Most who’d won their battles for the day eagerly grabbed meat from the cart. Those who had yet to fight declined… with one exception. Cla grabbed a half-chicken from Pursey’s cart and chomped into it, his eyes never leaving me.
The blow.
Iota on the stones of his cell.
The rolling bucket.
Eye crawls to his pallet, hand at his throat.
Cla looks for the bucket, picks it up.
What was there that Iota had seen and I was missing?
The cart came to me. Aaron was watching Pursey, so there was no salute. Then Doc Freed groaned, rolled on his side, and vomited across the floor. Aaron turned and pointed at Cammit and Bendo, sitting side by side on a nearby bench. “You and you! Clean that mess up!”
I took this momentary distraction to raise my hand with my thumb and finger pinched together. I wiggled my hand in a writing gesture. Pursey gave a hardly perceptible shrug, maybe because he understood or maybe to make me stop before Aaron saw. When Aaron turned back, I was selecting a drumstick from the rolling buffet and thinking that Pursey’s understanding or lack of it wouldn’t matter if Cla killed me in the day’s final match.
“Last meal, kiddie,” that jumbo gentleman said to me. “Enjoy it.”
He’s trying to psych me out, I thought.
Of course I’d already known that, but the actual words for what he was doing brought it into focus, made it concrete. Words have that power. And they opened something inside me. A hole. Maybe even a well. It was the same thing that had opened during my nasty outings with Bertie Bird, and during my confrontations with Christopher Polley, and Peterkin the dwarf. If I was a prince, it certainly wasn’t of the kind where the movie ended with the vapidly pretty blond guy embracing the vapidly pretty girl. There was nothing pretty about my dirt-caked blond hair, and my battle with Cla wouldn’t be pretty, either. It might be short, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
I thought, I don’t want to be a Disney prince. To hell with that. If I have to be a prince, I want to be a dark one.
“Stop looking at me, fuckface,” I said.
His smile was replaced with a look of surprised puzzlement, and I realized why even before I threw my drumstick at him. It was because that word, fuckface, came from the well, came out in English, and he hadn’t understood it. I missed him by a mile—the drumstick clanged on one of the buckets and fell to the floor—but he jerked in surprise anyway and turned toward the sound. Eris laughed. He swiveled toward her and got to his feet. The constant grin became a snarl.
“Nah, nah, nah!” Aaron shouted. “Save it for the field, kiddie, or I’ll shock you so badly you won’t be able to go out and Charlie will be declared winner by default. Flight Killer won’t like that, and I’ll make you like it less!”
Disgruntled and fuming, clearly off his game for the moment, Cla resumed his seat, glowering at me. It was my turn to grin. It felt dark and it felt good. I pointed at him.
“I’m going to fuck you up, honey.”
Bold words. I might regret them, but when they came out, they felt just fine.
5
Some time after “noons,” the fourth set was called. Again there was the waiting, and one by one they came back: Double first, then Stooks, Quilly last. Stooks was bleeding from a cheek so badly cut I could see the gleam of his teeth, but he was walking under his own power. Jaya gave him a towel to stanch the worst of the bleeding and he sat on a bench near the buckets, the white towel quickly turning red. Freed was propped in the corner close by. Stooks asked if there was anything Doc could do for his slashed face. Freed shook his head without looking up. The idea that the wounded were supposed to fight another round, and soon, was crazy—beyond sadistic—but I had no doubt it was true. Murf had killed one half of the comedy team; if he drew Stooks in the second round, Murf would put him down easily, stabbed shoulder or no stabbed shoulder.
Cla was still looking at me, but the grin was gone. I thought his appraisal of me as an easy kill might have changed, which meant I couldn’t count on him to be careless.
He’ll move fast, I thought. The way he moved on Eye. In my dream, Leah had said You’re faster than you think, Prince Charlie… only I really wasn’t. Unless, that was, I was able to find some hate-powered overdrive gear.
The fifth set was called: Bernd and Gully, little Hilt and big Ocka, Eris and a short but muscular fellow named Viz. Before Eris left, Jaya embraced her.
“Nah, nah, none of that!” one of the night guards said in his unpleasant locust-like buzz. “Hump, hump!”