I Am Alive (28 page)

So does my iAm. It gives up on me. I’ve used its last dying breath. I throw it to the side and lean back again, not knowing if I have been persuasive enough.

“Not good, huh?” I ask Honeybee.

The bee flutters its wings once.

“I know,” I say. “I was just one hour away. Just one hour, and I could have won the game.”

The bee flies closer to me. It lands on the tip of my nose.

I laugh again. “So my nose is honey now?” I mumble.

The bee flutters twice.

Carnivore roars from above.

Wait. That is not Carnivore.

It’s the sound of an engine. It’s one of those Zeppelins.

The Zeppelin hovers in front of me between the two mountains. Behind the glass, I see Prophet Xitler. A woman in her thirties, Eliza Day, is standing next to him. She is as beautiful as a doll.

The rain has stopped.

The glass opens, and I am face to face with Prophet Hannibal Xitler. I don’t know how I know who he is, but my heart beats faster. I am surprised he is even real.

Prophet Hannibal Xitler is sitting upon a fancy throne made of glass inside the helicopter. He is wearing a golden-striped robe, an outfit out of this world, and he is holding a strange cane with a snake crawling around it in one hand. The snake is alive. I see him pat it on the head. Xitler has long fingernails, like a woman. His hair is long, white, stiffed though. He must be like a hundred years old. A thousand? The lines underneath his eyes are nothing but grooves that could hold something in between them. He has a scar on his cheeks, and his eyes are the color of maroon. He looks ill, yet strong. Although he sits, I can see he is a tall man.

“Are we off camera, Timmy?” Xitler asks in his iAm.

“Yes, my Prophet,” I hear Timmy say.

“Hello, Decca,” says Xitler. “Now we can talk. Face to face, and away from the world.”

“I suppose I am the first to ever see your face. What do you want from me?” I ask.

“I want to know who you really are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to know what keeps you alive. What keeps you hanging on? What makes you refuse to shoot your friends for the price of your life? What makes you keep insisting on saying ‘I am alive’ in the iAm, even when the battery dies on you? What makes you want to save Leo and stay behind? What in the Burning Man’s name makes you want to fight Carnivore?”

“It’s a survival game, isn’t it? I am surviving. Until I win or lose.” I shift my eyes between him and Eliza, not trusting them.

“So you’re just playing?” Xitler chuckles, gazing at Eliza. “Didn’t I tell you? They’re just kids. They still think this is a game like any other,” he says to her.

“I am not a kid!” I snarl at him.

“I know, I know.” He bows his head slightly, as if paying his respects.

“What do you mean by us still thinking this is a game?” I wonder. “Isn’t this sick Monster Show designed for us outranked kids to get a second chance, so we might get ranked in your stupid system?”

“It’s a stupid system indeed.” Xitler nods.

I am puzzled by his honesty. He looks at me for a moment. I can’t make out what the look means. When I stare back at him, I feel like I am staring at a void, an emptiness, not a human being.

“Everyone in my nation has a number, Decca.” Xitler licks his reddened lips. It’s not lipstick. Could it be the blood of the outranked shed in the fields? “A number that lets me understand who they are, what they are made of, what they need the most. It’s called stereotyping, if you’ve ever heard of that. It’s a word that was cherished by the Amerikaz. I like stereotyping. I can control my nation with stereotyping, because now everyone has a number. So here is what I want to know. What is your number, Decca?”

“What’s the number of the human spirit?” I say, wondering where that came from.

Prophet Xitler considers my sentence, not looking happy. He takes off one of the fancy white gloves on his hands. As he does, Eliza tries to stop him.

“It’s all right,” he tells her. “We’re off camera.” He takes off the glove, and stretches out his bare hand.

Then he easily peels off the flesh of his hand, the way you peel skin off a banana. No blood comes out.

I shriek, hand on mouth.

“It’s all right,” he says to me. “I am not going to hurt you.”

Underneath his flesh, I can’t believe what I see with my own eyes. It’s a mechanical hand. It’s silver, wired with green liquid. It’s as if he is a robot or something, but there is also what looks like living tissue between the steel of his hand. It’s like he is a mix of both: machine and man.

“My whole body is like that,” says Xitler, pulling his flesh back over his hand, and pulling the glove back on.

“And you call us monsters? Huh,” I say.

“We’re all monsters, Decca,” Xitler elaborates with that plastic smile on his face. “Some of us have numbers, some of us don’t.”

“Why are you showing me this?” I wish I could get further back away from him. “Is everyone like this? Oh my God. Is the whole world like this?”

Xitler chuckles again, exchanging looks with Eliza. “No. No.” He — or it — waves his hands. “It’s only me. Even Eliza is human — I am also human, but let’s just say I am modified. The world is still human. Don’t you worry. If they weren’t human, they wouldn’t have fallen for my numbering system like lab rats running after a cube of cheese every day. I give them the same piece of cheese, and they just go get it, and wait for the next. Only, when you pull the cheese away, they start asking: who moved my cheese?” Xitler’s extra white teeth show through when he smiles.

“Who are you people?” I try not to stare at him too long. Xitler is like a contagious disease.

“We’re what the Amerikaz called the future.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to, if you ask me,” he says. “Humans becoming so aggressive, youngsters fighting for their lives to get a number. If my ancestors had foretold that to the Amerikaz more than a hundred years ago, they would have been called madmen. People would have claimed that human nature is good and blah blah blah. They would have insisted that human evolution would never go down that ugly path. But anyway,” Xitler stops for a sip from a glass nearby. “What’s done is done, and my new system works. For the Summit, at least.”

“You mean you don’t approve of the games?” I ask.

“I mean they are not only games. They certainly do look like games, and make our nation ridiculously rich and dominant, but they’re not just games. The games have a greater purpose that has never been met in the last ten years. A purpose only I know about. I have a feeling it could be fruitful this year.”

“You mean all those kids and my friends have died for your… purpose? How sick are you?”

“Very.” Xitler chuckles.

I am speechless. Why is he talking to me? What is he?

“My sick purpose of the game is to find the—” Eliza touches him on the shoulder again, as if not wanting him to spill out the secret. He pats her hand for reassurance. “Ten,” he says to me.

“What?”

“I am looking for the Ten,” he repeats. “The number we all believe is a myth. The pinnacle of human power. The one and only. The zenith of what the human creature can become.”

“Ten is a myth.” I chew on the words, trying to avoid the million other conclusions in my head.

“What’s a myth, but a god turned fictional? What’s a myth, but a human turned monster, or a monster turned human?” says Xitler, cocking his head with amusement. “Why do you think we all love movies and stories about heroes? Why do you think we’d love to be like them? Because deep down inside, we know they exist. Somewhere. Somehow. The problem is that they don’t know who they are. Most humans don’t know who they really are, if you ask me, but that’s not the point. How can you know if you’re a Ten, if you don’t play the games?”

“You mean a Ten is one who survives the games?” I ask.

“Indeed,” Xitler nods proudly.

“How so? If there is a Ten, they should be smarter, brighter, and genetically better than a Nine.”

“Those stupid numbers,” says Xitler. “Didn’t I tell you they’re lab rats? None of them can be a Ten. They’re just disposable parts of the clockwork. The more you stick to the number the iAm gives you, the more you lose your humanity. A Ten has to rise up from the ashes, from a Monster.” Xitler claws his hand and raises it with his palm up, gritting his teeth. “A Ten is all human in a world where humans have become numbers. He — or she — is the one you leave behind in the jungle for dead, but then they come back like Tarzan, after killing the lions, the wolves, and the tigers. They come back and shout in your face that they are still alive,” says Xitler theatrically. His last sentence pretty much sums up all the levels in the game.

“But if your ranking system works just fine for you, what do you need a Ten for?” I ask.

“Who isn’t looking for a superman?” Xitler chuckles again. “Besides, that’s none of your business.”

“Yeah? So what is my business? Why are you here talking to me?”

Xitler leans back in his flying throne, resting his hands on his big belly. “I am here because there is a possibility you are a Ten, Decca.”

“Me?” I let out an exhausted sigh. Everyone thinks I am a Ten now. The Breakfast Club, Xitler, and God knows who else. “I am a barely sixteen-year-old girl who wishes she could sing. Which reminds me, I am a Seven.”

“You are.”

“You mean you know that I am a Seven?”

“Actually, you’re an Eight, because your friend Ariadna, who is a Nine, had some extra points in her results, and gave them to you.”

“Ariadna did that?”

“Yes, she did it. But I don’t want to talk about her now. It’s beside the point. I mean that if you didn’t switch the iAm and enter the games, I would have ordered them to throw you into the games anyway. Some of the Monsters in the games are not monsters at all. Some of them are potential Tens.”

“What?” I jump out of my place to the edge of the cave, wanting to punch him in the face, but the Zeppelin is still far from the edge. I couldn’t do it.

Eliza clicks her fingers, summoning soldiers, but Prophet Xitler stops her again, staring admirably at me. “Let her show me what a Ten can do,” he says.

“I am not a Ten,” I say, still clenching my fists.

“That’s not what Dame Fortuna, the gypsy woman said,” Xitler says. “Did you forget that this is the Year of the Ten? The prophecy could be right.”

“You design a strict nation built on the iAm’s calculations, and end up believing that old creepy woman?” I wonder.

“It’s human nature, Decca, to look for the unknown, and the unpredictable,” Xitler replies.

“You really confuse me with your answers. Forget about all that Year of the Ten thing. Tell me why you did this to me?”

“Because of Woo,” says Xitler.

I let my fist relax. Woo?

“I know you think that Woo is alive. That he has fooled us by not answering the iAm and saying ‘I am alive.’ But he is dead. Before Carnivore killed Woo, I asked him if there was someone he thought was a Ten. He denied it. But I knew better,” says Xitler. “You might not know, Decca, but Woo was one of the few left of the Breakfast Club.”

“The Breakfast Club?” I mumble to myself, wondering why I am so surprised. The Breakfast Club was the revolution, and Woo certainly loved that. “What do you mean by left?”

“In their last days, the Breakfast Club lived in ships out at sea, like pirates,” Xitler explained. “I am sure your soldier friends told you that they found the containers in the Arc before me, but they had to escape when I arrived, because I had an army ten times stronger than them. We chased them out of the Wastelands, and out of Faya, out to the sea.”

“So?” I find it strange that Xitler is telling me this. I am just a disposable girl, who could die at any moment.

“The Breakfast Club’s priority was to find the Tens. It seems to me that it was foretold to them through information they got from the Arc that they have to find Tens, as if it’s a prophecy or something. It made sense to me too. How could you oppose the Summit, if you can’t find the Tens? And you were one of those they believed were a Ten. Woo believed you were a Ten.”

“I don’t believe you.” Even though I know Woo did believe I was a Ten, I opposed Xitler, hearing Woo’s voice in my ears, “Tender.” “If Woo thought I was a Ten, he would have told me.”

“Woo lied to you, Decca,” Xitler explains. “Remember when you were seven years old and the iAm predicted you to be a Bad Kid, at a time when Monsters were called Bad Kidz? Remember when your mother wanted to kill you, and your father eventually sent you to a homeless neighborhood, so he could later report you as a missing child?”

“Vaguely, but yes,” I say reluctantly. I have a feeling that what I am about to hear will sound crazy.

“The iAm was right. We’ve added some factors to determine if certain kids are capable of becoming Tens. Since we’ve never met a Ten, the iAm results showed us that a Ten has to be a rebel. A rebel has to be one of the four lower ranks, Four, Three, Two, and One, which makes sense. A Ten is technically a threat to the Burning Man system, if not dealt with properly. To become a threat, you have to be one of those Monsters: those kids who cause hassles, those who do whatever they please, and those who are just kids like their parents made them, unwilling to do things except in their own way. You know that everyone who has ever done something useful in the world had those characteristics when they were kids?”

“That’s how all kids are,” I say. “It’s just you who doesn’t know that. I take it you’ve never been one. You, with your steel skeleton. What are you, Xitler? An alien? A machine? A monster?”

“A Monster?” He laughs, which gets on my nerves. “Believe me, I wish I were. And to answer you, yes, all kids are like this. But not all kids defy the rules they’re taught, and those are the ones I look for. The Monsters who could be Tens.”

“And how about those who were ill?”

“It’s a system, Decca,” says Xitler. “I never said I didn’t like my system eliminating each kid who doesn’t fit into my plans. I never said I don’t like making tons of money from people loving our games worldwide. In fact, I like it a lot. All I am saying is that there is a greater possibility that the Ten is one of the Monsters. And I want the Tens. I have great use for them. I will not tell you about it, and I will not tell you what I really am. At least, not before you prove that you’re a Ten.”