The Benders (17 page)

What is she doing? Is she crazy?

Dareen has no time to react. Nada jumps on her and starts punching. Dareen squeals, her narrow eyes widening as Nada wrenches back her hair. Dareen's sloppy lunch goes flying, splattering on the floor. Dareen tries to slam a hand into Nada's chest, but Nada is quick. She opens her mouth to bite.

A guard yanks Nada off Dareen, wrestles her to the ground, and pins her to the concrete floor. When Dareen sits up, she’s wide-eyed, shocked. Food is splattered on her work coveralls. A red scratch runs down one cheek.

All eyes turn to Merek.

Nada is insane. Merek will kill her
, I think. I look to Doc. He’s standing with his mouth open, one hand covering his shock. Did he know Nada was capable of attacking an unarmed bender? How will he save her this time?

“She’s in,” Lord Merek proclaims through the silence of the cafeteria. When all heads swivel toward him, he repeats it. “She can compete. Spunk like that will liven up the games.” He laughs and goes to the guard who is pinning Nada. The guard pulls her up and holds her before Lord Merek. “Spunk,” he says, slapping Nada on the shoulder. “I expect that when you compete, understand?”

Nada smiles. Her lip has broken open again and blood dribbles down her chin. It makes her look fierce, like a real competitor.

My eyes flick over to Mister. From his sneer, I can tell he doesn't give a damn about spunk.

The rest of the sign-ups go in a much more orderly fashion. About a dozen of us line up and sign our names on a slip of paper. Dareen and Mister are the biggest. Nada is by far the smallest, but I’m not far behind. I can only hope there are games of skill and wit or it’s going to be a short contest for me.

As I sign my name on the parchment, I sense a figure behind me. Lord Merek stands a few feet away, watching me.

“You’re new here,” he says, arching an eyebrow. His face is not unpleasant with his trim beard and neatly combed hair. “Another little one wanting to compete with the big boys, huh? What makes you think you have a chance?” He peers at me, his lips puckering. His beard twitches as he studies my face.

I clear my throat and try to hide my nerves. I don’t want him noticing me any more than he already has. “I want my freedom.”

He frowns. “Around here you address me as, ‘My Lord.’”

“My Lord,” I say, averting my eyes and hoping he’ll move along to someone else.

“You’re awfully tiny to be a competitor. Are you savage like our Nada?”

“More like determined,” I say.

“Determined,” he says, running his thumb and forefinger through his beard. “What good is determined against meat like this?” He strides toward Mister and grabs his massive forearm. Mister flexes and smiles dangerously for his master.

I say nothing. These people are cattle to him, or toys. It's just like when little boys played with plastic figurines. Only Merek plays with human beings.

“Well?” Merek asks me, looking annoyed. “How will you stand up to Mister?”

Mister shoots me a venomous look. He licks his lips, waiting for my answer.

“I don't have to stand up to Mister,” I say, letting the corners of my mouth curve up ever so slightly. “All I have to do is outlast him.”

Mister flashes teeth like an angry animal, but I just turn away. Let Mister be angry. Let them all be angry. If I've learned anything from being on the road these months, it’s that cool heads prevail over burning hearts.

Nada and I don’t speak as we wash up for the night. Everyone else around us is speculating on the tournament at the sinks, talking about which games might be involved and who might win. Nada hasn't said a word since she volunteered, and I don't feel like talking to her either. My belly is full of eels tonight, cold and wriggling and making me want to hurl up my lunch. My name is inked on the parchment. I picture a medieval broad sword slashing through my stomach and wince. What was I thinking? What kind of wit does it take to swing a sword? I'm dead. Nada's dead.

A hand on my bicep startles me. I whirl around and there's Doc in the shadows.

“This way,” he breathes, nodding.

“Are we going to see the midwife?” I ask, suddenly remembering I asked him this favor.

Doc puts a finger to his lips. We turn to walk away, but Nada puts a hand on Doc’s arm.

“You can’t come,” he says, anger in his voice. This is the first time I've heard him talk to Nada that way.

I tiptoe after Doc into the dark. Once Doc sees that the coast is clear, he leads me around the wash house and across the shadowed courtyard. There are guards out and about, but the majority of them cluster around the washhouse and the bunk house. A few are on wall duty, but they stand near the gate with their guns aimed at the road.

“Where we going?” I whisper. My eyes flick toward the six-foot high wooden wall. I don’t want to see Annabell again.

Doc glances back at me. His face is locked in nervous anticipation as he scans the moonlit courtyard and then nods at me to follow him.

We slink around the side of the wooden fence until we come to where the fence meets Lord Merek's quarters. A small door is nestled in there. The knob turns in Doc's hand and he disappears into the dark interior.

I have no choice but to trust him. I follow him into the dark.

Doc shuts the door behind me with a quiet click. I expect him to lead me down the nearly black hallway, but he makes no move to do anything. I can see his dim outline in front of me. He rests against the wall and leans his head back.

“What're we doing?” I whisper.

He slides toward me until his breath puffs against my cheek. “We have to wait here until I get word that the coast is clear. Relax a minute. Consider it a smoke break.”

“I don't smoke,” I snap. I don't like waiting in the dark. I want to see Auntie now.

Doc sniffs as if my comment is mildly amusing. “You're just like Nada, always giving me a hard time. Maybe that's why I like you.”

I blush a little at this comment. Is Doc flirting with me? Leaning back against the wall, I change the subject. “Nada didn't sign up for the tournament to piss you off. She really thinks she'll die like Shali. I watched that bender burn. It was…awful.”

“I know.” He pauses. Somewhere deep inside the building a baby's crying. “Nada's just so damn stubborn. She's gonna get herself killed, and I'm probably going to die trying to stop her.”

“Here's one thing I don't get,” I say, shifting position on the wall. “How are you two brother and sister, or…” I pause, trying to figure out how to say this. “I know you're not technically her brother since you're a bender, but…”

“It's okay,” Doc says. I can hear the amused smile in his voice. “We're not related by blood, but we were both adopted by the same father when we were young and we grew up together. She's the only family I have left.”

I lower my head, knowing full well how it feels to want to protect your love ones. I bite my lip and try not to picture Ethan's tender face.

“Our dad was a doctor at a Breeders way station in Mexico. Traders from Mexico would kidnap girls and bring them to my dad. He'd make them healthy, take care of them, and keep them until the Breeders would come to collect.”

“Don't get me wrong. He wasn't one of the bad guys,” he says, rubbing a hand up and down the back of his neck. “He had to hand the women over to the Breeders or they would've killed him.”

“I know how the Breeders work.” My fingers find the ankh brand on my wrist.

“So he did what he could for the girls while he had them. He'd treat their ailments, feed them, talk to them. Then when one of them showed up with a baby in her arms—”

“That'd be you?” I ask. The baby down the hall whimpers quietly.

“Yeah.” He chuckles. “My dad said I was always bawling and red in the face. Constipation.” Doc chuckles again. “When the Breeders came for my mother, she begged my… father, my adopted father, to hide me, keep me safe. He did.”

“Nice,” I say, thinking about how Clay mentioned I have a father out there somewhere.

“I grew up in a tiny way-station in the middle of the desert with my dad and his medical books. It was a great childhood, really, except when I had to hide in the crawl space when traders or the Breeders came. That part was…terrifying.”

I picture a tiny Doc tucked in a cobwebby crawl space, clutching a binky while Breeders guards prowled around his home overhead. Not too much different than my own upbringing.

“When did Nada come into the picture?” I ask.

“When I was seven,” Doc says. “She was a dirty, wide-eyed two-year-old a trader delivered in a potato sack along with her mother. Nada's mother died three days later. I helped my dad treat the poor woman’s wounds. She…she had been brutalized.”

I swallow hard and say nothing.

“Nada wouldn't trust us for weeks. She tried running away, but we found her in the middle of the night huddled under a cactus. There was no where for her to go. Finally, when the Breeders came to collect her mother, Nada let me hold her as we hid. She didn't cry when they took her mother's body away. She never cried.” Doc's voice is wistful and forlorn. He sighs. “She only decided to trust me when our father died.”

“What happened to him?”

Doc shakes his head and shifts in the darkness. “A trader killed him for medicine when I was twelve and Nada was seven.” Doc goes quiet again. “We lived in the trading post for a year on the supplies my dad had hoarded. After that, we were on the road. Life was rough.”

“I can imagine.” I look over at Doc's silhouette. “Nada said something about free colonies.”

Doc turns to me again. “There's rumors, but I can't believe they’re much more than that. Everyone wants to believe in free colonies just like everyone wants to believe in Heaven. I'm not sure either exists, but it's nice to believe they do.”

“But what if they do exist?” I ask, my heart thrumming.

“What difference does it make? We're stuck here.”

I open my mouth to argue with him again, but boots thud down the hallway, headed our way. We freeze and turn toward the sound.

A figure pauses in the dark. “Doc,” a female voice whispers.

Doc's hand slips around my wrist. I stumble forward with a lump in my throat.

When we reach the main hallway, I see the faint outline of the woman. A small candle flickers in her hand, sending a warm glow over her soft features. She's older than I am, maybe twenty-five with wavy brown hair swept back in another of those princess hairstyles. She has a gold crown settled above her brow. Her gown is sheer and flowing like Annabell's and I can tell by her big breasts and sagging stomach that she's recently given birth. This must be—

“Mina,” Doc whispers. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she says, smiling with full lips and even teeth. “Last night with the delivery—”

“It was nothing,” Doc says, waving a hand.

“The baby was breech,” Mina says to me, placing a hand on Doc's shoulder. “He's a miracle worker. That midwife, too.”

“About the midwife,” Doc says.

“I know.” Mina turns, her candle fluttering. “This way.”

We tiptoe down the hallway behind Mina. My nerves stack up until I can barely take a step without hyperventilating. What if we’re caught? We'll be killed? Beaten? What will happen to Auntie? I keep my eyes on Doc and Mina in front of me. They seem nervous, but not petrified. But then, they aren't likely to be dragged into the courtyard and shot.

Mina leads us down the hall to a closed door. Slowly she turns the knob and pushes in. When I'm able to follow her, I see a crude nursery with a wooden crib and rocking chair. On the wall is a cracked mirror and a very old painting of a rubber duck. A woman leans over the crib where a baby sleeps. Long gray braids trail down her back.

“Auntie,” I whisper, my hands clutching together. Is it?

She turns.

“Puddin' head,” my Auntie says as she spots me. She smiles and holds her hands out, a tear sliding down one cheek.

But, her face looks…wrong. I haven't really seen it since I left her in the basement of the Sheriff’s house when she told me to go after my mother. She'd been beaten in town, that I knew, but this…

A healing scar cuts down her left cheek, and on top of that new bruises are greenish-yellow and puffy. One eye socket is closed and stitched shut. Her eye is gone forever.

They took her eye?

My hand slaps over my mouth to stifle a gasp. “What did they do?” This can't have happened. Her eye. They took her eye.

Doc's voice behind me draws my attention. “We'll leave you two alone for a moment.”

I barely notice the door closing behind them.

Auntie stands at the crib and looks me over. “Punkin’, you look all right. They treating you okay?”

I take a step forward, still shaking. “Who did this?” I point to her eye. The forever-shut lid looks sunken and gives her face a misshapen appearance.

Auntie's hand travels up to her eye socket. “Sheriff,” she says without emotion. She touches the scar on her cheek. “This is courtesy of that rotten pig eater, Warden. I gave him balls the size of grapefruits for it, though. Bastard couldn’t walk straight for a week.” She smiles ruefully.

I take another step on legs that will buckle any second. “I…I'm so sorry. I never should've left.”

Auntie folds her hands in front of her, dimpling her clean cotton dress. “Balderdash. I made ya go. And you found your ma, I heard.”

A hand clamps over my heart at the mention of my mama. “Auntie, I—”

She holds a hand up to stop me. “Hush, darling. I already know.”

I nod, neither of us saying that the woman we loved best in the world is buried and gone.

And suddenly I'm running to her and falling into her arms and she's holding me and rocking me like a babe. I feel like I’m back at home, safe. I want her to hold me and rock me until the wounds stop hurting, until the pain of my mama's death can no longer find me, until all of this falls away.

I force myself to step back and look into her face.

She runs a finger down my tear-streaked cheek. “Never was a great beauty me,” she says, sighing. “Don't mind my scars, Ri. Don't fret your pretty head.”

“The Sheriff's dead, but I swear to God I'll kill the warden for what he’s done to you.”