He looks at his sister standing next to him. She sways and twitches with confused agitation, her pinkish eyes darting between faces.
Nora watches her childhood crush, Evan, take a brutal punch and return it. She watches R, her strange new friend, slam a bloody elbow into someone’s temple. She watches Marcus—she doesn’t know how to classify him—kick a man in the chest, and she watches that man crash into Timothy Balt.
Balt sprawls out on the floor and his gun slides to the edge of the pit. Marcus rushes at him, but Balt jumps to his feet and fumbles a knife out of his belt just as Marcus tackles him.
The knife sinks into Marcus’s ribs.
Nora doubles over. A whimper escapes her throat.
Marcus falls to one knee. Balt raises the knife for a killing blow.
Julie hits him across the spine with a steel bar.
As Balt staggers forward, Julie locks the bar around his throat and pulls so hard she lifts herself off the ground. Balt reaches behind him with the knife and stabs blindly.
The blade sinks into Julie’s calf, then her thigh, once, twice…
Nora hears her friend’s screams like an alarm clock in a dream. Her mind tries to tell her it’s a bird tweeting or a violin playing, some innocuous nonsense that can disappear into the slurry oozing through her head. How much easier it would be to stay here in the dim shelter of this staircase and wait until the fight is over. How much simpler to forget the people she loves, to release her attachments, to cut her rope to the world and sink into the mud.
But the rope refuses to be cut. The rope is strong because it’s made of her. The rope breaks the knife.
Nora’s eyes snap open. She sucks in a breath. She runs through the scuffling mob and rams her boot into Balt’s testicles.
Balt drops to all fours and Julie rolls off of him.
“You…fucking…cunts!” Balt squeals.
Nora rears back for another kick, this time aiming for his face, but then her friend screams again.
“Nora!”
Where did that shotgun come from? Who slid it across the floor into Balt’s hands? Nora has just enough time for these pointless questions before something slams into her—but it can’t be a bullet. It’s a soft impact, almost gentle, and it comes from the wrong direction. She topples onto her side, stopping just before the edge of the pit, and then she hears the bang.
When she looks up, Evan is standing where she was a second ago. There is a hole in the center of his chest. He flashes Nora a sad smile, and she wishes there were time to say thank you, and I’m sorry, and a dozen other things, but Balt fires again, and Evan’s smile disappears.
Balt pumps the shotgun as he rises to his feet, his teeth bared in the ecstatic grin of a man winning his favorite game. Then his face flashes to incredulity—Julie is on his back again. This stupid girl isn’t respecting the rules. He already beat her and he’s on to his next target; this repetition is boring.
But it’s not quite the same. Julie is no longer armed with a steel bar. This time she has Balt’s knife. This time she doesn’t try to choke him. This time she cuts his throat.
Balt sinks to his knees. Julie stands over him and he glares up at her, clutching his gushing neck. Even now his face shows only outrage.
“Whore,” he gurgles.
With a snarl that’s been waiting seven years to come out, Julie kicks Balt in the face. Her boot catches his jutting chin and his head snaps back.
It almost snaps off.
Balt tips over the edge of the pit, and he’s gone.
Nora stares at that yawning void, though she refuses to look down into it. She stares at Evan, though only at his hands. She feels Julie’s arms around her, and for a moment she thinks Julie needs help walking. Then she remembers that Julie loves her, and this is an embrace between friends surrounded by death, and Nora returns it as her eyes burn and blur.
On the far end of the chamber, in the shadow of the stairwell, her brother watches. He doesn’t see violence and death. He sees risk and sacrifice. He sees love. And with our pages fluttering around him, a thought rings in his head:
Violence is concentric. Every great war grows from a thousand small ones. End the war at the center and you’ve ended them all.
How goes yours, Addis Greene? we ask him, for we are learning each other’s languages. Is anyone winning?
Addis watches his sister and her friend break their embrace and help the big man to his feet. He watches them pull him to safety while the tall man and the others close in on the remaining troops.
Does the world deserve forgiveness? Does it deserve another chance?
Addis bites his trembling lip. He doesn’t answer.
I
IT’S REMARKABLE what the death of a leader does to fighters who don’t know why they’re fighting. If these men had some noble cause, Balt would be their martyr and they’d fight twice as hard. But since their cause is some barely conscious blend of greed and fear, his death only releases them from his spell. They freeze. They glance around as if wondering how they got here. Then they run.
Kenerly’s army is unaffected by Kenerly’s death, because it’s not his army. These people are here for their own reasons, which have nothing to do with the charisma of one man. They chase the Cock Street Boys up the staircase without a backward glance, and suddenly it’s quiet.
As I gasp for breath and test a few broken knuckles, a sound that reached my ears earlier finally registers in my brain.
Julie’s scream.
I rush to the edge of the pit. Nora is helping her to her feet—or maybe they’re embracing; my attention is on her leg, where each heartbeat pumps tablespoons of blood out of three deep gashes.
“Are you okay?” Julie asks Nora.
Nora laughs darkly. “Fuck you, Cabernet. Worry about your—”
“Nora,” Julie insists, shaking her off and balancing on one leg. “Are you okay?”
Nora looks at the floor, wipes her eyes, and nods. “Yeah. I think I’m okay.” She looks over her shoulder; her little brother stands in front of the stairs, watching us with that strange, appraising gaze.
“Marcus is hurt,” Julie says, nodding toward M, who is upright but unsteady, pressing his hand to his side. “Go fix him up. I can handle my leg.”
Nora hesitates. “Sit down and keep it elevated. R, make some bandages.” She rushes to help M.
Julie finally looks at me. Her brows knit as she scans my body for injury, but most of the blood on my hands isn’t mine. I ease her to the floor and search the bodies for a reasonably clean shirt, then tear off three strips and wrap them around her wounds. She lets out of muffled shriek as I cinch them tight.
“Jesus Christ that hurts. I think he chipped my fucking femur…”
“Can you walk?”
She takes a deep breath and puts an arm over my shoulder. We stand up together and she takes a few cautious steps. When the initial rush of agony passes, she lets go of me and shuffles to the edge of the BABL pit. She looks down into its funneling depths. A smear of blood runs down its side, bits of clothing and flesh hanging off the points of the copper studs. There probably wasn’t much left of Balt by the time he reached the bottom.
Julie screws her eyes shut and unleashes a scream into the pit. Her veins bulge, her fists clench at her sides, her lips stretch back from her teeth. It’s not a scream of pain but of rage and disgust—for the man at the bottom of the pit and for the pit itself and for the insane world that built them both.