I didn’t care, because it wasn’t going to get a chance to leak very much. I snatched it and gulped it down. There was grit in it, but I didn’t care about that, either. It was heaven.
“Blow him while you’re at it, why don’t you?” another voice asked. “Give him a good old sucking, Hames, that’ll bring him around smart as a pony-whip!”
“Where am I?”
Hamey leaned forward again, wanting to be confidential. I abhorred his breath, it was making my head ache even worse, but I stood it because I had to know. Now that I was coming around a little and leaving my wishful dream of Radar behind, I was surprised I wasn’t dead.
“Maleen,” he whispered. “Deep Maleen. Ten…” Something, some word I didn’t know. “… below the palace.”
“Twenty!” Eye shouted. “And you’ll never see the sun again, new boy! None of us will, so get used to it!”
I took the cup from Hamey and made my way across the cell, feeling like Radar at her oldest and weakest. I filled it, put my finger over the water trickling from the small hole in the bottom, and drank again. The boy who once watched Turner Classic Movies and ordered online from Amazon was in a dungeon. No way to mistake it for anything else. Cells ran along both sides of a dank corridor. Gas lamps protruded from the walls between a few of the cells, muttering bluish-yellow light. Water dripped down from the hewn rock ceiling. There were puddles in the central passage. Across from me, a big fellow wearing what looked like the remains of long underwear bottoms saw me looking at him and jumped up on the bars, shaking them and making monkey noises. His chest was bare, wide, and hairy. His face was broad, his forehead was low, he was ugly as fuck… but there was none of that creeping disfigurement I’d seen on my way to this charming abode, and his voice was all present and accounted for.
“Welcome, new boy!” It was Eye… which, I found out later, was short for Iota. “Welcome to hell! When the Fair One comes… if it comes… I believe I’ll rip your liver out and wear it for a hat. First round you, second round whoever they send against me! Until then, have a pleasant stay!”
Down the corridor, near an iron-banded wooden door at the end, another prisoner, this one female, yelled, “You should have stayed in the Citadel, kiddie!” Then, lower: “And so should I. Starving would have been better.”
Hamey walked to the corner of the cell opposite the water bucket, dropped his pants, and squatted over a hole in the floor. “I got the bads. Might have been field mushrooms.”
“What, a year and more since you et any?” Eye asked. “You got the bads, all right, but mushrooms got nothing to do with it.”
I closed my eyes.
3
Time passed. I don’t know how much, but I began to feel a little more like myself. I could smell dirt and damp and gas from the jets that gave this place some semblance of light. I heard the plink of falling water and prisoners moving around, sometimes talking to each other, or maybe to themselves. My cellmate was sitting near the water bucket, staring morosely at his hands.
“Hamey?”
He looked up.
“What are whole ones?”
He snorted laughter, then grimaced and clutched his stomach. “We are. Are you foolish? Did you drop from the sky?”
“Pretend I did.”
“Sit over here next to me.” And when I hesitated: “Nah, nah, never worry about me. I ain’t gointer tickle your nuts, if that’s what you think. Might have a flea or two hop over to you, is all. I ain’t even been able to get stiff these last six months or so. Bad guts’ll do that.”
I sat down next to him and he gave my knee a clap.
“That’s better. I don’t like to speak for all those ears. Not that it matters what they hear, we’re all fish in the same bucket, but I keep myself to myself—it’s how I was taught.” He sighed. “Worryin’ don’t help my poor guts any, I can tell you that. Seeing the numbers go up and up and up? Nasty! Twenty-five… twenty-six… now thirty-one. And they’ll never go to sixty-four, Eye’s right about that. Once we whole ones was like a full sack of sugar, but now the sack’s empty except for the last few crystals.”
Did he say crystals? Or something else? My headache was trying to come back, my legs ached from walking and pedaling and running, and I was tired. It was as if I’d been scooped out somehow.
Hamey gave out another sigh that turned into a coughing fit. He held his belly until it passed. “Flight Killer and his…” Some strange word my mind couldn’t translate, something like ruggamunkas. “… keep shaking the sack, though. Won’t be content until he gets every last fucking one of us. But… sixty-four? Nah, nah. This’ll be the last Fair One, and I’ll be among the first to go. Maybe the very first. Ain’t strong, you see. Got the bads and food don’t stick to me.”