Chapter 9
Law 2
Fifteen Forever
I’ll find you, I promise, Quinn whispered as she leaned toward him, eyes closed, lips perfectly puckered. His heart raced. She was going to kiss him. He shivered with anticipation. This is it. This is finally it! He put his arms around her and was about to pull her closer when she spoke. He took a step back when the voice that came out of her mouth wasn’t her voice at all.
“Will he make it?” a boy asked in hushed tones. His voice sounded young yet somehow ancient.
“Yes,” responded a second accented voice.
“He’s been asleep for days,” said the ancient voice after a heavy silence.
“The body needs rest to heal. He will come through fine.”
“There’s a new girl. She fought for him, gave my boys a good show too. She threw a spear ten meters with no trouble, and I heard she kicked Nishi in the face. Love to have seen that.” The boy chuckled before continuing. “Fix him up good, Doc; we can use one like him.”
The dream was fading, but Akeem didn’t want it to. Quinn’s lips were so close he could still feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek. He wanted to sink back into unconsciousness and back to her but people were talking and they wouldn’t shut up and there was pain, lots of pain. His arm throbbed and burned, making his eyebrows knit over his closed eyelids. Reluctantly, he forced his heavy lids open. He was stretched out on a wooden pallet cushioned with moss. The earthy smell seeped through the blanket and tickled his nose. He was under a rectangular-shaped, four-legged shelter with no walls and leaves for a roof. The arrow was gone from his shoulder, replaced with a crudely tied bandage. He touched his shoulder and moaned.
He wasn’t alone under the thatched roof. There were two other boys lying on identical, handmade beds. One boy, snoring lightly, rested on his side facing Akeem, his leg wrapped in a roughly made cast. His large front teeth and slumber-spiked hair reminded Akeem of a rabbit. He rolled over in his sleep, and Akeem noticed a second boy in much worse shape. He had long gashes across his chest and shoulders that were stitched together with rough black thread. His right arm and hand were thickly bandaged and propped up on a makeshift pillow. Akeem turned his head away quickly when he realized the boy was missing three fingers.
He turned his gaze outward toward a raging fire with a throng of boys dancing wildly around it. More boys reclined on the ground lazily watching the dance and others sprawled across the ground in undisturbed slumber. Before he could get a look at anything else, his vision blurred and his head spun, causing everything around him to shift. He put his hand to his head and moaned, swallowing down his rising nausea.
“You’re awake.” An Indian boy with a heavy accent appeared at his side. He was painfully thin, with thick square glasses over large coal-black eyes.
“Where am I…my backpack?” Akeem asked as he raised himself uneasily onto his elbows.
“All right now, it’s a bit too soon for that. Your rucksack is just over there; it’s safe. We may be murderers, but we are not thieves. Well, at least we don’t steal from each other,” the boy said cynically as he lowered Akeem back down to the bed. Akeem’s head was swimming too much to make sense of what the boy was saying. He laid there panting shallowly as someone approached.
“Doc,” said a jittery white-haired boy with a yellowing bruise below his right eye.
“Hello, little Mouse,” Doc said, ruffling the boy’s hair.
“Gideon wants more bhang,” he said, hopping from foot to foot nervously. Doc huffed angrily.
“Tell Gideon he’s finished the last. There will not be more until tomorrow.” The small boy gulped and twitched nervously. “Go on, Mouse, he won’t hurt you. Just tell him I said so.” Doc sent the boy off with a reassuring pat on the back. Mouse smiled uncertainly before dashing away. Finally, the thin boy turned back to Akeem. “Here, drink this,” he said, passing a dented metal cup. Akeem took a careful sip. It was bitter and tasted suspiciously like grass and mud.
“What is this?” Akeem winced.
“Tea made with willow bark and meadow grass; it’s horrible yes, but it will ease your pain.” Akeem took a deep breath then drank the rest of the tea in one gulp, singeing the inside of his throat. Doc smiled broadly and Akeem had the impression that it had been a very long time since the thin boy had cracked even the smallest smile.
“Take it easy, it’s not that bad.” Doc chuckled as Akeem coughed and gagged.
“Where’s the doctor?” Akeem asked when his head finally stopped spinning.
“It is only me,” the boy said timidly.
“Wait, you took that arrow out of my arm? But you’re just a kid; they just let you play doctor? You could have killed me,” Akeem said a bit harsher than he meant to.
“You must have a purpose if you wish to survive in Fifteen. Since I have a lesser desire to kill than I do to cure, I choose to cure, or at least I try,” the boy said pointedly. Akeem looked at his arm, moved it around tentatively, and then realized things could be much worse. This kid had somehow managed to take an arrow out of his arm without him feeling a thing. He must have stitched him up too. That realization awed Akeem, and he looked at the kid with newfound respect.
“Hey, man, thanks for fixing me up. I’m Akeem.” He reached a hand out apologetically, and the thin boy shook it appraisingly.
“Akeem? Your name translates as “the wise one”; let’s hope it to be true. My parents named me Banu, but everyone calls me Doc.”
“How did you learn to do this?” Akeem asked, admiring his bandaged arm.
“My mother and father were doctors—my aunts, uncles, several cousins. Of course, they intended for me to follow in their footsteps. I have studied the science of medicine since the age of four. Yet I have never cared much for it. I wanted to be a magician when I grew up.”
Akeem chuckled. “When I was five, I wanted to be the guy that paints the lines down the middle of the highway.” Doc tried very hard to suppress his laughter, but eventually it burst out, and together they laughed at the silliness of their younger selves.
“You are indeed wise; you have given me something I have needed for a very long time.” Doc grinned before gazing toward the fire. Akeem looked also. One by one boys were falling to the ground and dropping off to sleep.
“And what’s that?” Akeem finally asked.
“Laughter,” Doc said, but as he said it his eyes clouded over and the smile faded slowly from his lips. Akeem followed Doc’s line of vision and noticed a stout boy walking with purpose in their direction. “Please excuse me for a moment,” Doc said and hurried out to meet the boy. Akeem watched as they argued. Finally, the large boy pushed Doc to the ground and kicked dirt in his face. Akeem jumped to his feet but was stricken by a wave of vertigo. His knees buckled and he had to grip the table to steady himself. The large boy sneered at him before storming off, back the way he came. Doc stood wearily and brushed himself off before returning.
“I guess that was Gideon.”
“Yes, but I prefer to call him ‘oh mighty hunk of cow dung.’ Not to worry, next time I’ll add a little something special to Gideon’s bhang that he won’t soon forget.” Doc winked.
“Hey, Doc, where are we?” Akeem asked as the boy helped him lie back down.
“This is the Dog House, as it is so affectionately called.” The boy spread his arms out, and Akeem took a good look around. They were in a large clearing at the base of a mountain covered in trees. He glimpsed a few strangely made dwellings scattered high among the wide branches, linked together by bridges resembling enormous spiderwebs. Torches burned at the edge of the tree line and fire pits blazed in various locations around the camp. On the ground, there were several more shelters like the one he was resting in, each with four long legs, no walls, and leaf and twig roofs. Under the shelters, boys slept in tangled groups on nests of sticks and palm fronds.
“The Dog House? I don’t understand. How did I get here?” Akeem asked, holding his pounding
head.
“Through the cube,” Doc stated.
“What?”
“You found a golden cube recently, am I correct?” Doc asked.
“Yes…oh,” Akeem said as he remembered.
“You’re inside the cube, and here is where you will stay,” Doc said, placing a consoling hand on Akeem’s shoulder. Akeem shrugged it off.
“I can’t stay here. I need to find Quinn and get back to the basement and take care of Aly.” The whole time he was talking Doc was grimly shaking his head.
“You cannot return. Once you are here, you are always here.”
“There has to be a way out,” Akeem said frantically.
“In theory, that is correct. If there is an in, there must be an out, but we have yet to find it and some of us have searched for many years.”
“How many years?” Akeem asked.
“Oh, hundreds I’d say.”
“Hundreds? How old are you, Doc?”
“I am fifteen, just as you are,” he said, and Akeem blinked in surprise.
“How did you know I’m fifteen? I’ll be sixteen next month.”
The thin boy shook his head again and looked at Akeem sadly. “You are fifteen and you will always be fifteen, just like everyone here. The friend that you seek is fifteen also,” Doc stated, and Akeem shivered. He and Quinn were born weeks apart. They would turn sixteen in the same month. This was impossible.
“Everyone can’t be fifteen. What about that kid, Mouse? He can’t be more than ten.”
“He is fifteen. We all can’t be hulking brutes like yourself, you know,” Doc kidded.
“But where are the adults, the babies, the cities?” Akeem demanded.
“There are none. It is just the castle, the forest, the cornfield, and us. That is all.”
“I must be dreaming. How long have I been here?” Akeem asked in disbelief.
“Tomorrow will make a week.”
“I’ve been asleep for six days?” Akeem asked incredulously. Doc nodded. “How long have you been here?” Akeem asked, getting more nervous with each question.
“I have been here more than fifty years. I am one of the longest,” Doc said with a bit of pride as Akeem barked out a laugh.
“You’re joking, right?”
“I speak the truth.”
“That’s impossible!” Akeem shot up and grabbed two fistfuls of the scrawny boy’s shirt. His arm screamed with pain, but he was too terrified to pay it much attention. “Where am I and how the hell do I get…” Suddenly his eyes felt too heavy to keep open. His eyeballs rolled in their sockets and his hands released Doc’s shirt and fell limply to his sides as his body went limp. Doc caught him with a grunt and laid him back down as gently as he could. Akeem was out cold before he hit the bed. Doc put a roll of cloth under his head, thankful he had added a sleep herb to the tall boy’s tea. Doc huffed and then shrugged his shoulders.
“Why do they never believe me?” he said to himself.