Ammit pushed him so hard that Mesel went sprawling on the tiles. “I’m back and he’s not. That’s all I’ve got to say and all you need to hear. Leave me alone.”
He went to the end of the bench, sat down, and put his hands to the sides of his bent head. It was a posture I’d seen many times on baseball fields, most often when a pitcher gave up a key hit and got pulled. It was the posture of a loser, not a winner. But of course we would all be losers, unless something happened.
Save her, Leah’s gray maid had whispered to me. And was I now supposed to save them all, just because my hair was blond under repeated applications of dirt? It was absurd. Cla continued to eye-fuck me. He intended to still be around at dinnertime.
Come the last death match of the day, I wouldn’t even be able to save myself.
The next one to return was Murf. One of his eyes was swollen shut and the right shoulder of his shirt was damp with blood. Stooks saw, understood that his comedy partner was no more, gave a soft cry, and covered his eyes.
We waited, watching the door. At last it opened and Jaya came in. She was as pale as windowglass, but seemingly unmarked. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“I had to,” she said. Not just to me, to all of us. “I had to, or they would have killed us both.”
2
The second set was called—Yanno to fight Doc Freed, Iota to fight Jackah, Mesel to fight Sam. When they were gone, I sat down next to Jaya. She wouldn’t look at me, but the words spilled out of her, as if keeping them in would burst something inside her.
“He couldn’t really fight, you know how he is, how he was, but he put up a show of it. For me, I think. They were crying for blood, you’ll hear it when your turn comes, crying for him to put the bitch down, crying for me to get behind him and stab him in the neck—”
“There are knives?” I asked.
“No, spears with short handles. Also gloves with spikes on the knuckles. They’re laid out on the table where the drinks were when we practiced. They want you in close, you know, they want to see as much stabbing and punching as they can before someone goes down, but I took one of the poles, you know, the…” She mimed a swing.
“The fighting sticks.”
“Yes. We went around and around. Fremmy was dead, his throat cut, and Hamey almost slipped in the blood. Wale was lying on the track.”
“Yuh,” Ammit said without looking up. “Stupid git tried to run.”
“We were the last. That was when Aaron said five minutes more or we’d both be put down. He could see we weren’t really trying. Hamey ran at me, waving his little spear off to one side, so stupid, and I hit him in the stomach with the butt of my stick. He screamed. He dropped the spear on the grass and kept screaming.”
Hamey’s stomach, I thought. His endlessly sick stomach.
“I couldn’t stand the sound. They were applauding and laughing and saying things like good hit and the kitty brought him low with that, and Hamey kept screaming. I picked up the spear. I never killed anybody but I couldn’t stand him screaming, so I… I…”
“You can stop there,” I said.
She looked at me, eyes full, cheeks wet. “You have to do something, Charlie. If you’re the prince that was promised, you have to do something.”
I could have told her that Prince Charlie’s first job would be not getting killed by Cla, but I thought she felt badly enough without that, so I just gave her a brief hug.
“Is he there? The Flight Killer?”
She shuddered and nodded.
“What does he look like?” I was thinking of that seat of honor with the armrests slanting outward, as if whoever it was meant for was extremely fat or at least extremely bulky.
“Awful. Awful. His face is green, as if there’s something wrong with him inside. Long white hair falling down his cheeks from under the crown he wears. His eyes are as big as soft-boiled eggs. It’s a broad face, so wide it’s hardly human. His lips are fat and red, like he was eating strawberries. That was all of him I could see. He’s swaddled in a huge purple robe from the chin down, but I could see it moving. Like he was holding a pet underneath. He’s awful. Monstrous. And he laughs. The others applauded when I… when Hamey died, but he just laughed. Drool came out of his mouth on both sides, I saw it in the gaslights. There was a woman beside him, tall and beautiful, with a little beauty mark beside her mouth…”
“Petra,” I said. “A man grabbed her by the boob and kissed her neck after I knocked Ammit down.”