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“It took me two years,” Grease says.
“What about cars?” The Parents had so many of them.
“Cars are hard,” Grease says. “Bikes are simpler. I can kick them awake.”
Pico revs the handle like Grease showed him, and the purr climbs to a roar.
“The King wants me to fix a whole bunch of them.”
“Cool.”
But Grease’s face doesn’t say cool. “He wants to use them with the guns.”
“Oh,” Pico says, and he sees the Knights racing toward the Biters on two-wheeled hurricanes, rifles bolted onto the handlebars. The horses are advantage enough. But these would be so fast, so loud, so hard t
o shoot at, that they would grind down anyone in their path.
“You fix the guns, too?” Pico says.
“Guns are easy,” Grease says. “Make sure the powder’s dry, the bolts are greased. But…”
“But what they do is hard.”
“There’s so much death already,” Grease says. “What’s to like about something that just brings more death?” That’s how Pico learns that Grease doesn’t agree with the King on everything, even though the King values him more than anyone else in the Kingdom.
“Why you guys fight so much?” Pico says.
“We know we’re going to die, but the most important thing is to die strong.”
“The most important thing is not to die,” Pico says, and Grease only nods.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE KINGDOM
Pico teaches Grease his letters when no one watches, although reading won’t get Grease Exiled like it would in the Holy Wood. Grease’s eyes wrinkle with joy behind the thick glasses the first time he makes out one of the words on the Kingdom’s walls: “Snacks.”
In turn Grease shows him how to take apart the mocycles and clean out the rust and spiderwebs, how to find extra parts from the pile of scrap he’s collected. Pico’s hands have always been a disappointment to him, a little too shaky and weak for machines, but they steady under Grease’s training. Pico learns how Grease got his name when his own arms are blackened to his elbows at the end of the day, but the pieces of the machines start to click together in his mind and in real life.
“It supposed to sound like that?” Pico says, looking at the motor that’s smoking and knocking as if someone were inside with a hammer trying to get out, but really he doesn’t care because it’s the first engine he’s ever fixed, and it’s actually running.
“It’s the gas. It’s old,” Grease says. “The stuff in cars won’t burn, usually. Only good stuff I found was at the place where they keep the skyplanes, about as fresh as the Grown-Ups made it. I gotta get some more.”