City of Savages Read online

  “Not much has changed,” I finally come up with. “You’re still a shitty sleeper.”

  Sky just shakes her head, turns the page, and buries back into Mom’s book.

  February 15—So it’s official. Tom decided to leave Robert Mulaney’s studio to work for his dad and Mary at the firm. I feel like I’ve gutted a bit of his soul—

  We both jump when we hear the creak of the door to our bedroom. Sky quickly closes the handwritten book, so all that’s visible from her lap is a faded picture of a pig and a spiderweb.

  “Still trying to get Phee hooked on Charlotte’s Web?” Mom gives Sky a forced smile. She looks a million years old, tired and hunched over those walking sticks, and a wave of guilt hits me over the idea of feeding her lies, especially tonight. But Sky’s right. Mom would definitely take the book if she found it on us. And the only sure thought I have about the thing is that I’m not ready to say good-bye to it.

  But before I can jump in, Sky shrugs and answers, “It’s a classic.”

  I stare at her, shocked at how easily the lie rolls off her tongue.

  “It used to be one of my favorites too, when I was a kid,” Mom says, and a lost look conquers her face. “Come on, let’s finish getting washed up. There’s no reason to make this any worse.”

  After Mom hides my contraband gun under our mattress, we take some more of the rationed cloths and smaller sticks left at the end of the hall and make traveling torches from the firecups in the hallway. Then we leave the Carlyle to join the rest of the stragglers on their way to the Park.

  The sky’s settled into twilight outside, lighting up the bordering trees, making the whole scene wildly creepy. My fear has already kicked into overdrive by now, but it’s not a cut-and-dried feeling. I want to run, shout, and fly all at the same time. There’s so much terror and excitement flooding my veins, I kind of think I might explode.

  “Protect your face, protect your stomach,” Mom says. She hobbles forward on her makeshift crutches, towards the mass of people gathering to hear Rolladin speak in Sheep Meadow, hundreds of torches waving in the air. “You’ve got to last through the first round.”

  “Right.”

  “Next round, you fall down as soon as Cass touches you. You got it?” Mom keeps lecturing, with these crazy-wide eyes. “Fall down and stay down.”

  “Yes.” I can barely hear my answer over the sound of my obnoxious heart. “Stay down.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Phee.” Sky grabs my hand and looks into the hungry crowd. “We can run away. Or I could take your place.”

  It’s an empty offer if I’ve ever heard one. Like I’m going to sign Sky’s death sentence. And where would we run?

  But it still makes me feel better. Like this really is a choice. And it empowers me, gives me just an inch of confidence to keep on walking. And I say, “No. I’ve got this. I’ll be okay.”

  Sky lets go of my hand, puts hers on my back, and we push our way into the maze of people. The crowd is bodies deep, a fog of dried sweat and earth from today’s tilling. We wade through the masses—Mom’s best friend, Lauren, calls out to us from the mess of people—but Mom just nods absently and keeps moving with us towards the front.

  I feel sort of terrible thinking this, but I really need to lose Mom and Sky. They’re making me nervous, even more nervous than I already am. As if they’re more weight on my shoulders. More people I’d disappoint if I get hurt. Or worse.

  We’re about nine or ten rows from the front when I hear a familiar voice.

  “Phee! Phee!” I barely hear over the crowd.

  God damn it. And I really can’t deal with Trevor right now. He bounds over to us and somehow manages to insert himself in between me and Mom.

  “Sarah, are you okay? What’s with the crutches?”

  “Trev, I’m fine, honey. Just an accident.”

  “And what’s going on with the street-fights? I saw the schedule of matches. Phee’s on it.” He looks at me. “How are you on it?”

  “Trev, we’ll catch up after the fights. Give Phee some space, all right?” Mom says, but she sounds totally spooked.

  “Is Phee going to be okay?” Trevor calls after us as the crowd pulls him back, and we keep rolling forward. “Will she be okay?” His voice gets softer, like we’re floating away from him, farther and farther out to sea.

  “I’ll be okay, Trev,” I somehow manage to call out. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Whorelords come crawling out of the folds of the crowd, nod at Mom and Sky, take me from them. And now that I’ve gotten what I wanted—we’re separated—I’m actually not sure I can stand on my own. But as my knees buckle, the whorelords pay no attention and just keep ushering me past Rolladin’s podium.

  “Phee—no!” Mom yells. I twist my neck and manage to catch her and Sky swimming against the tide of the crowd to keep up with me. “Clara,” Mom calls out to the old flaxen-haired guard on my right. “Please don’t do this.”

  “What’s done is done, Sarah,” the guard mumbles.

  I pass Rolladin’s stage just as she gets ready to mount it to address the Park, her Council surrounding her with a halo of torches. Somehow I manage to catch Sky’s eyes one more time before I’m dragged into the forest to be prepped for my match. “It’s going to be all right,” I call to her with a voice I don’t recognize. “We’re going to be okay.”

  4 SKY

  I watch, helpless, as Phee is pulled towards the trees that border the Park Lake. As she disappears into darkness, I unleash a hatred within my skin that threatens to eat me alive.

  Phee’s words echo through my brain. The littlest.

  The black sheep.

  The one on the sidelines.

  I’m the oldest. It shouldn’t be Phee.

  It should be me.

  I try to shake away the demons and focus my efforts on Mom, on being that shining pillar of support for her, and grab her hand.

  “Welcome,” Rolladin’s voice booms through the Park, “to the few winter fieldworkers who’ve just joined us. To my year-rounds, my Council. My lesser lords. Fellow survivors—all glorious three hundred eighty-two of you, according to this year’s census—we live another year. And for that, we have much cause to celebrate.”

  The crowd hurrahs, and a wave of torches rises and falls.

  “The war wages on beyond the skyscrapers, and yet because of our determination, our honor, our refusal to give in, we live,” she continues. “Our city has fallen, our shores have been surrounded. The Red Allies have cut us off from the rest of the world. And yet we live. They give us nothing but our bare hands to survive. And yet—WE LIVE!” Rolladin throws her hands up to the stars, and another rally from the crowd echoes like thunder through the Park.

  “I’ve been with my Council of Lords to the Brooklyn borders and back this summer,” Rolladin continues. “I’ve begged the Red Allies to spare us once again, to leave us here in captivity as the war goes on. And because of all of you, we can continue to survive here. We can afford to be ignored. We have made an oasis in the middle of a war zone. And we will continue to thrive.”

  She steps down onto the matted grass and the crowd rallies again, parts like wheat in a windstorm.

  “Tonight I am not your warden, but your fellow prisoner. Your fellow sister who emerged from the tunnels when the skies were black and the streets were singed, and we clawed our way back to life all those autumns ago,” she says. “Tonight I give you a gift, a celebration worthy of your courage. And we will rejoice and dance and fight for all that we have to be thankful for.”

  I can barely see over the rows of people in front of me, but it looks like Rolladin is signaling to a cluster of lesser lords behind her. The warlords break away and move towards the forest. The 65th Street fighting is about to begin. This is it. This is real.

  “So without further delay, let us commence th
e census festivities. To the Sixty-Fifth Street underpass for the first of our competitions!”

  The crowd cheers and a chorus of drums kicks up, percussion thumping against the night sky. We move as a herd across Sheep Meadow, in and out of the trees, spill onto the cement roads that cut through the Park like frozen rivers. Mom skip-hops next to me on her crutches, wincing a bit with every step.

  “Rolladin said the first round’s for the Council position, then the second round will be Phee and Cass.” I swear my heart is pounding louder than the drums. “We’ve got to be right under the bridge, so Phee can see us.”

  Mom nods. “We need to pick up the pace.”

  Mom’s friend Lauren catches up to me and my mother, and the three of us navigate our way together through the crowd, move quickly to get to the front of the pack before it floods both sides of the 65th Street underpass.

  “Do you see her?” Lauren asks us.

  “No, we lost her,” Mom says. “They must be prepping her in the forest.”

  The music’s grown so ferociously loud I can’t hear myself think. There are guitars in the crowd now, and singing, no words but moans and chants. Haunting, oddly beautiful sounds, like the odes of nightmares.

  We spill under the 65th Street Transverse. We nearly collide with one of Rolladin’s lesser lords, holding her arm forward to signal stop, her other arm waving a torch high above. Some of the Park kids giggle as they race around the guard and scale the rocks up to the abandoned street above, then lie down and hang their heads into the underpass, attempting to watch the matches upside down. My sister and I used to do this. My sister, who’s about to spar tonight.

  I exhale and try to focus only on my mission—protecting our spot in the front, in the first rows right at the edge of the archway’s shadows. Lauren and I start throwing elbows, and I put my hand out like a protective gate in front of my mother as prisoners file around us. Others come under the 65th Street Transverse from the other side, so now the underpass is caged by bodies. Guards with torches puncture the crowd like fence posts, the firelight casting odd, frightening shadows on the archway above.

  “Keep the underpass clear! Keep it clear!” Clara, the guard who took Phee, hollers as she walks in a long, wide oval, her stride marking the ring. “Save the aisle for Rolladin!”

  The drums and chanting quiet as Rolladin pushes her way through the crowd and into the underpass.

  Mom grabs my hand and looks at me. “Tell me Phee’s going to be okay.”

  “She’s going to be okay,” I say, for both of us.

  “The Sixty-Fifth Street fights are not only a Park tradition.” Rolladin’s voice booms through the tunnel as the drums fall into a steady beat: BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM. “They are a testament to the prisoners taken from us. A celebration of the lives that were sacrificed for the amusement of the Red Allies, those who were beaten senseless in this very street for sport. We honor them with these matches. Let us never forget our desperate beginnings. And let us always remember that strength and sacrifice keep us alive.”

  The crowd gives a huge collective “HURRAH!”

  “For the first match, I give you my two lesser lords Philip and Lory. They’re both fighting for the chance to join my Council, since we lost my dear friend and confidante Samantha this past summer.” A few of the lords murmur in sadness. “But as we’ve learned from this treacherous city, from death comes life and opportunity.” Rolladin raises her arms to the archway. “Three matches! To be followed by the archery contests, and of course, the races. Then last but not least . . . the feast of your year!”

  Another “HURRAH!”

  “Without further delay, we begin!”

  A soft cloak of mink brushes my arm as Lory pushes her way past us into the open underpass. Philip plows through the crowd on the other side, and the two begin circling the torch-lit underpass, a dangerous dance of light and shadows.

  “Philip’s as good as dead,” I tell Mom and Lauren as I study Lory’s chiseled arms, her legs as wide as tree trunks. Lory wears a scratched helmet long past retirement age and carries no weapons but her bare hands.

  Not that I feel sorry for Philip. After he turned us away from check-in today, I’m rooting against him with my whole being. The very fabric of my soul prays for his destruction.

  “He’s getting old,” Lauren says. “It was a stupid play for power. Rolladin will take his cloak if he loses.”

  The chatter has reached a fever pitch, as bets and side bets are being swapped and argued over—who will win, how many rounds, how many licks. I try to calm myself in the chaos, try not to think about the fact that my sister is next. That she might have the worst odds of any street-fighter who’s ever sparred in the Park.

  I put my arm around my mother, holding her close, letting her lean on me. I crane my neck behind me, trying to look past the thicket of bodies, to see if I can spot Phee approaching.

  I can’t find her, but for a second, I spot something else moving across the lawn beyond the crowd. It cuts in and out of the shadows, darts over the pathways of cement and into the trees, bounding away from the madness of 65th Street. I’m about to shrug it off as a startled deer, but it’s slower and bigger. It almost . . . it almost looks like a person.

  But before I can think through it, before I can say anything to Mom, the mania of the underpass overpowers me. The drums, the catcalls, the cheering—they build like a raging storm. Then Lory’s animal war cry thunders through the underpass:

  “You’re mine!”

  Philip steps onto the curved brick wall of the pedestrian walkway and leaps forward towards Lory, like he’s flying.

  But his fist meets air as Lory ducks and sends an elbow right into his stomach. Philip doubles over, and Lory kicks him square in the chin, sending him staggering back into the brick wall. He hits it with a slap.

  But he gets up quickly and dances away from Lory.

  She throws a jab, he ducks, she throws a hook, he jumps . . .

  “TIME!” Clara, the referee, comes bursting out of the folds of the crowd on the other side. She separates Philip and Lory, pushing them to opposite ends of the underpass.

  The crowd is wild at this point, and I feel hands and hot breath on my neck, tugs on my clothes, as the prisoners behind Mom and me lean in to get a better look.

  “Round two!” Clara yells a minute later.

  Philip repositions his helmet, then steps back into the ring. He starts to stutter-step, like some pathetic warm-up lap, but Lory’s already barreling towards him.

  “Philip’s a goner!” Mrs. Warbler declares behind me, in between hacks. “She has him. She has him!”

  Lory punches Philip in the face, once, twice, sends him flailing backward.

  “Use a rock!” someone yells from the crowd, tempting Lory to raise the stakes.

  I wince with expectation as Lory searches the shadows of the bridge and picks up a flat, smooth rock the size of a fist. Philip tries to slither away, but Lory grabs the collar of his raccoon shawl and pulls him under her.

  “Stop!” Philip cries. “Stop!”

  But no one pays attention. This is 65th Street fighting, after all. There are no rules. And there’s no “stop” until someone’s down and out cold.

  Lory whips off Philip’s helmet, then smashes the rock over his head. A river of blood springs from his temple, flowing over his eyes, his hair, his . . . I can’t look anymore.

  “Finish him, Lory!” the crowd rallies.

  I keep my eyes closed, take my mother’s hand once more, and squeeze as hard as I can.

  Then I hear the referee: “One, two, three, four, five . . .” The crowd joins in. “Six . . . seven . . . eight!”

  Then, silence.

  “Bravo,” Rolladin’s voice echoes through the tunnel. “Bravo.”

  My eyes snap open. Rolladin’s hovering over Philip’s heap of a body in the
corner of the 65th Street underpass. She bends down to survey him, some mess of emotions crawling across her face. Then she’s nothing but a blank slate again.

  “Lory will join my Council of Lords for her bravery. Philip’s service was commendable.” Rolladin waves a team of lesser lords forward to take Philip’s body away. “But over. If he survives the night,” she tells her team, “he’ll start as a fieldworker tomorrow.”

  The crowd booms with cheers and laughter as three young warlords carry Philip out of the underpass. Rolladin takes the victor predator pelt from the referee, throws it over her shoulder, and crosses the open ring to congratulate Lory. She grabs Lory’s face and crushes her own into it, a fierce, possessive kiss.

  “Do you understand what you’re watching, why I give you these matches, year after year?” Rolladin addresses the crowd. “To show you evolution. Survival of the fittest. Only those of us who are strong, like our champion here”—she thrusts Lory’s arm into the air—“will survive. There is no room for weakness in this city.”

  And it’s only when Rolladin drapes her newest Council member with the prized pelt of a zoo tiger that I realize Mom is crying.

  5 PHEE

  “I’m going to rip your hair out. Gouge out your eyes. Make your teeth into a necklace,” Cass calls ahead to me as a pair of whorelords pulls me across Sheep Meadow and towards 65th Street.

  One of my whorelord goons tightens her grip around my forearm. Then she turns around and tells Cass, “Save the fighting for the ring.”

  We stumble through the dark field, then over the walkways of cracked cement and towards the underpass, the 65th Street Transverse crested over it like a half-moon. Fieldworkers and whorelords with torches spill out of both sides, and kids are hanging over the bridge for cheap-seat views of the fights. The whole scene’s chaos, basically: shouts and cheers and flashes of fire against the night sky, side gambling and bickering. Every year I’ve been in the thick of it, just part of the bloodthirsty audience, calling for some whorelord to get what’s coming to her. I never thought about how it looked from the outside. I never realized it feels like some sort of crazy sacrifice.