“Good run!” said Stooks.
“Better than sex!” said Fremmy.
“Except for with you,” said Stooks.
“Yes,” Fremmy agreed, “I do give good sex.”
I reached for another cup and one of our guards pointed his stick at me. “Nah, nah, one to a customer, kiddie.”
Except one to a customer, of course, wasn’t what he said.
2
Next came playtime, which was on the whole less brutal than football practice. Until the end, that was.
First came the balls. There were sixteen of them in three bags. They looked like beachballs, but were sheathed in a silvery substance that weighted them down. For all I knew, it was silver. I could see my distorted reflection in the side of mine: dirty face, dirty hair. I decided I wasn’t going to wash my hair, no matter how grotty it felt. I didn’t think I was the “true prince, the one come to save us,” I couldn’t even save myself, but I had no wish to be singled out. I had seen the palace’s torture chamber and had no desire to be a guest there.
We formed two lines of fifteen. Hamey was the odd man out, and one of the guards used his limber stick to command him to toss the sixteenth ball up and down. Which Hamey did, in lackadaisical fashion. He was still out of breath from his walk up the inclined corridor and his one partial turn around the track. He saw me looking at him and gave me a smile, but the eyes above it were desolate. He might as well have had I’LL BE THE FIRST ONE TO GO tattooed on his forehead.
The rest of us threw the weighted balls—five pounds or so—back and forth. There wasn’t much to it, just an arms and upper body warm-up, but many of my fellow prisoners clearly hadn’t been athletically inclined in their old lives, because there were a lot of fumbles. I found myself wondering if most had been the equivalent of white-collar workers in the place they called the Citadel before the overthrow of the Butterfly Monarchy （little unintended pun there）。 Some were in good shape and a few had moves—Eye was one, Eris was another, Tom and Ammit were two more—but the rest were pretty clumsy. Coach Harkness would have called them gluefoots （never gluefeet）。 Fremmy and Stooks were gluefoots; so were Jaya and Double. Dommy had size, but he also had that cough. Then there was Hamey, who was, as Iota said, useless.
I was partnered with Iota. He tossed a series of soft lobs, shotputting our ball off the heel of his hand, so I did the same. We were told to take a step back after each pair of throws. After ten minutes or so of this, we were ordered back to the track for another run. Hamey tried his best, but soon slowed to a walk. I was jogging this time, basically lazing along. Ammit caught up to me easily, although his bowlegged stride caused him to rock side to side like a tugboat in a moderate swell. As we passed the VIPs, he swerved and bumped me again, only this time it wasn’t really a bump but a good old-fashioned shoulder-check. I wasn’t expecting it and went sprawling. Jaya tripped over me and went to her knees with a grunt. The others swerved around us.
We had finally captured the full attention of the swells in the box. They were looking at Jaya and me, pointing and laughing the way Andy, Bertie, and I might have laughed at some slapstick comedy routine in a movie.
I helped Jaya up. One of her elbows was bleeding. I asked if she was okay. She said she was, then ran on as one of the night soldiers approached with his limber stick raised. “No touching, kiddie! Nah, nah, nah!” I raised a hand, partly to show I understood, mostly to ward off a blow of the limber stick if he decided to launch one at my face.
The night soldier retreated a step. I caught up with Ammit. “Why did you do that?”
His answer was one I could have heard from any of the stonebrained, would-be Alpha dogs I’d played sports with over the years—and there are plenty of them. If you’ve played, especially in high school, you know. Those are the guys who end up hanging by the fence at practice in their twenties or thirties, building beer-guts and talking about their glory days. “Felt like it.”
Which meant Ammit needed a lesson. If he didn’t get one, the bumping and pushing and tripping would never stop.
After a single circuit of the track, we were sent to the rings and told to do pull-ups. Half of my fellows could do five; six or seven could do one or two; I did a dozen, then stupidly decided to show off. “Watch this!” I told Eye and Hamey.
I pulled myself up again and skinned the cat, legs over my head, a perfect three-sixty revolution. I had barely landed when I was whipped across the small of the back, and hard. First came the pain, then the burn, sinking in.