“If you killed him, you’ll pay a high price,” Yanno said. Then added, with unmistakable relief: “There won’t be no Fair One.”
“There will be,” Hamey said dolefully. “Flight Killer won’t wait. Red Molly’ll take Eye’s place.”
But Eye wasn’t killed. He eventually got to his feet, staggered to his pallet, and lay down on it. For the next two days he couldn’t speak above a whisper. Until Cla came, he was the biggest of us, the strongest, the one you would have expected to still be standing when the blood sport known as the Fair One came to an end, yet I had never even seen the throat-punch that took him down.
Who was supposed to stand against a man who could do that in the first round of the competition?
According to Kellin, that honor would go to me.
5
I often dreamed of Radar, but on the night after Cla took Iota down, I dreamed of Princess Leah. She wore a red dress with an empire waist and a tightly fitted bodice. Peeping from beneath the hem were matching red shoes, their buckles encrusted with diamonds. Her hair was tied back with a complicated rope of pearls. She wore a golden locket in the shape of a butterfly on the swell of her bosom. I was sitting beside her, not dressed in the rags of the clothes I’d been wearing when I came to Empis with my sick and dying dog but in a dark suit and a white shirt. The suit was velvet. The shirt was silk. On my feet were suede boots with folded tops—the sort of boots a Dumas musketeer might wear in a Howard Pyle illustration. From Dora’s collection, no doubt. Falada was grazing contentedly nearby while Leah’s gray-skinned handmaid groomed her with a brush.
Leah and I were holding hands and looking at our reflections in a still pool of water. My hair was long and golden. My few spots of acne were gone. I was handsome and Leah was beautiful, especially so because her mouth had returned. Her lips were curved in a small smile. There were dimples at the corners of her mouth, but no sign of a sore. Soon, if the dream held, I would kiss those red lips. Even in this dream I recognized it for what it was: the final sequence of an animated Disney film. At any moment a petal would fall into the pool, rippling the water and making our reflections waver as the lips of the reunited prince and princess met and the music soared. No darkness would be allowed to mar the perfect storybook ending.
Only one thing was out of place. In the lap of her red dress, Princess Leah was holding a purple hairdryer. I knew it well, even though I’d only been seven when my mother died. All of her useful things, including that, had gone to the Goodwill Store because my father said every time he looked at what he called her “woman stuff,” his heart broke again. I had no problem with him giving most of it away, only asked if I could keep her pine sachet and her hand mirror. Dad had no problem with that, either. They were still on my dresser at home.
Mom had called her hairdryer the Purple Raygun of Death.
I opened my mouth to ask Leah why she had my mom’s hairdryer, but before I could, her maid spoke: “Help her.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
Leah smiled with her new and perfect mouth. She stroked my cheek. “You’re faster than you think, Prince Charlie.”
I started to tell her I wasn’t fast at all, which was why I’d played on the line in football and first base in baseball. It was true I’d shown some speed in the Turkey Bowl game against Stanford, but that had been a short and adrenalin-fueled exception. Before I could say anything, though, something hit me in the face and I jerked awake.
It was another piece of steak—a small one, hardly more than a scrap. Pursey shuffled down the corridor, tossing a few more small pieces into other cells, saying “Wef’ovas, wef’ovas.” Which I assumed was the best he could do with leftovers.
Hamey was snoring away, exhausted by “playtime” and his usual post-dinner struggle to empty his bowels. I took my little bit of steak, sat with my back against the cell wall, and bit into it. Something crackled under my front teeth. I looked and saw a piece of paper, hardly bigger than a fortune cookie fortune, tucked into a slice in the meat. I took it out. Written in neat and tiny cursive, the handwriting of an educated man, was this:
I will help you if I can, my prince. There is a way out of here from the Officials’ Room. It is dangerous. Destroy this if you value my life. Yours in Service, PERCIVAL.
Percival, I thought. Not Pursey but Percival. Not a gray slavey but a real man with a real name.
I ate the paper.
6
The next day we had sausages for breakfast. We all knew what that meant. Hamey looked at me with desolate eyes and a smile. “At least I’m done with the belly cramps. No more straining to shit, either. Do you want these?”