City of Savages Read online

  Someone comes sprinting towards us out of the madness. “They’re ready for her,” says Clara, the old referee.

  “Who won?” Cass asks behind me.

  “Lory.”

  “Figures. Philip was a relic.” Cass laughs. “I was sick of that old queen anyway.”

  But Clara doesn’t laugh along with her. “Show some respect. He got his face rearranged.” The referee takes me from my escorts and nods at Cass. “Maybe you should focus on your own match.”

  Cass adjusts the little squirrel shawl around her shoulders, the only stupid thing separating her from me. “You think I’m worried about this lemming? Please.” Cass smiles at me. “She’s as good as dead.”

  The drums have kicked up again, and now I know we’re minutes from starting. My heart starts sputtering, climbing, clawing its way to my throat. God, I think I’m going to be sick. Referee Clara leads me away from Cass and my two bodyguards, then pulls me down a small hill and into the crowd of people.

  The underpass is humming, a fat, soupy stew of grabby hands and catcalls—Wait, is that Phee? Sarah Miller’s youngest?—as Clara pulls me through the crowd. My head starts spinning, my heart keeps pounding, and I swear I’m going to drown in all of this. Like it’s all going to wash over me and pull me under.

  I say, “I don’t think I can do this,” before I even realizing I’m saying it.

  Clara pulls me into her side as we plow forward. “You can, and you will,” she says into my ear. “Do whatever it takes to make it through the first round.” And even though she’s giving me advice, her eyes are hard. “The only place there aren’t rules is the ring.”

  But before I can pump Clara for more, she thrusts me into the center of the underpass.

  The crowd falls to silence as I stand there, alone, in the middle of hundreds of prisoners.

  I look around, the faces of friends and fieldworkers blurring together in the light and shadows of the underpass. I try to take a deep breath, just try to find Sky and Mom, but the crowd’s gasps and shocked whispers rattle me like thunder.

  I start backing up, into the hands of the crowd behind me, then look over to the other side, where they’re packed in like matches.

  Even if I wanted to escape, there’s nowhere to run.

  “And now, I have something quite unusual for your viewing pleasure.” Rolladin steps into the center of the ring and calls over the crowd. “One of your own has pledged a street-fight to me, as a pleading for mercy.”

  The crowd grows louder, a hive buzzing with questions.

  “Her family has disrespected the rules of the Park,” Rolladin adds, “and extends this offering in desperation. As you can see, I have accepted. But let this be a lesson to all of you. Nothing is given for free in the middle of a war.”

  Rolladin looks at me. Her face is weird, though, all mashed up, almost like she’s worried, or upset. Then she gives me a little nod, so small and serious that I almost don’t catch it. But I can’t stand to look at her. Screw you, Rolladin.

  I reach for the grass necklace Sky gave me for my birthday this morning, pretend it’s her hand. I need to see my family, and the need is quickening my breath, shaking my hands. I search the crowd frantically, run through each face as quickly as I can.

  Where are they?

  Clara comes back with some loaner helmet with a hole on the right side and a fat pockmark in the middle.

  “Keep this on, whatever you do,” she says as she fastens it under my chin.

  But I don’t answer, I can’t answer—it’s all going so fast, none of it feels real. I’m watching from a cage in someone else’s nightmare.

  Rolladin’s still blabbering on about Cass, and the match, and about me being an example, but I can’t process her words. They’re just flies, buzzing past me.

  “Eye for an eye—”

  All I can think is, Where are they?

  “The way of the Park—”

  And the shadows dancing across the arched ceiling of the underpass, Rolladin’s voice, the gasps and the whispers—it all comes to a quick boil, and before I realize what I’m doing, my vocal cords are straining under the pressure of, “WAIT!”

  And then it’s only me talking. Fear is flattening me, crushing me on all sides, but somehow I’m talking.

  “I’m not doing this for Warden Rolladin,” I say. I’m surprised I sound powerful, my tone as flat and steady as a drum. “I’m doing this for my family. For my mom and Sky.” I look around at the worn, tired faces of the Park on both sides of the underpass. “For the fieldworkers.”

  “How dare you speak—,” Rolladin begins, but she’s interrupted.

  “Phee!”

  Sky angles past one of the whorelords who’s guarding the crowd on the other side and moves a few steps into the ring. Mom’s trying to pull her back, but Sky shrugs her off. I close my eyes and open them, and when I do, there’s no longer any crowd. It’s just the two of us. Back by the water on Wall Street, laughing and sparring, ready to begin our own fake fight. And in that crazy way Sky can read my mind, she reminds me of what I’ve forgot.

  “Remember your weapons,” Sky yells.

  The crowd murmurs, confused.

  But I’m not confused.

  I take a deep breath, close my eyes again, and do what she says. I think of the weapons we made as kids, the ones hammered out of my sister’s stories and dreams. Swords from wizards and magic dust from fairies that Sky swore lived in Battery Park. We’d pull the weapons out and be ready to battle anything. Even the ghosts that made Mom scream in the middle of the night. Even the skeletons we’d find in bed when we’d scavenge downtown apartments.

  Cass can’t touch me.

  “Silence!” Rolladin roars. “Enough delay. It’s time to begin!”

  My sister runs back to the sidelines. Then it’s just me and Cass, on opposite sides of the underpass. She starts pacing sideways, surveying me like some zoo animal, so I start mimicking her and stalk the other way. The crowd’s alive again, and a swell of cheers and catcalls erupt out of the Park and shake the underpass.

  “PHOE-NIX. PHOE-NIX.”

  Even through my fog of fear, I hear the cheers. I grit my teeth, crack my knuckles, and swallow the tight ball in my throat down, down, down.

  Cass crosses the ring. She comes at me in a burst, sprinting, jumping, fist framed against the torch-lit underpass. . . .

  I duck and roll away.

  Cass gets to her feet, dusts herself off, turns around and smiles. “You can’t duck forever.”

  She growls and runs at me again, both fists up and ready to strike. She grabs my shoulders before I can wriggle away from her. My hands go up on instinct, reaching for her face, her eyes, her dumb squirrel cloak. . . .

  BOOM. My rib cage rattles. Then Cass whips her hand up and brings it crashing down against my cheek. The blow burns, feels like candle wax against my skin, and I yelp and turn to run away from her. But Cass has got me, pushes me, and now I’m flailing backward. I fall against the pavement, the wind knocked out of me in one tight whoosh, as gasps echo through the underpass.

  Get up, God damn it, Phee, get up—survive the first round.

  I take a breath out of my battered lungs and crawl my way to stand.

  “You’re a masochistic little bitch, aren’t you?” Cass leaps for me, grabs my hair, and pulls me towards the brick wall.

  “Stop,” I’m yelling. “STOP!”

  Somehow I manage to elbow Cass in the ribs and fold into her side, and I send us both careening onto the pavement.

  Cheers roar through the underpass:

  “Phoenix, hang in there!”

  “She’s nothing but a Rolladin lackey!”

  “Stay in it for me. For my daughter! May she rest in peace!”

  Then Referee Clara is untangling us, shouting, “TIME!”

  Cas
s comes at me again, but Clara pulls her into the opposite corner.

  “Don’t make me try, bitch!” Cass is shouting, fighting, as she’s dragged away for the one-minute break between rounds.

  The crowd is just a loud wave of voices, like an ocean under 65th Street, but somehow I pick out the one voice I need to hear. Mom. “Phee, next hit, stay down!”

  I scramble to my feet, desperate to see her and Sky again. But they’re no longer on the front lines. The crowd must’ve swallowed them whole.

  “Round two!”

  Cass bursts out of the fieldworkers and comes running at me. She wastes no time. Blow to my right side. Then she undercuts my chin, and I swear, I feel the jab in each tooth. The next hit comes fast as lightning, across my cheek, and the pain sears me like a flame.

  I double over.

  Cass kicks me in the stomach, and now I’m hurling, just bile and spit and blood as I crawl to the side of the underpass, to the rows and rows of legs and feet marking the borders of the ring.

  “Enough!” I can’t see my sister, but I can hear her. Sky’s voice rings out, panicked and desperate above all the others. “Phoenix, stay DOWN!”

  Referee Clara begins the count. “One . . . two . . .”

  Then time does a funny thing as I’m on the ground, bleeding.

  It stops, hands me a slice of forever, and I feel all the fieldworkers around me. All the prisoners, especially the young ones, like Sky and me, even Trevor, the ones who have only known rules.

  And even though I know I’m supposed to just . . . stop, and stay down, I said I came to fight for them.

  “. . . five . . . six . . .”

  Before I can even think, Yes, okay, this is what I’m doing, I spot a thin red-handled blade poking out of a whorelord’s boot. I lunge towards the leg and dislodge the weapon, then with every shred of fight I have left in me, I whirl around and thrust it forward, the referee’s words whispering in my ear: The only place there aren’t rules is the ring.

  The small knife lodges into Cass’s forearm, but I pull it out fast as a reflex. Her eyes fly open, and she shrieks and falls to the ground, folds around her arm. I scramble to my feet, blood and heat and pain attacking me from all sides, just as Clara jumps between Cass and me.

  “TIME!” Clara says, pushing us to opposite corners.

  I look at Cass’s arm, a cut the size of a finger lacing blood around her forearm. I did that. I exhale. Wipe my lip, wipe my brow, readjust my helmet. I did that.

  “Time?” Cass is sputtering. “Time? That bitch is a cheat! You can’t bring weapons into the ring! Rolladin,” she appeals to our warden, who’s standing in her cushy spot on the sidelines.

  Rolladin’s face is hard, cool . . . she doesn’t answer.

  So was that fair? Does it matter?

  I can’t think, I can’t process any of this, ’cause time’s now skipping forward like some kid hopped up on honey, but somehow I manage, “I didn’t bring it in.”

  Cass gives this tight, twisted little laugh. “You’re giving me technicalities?” she shouts. “You are so fucking dead.”

  Again the crowd is all whispers, grunts, and groans. Out of the thick madness, I swear I can hear Sky and Mom call to me. “Phee, enough!”

  But time keeps skipping forward, and Clara shouts, “Round three!”

  And then Cass is coming for me like a lion from an open cage. I try to keep the small, bloodstained knife between us, thrusting it in all directions like some moving wall she can’t scale.

  But she catches my arm and brings it crashing over her knee, and sends her other hand into my stomach. And I can’t hold on anymore. It’s like someone’s taken my heart and thrown it against the cement. I fall to my knees, and the knife goes flying.

  I lunge for it, but Cass pulls me back into her, and then we’re locked together, rolling around in the underpass, nothing but the cheers throughout the Park to buoy us. She’s feet, inches, away from the knife. I know it’s over when she gets her hands on it. But I can’t hold her, I—I can’t stop her. . . . Her fingers wrap around it. . . .

  “ENOUGH!”

  Cass looks at me hungrily. Then at Rolladin, confused.

  I want to roll away from Cass and run, run as fast as my legs will carry me, through the crowd now as quiet as Wall Street in winter. But I can’t move.

  “I said enough.” Rolladin’s voice is louder, closer now, like she’s right up next to me, in my ear, and then I feel Cass release my hand. And now Rolladin somehow is beside me. One rough tug by her, and I’m on my feet. Rolladin’s gripping my forearm, holding me steady, with Cass pulled close on her other side.

  “The match is a push,” Rolladin booms through the underpass. But her voice sounds funny, shaky, like it’s balancing on the edge of a skyscraper. “Cass has secured her place as newest lord on my lesser council. And for her courage, Phee and her family will remain with us in the Park. Extra rations to the three of them tonight.”

  The crowd’s not quiet any longer, as hundreds of voices let out a roar, and a bloody smile creeps across my lips. A push.

  And even though the world’s spinning, I stand a little taller.

  “Final match!” Rolladin calls over the crowd. But before she gets back to the best spot in the underpass, she pulls me in tight to her, so close that I can see where the blue of her irises fade into green.

  “Go to your mother.” Her eyes are haunted, two tortured ghosts in the firelight. “Now.”

  6 SKY

  The fire pit laps at our faces and hands, warms our full bowls of peacock stew, and for a moment, the world is a mirage, the crest of a dream. My sister is safe. With a patched eye, a fat lip, and some bruised ribs. But safe. Alive.

  We eat shoulder to shoulder, huddled over our soup bowls. I’ve even slipped my arm through hers, just to convince myself that she’s really there. It’s an awkward way to sit, I know, but when Phee tried to shrug me off and dig into her dinner with both hands, I couldn’t let her go for some reason.

  “All right, weirdo.” She’d shrugged but had flashed me a wide, uneven smile. We both knew how close she had come, we had come, to losing everything. “Arm in arm it is.”

  Sheep Meadow is now peppered with small fire pits, each one encircled by hungry, tired prisoners perched on stones and logs, since the races have ended and the official census feast has begun. Most of the pits are crammed with people, but after Phee’s brave performance, Rolladin gave us our own fire pit near the solace of the trees, at the edges of the crowd. Ironically, even though she’d demanded that one of us spar in the first place, afterward Rolladin kept asking Phee if she was okay. She even checked out Phee’s injuries herself during the archery competitions, instead of letting one of the medics do it, almost . . . almost like she cared. Mom gave her steely eyes the whole time, of course, but that part I expected.

  “I still can’t believe that match,” Mom says now, after she comes back from the ration line and settles in close on Phee’s other side, like we’re fencing her in. We had our big reunion on 65th Street, right after Phee’s fight, but Mom and I don’t trust our luck. Like Phee might disappear any moment on us. “Your sister and I were beside ourselves.”

  “What, you really thought that Cass-hole was going to take me down?” Phee says to her bowl. But as she plays with her fat lip, I can see fear lingering behind her eyes. And for some reason, I’m still afraid too, as if I’ve just woken up from a long stretch of feverish nightmares. We came so close.

  Mom pulls both of us into her. “Never, ever, ever pull something that crazy again, you hear me?” she whispers.

  I can’t help but laugh when I feel Phee shrug next to me and say, “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  The festival becomes warm and loud, as the music kicks up again and some of the warlords begin dancing in the center of the fields, raising and clanking their mugs of Rol
ladin’s moonshine as they twist and writhe across the Park.

  Every year it’s the same. We watch the street-fights and scream for bloodshed. Then some of the fieldworkers compete in the archery contests and field races for extra rations or a day free of duties. Then we’re fed, well for once, and relax under the stars while music plays until midnight. Or until Rolladin’s warlords get sloppy and fights break out, whatever comes first.

  It’s one of the few easy days in the Park, and I want to enjoy it, just let myself celebrate—but it’s kind of hard to do. My nerves are still fried, and I can’t seem to sort my feelings out. Fear, adrenaline, envy, anger. And in the dark corners as always, like dust swept under a rug, a sadness I never fully understand.

  “Oh God,” Phee mutters next to me. “Here he comes again.”

  I follow her eyes and watch Trev bound across the Park with a huge grin on his face and a steaming bowl in his hand. I shake my head and start laughing, try to herd my disconcerting thoughts back into their cages.

  “Be nice,” Mom warns my sister.

  I feel bad for Phee a lot of times, I really do. Gangly Trevor, self-proclaimed Miller family adoptee, has such a monster crush on my sister that most times, it’s painful to watch them together. But other times, it’s total entertainment. Right now Trevor’s practically sprinting over to our fire, bobbing and weaving through the crowds, arms outstretched like he’s praising the heavens. His peacock stew is spilling over half the Park.

  “Phee, the birthday victor! You were amazing!” He breathes excitedly as he approaches us. He looks around for a seat, and I gladly oblige.

  “Sky, don’t get up—,” Phee grits through her teeth.

  “Oh, I don’t mind.” I know she’s been to hell and back tonight, but we’re still sisters, after all. She’s going to kill me for this, but it’s worth it.

  Trevor sits down hastily, right up close to her, his silky black hair flopping over his eyes. “You. Were. Fantastically Incredible,” he sputters. “I didn’t know you had it in you! I mean, of course I knew you did, but to see it, in the flesh.” He looks up at Mom and me, making sure we’re hanging on every word of his eloquent synopsis. “Cass pummels you. Cass knocks you around. Cass beats you senseless. Then you whip out a weapon from some whorelord’s shoe, and whoop! You slice her!” He laughs this choppy, tight little laugh as he wields an invisible knife over the fire.