Chapter 3
For breakfast, each of us had a portion of brown mush we’d scraped from the insides of the paper bag. I think it was bread, cheese, and maybe dry cereal, but everything of course tasted like the chicken soup whose container Bones had crushed earlier. Then we set to making foot protection for tonight.
The first time we’d managed to pick the lock on our door had been five years ago. The gods naturally caught us, beat us, then took away our shoes. We picked the next lock. They caught us and spread glass outside the bookstore. We ripped our blankets into pieces, wrapped our feet, and tried to escape again. The gods went berserk that time. They pummeled us till we blacked out. Then they took away everything we had: blankets, towels, spare clothes. They even talked about shaving our heads, fearing that we’d pull out our thigh-long hair and wrap our feet with that, but they quickly snapped out of it and let us keep our hair, the clothes we wore, and the books. They saw nothing dangerous in the books.
“Now your left leg,” Fox said, gently patting my left ankle.
I nodded and placed my left foot on the somber gray cover of The Guide to Your Child: How to Raise an Obedient Kid from Day Zero to the Teen Years. There was a picture of a skinny, frightened girl under this heavy title, and the book itself, a massive cloth-bound tome, had been Fox’s pillow up till this morning. Today he insisted my soles be made out of this book’s cover because, in his opinion, the cardboard there was the thickest and strongest in the store.
“Don’t slouch,” Fox reminded me.
I sat up straighter on my bed of books and magazines.
“Good,” Fox murmured, pushing my long skirt up over my knees and repositioning my foot a quarter of an inch closer to the book’s spine. Then, using the metal trip lever from inside of our toilet tank—we’d sharpened one end of it against a cement wall—he began to scratch an outline of my foot on the book’s cover.
Since he absurdly feared that I would move my foot while he was doing it, he held me down by the ankle. He also kept on reassuring me that he was almost done. When he reached behind my heel with his lever, his face came close to my knee, and suddenly, Fox was pressing his swollen mouth to my skin. I sobbed. Ever since the gods had left, I’d been fighting my tears, but I could no longer. Large, scorching drops fell on my hands, my thighs, and the shreds of the ruffles I’d been ripping off my dress so we would have something to tie the cardboard soles to our feet with tonight.
“Crying!” Demi scoffed. “That’ll work miracles for us when we’re escaping and Fox can’t fight. No, really, Ev, would it have friggin’ killed you to stick to the Plan and feign a stumble and let Fox quietly lift the key from Rig? Five months Fox was learning to pickpocket. Five months we starved ourselves for tonight. Five months we—”
“Demi,” Fox said evenly, “if there’s anyone who could be stewing right now, it should be me, but I’m fine.” He kissed my knee again.
I turned away from him, and my tears splattered the July issue of the Gifted Times magazine that lay next to my thigh. Nobody was looking at it, but its cover was etched in my memory. It was a portrait of a laughing teen girl. Her red lipsticked mouth was pulled taut over her sharp teeth, and her dark, slightly narrowed eyes glimmered with malice. A black-lettered title cut her in two across her waist: “Young, Gifted, and Dangerous.”
Demi made a guttural sound. “You’re fine? How could you even forgive this slut for what happened before the gods showed up?”
Fox raised his eyebrows. “Slut? Didn’t Sin admit he started that kiss?”
“Yes, but she kissed him back.”
Fox smiled unpleasantly. “Well, that makes them both slutty, doesn’t it? But that’s beside the point. What I want you to understand, Dem, is this: if Sin touches Ever again, I will find a way to break his neck no matter how carefully you protect him. Are we clear on that?”
The echo from his last words reverberated in the room. After it went quiet, Fox lovingly tapped on my foot, meaning I was allowed to move it off the cover so he could cut the sole out, following the outline he had made. He also glanced at my hands to help me see what I was doing, and I felt divided between gratitude and annoyance: I could tie pieces of polyester together blindly.
Cr-r-rack. Demi stripped a book of its cover. Picked the next volume. Crack. We didn’t need any more cardboard, but she kept on ripping books, her blond curls clinging to her sweaty face and her blue eyes—unlike mine, they matched perfectly—glowering at me.
Sinna gently stacked the damaged books against the wall.
Demi hurled the covers that had accumulated in her lap onto the floor. “And of course now Rig’s curious. Any dimwit would wonder why Ever’s always wiped out here, in two friggin’ rooms with supposedly nothing to do.”
I balled my fists.
“And naturally,” Demi raged on, “Ever can’t pretend to be feeling swell. Dang it, I’ve never seen anyone who could fake stuff worse than Ev. The only thing she can passably do well is to look empty-faced, like she’s missing half of her brain.”
The fabric scraps flew off my lap. “You know what? I wouldn’t be anywhere near this tired if you didn’t make me do all those body contortions from that sadistic Martial Arts Bible of yours for ten hours every day!”
Demi curled her lip. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have bothered teaching you to fight. You’re nothing but a burden—weak and blind—and tonight—”
Fox rapped his lever against the floor. “Dem!”
She held his gaze defiantly, but redness crept up her cheeks. She picked up one of the ties I had made, wound it around her forefinger, unwound it, then muttered guiltily, “Nice knots, Ev.”
Since I’d made enough ties for tonight, I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Fox asked, his fingers coiling around my ankle tenderly, but firmly.
I blinked. Actually, I hadn’t been going anywhere—I just wanted to give my speech standing. The whole of the last night, I’d been organizing it in my head, and by morning I’d nailed them: five reasons why we shouldn’t try to escape. Except now Fox had scattered my thoughts with his question. Annoyed, I waddled in place, straining to reassemble my reasons, but the only thing I clearly recalled was that I had decided to deliver my address standing to sound more impressive.
I sat back down. After everyone returned to the sole-making, I flipped open a miniature chess set, the only game we had, and started shuffling the pieces. The way their magnetic bottoms glided along the board—smoothly, almost swimmingly—focused me. I began to remember what I’d wanted to say.
I’d planned to start by pointing out that we had no idea how the world outside worked. Yes, Rig and sometimes Bones had chatted with us, telling us things. That’s how we learned that it was NYC outside this mall, and that it was the twenty-first century, and that people had thought it would be paradise on earth after it had been discovered that everyone had a talent. Only it wasn’t a paradise. Instead, a new crime had arisen: stealing and selling gifted kids. Gift trafficking. At first only older kids had been snatched, yes, the ones who’d already come into their talents, but then some particular jerk—Rig had called him “that bro”—had surmised that if you looked into a baby’s dreams, you’d see what talent he’d been born with. And that’s how it had been done ever since: dreams, people who could peek into other folk’s night visions, would check out newborns’ talents, then sell this information to the highest bidder among the gift trafficking gangs, who would then hasten to kidnap the children with talents useful for theft and murder. Only, of course, the stolen kids would be useless for many years, so they locked us up to be raised by guards, who were exclusively sadists, pedophiles, and psychos. Nobody had told us the last fact, of course. We’d figured that out on our own.
Since by a stroke of luck we’d ended up in a bookstore rather than, say, a clothing department, we had plenty of printed materials to learn things from. Fox had somehow divined this most amazing skill of reading, then painstakingly taught it to the rest of us. The only problem was th
at while books had told us a prodigious amount of stuff, from word definitions to how one could survive a zombie apocalypse, there was nothing on how to make it through a normal day in a normal city. How would a bus stop look? How would you get a taxi? How would you use a phone? And it wasn’t like we could just ask any of these things after we escaped, because what if the person we stopped worked for Horgreth or some other gift-trafficking lord?
Next, I had meant to talk about our clothes. The gods handed us whatever rags they chanced upon as long as these things remotely fit us. Our current outfits weren’t the worst we’d had so far, but still, who knew how appropriate they would be to rush out of a mall and into the wide world full of normally dressed people? The only gear I didn’t doubt was Demi’s. Just yesterday Bones had brought her a pair of light blue jeans and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that said, “I Heart New York.” I had seen people dressed like that in the magazines, and besides, these clothes seemed plain enough not to invite gawking.
Less lucky, Fox had gotten a shabby, tight black suit and a weird white T-shirt with no sleeves, but only a pair of narrow bands over his shoulders. An iffy combination. But still, if Fox turned his collar up, his white shirt was almost invisible, and Fox looked almost like guys in Business Gift mags. And that’s where our luck ended because my dress, white and long, with torn ruffles and a plunging neckline, was a wedding gown, and the only time a teenage girl with vampire-pale skin, thigh-long hair, and cardboard soles might slip by unnoticed while dressed like me was probably Halloween. Which had happened two months ago.
And yet it was Sinna’s attire that I figured would do us in. Out of cruel perversity, the gods had supplied him with a loose suit of seizure-inducing periwinkle. With a pattern printed all over it. No, the color, I believed, was okay. After all, people couldn’t wear sensible colors day in and day out. But the pictures—I don’t even know how to put it—they were surreally, grotesquely bad. It was a nightmare captured on cotton. Imagine a herd of bloated, dandruff-ridden sheep. As one, they were all squinting at you, their matchstick legs splayed under them as if these beasts couldn’t hold their own weight, and their mouths, evil and crooked, emitting strings of gigantic Zs. What these letters signified I had no idea, but altogether this suit was far too sensational for someone on the run.
So our clothes and our ignorance of the world—I slid a pawn across the chessboard—that made two reasons to stay put.
The third reason was Fox. He didn’t look human, or at least not normal-human. If his talent, time, wasn’t tattooed on him, I’d have sworn he were a color, because where it came to time, he couldn’t twist it, not even a second forward or backward, but his colors were amazing. His hair, eyebrows, and irises were the hue of dark red tulips. I could just picture him playing with his colors when he was little and then forgetting to change them back. Or choosing not to. Still, whether a time or color, Fox would stand out, which, added to Sin’s and my clothes, would make people remember our motley crew, and then the gods would have a picnic of finding us.
I knocked a king off the chessboard with my pawn, trying to recall my fourth point. Oh yes, money. We had none because the gods for some reason never carried even a dime.
And my fifth reason? I couldn’t remember it, and it was the most convincing of them all. It drove me nuts, but presently, I came up with yet another reason: Sinna’s smell. The poor soul reeked of rubbing alcohol. Yesterday, very late in the evening, the gods had taken him to a doctor. Given us no explanation, naturally. After an hour or so, Sin had returned, told us the doctor had drawn a blood sample from his arm, and made us all but drunk with his alcohol stench. Then, since it had been pretty late, he’d simply gone to sleep, and now, even if he took a shower and washed his clothes, there was no time for them to dry.
We were so not going to pass for normal people out there.
I got to my feet. “Listen.”
Demi looked up, and we both saw her reflection in the steel door—she was rolling her eyes. “Ev, we’ve been here for fifteen years,” she said. “We heard all your friggin’ reasons before. Do you suggest we rot here?”
“Ev.” Fox stood up and put his arm over my shoulders. “I know you’re unhappy with my decision to try to escape this hellhole. You—and Sinna—would much rather we mastered our talents and then showed Horgreth and the gods how wrong they were to mess with us.”
“Exactly,” I began, but Fox didn’t let me finish.
“There are just two problems with that, Ev. One small and one big. So the small one is this: have you ever considered that there might have been a mistake and we might not be gifted in what our tattoos say at all? Because we’re fifteen—in fact, fifteen and three quarters in my case—and we haven’t had even a glimmer of any of our alleged talents.”
“Wait.” Sinna jumped to his feet, then quickly glanced at Demi and pressed his hand to his mouth. “No, nothing. Sorry about that,” he murmured through his fingers.
He must have wanted to tell Fox and Demi about the nightmare he’d made for me. Why’d he stopped? Maybe I should tell them…or maybe I should wait. Right now Demi just might kill me if she learned Sinna and I had shared more than a kiss.
Fox returned to his spiel, “So, as I said earlier, the dream people might have gotten our gifts wrong, and if we don’t perform real soon, Horgreth will have us killed and fed to those rottweilers. That’s the small problem.”
I suddenly recalled the ice I had tasted that morning. Yes, I’d felt the hard, cold chips on my tongue, and I’d known the people around me were frightened, which could only mean that I had sensed their emotions and that the butterfly woman had been right: I was becoming a heart!
Fox plowed on, “Now, the big problem I explained to you many times before, but it bears repeating because that’s how kids learn. Ever-Jezebel, all the hearts who have ever lived have turned evil. Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. They butchered millions. And you can only do something like this if you don’t have to feel rotten about it afterward. I guess they simply channeled happiness into themselves after the deed and went right ahead with their day. And I’m sure they didn’t start out that way, they weren’t born horrid monsters, but if you can play with your feelings—create them, erase them, channel them—then how long will it be before you start cutting ethical corners, hmm?”
I stood silent. There had been decent hearts—must have been—even if we’d never heard about them.
Fox sighed. “And I know my own moral standards are awfully low because, given an opportunity, I would not hold back from ripping any gift trafficker into bits the size of our keyhole. Nor would I stop you from channeling pain into them. Save for one catch. If you channel torture, it’ll be all agony in your nerves. No love for me at all. Then, of course, you’ll kill the pain and you’ll love me again, but with time—and I can only imagine how dreadfully short that time will be—you’ll feel that your love for me is just another feeling, nothing special, and why even go back to it if your feelings are your juggling pins? And then, with no goodness in you and no love, you’ll abandon me, and I—” His voice broke, and he pulled me into a crushing hug. “I will die without you.”
Terrified, I hugged him back.
“So, you see that I’m right, don’t you?” he said.
Yes, I saw it; his words were logical; it all made sense. I nodded into his chest, and he kissed the top of my head. “Good girl. I love you.”
“Well, that settles it.” Demi stomped in her new cardboard soles, testing them. “We’re escaping tonight. And we are going to make it.”
***
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Into the Blind is available for purchase on Amazon.com.
About the Author
Helen Rena loves reading and writing novels. And short stories. And flash fiction. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and a vast collection of books and green bottles. She is still not sure why green bottles. She lives in Southern Oregon with her husband and two children.
Please visit her at helenrena.com.
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