Cannibal Kings - A Dark Coming of Age Fantasy

ASAIO

I wake up in a dimly lit room with a low ceilin and thick stone turrets holdin the place up. I immediately sit up, heart poundin. I lay on somethin soft. I hate small spaces. My head comes in contact with somethin hard, and I hear Seht yell, “Ow!” I realize that I was laid across his and Ellie-Darlin’s laps, and my head hit his chin.

“Asaio,” Ellie-Darlin says. She grabs my face in her hands, runnin her fingers along my nose and mouth, the way she does when she wants to remember somethin or someone. Her lenses are gone, revealin her puffy, red eyes. Her hands shake and are icy cold.

I want to ask what happened. “Are you okay?” I say instead.

She nods, but I notice that the tips of her fingers are red, the skin peelin. They had been burned. I grab her hand. “Suns, Ellie. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she whispers, but she has a very far-away look in her eyes.

I lean to kiss her on the forehead. She flinches. I pull away.

“We’re in the tunnel that Yaselle up and kept you in,” Seht says. “When Asher found you.”

I recognize it. The chair is gone. It is much stuffier, the air thicker and dustier. The door at the front is left wide-open.

Around, in the dim light, I see Vip and Vernon and Lahla and all the other Garnets sat round us, but they are all slumped against one another. The only person standin is Vernon himself, pacin round the room. He rushes to my side when he realizes that I’m awake. It reeks of blood and sweat. A couple muskets lay on the ground, but very far from everyone, like they can’t stand to be in the vicinity of the weapons.

When Vernon turns to me, I see that his eyes are red and puffy.

“What?” I say. “What happened?”

“They burned it,” Vernon says.

“The cave?” I say. “I know. I saw it burn.”

I wonder if Vernon has some sort of similar trauma to fires that I didn’t know about. The look in his eyes is so far from the confident, happy, fiddle-playin guy. Course, we’ve just been through the ringer, but there’s somethin different right now.

“No, not the fake warehouse,” he says. “The real one. Our home, Asaio. The Lime Men burned it to the ground.”

I am silent.

Then: “What?”

I get the story in broken up pieces between the all of the Garnets. After runnin from the Lime Men, we then had to evade the lickers and a bunch of other gangs and stragglers. Seht used his plague-gift to carry me the entire damn time. But, apparently, I’d taken out more Lime Men than I’d given myself credit for. I’d gain consciousnesses only to use my tree-whisperins to strangle someone or twist their neck or some other extremely violent, brutal death that I don’t normally find myself drawn towards. Shimmy tells this part in extremely dramatic and graphic detail, to the point where Seht has to cover Uyala and Kim’s ears—both, to my relief, are none-worse-for-wear.

“You had this dead look in your eyes and we would talk to you, but you wouldn’t respond at all,” Shimmy says. “We’d only hear bones crack and necks snap and then you’d be out again.”

This is when I realize that Uyala is starin at me. But not her usual, bright-eyed stare.

It’s a fearful one.

“I don’t remember none of that,” I say. “I mean, I remember a vague dream bout a forest. There were whisperin trees then, I think, but not like that. I really don’t remember nothin.”

“It’s fine, Asaio,” Seht says.

“Your veins.” I grab Seht’s arm. His arm is covered in black boils, but his veins are unsually prominent right now. Thick and pulsin and black.

The thing bout plague-gifts is that they can be abused. The more you use the gift, it’s likely that your plague symptoms get worse more rapidly. I feel terrible.

“It’s fine,” he insists, pullin away. “Can’t keep your hands off me, can you?”

“Suns,” Ellie-Darlin says.

Seht’s leg is wrapped up crudely with someone’s shirt. He got shot in the leg and still managed to carry me. Uyala, with her head of thick curly hair, climbs into her lap. She examines me coldly.

Vernon had pulled away from the others in the Spider paths, they explain. He made it to the warehouse before anyone.

Vernon interrupts Shimmy. “I’m tellin Asaio this part. It was all up in flames, Asaio. Every single piece of it. Nothin to be salvaged. All our trinkets, all the blankets we had, all the instruments we had, the-the art we stole, it’s all gone. All of it. Our home, Asaio.”

Lahla gets up and grabs her lover by the hands. “Vernon—”

He pulls away from her and grabs me by the face. “Do you understand?” he says, his eyes brimmin with tears. “It’s all gone. Again. Nothin to be salvaged. Not a single thing. And-”

“This ain’t everyone,” I realize, lookin round the tunnel.

Lahla shakes her head. “We split up into the Spider groups. Ana, Crass, Crimson, and Mallo have not come back.”

“Or Asher,” Vernon says.

“Or Asher.”

“Yaselle said she’d find them,” Genavieve says.

“I don’t trust her,” Lahla says. “I do not. I trust Ana. She’ll bring them back safely.”

But Lahla is not an optimistic person. She is the night where Vernon is the day, and it is clear she says this only for show. Her voice quivers. That is not usual for her either. The idea that Lahla may not be sure of herself is more terrifying than any Lime Man could be.

“We have to go back for em,” I say suddenly. We lost our home. Again. “We have to back. Or, I should go after em. I should do somethin—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Seht says, grabbin my arm.

“They were after me, they—”

“Don’t try to be a hero, Asaio,” Seht snaps. He glances pointedly at Vernon. “There are no heroes in this City. If we go back out there, we all die. No one’s in a state to up and go do something like a scout.”

“No,” I say. “Ana and Crass and Crimson and Malloo—they wouldn’t just leave me behind. You didn’t. Stop it, Seht. Let me go. I said, let me go!”

“Asaio, wait—” Ellie-Darlin tries. Everyone is yellin at each other at once, arguin.

Suddenly, Vernon slams his fist into the wall. Every head turns to him. “Fuck!” he curses. “I shouldn’t have—Suns, Yaselle was right. She was right. We should have just taken her deal. Suns. Suns. I’m so stupid. We couldn’t—I couldn’t—”

He grabs his chest and takes a breath like it’s the most difficult thing in the world.

Lahla leaps to her feet and grabs her lover round the waist. It’s easy to forget how much smaller she is than him. He buries his face into the nook of her neck while she whispers into his ear, incoherently to the rest of us.

A silence comes over us.

So I make them tell me the most horrific parts of us gettin here. Ellie-Darlin tries to protest, but he understands.

The least I can do for not bein present when my family needed me the most is to be the one to carry the load of their ventin.

Havin to jump fifteen legs off an apartment complex with me on his back, he admits. The way that the Lime Men caught Vip by the neck and hauled him away. He was only saved, miraculously, by an angry mob of women who could not stand to see another child abused. Uyala, who has the ability to shrink her small body—sort of the opposite of Vernon’s ability to extend his limbs—was lost for a time, and then found in Kim’s pocket. Neither she or Kim cried, both not even eight. Genavieve bein lost and Mustletop goin back to her by climbin on rooftops he’d never climbed before. Vernon savin Lahla from a bunch of lickers in the back of an alley. A romantic disposition, Shimmy assures. He tries to add onto these stories lightly, but my family are in a position of such mental strain it’s horrendous.

Flynn and his snakes lay asleep a few legs away.

“How is he?” I ask.

Seht and Ellie-Darlin exchange a look. “Not too well,” Seht says. “He couldn’t control himself.”

“Oh.”

“He was angry.”

I glance round at the other Garnets, wonderin if any of them will fuss up on Flynn bout this, but then my mouth goes dry.

“Don’t feel so bad about sleeping,” Seht says. “Really. I think you were actually more useful half-asleep than while awake. Maybe your brain goes and works better when it’s off.”

“We’ve surely alerted Kamon,” Shimmy says. “He knows that we were the ones who had taken the shipments.”

“What happened to those, by the way?” I say.

“We left them with Michie before coming to you.”

“What are we waitin here for?” I say. “Yaselle?”

“The Lime Men know our faces, Asaio,” Seht says. “So do the lickers and every other gang in the City, I’m guessing. Kamon, too, and Punnet Street, cause we stole his stuff. And those Damaskragan merchants, if they cared. If we go out there, we’re under fire again.”

“Yaselle told us about the deal you were supposed to make,” Genavieve says. “A safe home. Protection. Money. For you.”

“Suns, we aren’t starting this again—” Seht says.

“Please tell me you took the deal,” I say. “You should’ve agreed the first time.”

“We don’t know,” Shimmy says. “That’s why we’re here. We’re waiting for Yaselle to come back and we were waiting for you to wake up. To talk about it. And because we have nowhere else to go, like Seht said.”

“When Yaselle comes back, you’re givin me up,” I say.

“Asaio—” Seht tries.

“No,” I say. “She promises us everythin just for me. Just for—”

“Just for you?” a raspy, thin voice suddenly says. It is Shis-Aspinova. I hadn’t registered her in the extreme darkness. It is like she is trying to stay as far away from our single shroomlamp as possible. “Just for you? You’re Enlightened.”

“Shis—” Seht tries in that same warnin voice. I realize that multiple debates had probably been happenin while I was unconscious. I wonder, with alarm, how much time’s passed.

“You’re supposed to be… you shouldn’t exist,” Shis says.

“Shis,” Shimmy says. “Stop. Now.”

“No,” she says. “No, you can’t tell me not to freak out when you don’t tell Vernon the same thing, not when I have been living with someone who’s ascended for two whole cycles. No, you don’t get to tell me that, Shimmy.”

“I mean, haven’t we had our suspicions?”

“No,” Shis says. “No, because you don’t think that one of your friends is Enlightened, Shimmy. When you ascend, it’s an entire process, and it’s overseen by the Fathers and Mothers of the Temples and the Purity Checkers. There are rituals. There are—he’s never had his Soul checked. This is impossible. It’s not possible.”

“Are we even sure he’s Enlightened?” Seht says. “Aren’t there only supposed to be three?”

“He has no plague symptoms,” Shis says. “He has an elemental gift. I should have realized it sooner, but you don’t think—no one thinks that their friend is a chosen one of the Suns. No one thinks that. No—”

“Him being Enlightened changes nothing,” Seht says.

“It changes everything, don’t you see?” Shis insists. “Asaio will not die when we do. He will not experience the plague as we do.”

“We knew—”

“His Soul is powerful,” Shis says. “He’s so Pure he could have been a noble. You could have lived in the Fortress. You’ve beaten death, Asaio. You’re—we’re not worthy to be standing before you.”

“Shis—”

“Seht, you don’t get it—”

“I do,” he huffs. “I wanted my Soul to be Pure too. But Asaio hasn’t changed magically, Shis. Look at him. Don’t do what we did to Flynn. He’s no different. He—”

Shis grabs my hands. I instinctively squeeze them tight. “You could have a life,” she says slowly, “so much better than the one you have, Asaio. You’re better than all of us. You are so good, so Pure, that you ascended without even the help of a Father or a Mother or a Purity Checker. Your birthright is to be in the Court right now. And now we’re just going to hand him off to some Bug? Asaio is worth all of our lives combined.”

Shis leans down to kiss my knuckles. She clicks the her tongue rhythmically the way that she does when she Prays, and I pull away. “Shis, don’t do that—”

“Enlightened Asaio,” she whispers.

“Shis, please. Really. Don’t do that. I ain’t changed at all or nothin.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t want to overwhelm you, but… Suns. No wonder your eyes were always two colors. It’s said that the Enlighteneds have peculiar appearances. I can’t believe I am standing in the presence of an Enlightened.”

“You’re standing in the presence of Asaio,” Seht says.

"Shis, stop," I say when she tries to take my hand again. I swat her away. "Shis, stop."

That’s when Shis takes a step back. She blinks very slowly.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “If you’re the chosen one of the Suns, why did you mutilate those Lime Men like you did? That was so… excessive. And—and you’re a thief.”

“Shis, stop,” I say. “I ain’t religious. Most of that stuff is like a giant story to me. And we got other things to worry bout right now than me. Stop lookin at me like that.”

The sheer shock on her face makes me instantly regret those words. “Just a story? Asaio, Purity is the reason why we keep living—to serve our Suns. And even if it is all just a story—stories have meaning, Asaio. They stem from truths.”

“Most stories don’t have a point,” a quiet voice says in the back. Asher stands in the entrance of the tunnel, his face half-hidden by shadow.

Beside him, there is a boy I ain’t ever seen before with silver hair, wide eyes, and an expensively drawn arma.

He carries a huge lump of somethin in his arms. An odd stench comes from it, one that I am far too familiar with. I know instantly what it is. I grab onto Shis as the world suddenly lurches. Her face has gone ashen in a matter of seconds.

“What is that?” Kim says in his high-pitched, childish voice.

Asher’s face is blank when he says, “I am very, deeply sorry.”

He lowers the thing, wrapped in his old cloak. Vip—who had been lyin on the ground, all but silent, suddenly lets out a strangled cry.

“No.” Vernon rushes forward and shoves me and Shis away. “Ana, no.”

***

There is no dramatic scream from anyone or cry of retribution, as there once was for Seran. No fires are set ablaze.

When Asher sets the body on the floor, I stumble. Shis doesn’t catch me.

The thing bout death in a City like ours is that it’s so normal I always think I’m used to it, then the body count of people I love rises higher and higher and I feel so sick I can’t breathe. I am not surprised. I am surprised. I am not surprised. My heart beats so fast I think it may just explode.

We sit around the body and there ain’t a sound, as if everyone is too afraid of what a single verbal cry will unleash. Just silent, deadly tears.

Vernon and Vip crouch beside Ana’s body.

They knew her the longest. The three are the eldest, minus Shimmy and Lahla. Vip and Ana were two inseparable parts of a whole. Vernon takes Ana’s head and cradles it in his lap, while Vip just shakes his head. “No,” he says. “No, that’s not right….”

“They shot her,” Vernon whispers. “They shot her, look. They shot her. They shot her.”

The thing bout death is that it is inevitable.

My hands shouldn’t shake right now. Ana had the plague. But she was only seventeen. She still had five or six cycles left in her. This wasn’t the plague. This was the deliberate takin of a life.

How horrible it is to take a life. Lives like the Lime Men we had killed early, the ones I mutilated as brutally as they have mutilated my Ana, my distant older sister Ana. I can’t think of the faces I killed just as they probably didn’t even see hers when they shot her. All to get to me.

It’s Uyala that makes the first sound of grief. Just a little cry, one she couldn’t hold back for much longer.

Poor little Uyala. Seht rushes to her aid and then it all comes floodin: cries, Prayers, fists slammed against the ground in anger. We don’t allow ourselves to question what might have happened to the missin Crimson, Crass, or Malloo.

I just sit there in a darkness that seems to only get darker, starin at her body. It’s probably still warm. I think she was happy. I hope she was. I don’t know.

I remember her tryin, and failin, to teach me how to pick a lock I remember all those times that she and Vip would sneak round and have little competitions to see who could raid the biggest, most expensive apartment complex. I remember her teachin me bout girls and their minds cause she thought I had a crush on Isaela, and I just laughed at her, and we laughed together. I remember, when I was real, real little, only a little after I was first recruited by her and Seran and Vip and Sheral and Ze and all the other Old Garnets, that she was the one who defended me when Ze claimed I was too much of a burden to keep on. She’d sing lullabies sometimes when I had nightmares. She didn’t have a very great voice.

All these little things, old memories—reminders of how she lived only when she’s taken her last breath.

Some might call that poetic. I think it’s horrific.

Flynn wakes up at the commotion and sobs at the sight of her. He hardly knew her.

I remember bein upset when she was thinkin bout pullin away, thinkin bout applyin to the Industry to find a job to better sustain herself. She knew a life of thievery and the old gamblin hub couldn’t sustain us all. Yet she and Vip were always the first to volunteer themselves when one of us Garnets were in trouble.

Memories I ain’t even sure are real come back to me. Moons when I was angry at her for not lettin me do this or that, Moons when she was sick, Moons when she was sad that her late brother had to whisk her away from their dangerously plague-ridden parents.

I stare at her body, and a dozen other dead Souls appear behind her. Souls that are forgotten. Souls that some think deserve to be forgotten because they had little impact—they ain’t Pure.

Our lives combined are not worth yours.

That ain’t true.

Vip takes one of the muskets that lay in the middle of the room and slings it over his shoulder. He nearly barrels out the door, but Lahla grabs him by the shoulder and forces him back inside. He screams at her—Vip never raises his voice—and she punches him in the gut. He falls into her. He don’t cry. Just stares, shell-shocked.

Someone kneels beside me.

“Should I go?” Asher whispers. “Look for the others missing? I remember what they look like.”

I don’t even acknowledge him.

I walk away, slowly, and press my face against Vernon’s chest. I wrap his arms round me. Then I shut my eyes very, very tightly. None of us even saw her die.