My heart raced. I set the book a little low, somewhere to the side of my knees as I crumpled up into a half-ball.

  “Are you alright?” Ritcher asked. “Why’d you stop?”

  I opened my mouth, then breathed because as I said - my heart raced and in that race I’d forgotten to breath.

  I raised a finger. Shaky eyes set on Ritcher, I rolled up. Then stopped. Footsteps somewhere down the hall. Metal clangs like steel-hooved warhorses. A heavy body set on walking down the path, towards us.

  “The inmate would like to go to sleep now.” Gunther said, somewhere beyond the cell. I opened the book fast and set my head deep into it, eyes jumping left and right.

  “Wait. I’m not done.” I said.

  “Neither am I.” Ritcher asked.

  “The inmate would like to go to bed now.” Gunther said again. The book shut with a slam. Gunther was there now to the side of Ritcher. I crumpled a corner page and raised it slow and steady in between the bars, the book I mean. My strained eyes (reading was hard) looked over the man. Gunther. Head warden of this floor, Gunther with his scarred face and his apathetic look where you couldn’t quite tell smile from frown.

  He looked at me too, the same beard and hair pooling outside his helmet. The same broad shoulders and gaunt eyes. Ritcher, stuck in between us with the torch flickering and the cold draft coming up against our feet like the death-exhaust of the prison floor. Not even the rats crawled. My toes flexed inward.

  “The inmate is going to sleep.” Gunther said.

  Ritcher looked at him, glare and all. Gunther straighted out. His armor clinked, louder. So did Ritcher, with his own suit and his rose knights with their hands on the handle of their weapons.

  “Is this how you’d treat a prince?” He asked.

  “No. Only trespassers. Which you are by being here.” Gunther said. “The prisoner is going to bed. You’re more than welcome to speak to him two days from now.”

  “Why not tomorrow?” Ritcher asked.

  “I’ve been tasked to seeing to the inmate’s health by Hannibal. He will be unavailable tomorrow.” The guard said. My stomach dropped, I took a few steps back and fell on my ass. The book plopped in front of me, a little beyond the bars.

  “Hannibal?” Ritcher turned to me.

  “God damnit.” I said. I turned to the guard. “Why’s Hannibal sending you messages now?”

  “No reason. He would just like to see to your health, Virgil. That’s it.” Gunther said, voice low and eyes unmoving.

  “Would you please see yourself to your room, Ritcher?”

  Ritcher looked down at me, hell, I looked down at myself. My head went low, my legs pressed against the floor and up to my stomach. He (Ritcher) picked up the book and lifted it, folding the edge of the chapter and closed it shut, back to it’s bag like the time bomb it was hidden from sight.

  “Let me ask one thing.” Ritcher said, who did not look at me, who did not eye me once. Who stared at his guards, but spoke with that fatal growl. The growl of anger stirred. “Do you remember anything about the flock? Anything at all?”

  “Do I remember?” My heart eased. I formed a smile, I don’t know how. “I don’t remember shit. All of it sounded ridiculous if you ask me. Man bats? Credit Cards? Meeting Vincent?”

  “Vincent?”

  Another throb.

  “Uh- I mean…Vicentius. Vicentius Volarus.”

  My eyes looked up and my mouth went ajar and the cold reared itself underneath the folds and bags of my prison robes, making my skin prickle.

  “Hurry up.” Gunther said.

  The rose knights gripped their hilts. They unbuckled their sheaths, took out their blades with such a scratching noise like a cat’s claw going straight through leather.

  “Rush me again and I’ll cut your tongue.” Ritcher said.

  For the first time since I’d been here, I saw some chink to Gunther. He suckled his lips, breathed heavy. Swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbed.

  Ritcher looked back to me - I could tell by the feeling alone. It was the feeling of being smothered, sometimes warmly, sometimes coldly. And here I was trying to figure out which I felt more.

  “We spoke of a deal before.” Ritcher said. “I’ll honor my end. Will you honor yours?”.

  I turned my head to laugh and this time louder because between all the trouble of now meeting with Hannibal and now dealing with this guy, I realized it was going to et worse.

  “Virgil?” Ritcher asked. “Are you listening?”

  I looked up.

  “Yeah.” I said.

  “Will you fulfill your end of the bargain?” He asked.

  And I looked down at my fingers, clenching them, grasping them with my good hand.

  “Maybe.” I said. Maybe.

 

 

  Gunther hadn’t come to check up on me. It was all bullshit. It was the next day and it was just after having finished fishing and things were back to normal. Not Ritcher, not Gunther. Not anything out of the ordinary. Normality.

  Normality; which as I’ve come to learn and as I will learn, is the most abnormal circumstance of all.

  We lined up with the bucket of fish on our sides and went up to the well-dump, a large gray bricked hole (a bit like a well) where we threw the Lalos in with big shakes of our buckets, so’s they’d slide on their bellies all the way down and end up in what I thought was the pits of hell but as I found out was actually a processing room where a group of inmates (the more favored ones), would cut open and gut the things to make proper feed. The fillets, of course, went to the wardens.

  The guts, of course, went to us.

  I came up to the hole and slammed the rim of my bucket against the tunnel walls and the fish bounced around the small tube with slick slaps against the shiny walls. Every time I’d look down and see their red scales like blood cells in a vein. This time, I saw nothing but black. The hole seemed bigger, or the light dimmer. Rising, I stared the guard across the room in the face, a figure with a mustache and with curly brown hair coming through the holes and gaps of his helmet. Here came Gunther, again, with that finned and fish engraved armor on him. He stopped in front of me and pinched his nose. He blew out one hole of his nose, the mucus fell down next to my feet. I turned my body, intent on going back to the dinner hall.

  He grabbed me by the wrist.

  “What? Didn’t I give you my quota?” I asked. “Ten fish. I gave you ten fish, that’s good, no?”

  “You’re needed elsewhere.”

  “Is this a detainment?”

  “You’re needed-” He pulled me in. My face inches away from his. “Elsewhere.”

  Everyone in the line stared at us, I could feel their burning eyes and the way they turned their faces when I looked back at them. About a dozen men in a lane sprawling out towards a hallway, and each step I took past them, they’d put their faces down as the two guards grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out.

  “Where am I going? Where am I needed?” I looked around, trying to find some kind of semblance of an idea of where things headed. Up a few stairs, through Dead Man’s Walk, past used torches whose extinguished tops fumed like morning mist. I came out of Shrieker’s Veil, they dragged me through a roundabout path outside the keep that wrapped its way up as tower and up to levels higher.

  We came out of two doors onto a stone way to a collection of prison rooms so small that I had to bend my knees and my neck and crawl like some midget crab. A guard pulled me from the front, a guard pushed me from the back. Within this little tunnel there were bits of the scene outside, small holes no bigger than my eyes where the blue ocean and coastlines came in parsed in circular snippets. The water crashed against the rocks, against the prison. Birds taunted above, swooping down with sharp forms, dipping into the ocean and coming back out with Lalos in their mouth.

  “Get a move on.” The guard from behind said. He pushed me up.

  I wanted to stay a little longer, looking at the rising sun.

  I came through two more wooden doors into a hallway, thinner, more claustraophic. So much so that the two men had to walk a little sideways to fit themselves. These looked like sewer chambers more than jail cells, I would have confused them for those too if it weren’t for the occasional cough. The sideways glance of men in cells so cramped they squeezed themselves into balls.

  People lived here in places where no insect would, humans with scarred and shiny flesh from the wet holes above, browned and burned as if they were wearing shells. Human anthropods.

  We walked a few paces into this corridor, then the two guards stopped at a dead end. I put my open palms against the wall. I looked at them, they didn’t even give me an ounce of attention. Their eyes were backwards, and when I turned my face to the direction they had theirs, I knew what they looked at.

  A group of four individuals, scrawny looking with the mad intent in their eyes as they walked forward.

  “W-what’s going on?” I asked.

  They undid my cuffs. Hard hands on my back. The both of them, pushing so hard my shoulder popped. I slipped almost, barely to my knees. Then they kicked me. And the pain shot up my back. My face landed on the wall, my skin peeled as I shook myself standing. I tried to speak, but there was nothing but gasps and coughs. And I tried to point, to remember their faces but the guards disappeared into that darkness. A space too black, too cold, too trapping. Standing, the ceiling touched my scalp, I had to bend to fit in. The two guards walked away into a corner around the time the group of four continued. They were running for me.

  “Guards! Come back! Guards!” I stood. Turned. I ran into darkness, into a wall. Extending my hands, scraping on the walls. There was nothing to climb and nowhere to go.

  “Stop. Stop!”

  They came shifting the earth and bringing the pools of mud up into the air like wet black wings, and I turned my body around for anywhere, any brick I could pull. Their forms approached, you could hear it in the thick footsteps they made as they came forward, the loud breathing that was almost wheezing. Someone grabbed my nape and pushed me against the wall, I felt the knee strike my stomach first. Another man raised my face up. He had his hand on a scar on my forehead, but mostly had my hair in his hand.

  “Who are you?” I asked. They wore masks, I couldn’t even tell their faces. And they weren’t complicated masks, as a matter of fact, they were just potato sacks with holes ripped in the front made of rough burlap that scratched against my skin each time we all rolled and tussled. It was as if I was being put against a grater, fitting my skin through each hole with the way they rubbed their garbs on me. The walking graters.

  One of them grabbed my face. He slammed it against the wall.

  “It don’t matter who we are.” One of them said. “We’re here to deliver a message; you’re to stop talking to Ritcher. Understand?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re to tell him to go away, that you know nothing.” The tallest one said.

  “Uh, huh. Don’t know nothing.” Another behind him spoke.

  “You are to forget your name. Call yourself anything else, and forget everything about the main land.” He said.

  “Why?” I asked. Another knee to the chest. The mucus rose up my throat, out my nose. Then the vomit.

  “You forget everything about Ritcher and this event, and anyone else. You just forget, you hear me?” They said. Voices in unison, voices so afraid and excited that I couldn’t make them out.

  My eyes spun. Liquids - all of them - filled my throat and nose.

  “Okay. Okay.” I said. Each word followed a wheeze, the air scratched against my tight throat. It was like sucking cement through a straw.

  “That ain’t good enough, Na’wei.” Another said. The stockiest fellow, who grabbed my arm and extended it out. “We must make sure he remembers.”

  They stopped and looked at each other and nodded, slow at first then gaining until they looked like a bunch of bobble heads in excited agreement and me, the passenger on this mad seat with my hands sprawled against the mad dashboard, waiting to crash.

  “No, No. I understand!” I said. My arm shaking, my whole body convulsing as they pinned me with their knees against my limbs. “Please, please!”

  One of them came around with his shoulders rolled and spine bent and his knees at an angle as he carried around something. A rock. Black, like obsidian. This figure came up above me, the rock hovered up above.

  “His right hand is already fucked. Get his left’n.”

  “N-no.” I said.

  “Yeah. Yeah. The left one! Left! Left!”

  “No. No. No.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No!”

  He heaved and I cried and he went around my body, one foot up above my head as he came to the other side.

  “Take a deep breath.” The man straddled on top of me said. “Makes it easier.”

  “No-” I gasped.

  I looked at him through his eye hole, to what looked like two empty dark oceans staring back. Dark blue eyes, even-shaded. I kept my focus on those two eyes, and the sweat they collected and how wide and excited they were. I kept looking, remembering - nodding my head - Just breath out, harsh and fast.

  Harsh and fast. Harsh and fast. Harsh and ah. Ah. Ahh!

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