City of Savages (27 page)

41    PHEE

I’m not myself, but I see myself. At least I see who I was, who I think I was—Phoenix. Blond hair, closed eyes, limp arms and legs. Me, I’m floating somewhere else now, just a voyeur without a body. Forced to watch.

Phoenix is being taken up the stairs by a team of men. They drag her through the hall, propel her forward, and she offers no resistance. She just lies in their arms, aware but unaware, present but somewhere else.

Like a puppet. Not a real girl.

The group enters Phoenix’s room.

“Put her on the bed,” Wren orders the men trailing behind him. “She’s not going anywhere anymore.”

The men lay her down, and Wren leans over her. “Sister Phoenix, this too shall pass,” he purrs, petting her hair. She tries to flinch and pull away, but she can’t move. “Bring in the boy.”

“But, Master Wren,” one of the men—Francis—says, “I thought I was to be sealed with her.”

Robert nods. “Master Wren, the boy’s too young—”

“How dare you question me, after the mess you made tonight,” Wren interrupts. “
I
ask the questions!
I
am the embodiment of the Standard!” He sighs and collects himself. “If we give her to the boy, we win the boy. If we win the boy, we win that self-appointed guardian of his. Stryder or Ryder or whatever. We get him, we have his brother,” Wren continues. “Then we’ll have the girl’s mother and sister, too. People are nothing but dominoes. Knock the right one down and they all fall. Come,” he says. “Let’s get the boy.”

42    SKY

They grab me on the Great Lawn. At least ten of them—they move out of the trees, drawn like moths to the escaped fieldworker going down in flames.

“Please show us the lords’ mercy!”

Five, ten, then fifteen warlords converge on me, picking me off the ground, until I’m just a caught animal, stretched and ready for roasting.

“You must be suicidal,” Lory hisses into my ear as the troop of guards carries me towards the castle. “Rolladin’s had a price on your head for weeks. You’ve signed your own death sentence, marching back into the Park.” She gives a tight, confused laugh. “You Millers are masochists.”

We burst into the dimly lit hall of Belvedere Castle, the warmth of the firecups burning my frozen limbs like fiery ice. My arms are nearly ripped from their sockets as I’m pulled forward, down the entryway. The ceiling oddly looks lower, the hall shorter, than I remember, especially compared with the awe-inducing tower of glass we’re trapped in now.

Rolladin is in her chambers when I arrive. She’s waiting, already expecting me, the news of my return getting here faster than I could.

“We found her shouting through the Park.” Lory gives me a small shove forward. “She asked for the lords’ mercy.”

Rolladin doesn’t look at me, not once, has eyes only for her guards. “The lords’ mercy,” she says. “Hmm.”

She stalks to the bar behind her desk in the far corner, the same one where she’d pulled the whiskey bottle out for Phee and me, all those nights ago. When my greatest fear was my younger sister overshadowing me, becoming a warlord. That fear seems a luxury, compared with all that awaits us at the Standard now.

Rolladin pours herself a half glass of whiskey and downs it. The warlords and I hang on her every movement, awaiting her word.

She thrusts the glass onto the table. “You killed one of my guards. Injured another,” she finally says. “The lords’ mercy is hardly appropriate.” She looks at Lory as she delivers my sentence: “Solitary confinement. Take her to the primate tower.”

No.

“Yes, Rolladin,” the guards say in unison, tightening their grip, and pull me back out the door.

“It was an accident!” I stammer. “Self-defense. Cass was about to kill Phee!” I struggle against my captors, appealing to Rolladin with wide, pleading eyes. “I need your help! They’re drugging them! My mom, Phee, we need you! Please!”

“Quiet.” Lory spins me around, dragging me down the hall, as I thrash with all the energy I have left.

“Please, Rolladin,” I wail over my shoulder. “They’re going to die!” The tears spring forward. “You have to help me, please!”

Rolladin walks slowly behind us as we push and pull down the hall. I crane my neck, trying to see her, trying to get her to see me, to show her the desperation in my eyes. I try to probe through the Rolladin exterior to the Mary inside her, the woman I read about, the one I came to see.

“My dear, the one thing I’ve really learned from the war,” Rolladin purrs as I’m taken down the hall and back out into the cold. Her form gets smaller, her voice softer, like I’m drifting away from a shore. “Is that there’s really no such thing as second chances.”

Before the cold air outside the castle slaps me, I call out once more, “Mary!”

Then the doors close.

They leave me, alone and shivering, in the primate tower.

43    PHEE

Phoenix doesn’t stir. And I’m still here, watching her. Removed, a visitor at a horror show played out behind glass.

Two of Wren’s men return with a basin filled with water and a cool towel to wipe Phoenix down, to prepare her for something I’m sure I don’t want to see. They do their job quickly and place the basin and the towel in the bathroom. They leave one of their torches hanging in a slot attached to the wall.

There’s silence for a minute, a lifetime. Then different voices enter the room.

“Master Wren.” Trevor, who I haven’t seen in weeks, trails Wren into the belly of the bedroom.

I see Trevor, now, for what he is. He’s a teenager, even though when I was Phoenix, he was never more than a kid. He’s tall and thin, with a kind, even face, confused eyes. And he looks nervous. But also happy, expectant. Unlike me. Unlike the girl on the bed.

“Brother Trevor, we find you most willing to accept the Standard,” Wren whispers into Trevor’s ear. “And we reward those whose souls are empty and ready to be filled. As I promised, this Sister is our gift to you.”

“Gift,” Trevor repeats. His face looks puzzled, torn. Like he knows there’s something wrong, but he’d rather not think about it.

“You are old enough to partake in the most sacred tenet of the Standard. Being sealed with another, creating new life to serve me and my Standard. Only then will you truly become part of us,” Master Wren whispers. “Do you understand what I’m asking of you?”

Trevor’s quiet for a long time. “I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of anything.”

“You will be tomorrow morning,” Wren says. “Do not disappoint me.”

Master Wren walks away from Trevor and out the door, leaving him with Phoenix. I want to wake her. I want to shake Trevor. But I have no hands. I have no voice. I have nothing left.

“How . . . how are you?” Trevor asks Phoenix.

Silence.

“I heard about you kissing Ryder from Sister Ava,” he adds. “I don’t care.”

More silence.

“I love you,” he blurts out. “I always have.”

I watch him slide in beside Phoenix’s body. He’s tender with the girl on the bed. He . . . puts his fingers carefully in her hair, as if she might disappear if he moves too suddenly. He dares to put his lips against her shoulder, curling himself into a ball, imprinting his body next to hers.

“I know you think you’re too good for me,” he whispers. He carefully puts his hand on her stomach. He’s testing the waters inch by inch. “You
are
too good for me,” he says. “But maybe you’ll feel differently. One day.”

After a long time of lying next to her, he cautiously props himself on his forearms and leans over her. I watch his face turn gray. He knows something is wrong. Something
is
wrong, Trevor. Something is really, truly wrong.

“The love potion will kick in soon, I promise,” he says. “Then everything will be as it should be.”

He inches closer to her, studying her drawn, pale face.

He lowers himself down to her lips. He grazes them softly, gently—

Then he stops.

His pause waters a tiny seed of hope in me. I try to make it grow. I push it out of my body like a new limb, will it to reach out and wake the girl on the bed. I try to breathe life into her, force her to speak with me. Beg her to tell Trevor what’s ripping us apart.

“Please,” we finally, barely, whisper. “Don’t see me like this.”

44    SKY

I’m jarred awake by a heavy blanket thrown at my feet. I don’t remember falling asleep. All I remember is being bullied behind bars, screaming until my voice finally gave out, and curling into a ball of defeat in the corner. The stagnant air of the primate tower, thick with trapped humidity, must have finally knocked me out.

I jump at the scrape of a match. A burst of warm light illuminates the black hole of the prison.

I shield my eyes. “Who’s there?”

“Who do you think?” a rough whisper answers me.

My eyes settle and there, in front of me, puffing on a long, thin white cylinder, sits the warden of the Park.

I’m speechless, but Rolladin doesn’t say anything either. She just lifts the flaming roll of paper to her lips, offering me nothing but soft, hazy rings of smoke. But this feels like a chance.

“What . . . what is that?”

She eyes me carefully. “A cigarette.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” I whisper, very conscious that the fate of my family rests in this woman’s hands. And in mine.

“I outlawed them in the Park.” She shrugs, squashing the end of the stick into the cement floor with a flourish. Then, thinking twice, she promptly lights another. “Didn’t need any temptation after I decided to quit.”

I don’t ask her why, if she gave them up, she’s smoking one now. I don’t know what to ask her, what to say. It feels like I’ve talked myself into a corner in about three seconds, until I remember a vague, borrowed memory from Mom’s journal.

“You used to smoke, before the war,” I say cautiously. “You had a lighter in the tunnels.”

Rolladin doesn’t answer.

“You used it to guide everyone up to Great Central.”

“Grand Central.”

“Right, of course. Grand Central.”

It could just be shadows’ illusions, but I swear the smallest of smiles plays at the corners of her mouth.

“We’re . . .” Dare I say it? Do I actually dare to say it?
Stop it. There’s nothing left to lose
. “Related,” I finish.

She sucks in quickly on the cigarette, and a startled
“PUGH!”
escapes her lips.

She looks at me for a long time, until my stomach starts sinking, until my face becomes hot with anticipation over her impending rage. “Your mother finally told you that?” No feeling, no emotion. Just a question.

“In her own way,” I hedge.

“Interesting.”

“Why . . . ,” I start, but there are too many ways to finish my question. Why did I have to read a journal to know that? Why did Rolladin lie about the E-train summit and tell my mother to give up hope on my father? Why does she act like she doesn’t know us, not really?

And why is she here with me now?

“Your mother and I,” she finally starts, but it seems that her words too, are betraying her. She fingers her crumpled pack of cigarettes, as if it might contain some answers. As I’m thinking the pack is probably older than I am, she pulls one of the sticks out and hands it to me through the bars.

“Thank you.”

“Other way. Turn it around.”

I reverse the cigarette and stick it into my mouth. It’s got a wheaty taste, burnt cinnamon, and she snaps another match and lights it. A storm of smoke attacks me and burns through my nose and ears. “That’s pretty brutal.”

“If you can believe it,” Rolladin says, smoke spiraling out of her mouth like silk, “each one gets better.”

I try once more, peck the cigarette and let the smoke escape quickly, and manage to avoid choking.

“The thing about your mother is that she’s stubborn.” Rolladin takes a long pull from the bottle of whiskey I didn’t realize was next to her. “And she blamed me for everything. Not just for that mess with the E-train summit, but all of it. Did she tell you
that
?”

It’s obvious
, I think.
She hates you, despises you
.

But I just shake my head.

“If you two were sick. If you weren’t getting enough rations. If one of the soldiers looked at her funny. Anything. I was responsible for both of us. For all of us.” I simultaneously cringe and soften at the word “us.” “All the time. But I didn’t mind.”

I think again of the journal, about Rolladin on every page. How her smothering need to protect, her caging love for my mother, breathed life into Mom’s words.

“No?” I whisper.

She closes her eyes, as if she’s conjuring younger versions of all of us, long ago. “No.” She takes another hard swig. “That damn E-train summit, I swear”—and I get the sense she’s no longer talking to me—“if I could go back and do it all again, I’d keep going. I’d find the damn meeting, despite the fact that we were attacked by those cannibals, Dave strung up and pulled apart like a roast. I’d die trying to do it, to say I did it. So there was no confusion. Though at that point, if I had found my brother”—she laughs—“I don’t know what any of us would have done.”

But I haven’t heard the last part: I’m focused on the cannibals. I’m trying to remember exactly what Mom wrote about the E-train summit, trying to mentally conjure the pages. In the journal, Mary told Mom that she went to the E-train summit and had been attacked by the summit members themselves . . . then later, Mom found out she was lying.

There was never any mention of tunnel feeders.

“Did Mom know how you were really attacked?”

Rolladin stares at me with blank eyes, and I wonder if she really sees me, or if I’ve somehow become a window, a portal to the past. “Everyone knew we were attacked,” she mutters. “But they didn’t know by what. I said we were jumped. Wasn’t about to tell a bunch of malnourished, terrified captives that Dave had been eaten alive. That I’d escaped within an inch of death. That living in the tunnels was turning people inside out, and there were nightmares down there, even worse than what was going on at the surface. So, no,” she says. “I thought it best to keep that to myself.”

But after the Standard, I’m not sure what sounds like truth anymore, and I get a sudden, feverish feeling that Rolladin might be lying. That she’s put me behind bars to feed me this story and make some kind of bizarre peace with herself.

“Rolladin”—I try to remember my place—“if you had just told Mom about the tunnel feeders, don’t you think she’d understand why you never went? Why you never found my dad?”

“Never got the chance to,” she says. “When she found out I never went to the summit, Sarah stole one of my guns and escaped from the Park. Took the two of you with her. I didn’t see her for months.”

She lights two new cigarettes and hands one to me. Even though I feel my lungs shrinking away in my chest at the offer, I accept it through the bars.

“After she was brought back,” she continues, “when they started the census, she was a different person. For years, I tortured myself with the idea that
I
had broken her.” Rolladin shakes her head. “She pretended we were strangers, to the point where we
were
strangers.” She takes a long drag, lets tendrils of smoke curl around her words. “Until she and her children hated and feared me, just like everyone else. It was devastating. I’d allowed myself . . . to hope for so much more.”

I watch her, this woman wrapped around a bottle. Smoke clinging to her tight flame of red hair, her polar bear cloak hanging off her shoulder—our bloodthirsty, backbreaking Rolladin. And even though part of me wants to see
Mary
, more, perhaps, than I can even begin to understand, I can’t see this woman as anything but my warden. Maybe that’s what Rolladin mourns—having us see her in a different way, having someone know that there is, or was, more to her. But my mom killed that possibility. Or Rolladin did, when she drove Mom away.

It makes me think of Phee, of course, how we’ve drifted. Of the way we’ve been recently, missing and misunderstanding each other, growing apart. It makes me wonder how two people can ever go through something together and come out the same way on the other side.

As if sensing my thoughts, Rolladin asks, “What happened to you, when you left?”

I take a deep breath.

Then I tell her, about all of it—about the cannibals in the tunnels, about Robert. About the crushing void of the Standard, and what had happened to our Dad there. Mom, now comatose and disconnected. Phee, just an empty vessel. I tell the story brutally, honestly, quite aware that all our lives depend on its telling.

When I’m done, Rolladin slowly wraps her thick knuckles around the bars of the cage and squeezes. But she doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“I’ll help you,” she finally says. “Like you asked. Tomorrow morning, I’ll talk to my Council. You tell us where to go. We’ll get them back.”

“Rolladin, thank you. You can’t imagine what they’re doing down there. The Standard—they’re monsters.”

“This city, this world. It’s full of monsters,” she says. “The world’s a terrible place. And despite what your mother thinks, it’s still my job to keep you safe.”

I get an odd prickly feeling at the back of my neck.
Keep us safe
. Keep us stored away in a park in the middle of a tiny island. Keep us dressed in lies. And for a minute I can’t hold in my emotions any longer. I just need answers.

“Rolladin, the war,” I say, before I can think twice. “Why’d you lie? Why didn’t you tell us it was over?”

For a second, everything but pure anger drains from Rolladin’s face. “Don’t talk to me about things you don’t know.” She rages forward and grips the bars of the jail, rattling them, and I fall back in surprise.

I’ve blown it. With one bold, stupid question, I’ve blown my family’s chance to be saved.

Rolladin slowly steps back from the cage. “You’re young. I forget how young sometimes,” she says. “So you can’t understand. The people who survived this—our lives were
stolen
. Mine and your mother’s and the hundreds of others who spent months crawling through the tunnels eating and praying and shitting alongside each other.”

She begins to walk towards the stairs, then turns. “I rode into Jersey years ago, after the Red troops were pulled out of the boroughs and shipped to other fronts. After I didn’t receive news from our captors for weeks, then months. Then years. Went as far as Pennsylvania on horseback. And there’s nothing. Nothing but burned and riddled wasteland from a decade of attacks. The world that we were waiting for, gutted and gone. What was I going to do, let my survivors stumble out into a black hole? Let them know it was all for nothing?” she whispers. “Life is good here. Hard work and sacrifice give people a reason to live. They give people
meaning
. Our city—this Park—this is the seed from which the new world will grow. You’ll see that eventually.”

But that’s not your call
, I want to say
. That’s not your call to make
.

“There are reasons for lies, Skyler.”

She leaves me confused over whether I hate her, or pity her . . . or somehow understand what she’s saying. And the idea of understanding her, this patchwork of a woman, this blur of misguided ideals and contradictions, angers me more than anything.