Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “How you get the stuff back?”

  “I can carry a little, or talk someone into throwing it on a cart.”

  “You need something with four wheels to carry stuff.” Or more people, Pico thinks. “Like a car.”

  “But if we had a car … then we’d have a car.”

  “What if it was only like a car?” Pico says. Then they’d have a way to San Diego.

  * * *

  The cannibal’s white-pink skin is red-pink after a few days in the boat. He’s not getting enough water, Jemma sees, and she sneaks some to him on the third day.

  The Biter on the right is almost dead, and the one on the left watches her with dead eyes. He looks like Andy before he joined the Last Lifers, she thinks, but the kid is completely gone from this Biter. She doesn’t know if he gave up life or if the Kingdom took it from him, but this is what it looks like when you stop living.

  “They ain’t treating you so good?” she says.

  “As well as they treat anyone who eats them,” Tommy says, and she laughs. The little burst of humor makes her think she can ask her question.

  “So … what do you know about the End?” she says.

  He smiles, as if he knew what she would say. “You’re not the only one who has seen someone live after the End,” he says. “We had one of the Chosen, trampled in battle by the King’s horses. He’s still alive and almost nineteen.”

  “That’s how—” Jemma makes herself stop.

  “It’s his head,” Tommy says. “The brain.”

  “I didn’t know you heard Pico call it that,” Jemma says.

  Whatever Tommy was about to say comes out empty, and he closes his mouth with a snap. “I must have,” he says a moment later. “What does Pico think?” he says.

  She doesn’t want to give too much away. But she wants his help, and he seems to have figured a lot of it out on his own. “He thinks—he thinks the End works on Parents cuz their brains changed somehow when they grew up. That’s why the Touched go first, the kids who’re smarter, more mature.”

  “That makes sense.”

  They speak carefully. They don’t trust each other, and each seems to think the other knows more than they say. But they need each other, she thinks.

  “You’re going to need to get us out of here soon,” he says.

  “Us?”

  “You need to leave. I need to not be dead.”

  “I ain’t agreed to that,” she says. “Also, they’re too strong.”

  “There’s your answer,” Tommy says. “They’re too strong to care about being smart.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Jemma says.

  She leaves his prison, unraveling the problem like an old yarn doll. The Kingdom is as strong as Tommy says, with a code that doesn’t break. And strong as warriors, because they don’t Exile the ones who start to rage. She’s seen them at one another’s throats already, teenage boys, like a sack full of rats. That’s …

  Othello is leaning in the shade of the Horn, watching her and the prison.

  “You got a thing for the little Biter, don’t you?” he says, pushing out from the wall. “Want to make a little pink baby? You’re going to have to wait for his dick to grow.”

  She wills herself to be hard and tall, to bury her fear the way she did with Lady and Li the night they left the Holy Wood. But that was for her friend, not for herself.

  “Don’t you got a horse to roll with?” she says.

  Othello grabs her throat. “I could kill you for that,” he says.

  “If you could, you would,” she says.

  His arms are so strong, his fingers so tight she feels them inside her throat. But she is strong, too, the strongest girl in the Holy Wood, and she squeezes a point in his wrist until he lets go, and she never lets go of his eyes. “You ain’t never lived with girls in charge.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “You’re in the Kingdom now.” He raises his hands, smiles light and easy, and glides away.

  * * *

  Helping Grease means Pico gets to leave the Kingdom, holding on to the mocycle under the roar of the internal combustion engine. He learns to love the wind on his skin, the buzz of the motor.

  The first place Pico asks Grease to take him is the park where the riders attacked them. He shows Grease the rows of carts, and Grease understands.

  “It’s a golf cart,” Pico says, when they’ve explored the garage where the Parents fixed the carts and he’s read the signs. “That’s what the sticks are. Golf sticks.” Inside a panel on the rear of the cart, Pico can see a motor that’s much smaller than a car’s, with fewer tubes and wires and none of those black boxes that Grease can never crack. “You think you could figure this out?”

  “Most of it. We got a lot of parts here. For the rest of it, I have this”—he tosses a thick book toward Pico—“and you.”

  “‘Golf Cart Maintenance and Repair,’” Pico reads, for a moment only thinking of the fact that he can read “Maintenance” but still doesn’t know what it is.

  “Where I get stuck, you read our way through.”

  “We only got seventeen days before the fight,” Pico says, as if both of them know what it’s for. Somehow, in five days, Pico has won Grease over, and he’s not sure why. But he’s glad.

  “So easy,” Grease says. Grease and Pico look at the cart, not at each other. They see what it can become. If they can fix it. But he knows they can.

  “You realize,” Pico says, “this is gonna die with us.”

  “What?”

  “Your machines. My books. What we know about the End.”

  “The King loves my machines. So will the next King.”

  “Yeah, but there ain’t gonna be a you to fix em,” Pico says. “No one’s smart nuff, no one lives nuff. And cuz we’re smart, that means we’re Touched, and we gonna End even faster.”

  “Yeah,” Grease says. His face is somber.

  “One or two people gonna remember what we did but ain’t gonna be able to teach the next. The next time someone smart nuff to figure this stuff out on his own comes along, the machines are gonna be rusted to pieces. Life ain’t long nuff for all that when everyone’s just trying to live.”

  “In that case,” Grease says, “this really is the End. You know what the Preachers call it? They go way back to the old book, the oldest book.”

  “The Bible,” Pico says.

  “How did you know?”

  “I read, remember?” Pico says. “But I gotta tell you, it ain’t a very good book. I never got past the snake.”

  “Well, they call it the apokalips.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The end of the world.”

  “Wonder if the Bible saw this,” Pico says.

  * * *

  Tashia has Lady and Jemma running errands for her horses. Fresh vegetables from the kitchen, new leather from the tanners, ointment for hooves.

  Lady is retrieving a bundle of grass brought in on the Mono from the fields beyond the wall. The Kingdom dries them out and stores them in the stables so it’s always easy to feed the animals.

  Grease told Lady that the Mono uses rubber wheels so it glides above them quietly. The only sounds that give it away are the moos of the cows pulling it and the shouts of its drivers.

  The Mono will never work as the Parents would have intended, not without Lectrics, because of the wall surrounding the Kingdom. The Mono track carves a long loop throughout the Kingdom. When it leaves the Kingdom, it crosses over the wall far above the ground through a hole in the fence, and the cows have to stop at the wall. The momentum carries the Mono mostly over the wall, and then the girls on top fish up the tow ropes and throw them over to the drivers waiting on the other side. Those drivers take the Mono to the hotel and the gardens and return in a loop to the same spot at the wall, loaded up with goods for the animals and people of the Kingdom.

  As the girl from the Mono swings her the bundle of grass, her attention catches. Lady looks behind her to see what she
’s watching. In front of the Night Mountain, she sees a boy and girl, maybe thirteen, holding hands on a bench. No, not holding hands—they hover an inch apart as if magnets keep them from touching.

  Lady remembers that feeling, but it seems to have buried itself since she left the Holy Wood. There are boys here, strong and tall, and she still feels twinges of longing when she passes them. But since Li, she’s not as in love with muscles. She knows what they can do.

  The boys are strange to her, too. They don’t flirt or show off like the Holy Wood boys. They don’t talk to you and they don’t touch your shoulder if they do. Here in the Kingdom, they just stare at her when she walks by. She knows that look, and it feels like Li.

  Tashia says it’s because they don’t talk about rolling here. Some kind of Preacher thing. They have to roll to keep the Kingdom alive. The strongest kids have a duty to make the strongest babies, but they’re not supposed to like it.

  Lady doesn’t understand. Rolling is the most important thing. Rolling is life. How can it be swept aside, as if it’s shameful … as if it’s something to be feared?

  These two at the bus stop aren’t rolling together, not yet. But these two have marked each other with their eyes, a trail of invisible fingerprints climbing across the shoulder blade to the side of the neck to the lips. There’s something more than rolling going on behind their eyes.

  Like the way Apple used to look at Jemma.

  Yes, like that.

  Lady smiles at the way they fit each other—willowy, gentle, maybe too fragile for this world. Maybe that’s why they break their gazes only to check over their shoulders, why they shrink into the corners of the bench.

  That’s when she sees Othello striding toward the girl as if she’s something he dropped and just remembered to pick back up. Othello grabs the girl, shakes her just once like a nanny with a runaway child, and pulls her away from the bench. From the looks of the people nearby, that’s what’s supposed to happen. The girl slips her hand from his giant fist, though, and yells at him. Now all the girls near the plaza are watching.

  The boy is sitting so small on the bench he’s almost invisible. When Othello turns his back, the boy launches himself from the seat and tackles Othello in the leg. For a second Othello might go down.

  He doesn’t. He sways, roars, peels the boy off his side. He flings him into the bench with one hand, and Lady swears she can hear the wood crack. Lady’s hand searches her hair for the pin, desperate to stab. But her arm freezes there.

  The girl hasn’t given up all fight yet, and she collapses to the ground like a Toddler as Othello pulls her away from the bench. Othello drags her along without looking back at her trying to dig her fingernails into the cracked pavement.

  The plaza in front of the Night Mountain is empty except for a streak of blood from the girl’s thumb.

  But the girls at the edge of it make the air vibrate with fury. Lady watches them, their arms slicing through the air as they talk.

  She’s been watching so long that she doesn’t notice that the girl who helped her load the bundle of grass is standing at her shoulder.

  “Was she … his girl?” Lady asks.

  The girl’s voice is having a tough time making it out of her throat. “When you’re a Knight, everyone’s your girl. Whether you want it or not. Because they’re strong.”

  “That ain’t right,” Lady says, already losing her bearings.

  “Whether you want it or not,” the girl says. “Can you imagine that?”

  Lady doesn’t answer.

  Yes, she imagines it. The hard part is to not.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE GIRLS IN THE RING

  Tommy doesn’t say anything, but every day Jemma wonders if he’s the next Biter to die. The others’ heads are on the wall. His skin is blistered from the sun and cut from when they torture him. She has learned to stay away from the castle when the screams come.

  Somehow he survives, even with the little water and food Jemma can sneak past the guards. Tough little pendejo.

  She’s curious about something. “Why you Biters even bother trying to attack the Kingdom?” she says. “That wall ain’t goin nowhere.”

  “There’s an answer to every wall,” he says. “This one’s too big. They can’t man it properly. I bet you I could find three places where someone could get through.”

  “Yeah? Where would you climb?”

  “Where the Mono comes through, for one,” he says.

  Something about the Biter’s face just then makes her recall a vision she must have had through the haze. He was in it, but the details swim away before she can see what he was doing. She’s worked on seeing the haze every day and can sometimes call it up at will. The images are sharper, the buzz has faded, as if it finally understands how to speak to her clearly. But Jemma doesn’t always know what is real. The haze seems to show her the paths most likely to happen, not the ones that will surely come true.

  “I’m glad you decided not to kill me,” he says, and his voice softens. “In the Palos, the big ones stole my food, beat me up from the time I was three. I never had anyone who cared. Never had anyone to protect me. I think you might be her.”

  Right then, he changes. Not an enemy. Not a threat. Just a kid.

  * * *

  “You think you could teach me to ride?” Lady asks Tashia without turning away from the horse she’s feeding. If she could ride, they’d have a chance to leave these walls. Tashia doesn’t come up to the horse, though, stops just short of entering the corral.

  When Lady turns around, she sees that today is not a good day to ask Tashia anything.

  The cowboy’s face is tight, but not crying. Lady almost doesn’t speak, unsure if she wants to release the tears. “Something wrong?”

  Tashia lifts up the front hoof and inspects it, running her fingers around the edge. “You hear about Othello and the girl?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Tashia … Tashia, I know how you feel.”

  She doesn’t see Tashia’s face. Doesn’t see Tashia move. Just feels Tashia’s arm on her neck, slamming her into the fence. The bars dig into her shoulders. She pushes off them and Tashia is staring at her down an outstretched fist, one eyebrow arching above the knuckle.

  Then the fist shows up in Lady’s gut. The air rushes out of her lungs, and Lady struggles to pull it back before it escapes to the clouds. She doesn’t feel she’s being attacked by Tashia but by floating fists landing so fast on both sides of her body that she can’t trace the swings. Lady collapses against the fence and draws Tashia in, closer, closer, until a punch lingers long enough on her torso that she can grab the forearm, until she can hold it tight, until she sees Tashia’s eyes widen at the grip that doesn’t let go.

  Until her own right hand connects with Tashia’s jaw two, three times and rocks Tashia’s head backward and Tashia is sitting in the dirt, still not sure how she got there.

  Lady braces herself for Tashia’s rush, but Tashia shakes her head twice, slowly, and only her eyes smile. “Damn, honey,” she says with her mouth. That’s a hell of a punch, the rest of her says.

  “I ain’t saying sorry,” Tashia says.

  “Me neither.”

  Tashia scoots across the dirt to the fence and leans back against it. Lady slides down the fence, inches from the horse’s nose. It hasn’t budged. It doesn’t care what they do to each other as long as it’s got its food.

  “She’s my sister,” Tashia says. “Not our sister like we all are, but my true sister, from my Ma. My Ma was so young when she had me, maybe fourteen, that I remembered her before she passed. ‘That’s Jackie,’ she said. ‘She’s yours now.’ And she has been since.”

  “Never had a sister,” Lady says. “Just Jemma.”

  “I taught her to walk. I showed her how to throw the bolas, how to ride, how to find the only mushrooms that won’t kill you. And now Othello—I’m gonna kill that—”

  “Puto, is what we say,” Lady says.

  “What does th
at mean?”

  “Means someone like Othello.”

  “Ha!” Tashia sags just a bit.

  “Can’t the King do something?”

  Tashia snorts. “The King? X isn’t going to do anything.”

  “X?” Like the letter, she almost says, but it’s just a sound to Tashia.

  “He hasn’t been the King forever, honey. Before he was the King he was a kid named X. X was a beautiful boy, strong. Strong and sweet. And he was mine.”

  “Oh,” Lady says. She thinks back to every time she’s seen them together, and can’t see anything but a simmering hatred, and realizes that she’s only seeing the underbelly of their love.

  “He was my boy, since we were old enough to know that boys and girls were different. Then the old King, the Cleaver, took me, and he wasn’t beautiful or sweet.”

  Lady sees Li lunging for her, her fingers fluttering toward the hairpin.

  “X challenged the King to fight at the next feast in the Night Mountain and barely walked away alive. And then he challenged him at the next one and the next. Each time he got a little closer, and he got stronger, and one night he caught the King in the kidney and X stomped him until he didn’t get up again.”

  “He became King for you,” Lady says, a little bit awed.

  “No, honey, not quite for me,” Tashia says. “He came up to me and said, ‘I took you back.’”

  She watches Tashia’s face, the way the old pain plays across it like a distant storm, moving away but still splitting the sky. “I said no,” Tashia says, “you didn’t take me. No one gets to take me ever again.”

  That’s why there’s a kinship between them, across tribe and captor and captive. Two girls who wouldn’t be taken.

  “So you gotta fight them?” Lady says.

  “I’m gonna fight Othello. But I ain’t strong enough yet,” Tashia says. “The boys won’t train with me anymore, and the girls are too small.”

  “We’ll fight you. Me and Jemma. Teach us how to fight, and we’ll fight you.”

  “Please.”

  “We only got sixteen days before they throw us in the Night Mountain. We need it.”