Fif15teen Read online

  Chapter 16

  Law 48

  Betrayers Will Be Tortured

  Dregg didn’t mention that there were two paths at the back of the cave. Akeem stood with his hands on his hips, contemplating. Doc’s warning echoed in his head and he took the path to the right, preferring to take his chances on an unknown path than return to Dregg before he absolutely had to. There was no way he was staying in that cave with that overgrown ox. He shuddered at the thought. He had to find a way out before he ended up dinner for Dregg, like Ganock the bear. Maybe Doc could give him a hand at escaping Dregg’s cave. There was just too much to do and so much to learn before the Dogs’ next raid on Castle Haven. He needed to go with them, but first, he had to speak to the girl, Piper.

  He was sure she had information about Quinn. Perhaps he could slip into her prison unnoticed. He needed to be alone with her so there would be less chance of someone accusing him of breaking one of the insipid Laws of Fifteen. He worried if she would even speak to him, but then he brushed the thought from his mind. She would speak to him; she would tell him what he needed to know. She had to.

  He was so lost in thought that he didn’t realize he had walked into a graveyard until his path was blocked by a crudely made wooden cross. He stopped short at the sight of it. He was stunned to find something religious in a place that seemed devoid of any semblance of God. He found the children of Fifteen to be hedonistic, uncivilized, mini-maniacs that did not possess the distinction between right and wrong, good or evil, and perhaps life or death. The cross didn’t belong in this ungodly place. He bent to his knees and examined the etched stone strapped to the center of the wooden cross with vines. “Good-bye Boogs” was carved in a childish scrawl. Akeem’s eyes flicked from grave to grave. “Here lies Frenchie, a great trap builder.” “R.I.P. Max Scarbo.” “Kendle was like a brother.” He read on and on, walking through the graves in bewilderment. Hundreds of boys dead. Why?

  How do they kill so thoughtlessly then bury their dead with such care? Don’t they see the absurdity of it all? He shivered as he envisioned someone digging a grave for him. Would it be Doc? Perhaps Gideon? What would his epitaph read? “Here lies Akeem, he didn’t last very long.” Or maybe: “Farewell Snakehead.” A dry tree branch fell from the canopy and bounced off his shoulder, snapping him out of his thoughts. He felt eyes on him and looked up suspiciously. He stood for a while gazing into the branches before hurrying on.

  He was thinking about the hundreds of shallow graves, the merciless kids of Fifteen, and the severity of his predicament when he stumbled across an armed boy. The boy had curly red hair and stood shirtless and unashamed of his abundance of fat rolls. He leaned heavily against a tree picking lint out of his enormous belly button. Next to the boy was a pit in the ground covered by a wooden grate. Akeem’s heart sank. If Piper was down there, he would never get to speak to her alone.

  “It’s about time,” the boy said when he noticed Akeem. “You should have been here hours ago. You’re the new kid? They sent you for guard duty so soon?” The boy didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind, I’m starved. Here!” He tossed a long spear with a sharp flint tip into Akeem’s hand. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t let anyone hurt her until I get back, okay, I don’t want to miss it,” he said with a sinister glint in his eye. Akeem couldn’t believe his luck as he watched the fat kid waddle into the woods and out of sight. He walked over to a tree and leaned against it. From there he scanned the tree line, the bushes, and anything else that could hide spying eyes. When he was convinced he was alone and unwatched, he approached the pit and gazed down. He glimpsed the tip of a small, filthy, bare foot.

  “Piper?” he said, causing the foot to disappear. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you,” he assured her. A high-pitched laugh broke the silence.

  “I’d like to see you try.” She laughed again. Akeem was impressed. After nearly getting blown up, taken as prisoner of war, stripped practically naked, and tossed into a gravelike pit, the girl still had fire.

  “Do you know a girl named Quinn?” he asked tentatively but received no response. “She came with me, a few months back. She has dark hair, dark eyes...”

  The stream of obscenities that spewed from the girl’s mouth left Akeem feeling dirty. She called him words he didn’t know the definition of, but by the way they were said, they were definitely insulting. At one point she must have run out of disgusting words to call him in English and had switched to an entirely different language. Akeem shook his head; he thought this would be easy. He knew he could never force this girl to tell him anything. In fact, he was certain that he would come out the worst in a one-on-one fight with her. He sat down at the pit’s edge and got as comfortable as he could. This was going to take some time.

  “She’s my friend, my best friend,” he said.

  “Piss off!” the girl growled but Akeem continued.

  “We met when we were twelve. I cut school to go to E3 at the Garden. Do you know what E3 is?”

  “Is that where your mother goes to sell herself for sex?” Piper asked snidely.

  Akeem laughed humorlessly. “Trust me, nobody would pay to have sex with her,” he said before continuing. “E3 is a huge video game expo that goes down every year. My father always promised to take me; he died before he had the chance. Asking my mother was out of the question, so I went alone. Quinn was there too,” Akeem said, falling into the memory. “It’s one of the largest gaming conventions in the world. They have these areas set up just like your living room except cooler, with jumbo flat-screen monitors that make you feel like you’re actually in the game. I was kicking some serious geek butt on an unreleased warfare game when the next kid sat down and picked up the controller. It was Quinn. I didn’t even know she was a girl.” Akeem snorted. “She was puny and grungy and wore beat up Doc Martens and a hat that looked way too big for her. We played for the next few hours, neither one of us losing a man. It was incredible. We stayed all day then left together, grabbed a slice to eat, and took the same train home. We didn’t say a word to each other the entire ride, but it wasn’t freaky or anything. It was just cool being silent. Her stop came first; since I was in no rush to get home, I walked with her. She mentioned that she had tickets to a Knicks game. Said I could come if I wanted to. I went.

  “A few months later, sometime around Christmas, Mom locked me out of the house again. I got kicked out of every place I tried to squat in. There was so much snow; it was so cold. I had nowhere to go, so I went to Quinn’s house. It was late; the house was dark, so I broke into the basement. She was down there, asleep on a couch with her five-year-old sister. They had on matching yellow nightgowns. That’s when I realized Quinn Rivera was a girl.” He chuckled, raking his fingers through his dreads. “I curled up on the floor in front of an electric heater and fell asleep. She didn’t seem surprised to find me there in the morning. She just turned on the TV, and we started playing games. It’s been basically the same up until we got sucked into that weird cube that belongs to a crazy lady with an obsession for grimy hats. We left her little sister behind, her name’s Aly. She’s still back there, and she’s alone now.”

  Akeem stopped talking. He hadn’t allowed the thought of his favorite little girl to enter his mind for fear of what it might do to his heart. Aly was the only one that knew what happened, and he was certain nobody would believe her. He didn’t want to imagine what her life was like now. Thinking about her made his heart ache, but thinking about Quinn was far worse. Thoughts of her caused a burning pain each he took a breath. Feelings of loss and desperation touched him on a cellular level, threatening to erupt like a volcano and send him screaming through the woods in search of a cliff to throw himself from. He swallowed hard and fought back the hurt. He stamped it down, crushed it away. Fifteen was no place for it. The display of the smallest weakness could mean the difference between life and death. He’d forgotten about the girl in the pit until she spoke. Her voice startled him back to the present.

  “What’s
a slice?” she asked softly. At first Akeem thought he had imagined it until he looked down into the pit and saw green, almond-shaped eyes looking up at him.

  “Pizza. Chewy dough slathered with tomato sauce and cheese cooked until smoking hot and bubbly. In New York one slice is about as big as your head.” She looked up at him like she could eat four head-sized slices in two and a half bites. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a power bar from the stash he brought with him. He looked around cautiously, once again scanning every bush and tree. He let it drop. It fell through the grate without a sound and landed at Piper’s feet. It startled her and she scrambled away. The sound of someone lumbering through the woods met his ears, and he knew he didn’t have much time left.

  “It’s food. Eat it and bury the wrapper. I’ll get you more,” he whispered before stepping back over to the tree. He was leaning against it and imitating boredom when the red-haired fat kid returned.

  “Did I miss anything?” he asked, panting heavily.

  Akeem glared at the boy in disgust. He was suddenly seething. He was angry that Aly had been left behind, furious he hadn’t found Quinn, and enraged by the crazy boys of Fifteen. But mostly he was offended that this boy was disappointed that someone hadn’t come along to torture a girl held prisoner in a four-by-six hole in the ground. He grabbed the kid by the shoulders and slammed him against a tree. “She belongs to me!” Akeem moved so close to the startled boy that their noses nearly touched. “You let anything happen to her…if there’s so much as a scratch on her, that pretty brown left eye of yours is mine.” Then he looked into the boy’s open mouth. “And maybe I’ll take a few teeth too.” The boy closed his mouth with a snap. “Do I make myself clear?” The boy shook his head so hard his entire body jiggled with shockwaves. “Good. Make sure she has plenty of water and enough food so when the time comes, she’ll have enough strength to put up a good fight. I don’t want an easy kill.” He left the startled boy staring at his back as he disappeared into the woods.

  Akeem made it thirty feet before he broke into a silent fit of laughter. He laughed so hard, he had to sit down to catch his breath. He said a silent thank you to the heavens that Big Red had never seen the movie Art of War 2 because if he had, he would have realized that Akeem had just acted out a scene from that movie, almost word for word. That semester he was forced to take drama class at school had finally paid off.