by Jeff Sweat
“Space men,” Pico says, pointing up at the ceiling. Two men in space suits hang upside down from what looks like a rocketplane engine.
Jemma and Lady get as close to the floor of the Night Mountain as they can, trying to memorize everything about it. Jemma realizes for the first time how much debris is in the Night Mountain—metal bars, bricks and rocks, pieces of the rollertrain. Weapons there if you can find them fast enough, Tashia had said.
She doesn’t get much of a look, though—the fighters aren’t sitting there. Grease nods to two ramps leading out of the launch room, climbing toward the ceiling of the Night Mountain. They take the ramp on the right and enter a tube that would once have carried the rollertrain up. The tube opens up to the sky, and she sees Othello and other Knights trudging up the tube on the left. She hadn’t seen them enter. Othello smiles, deathly in the dim light.
The King’s platform is built at the very top of the ramp, where the rollertrain tracks would have fallen toward the floor. That way the Round Table can see every fight that happens inside the Night Mountain. The friends sit as far away from the King as they can, with younger fighters in between them and the Knights.
Servants carry huge platters of cow up clanging steps from the floor of the Night Mountain. Despite her terror, her mouth waters when they place a seared steak in front of her.
Lady has already dug in. “Jesucristo, I can’t believe you get to eat cow every day,” she says, her mouth full. They’d never had it before the Kingdom, and it’s already their favorite food.
“You can get sick of anything,” Grease says, eating squash instead.
“Don’t get too full,” Jemma says, thinking of the fight ahead.
“If I gotta die,” Lady says, “it’s gonna be with a stomach full of meat.”
The inside of the Night Mountain blazes bright, as if someone had turned on the moon. Grease and Tashia had tried to explain it to them, but they still aren’t prepared for it.
Jemma looks along the balcony and sees three metal canisters, each over a fire. There’s a glass lens on the front, like Grease’s goggles, and a mirror behind them to focus the light. The light operator drops a thick metal shade over the lens to block the light, lifts it to shine it again. “I built them for the Wall,” Grease had told them, almost angrily. “I guess this is a better use.”
The King speaks briefly, and the fights begin. The first is a pair of younger kids, twelve-year-olds, trying to win their way fully into the Kingdom. But they’re not fighting Knights, and as far as Jemma can see, no one is trying to kill them. She points that out.
“They didn’t kill a cow,” Tashia says.
The fights at the feast are the way that everything is decided in the Kingdom. The girl who wins will go on to become a cowboy, something important. The girl who loses will go to the kitchens or the fields.
The two girls circle each other, feinting and ducking, in the light. Suddenly the lights go out in the ring, and there’s darkness below. The shades have dropped over the canisters, by some whispered signal between the operators. The only light comes from the candles and firelight in the platform and the feast room. Jemma tries to make out the fighters, tries to see them in the haze, desperate to understand a way to help her and Lady win. But the haze stubbornly stays dark.
When the lights come up again, one girl is straddling the other in the sand, pounding away with her fists. There’s blood on the sand. The crowd cheers.
“It’s the hardest kind of fight,” Tashia had said when she was training them. “The Night Mountain tests strength, agility, all your senses.”
There are three more fights before theirs. The last one is a boy challenging to become one of the Round Table. But the Knight who accepts the challenge is John, a huge friend of Othello’s. John throws the boy off the rollertracks to cheers.
The King stands. The words he uses seem familiar to everyone at the feast. “There is nothing like the Kingdom, in this life or our last one,” he says, and the crowd echoes it. “We came out of the darkness. We turned the danger and the chaos of the End into the Beginning. We tamed the darkness and made it light.
“Each new member of the Kingdom goes through the same journey. They enter the darkness. They face the dangers in the Night Mountain. Tonight, outsiders ask to become part of the Kingdom; they ask to join their strength with ours. That is not something given freely. They have to win it. If they emerge whole from the Night Mountain, we embrace them as our own. If they lack the strength to do so—” He shouts the last line, leaning on every word. “If they lack the strength to do so … they were never meant to be one of us!”
Jemma’s limbs feel numb, as if they might not move when asked. But somehow she does stand when he calls their names, when the crowd rocks the room with mostly boos, when they are herded down the towering steps onto the floor of the Night Mountain, when they wait for the King to announce their opponents. Sometimes the opponents are picked, Tashia told them. Usually they’re volunteers.
The two Knights climb lightly down the steps. They always knew Othello would be one of them. He fights every chance he can get, and he hates the Angelenos. The other one is a Knight named Sipu. He’s not as tall, not as broad as Othello, but moves with a sinewy grace.
“Stick together,” Lady says, and grasps her arm around the wrist.
Othello looks at Jemma with a slow, confident smile. He lifts his finger to his throat and slices across it.
The lights go out.
* * *
There is nothing around them but darkness. Lady takes a half step forward and stops, vertigo washing over her for a moment. She can’t balance because she can’t tell which way is up.
The crowd is way too loud for this. She listens for footsteps in the arena, but all she gets is the static of shouts. All of my senses are gone, she thinks.
“Can you see anything?” she says to Jemma. Not with her eyes, of course. But with the haze. If Jemma can use the haze to see the outlines of the fighters, they just might win.
“It’s still dark,” Jemma says. Lady hears the scratch of sand and then a fist clubs her in the side of the head. She wriggles away, losing her grip on Jemma’s hand. These boys can’t see any better than Lady can—but her voice gave them a target.
The lights blast on, and the crowd roars. She blinks once, twice, and sees Sipu charging her. She ducks, and he just misses, stumbling to the ground.
She spots a steel bar underneath a section of rollertrain track, which swoops close to the floor but doesn’t quite touch it. She memorizes the location—twenty steps, maybe fifteen at a run—and sprints across the sand.
The dark comes back, although she’s not surprised by it this time. She finishes her steps, hoping her direction held, and slides into the sand feetfirst, hoping to hit the bar with them. She doesn’t. She scrambles for it in the sand.
The rollertrain track clangs above her head, sparking. She can see Sipu’s face for a flash. He found some kind of club, but the track above her blocked his swing. She huddles beneath the truck, realizing it’s the only safety she has. Her feet churn up the sand, trying to find the bar. Had she run the wrong direction?
The club strikes her across the side. Sipu found her. In a panic, she reaches up and finds the tube of the rollertrain track and flips herself up on its top. She inches herself up the track, hoping to distance herself from the ground. She tries not to scream, not to pant. She can’t give herself away.
The lights go on again, and her heart sinks. She’s only climbed a few feet above the floor, within Sipu’s reach. The crowd laughs at the sight of her clinging helpless on the bar, like a rat in a storm. This time the light gives Sipu plenty of time to reach her, and his club smashes into her wrist before she drops onto the sand and runs away.
Lady looks around for Jemma and doesn’t see her.
The crowd goes quiet with the light change this time, as if they sense that Sipu is closing in. She’s cradling her arm, weaponless, waiting for him to finish her off.
Sipu knows this place. But he doesn’t know her.
She spotted a dense thicket of girders in the center of the Night Mountain that holds the King’s platform. That’s where she can draw him in. This time when the lights go up, she walks deliberately, almost slowly toward them. The slow speed seems to help, because it doesn’t trigger his peripheral vision. Sipu doesn’t spot her until she’s nearly to the thicket, and she pauses for the lights to dim before she goes in.
There’s a closet-shaped hole in the thicket. She doesn’t go into that, but ducks under a bar into a tighter space next to it. She picks up a handful of sand and waits until the arena is quiet. She drops the sand, hoping it will make noise, and it does. Sipu barrels toward her, into the closet-shaped hole, and slams into the bars. Her hand darts out, trying to grab anything.
She finds his hand. And drives the hairpin into it with all her force.
Sipu swears and drops the club, which is what she really wanted. She picks it up from the sand, slithers to the opening of the closet hole, and swings with all her force at whatever’s in there, again and again. Something crunches. His screams tell her he’s still alive—but that he’s not going anywhere.
The arena is silent at that, as the crowd waits to find out what happened. In the quiet she hears Jemma’s voice from maybe thirty feet away.
“I see you, Othello,” Jemma says.
* * *
The haze doesn’t come to Jemma right away, and she has to fend off a flurry of Othello in the dark before she wiggles away. I don’t know how to turn it on, she thinks. I can’t use it if I can’t turn it on.
She tries to remember the way she held her mind still to see the images before, but all it can manage is He’ll kill me. Her mind won’t clear in the panic.
The light blasts her eyes, and she blinks. Othello is right in front of her. He punches her so hard her head snaps back, and he hauls her back by her collar so he can hit her again and again. It doesn’t matter when the lights turn off again, because he has her.
With that thought comes acceptance, and then comes clarity. Images start to float in. She can see the outline of Othello, the dots making up his face in the haze, the snarl in his lips up close. She can even trace the shape of the track, the girders, the old lights, the room filling up with straight blue lines in the haze. Of course, she thinks. These were all Lectrics. It’s a huge antenna to focus the haze. She can see even better than when she was fighting Tashia.
She smiles.
Othello isn’t using the terrain of the Night Mountain, he’s that confident in his strength. So he stands toe to toe with Jemma and hits her with everything he has.
Only she’s not there.
The haze shows her where he’ll go, a second before he does, just like with Tashia. She ducks and clips him in his neck. He swings again and again, and again and again she’s not there.
The light flickers on, then off again, as if the kids running it couldn’t decide whether they needed it. The moment it goes off, she hammers straight at the spot in his throat where the haze says will be unprotected.
Only it’s not. When she misses, Othello knees her in the gut.
Because it’s not like Tashia. Othello is faster than Tashia is, more unpredictable, and the haze can just barely catch up. Sometimes it’s wrong about his motions, as if it guesses them incorrectly. Half the times she tries to connect with him, he’s not there. And half the times she tries to dodge him, he connects.
Her face is bloody, she can tell. Her ribs ache. Every blow means that much less of a chance for her to walk out alive. She starts to hide from him, to scramble across the tracks and the girders using their blue silhouettes. He follows, not as gracefully, but somehow he can sense her.
Jemma climbs up a set of girders, a tower on the opposite side of the Night Mountain from the feast room. She steps out onto the track they support. Othello is several feet below, and the light still hasn’t come on. “I see you,” she says, and she crouches to jump. She’s going to fall on him and break his neck.
But Othello tracks her voice and jumps up toward her, barely touching the girders as he climbs up. His arm wraps around her ankle, and he yanks her down against the track. Her head bangs against the rails, and the haze stutters for a moment as she struggles to concentrate on it. She shakes her head clear of pain and she can see the outlines of the Night Mountain in the haze again. This time the haze comes back even stronger, the rollertrain tracks clear and sharp.
Othello pulls himself up, still pinning her down. She wriggles out and scrambles upward to the next loop of track, trying to evade his flailing hands. In the next flash of light, he grabs her with both arms and squeezes. He leans on her, smashing her back against the track.
Her ribs start to give. She gulps and he squeezes harder, forcing all the air out of her lungs. The lights turn off again, and this time she can’t tell because she sees light dancing inside her head from lack of air.
The haze stays by her, though. It seems to fill her lungs even when the air doesn’t; it flows into her limbs from the track in her hands. It strengthens her. She reaches out to it, to the rollertrain tracks holding the haze like a giant pulsing web, and forces herself into the haze.
The lights burst on. Not Grease’s torches, but the real lights, the Lectric ones that used to guide the rollertrain. All the lights that are intact, that the haze can still touch, turn on. She sees a blazing night sky, a swirl of meteor red, an exploding sun. She hears bursts of sirens, whistles and wails, sounds unheard by Children in a hundred years. And then the floodlights overhead, like Grease’s searchlights but a thousand times brighter.
Othello’s face is frozen above hers, not just because he’s blinded but because he never thought he would see or hear this. No one did. Jemma folds her legs to her body and kicks out as hard as she can.
Into Othello’s chest. His body flies backward, downward, and it hits a girder and then the track and then the floor. It lies still in the sand.
The lights overhead stay on, the noise stays on, because Jemma doesn’t know how to turn it off. She climbs down slowly to see if he’s alive.
He is, although is leg is broken badly, and he seems to be unconscious. He won’t threaten them now.
“You do that?” Lady says, next to her. The lights and the sounds from the rollertrain dim, as if the haze knew its job was finished. For the first time, Jemma realizes that there’s no noise from the crowd. Then a single shout, followed by another. She looks up and sees angry, frightened faces peering over the edge of the platform. The King’s is the last of them.
“Witch,” they say.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE ROLLERTRAIN
“I only have one question,” the King says, in his room in the Horn where they’ve dragged her after the fight, along with Lady and Pico. He’s calm. No, not calm—contained, as if any second all his anger and fear will come bursting out.
She knows more or less what the question is but waits for him to ask it. “Are you a devil?” he says. Saying it out loud unleashes all the anger in the room, and the Knights begin shouting. The one holding her shoves her face down on the Round Table. She feels a knife at her throat.
“No!” The King’s voice cuts the air like a whip. “She’s one of us now. And if we punish her, it’ll be as one of us.”
She stands back up, quiet. She won’t bend. “I dunno what it was,” she says. “It ain’t ever happened before.”
“Are you a devil? A witch?”
“Do I talk to demons or something? No.”
“But that power—it comes from some kind of god.”
“No, King, it doesn’t.” The King jumps when Grease speaks, as if he and Jemma had been the only two people in the room. “Something tal
ks to her, but it isn’t a god. It’s some kind of machine, some kind of Lectrics. It was part of the End.”
Harsh, frightened whispers at that. The King may say that the End is actually the Beginning, but his Knights live in fear of it.
“We came here cuz we wanted to know about the End.” Jemma shrugs. “Turns out the End wants to know about me.”
Pico and Grease explain enough about the haze, about their theories about the End, that the King seems truly interested.
“She’s not a witch,” Grease says. “But she matters. We hurt her, we lose our only chance of figuring out the End.”
“I don’t care about—”
“I do,” Grease says. She never thought him capable of saying those two words in front of his king. “We all do. We don’t have enough time to be great. Every year, we get smaller. We lose more people, we lose what we know.”
The King seems to relax. He’s thinking now, not bristling. Grease saying what he did could give the King cover to say what he really thinks, not what the Knights think he should say. “Maybe you’re right,” the King says. “A power like Jemma’s, as terrifying as it is … it would make all the difference in the war against the Biters.”
I’m not a weapon, Jemma thinks. I’m not a weapon.
A guard bursts into the room. He’s winded from the run up the stairs, but he doesn’t pause for breath. “The little Biter,” he says, “the little one that was locked up. He’s escaped.”
Dammit, she thinks.
The King pushes her. “You were friends,” he says. “All of this was a way to distract us so he could get away.”
She thinks about the things Tommy said. The way she started to trust him, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. The things she must have told him about the Kingdom, about the Angelenos, without even realizing it. The things she certainly told him about the End. She can’t even shake her head at the King, because he’s right. She helped Tommy escape when she thought she was using him to escape.