Nice Day to Die (4 page)

Madame Delacroix, although still dizzy from the electric shock, must be wondering how I know all this. How I suddenly changed from that damsel-in-distress girl to a rebel. She takes Eva’s iAm, opens it, and starts working her magic.

“You know that this will make Eva a Seven, and you’ll become a Monster. Don’t you?” She locks the iAm and types on the computer. I see Eva’s data and mine being switched. “Why would anyone do this? Why would you want to be a Monster?”

“None of your business.” I threaten her by pushing the electric cattle prod closer to her.

After she finishes, I snatch the magnetic card that opens the door away from her, and tuck it along
with the two iAms
in my pockets.

“I wanted to cry,” Madame Delacroix mumbles. “When I killed my children. I wanted so bad to cry, but I couldn’t.” An unborn teardrop seems to argue its way out of her eyes. “You know why I couldn’t? Because the iAm would pick up on it, and I didn’t want that to happen. In our nation, we have to accept these sacrifices, right? It’s for the best interest of us all. It’s our fate that we can’t control.”

I throw her one last disgusted look, and I don’t hesitate to buzz her to sleep with the electric prod. “I guess I’ll have to sacrifice you now. I’ve
decided that this is
your
fate, child-killer,” I say, walking to the door with the only magnetic card that opens the door from outside. Madame Delacroix won’t wake up for hours to ask for help, and no one will know she is hurt. They will think she is working in Classroom Z.

 The first thing I do when I get out is plaster a naïve and innocent smile on my face again before I stumble intentionally over another boy’s shoes.

I told you I was going to surprise you. 

Disneyland
is Gone

I was born at ten in the morning on the tenth day of the tenth month in the ‘Year of the Ten’ — named after the year a gypsy woman foretold the upcoming birth of the first Ten in our nation. Even though everyone knows you can’t believe a Gypsy, who was a Five, we still loved to believe.

My birthday coincides with the date of the annual Ranking Day, which allows me to attend this year’s rankings or the next’s. I insisted I take it this year. I have my reasons.

In my world, a week is ten days, unlike the Amerikaz who used to have seven days in a week. We cherish the number Ten in Faya. If we could, we would have changed the months of the year to be ten instead of twelve.
Ten
is the most important number in the world. It’s almost holy, and that’s because no one has ever been ranked a Ten, and no one probably ever
will. Even the iAm gets that.

I sit next to Ariadna and gaze out the window, thinking about what I’ve just done. The students in the bus to Grand School celebrate like crazy.

I played naïve the past year so no one suspected what I was capable of – which wasn’t that much. Now I am fooling the Summit into believing that I am a Monster to enter the deadly Monster Show that every teenager in our nation avoids at all costs. I couldn’t even tell you the story from the beginning. That’s because I didn’t trust anyone, particularly since Woo died and left me alone in this world. I have to be in the Monster Show today because I think Woo is still alive, and I will risk my life to find him. Even if it’s a mere possibility.

Ariadna socializes while I watch the highway absently. Timmy educates other students about the history of the Monster Show. Sam keeps watching recaps of older games on the iAm with his friends. I can hear the Monsters screaming from his iAm’s speaker. I can hear them scream ‘I am alive’ every now and then.

Again, it’s how the games in the Monster Show work. You have to report that you’re alive every six hours, or you’ll be considered dead, which is reasonable. Why wouldn’t you declare you are alive unless you’ve been killed in the games?

Although the show is broadcast worldwide, the cameras can’t cover every inch of the battlefield that is called the Playa. Woo told me that the Playa is a new name for what the Amerikaz once called Disneyland. It’s located in a neighborhood called Zanaheim, near the capital of Sol.

I don’t understand when people consider the Monster Show a game, because it’s not. This is a ritual our nation believes in. A sacrifice to the gods. To the god we call Burning Man.

The highway to the capital of Sol is beautiful, filled with fancy cars, and lined with palm trees. We don’t have those in the city of Eve. Everyone is excited. We can hear the drone of celebrations from far away. The celebration this year is going to be a special one because it is the tenth year of the Monster Show, which was invented when I was six years old. Every step closer, my heart beats louder, and gets bigger in my chest.

We pass by a huge Burning Man effigy on the way. Students have to lower their voices and heads when passing, paying respects to what we treat as god.

The bus enters the Dizny neighborhood as fireworks blast against the daylight. I see white zeppelins in the sky, occupied with teachers and senior students waving at us. They are last year’s graduates that are greeting us and wishing us a good Ranking Day from the balconies in the zeppelins.

The Grand School dome is a little lower in the sky than the zeppelins. With the sunrays reflecting from its curving surface, the dome seems to be radiating outward. In front of us, dozens of other buses drive slowly toward the dome. Huge, booming speakers are pumping music that sounds like restless heartbeats on a nearby dance floor. To the left and right, girls are dressed in bright yellow latex trousers, dancing with colorful pink scarves in their hands. Beautiful, muscular boys are playing the big drums that are strapped on their broad shoulders. Senior boys tease and take pictures of us. Ariadna poses for the camera instantly. I shy away, but she pulls me into the frame. I plaster my fake smile on and let the flashes hit me. I blink, like always, and mess up the photo shoot.

Hundreds of girls, younger than sixteen, jog next to the bus and throw purple flowers at us. I recognize these flowers. They’re called
Passiflora
; passion flowers that have ten petals. I told you we’re crazy about the number ten. Orange and green flowers also adorn the buses. Stray, single flowers fly through the windows. Ariadna catches one and sticks it in my hair. It smells surprisingly pleasant. Half of Timmy’s body is out of the window as he waves like crazy at the crowd and blows kisses to the girls. Ariadna tries to pull him back in, but she ends up with one of his sneakers in her hands instead. Faustina, sitting with her legs crossed, is blowing kisses from her hand to the crowd outside as if she were a queen. Sam is silent and unimpressed, and doesn’t take off his shades.

When I look at Eva, my eyes almost pop out. She is dancing on her own, but she is smiling. I admire her enjoying herself even when she thinks she is going to die a couple of hours from now. She doesn’t know she is going to become a Seven today. I would love to see the look on her face when she gets ranked, but I won’t. I will be fighting for my life by then, if I’m not already dead.

Oh. My. God. What have I done?

Have you ever planned for something for months, wished for it to happen, and counted the days? Then when the moment comes and you make your brave move, the one you were so sure was right, you suddenly discover that you were a coward, and not up to what you had planned?

Even though I desperately want to find Woo, I am somewhat regretting my actions. All this celebrating makes it harder for me to stay strong. This emotional euphoria feels like the huge party I have never been to. The one I wish I was invited to if I were ever popular at school. If I had stayed a Seven, I would have been dancing and enjoying this ceremony.

Stay strong Decca. Don’t give in. You can do this! 
I think to myself.

I see girls waving flags with Faya’s national sign on it. It’s a closed shape of ten sides and ten angels, called a Decagon. This is how Faya is geographically designed. Ten major cities, each one located between two angles. The ten cities are called Noo, Aft, Eve, Sun, Twi, Dus, Mor, Nig, Mid, and Daw. The city in the middle of the decagon is called Sol, the capital.

The buses start to slow down.

“What’s going on?” I ask Ariadna.

“We have to listen to some boring speech from Prophet Xitler,” a boy tells us.

Prophet Hannibal Xitler is like what they used to call a president in the Amerikaz. His name is pronounced
Zitler
with a Z. The X is a symbol that represents a Ten – which he is not. He is a Nine, but he is the prophet and can do what he likes. We are told X equals ten in some ancient pre-Amerikaz language.

We get out of the bus into a huge circular park-like space in front of Grand School. Thousands of students throng everywhere. Two huge screens, made of flexible fiber, roll down from two zeppelins.

A beautiful woman appears on the screen greeting all teens, reminding us that this is the most important day of our lives. She is a Nine. Her name is Eliza Day.

Eliza introduces Prophet Xitler. “On such a fabulous occasion, and on a day that has shaped the history of Faya, here is a word from our Prophet Xitler!”

Prophet Xitler is ugly. He has a large irregular nose, white stiff hair, and resembles a mad scientist. He is tall but chubby, and loves to chuckle at every silly comment. It is rumored that he has never actually attended college. One of the privileges of Eights and Nines is that they get to
attend college. Sevens have to have a scholarship. All the others will not get a higher education because they are the brute workforce of Faya.

Someone claps in the crowd. Slowly, someone else joins in, and then
someone else. Dictatorship is like a disease. It doesn’t hit you in the face. It spreads slowly until it grows bigger than you think it ever could.

Finally, we hail Prophet Xitler, spreading our arms making a V sign, imitating the Burning Man’s two arms reaching for the sky.

Prophet Xitler starts his annual speech. It’s the same story we hear every year. The story of Faya, the country that rose out of the ashes of a place that was once called the Amerikaz. He recites how his ancestors, the Xitlers, rebuilt this nation after finding a large wooden effigy of a man set on fire in the Nevada desert, where the remains of Amerikaz’s civilization had been collected in large containers and buried in the sand underneath. The effigy of the man on fire is called the Burning Man. It was more of an x-marks-the-spot sign, as if the few survivors of the last days of the Amerikaz left it for us on purpose. They wanted us to dig and find the containers, which contained everything about their civilization. They wanted us to avoid the mistakes that caused their extinction. They wanted someone to use their experience and rebuild a new Amerikaz after the world had ended. They wanted to warn us of the Bad Kidz who caused the uprisings against the governments of Amerikaz. That’s why we have our ranking system and the Monster Show ritual, so we don’t allow the little Monsters to bring down our nation with their recklessness and irresponsible behavior like in the Amerikaz.

We call the containers the Arc.

People in Faya worship the Burning Man and think of it as God. The Monster Show is the killing ritual that cleanses the nation’s sins, like a human sacrifice for the gods.

“It is an important day for the nation of Faya,” notes Xitler in his gushy voice. “The tenth year since we’ve developed the Monster Show sacrifices for the Burning Man.”

This is the thirty-fourth year of the Ranking system. The Summit developed the Monster Show only ten years ago, when they found out that all uprising attempts were led by teens with ranks lower than Five. Before that, rankings went all the way down to Four, Three, Two, and One. All old Ones, Twos, Threes, and Fours are called Nones now. Nones are not treated as Monsters. They are considered Fives until they die, but we don’t have many more of them left. The youngest None is twenty-six. I don’t have friend that old.

“The Ranking system has made us a great nation that the world looks up to,” rants Xitler. “The growth in economy, quality of living, and our place in the world is at its zenith and it’s all  thanks to you, Burning Man!”

Xitler thanks all teens.