Galdoni (22 page)

I waited for the guards’ next round, then
tapped his arm again.

“
What?” he growled quietly
in a tone laced with menace.

“
How long were you out?” I
asked, pretending not to hear the threat.

He stared at me for a second, then shook his
head. “You’re crazy.” He turned back to his meal.

I pursed my lips and slid my plate closer to
his. He glanced over at me again suspiciously. “You’re a big guy,
bigger than me, and this food doesn't even touch my hunger. I can’t
imagine how you must feel. Don’t you hate going hungry every day?”
His gaze darkened, but I took it as a good sign that he continued
to listen. “Tell you what. You can have my food if you just talk to
me.”

The guards came by again and he turned away.
I was about to pull my plate back, but he put a finger on it after
the guards had passed. “We talk, I eat?” he asked quietly, his eyes
still full of suspicion.

“
That’s it,” I answered
with a nod.

He considered for a moment, then slid his
empty plate to me and pulled mine in front of him. He took a bite
of the cold gruel. “Six months.”

“
What?”

He glanced at me, exasperated. “I was out
six months before they caught me.”

I wondered how a Galdoni so huge could have
hidden for so long. He caught my stare and shrugged. “I found a job
as a bouncer. It was dark. I liked it.”

I fought back a smile at his simple words.
There was weight behind them, longing. “I came back last week. I
went to school.”

He let out a surprised chuckle, deep like
the growl of a lion. Several others glanced at me, too. “School?
Didn’t you get enough schooling here?” He ducked as the guards
passed again.

I waited for them to get out of earshot. “I
learned about real stuff, not the filtered crap the Academy teaches
us. I learned about anatomy, and about language and history and
economics.”

“
Not our history,” a
Galdoni across from us shot back. He glowered at his plate as
though daring the gruel to get away.

“
Some of our history,” I
replied. “We
are
part human.”

The Galdoni next to him scoffed. “Yeah,
right. We saw how the humans welcomed us.”

A whip cracked above our heads. “No
talking!” the guard shouted.

We fell silent for the next several passes,
then I took a steeling breath. “We found our places, and I have a
plan for a better reception next time if we can survive in
here.”

Despite their fear of the guards, several
more Galdoni down the table looked at me expectantly. “A plan?” the
huge Galdoni next to me grunted. He finished my meal and put an
enormous elbow on the table. Plates rattled.

“
I have friends on the
outside, human friends.” At their annoyed looks, I smiled. “It is
possible. I know I’m not the only one to have made friends out
there.”

I saw a few nods of agreement around the
table. A skinny Galdoni with light brown wings and red hair who sat
on the other side of the giant met my eyes. “Do you really think we
could go back?” His eyes held hope and fear.

I nodded. “Definitely. If we play our cards
right.”

“
What do we have to do?”
the Galdoni across from me asked, his dark eyes guarded.

I shrugged and smiled at the thought of my
conversation with Zach. “It’s simple. Not fight.”

Several of them laughed, and they all turned
away from me. Whispers rose that I was insane. I was losing them,
and didn’t know how to get them back.

“
Listen to him,” the big
Galdoni next to me growled quietly. The others fell silent. “At
least he has a plan,” he muttered. A few glanced at me.

I took the opportunity. “Look, we all know
we’re here because our fights bring money to the gamblers. So what
do we do? We wait until the Blood Match and then refuse to fight in
the Arena. What can they do to us?”

“
Kill us,” someone at the
table behind me piped in.

I shook my head. “We’re too valuable. That’s
why they brought us back instead of killing us before. They need
us.”

Everyone fell silent for the next few guard
passes.

Finally, the big Galdoni next to me grunted
again. “We don’t fight. People can’t gamble. Then what?”

I smiled. “Then my guys on the outside work
their magic.”

At the end of lunch, the big Galdoni told me
I could call him Goliath, the name he had given himself when he
left the Academy. I stifled a laugh when the skinny red-head told
me his name was David.

“
Like the
Bible?”

They both nodded. “We were roommates out
there,” David explained. He elbowed the big Galdoni. “And he needed
a protector.”

A rare smile appeared on Goliath’s face; he
didn’t disagree.

Later, I found myself practicing next to the
big Galdoni in the weapons combat room.

“
What happens if Galdoni
fight anyway?” Goliath asked between swings; he proceeded to bash
apart a large wooden dummy with a mace.

“
It’ll undermine what I’m
trying to do. We need everyone to be on the same page.” I weaved
the broadsword I was holding in a figure eight to warm up my
shoulders.

“
No talking,” a guard
yelled. He cracked his whip and the sting of the lash caught me
just behind my left ear. I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore the
trickle of blood that made its way down my neck. I threw my anger
into the sword and swung it as hard as I could at the dummy
suspended in front of me. The blade cut cleanly through the canvas
middle. I spun back around with the momentum and sliced through the
dummy’s neck as well.

A guard came out grumbling about wasting
perfectly good dummies as he replaced the one I had mutilated with
one less damaged. He glanced at me; surprise showed on his face
when he met my angry gaze. He glared back in an effort to hide the
glint of fear that showed in his eyes. “You know broad swords are
for the wooden dummies. See that you follow the rules or I’ll
report you.” He stomped off in loud bravado, towing the mangled
dummy behind him.

Goliath gave a soft chuckle. “Remind me not
to get on your bad side.”

I fought back a smile. “I thought the same
thing about you in the lunchroom.”

He turned away before we were noticed, then
he grinned and tore through my fresh dummy with his mace.

The guard that had just replaced it gave a
strangled yell and I wove through rows of fighters toward the
wooden dummies before he could accuse me of starting anything.

“
Hey, you!” he yelled
behind me.

I ducked my head and took a few more steps
only to find my way blocked by another guard. “He’s talking to you,
Galdoni,” he said, spitting the last word like it left a bad taste
in his mouth.

I glanced back over my shoulder as though I
hadn’t noticed the shouting, red faced guard. I made my way back to
him, the broadsword resting casually across one shoulder. The room
fell silent. “Yes, sir?”

He pointed at the destroyed dummy. “Did you
do this?”

I shook my head with an exaggeratedly
baffled expression. “No, sir. I only have a sword. It wouldn’t do
that kind of damage.” I hefted the sword to prove my point, and he
ducked as though afraid I was going to cut off his head. Several
chuckles sounded around us, but when the guard cracked his whip,
they returned to their activities.

“
I think you had something
to do with this,” he said, his eyebrows low over menacing black
eyes.

I shrugged. “Why would I? I was on my way to
the wooden dummies like you suggested.”

“
Suggested?” he sputtered.
“Ordered, more like it.” He glanced at one of the other guards,
unsure what to do. The other guard gave a small shrug, clearly just
as interested as the Galdoni at what his next move would
be.

The guard’s face grew even redder. “Get in
the holding box.”

“
On what charge?” Normally,
I wouldn’t question such an order, but I was feeling overly
unruly.

The guard looked as though he was going to
explode. He sputtered again, searching for the right words, then
shouted, “I don’t have to explain myself to you!”

I shrugged as though I couldn't care less
and turned to go.

“
Give me that!” he
demanded.

I glanced back to see him hold out his hand
for my sword. With a small smile, I brought it down from my
shoulder and switched my grip so that he could grasp the hilt. I
let go and turned away just before he could get a good grip. I
didn’t look back at the sound of the blade hitting the ground
followed by a series of very detailed expletives. A few Galdoni
stared at me as I made my way to the door, and a couple of the
older ones even smiled. I pushed open the door and casually pulled
the fire alarm on my way down the hall.

Chapter Sixteen

I was careful not to be the first one in the
Arena as guards herded the Galdoni in and then left to investigate
the source of the alarm. I stretched my wings, but only glanced at
the false sky of the Arena dome. I wasn’t the only one who refused
to enjoy the brief seconds of flight the Arena offered. It wasn’t
freedom, not now that we had tasted what it meant to truly fly.
Several other Galdoni glared at the dome, while most of us ignored
it entirely.

“
What are we waiting for?”
someone in the back grumbled.

“
Better hurry; you don’t
have much time.” I turned to find Goliath at my side, David next to
him. The big Galdoni grinned. “Allow me.” He cleared his throat and
then roared, “Brothers, Kale has a message he needs to share and
we've got to hurry, so quiet down and listen. It might mean your
freedom.”

“
Freedom?”

“
False hope.”

“
What’s he talking
about?”

I ignored the mutters and gestured toward
the dome. “You know we're captives here. If our taste of freedom
did anything, it gave us a thirst for life beyond these walls.”
Several half-hearted agreements met my words, but they died away
quickly at the skepticism on the faces of their comrades.

“
We don’t have much time,”
I continued, “But I have a plan to get us out of here.”

“
They aren’t going to let
us go,” a small Galdoni who was missing several fingers
argued.

“
They’ll have to if we
don’t bring them a profit,” I pointed out.

“
They profit when we die,”
someone stated helpfully.

I gave him a small smile. “Exactly, so we
don’t die.”

Mutters rose, but quieted down when Goliath
glared at them.

“
And how do you propose we
do that?” the small Galdoni asked.

I shrugged. “It’s simple. We don’t
fight.”

This time, the laughter that followed was
harder to silence. I knew we were running out of time, so I didn’t
wait. “Brothers, if we don’t fight, they have nothing to gamble on
and no one makes money. Without money, the Academy falls.”

There was more grumbling, but looks of
comprehension also dawned on many faces. “He’s right,” I heard one
Galdoni say to his neighbors.

“
What’s our motto here?” I
asked.

“
Fight with honor,
fight-”

I shook my head. “Not the Academy’s motto
for us, but our own motto?”

A Galdoni with gray hair and many scars
stepped forward and turned beside me so that he faced the others.
““This is the Academy, and here we live to die.” The words had been
scratched into the floor of holding cell two, one of the most used
cells for isolation. I didn’t know who originally put them there,
but over the years the words had been traced by the rotation of
occupants until they were etched so deep the stones would have to
be removed to erase them.

I nodded. “I used to
believe that we were dying for honor, for glory, for a greater
cause, because that’s what
they
would have us believe.” I gestured toward the
sound of feet marching down the hall toward the Arena. “But the
truth, which you already know, is that we are dying to fill the
pockets of men eager for our blood to be spilled. We are dying for
mere entertainment. Is that a worthy cause?”

I didn’t expect an answer, but shouts of
‘No’ echoed through the Arena. A feral grin stretched across my
face. “Are we going to let them win?”

“
No!” they yelled
louder.

“
Then stand with me. Don’t
slay your brethren for
their
monetary gain. Together, we can beat
this!”

A roar of approval echoed off the Arena
walls. My heart sang with it until a black-haired, gray-winged
Galdoni stepped forward. The gathered Galdoni hushed at the sight
of him and the other four Galdoni that stepped forward.

“
Yes, Blade?” He was one of
the few who had won so many battles he had been allowed to pick a
name that was recognized by the Academy.

Blade gave me a cruel smile. “And what if we
want to fight, little one?” he asked, mocking my lack of fights in
the Arena.

I glared at him. “Then you destroy our
chance to leave here.”

His grin grew wider and
more pointed. “And you think they’d just let you leave?” he asked,
his tone incredulous. “You think that if you refused to fight and
cost
them
millions, they’d just hand you the keys to the gate and let
you walk away?” He laughed and his followers echoed it.

“
As if,” one said. Blade
glared at him and he shut his mouth.