Crap Kingdom (21 page)

The warrior looked at the boy enemy.

The boy enemy looked at him.

He charged at the boy enemy.

He managed to knock him off the sphere. They fell toward the ground. He had his armored hands on the boy enemy’s sides, intending to drive him into the soil, but the boy enemy clambered over him in midair, and it was he who landed with his back in the dirt. The boy enemy landed on top of him. Since he had his crystal armor, he was still fully conscious, in no pain, just dazed. Regaining his faculties, he got a hand on the boy enemy’s throat. A drop fell onto his face. Then another. He reached up with his fingertip to wipe these drops away. He looked at them. They were not blood. They’d come from the boy enemy’s eyes. They were tears. He paused for a second.

In this one-second window of distraction, the boy enemy raised a bare fist and brought it down onto his face.

Everything went foggy once again.

26

TOM HAD NEVER
drunk, so he’d never had a hangover. But when he woke up, he felt the way he’d heard a hangover felt. It was Kyle who’d told him, actually. Tom had felt oddly betrayed at the time. All that stuff scared him, so he liked to think of himself as better than it. It was supposed to be years before that stuff invaded their lives, wasn’t it? But he now felt the way Kyle had described feeling the morning after that party he’d gone to at some senior’s house: nauseated and headachy and oh God what was this taste in his mouth? The whole top half of his body was cold and wet. What was happening?

“One last bottle should bring him around fully,” he heard someone yell. Well, they weren’t yelling, but it sounded to Tom like they were.

He sat up. His head felt like it weighed about as much as a small van. He blinked. There was Gark. There was another man, who looked like a grizzled old prospector. The prospector was holding a sun-bleached plastic bottle.

“Ready to take down another bottle?” the prospector said. “For someone who’s never drunk this stuff before you’re doing an awfully good job.”

“What stuff?”

“Thinkdrink, of course!” the prospector said, smiling.

“Did you get it out of the toilets?” Tom said.

“Of course! Don’t worry, it’s the good stuff,” the prospector said. “I know I ain’t supposed to be talking to you, but I’m just happy someone wants to drink what we make. Folks ain’t so interested in thinkdrink since Kyle came around. Young folks especially.”

It was the drink that came out of port-o-potties that made you remember stuff instead of forgetting it, and he was in Crap Kingdom, and he remembered everything all at once. Everything.

“Gark, what’s going on? Is everything okay with—”

As soon as he said Gark’s name, Gark turned away and pulled the thinkdrink man by the arm out of the small dark room. Gark slammed the door behind them and Tom heard a heavy lock click into place.

He remembered everything that had happened, the way you would remember something stupid you thought when you were a kid. It was like remembering the logical leaps you used to have to make to still believe in Santa even after you were probably too old, if those logical leaps had resulted in you endangering the lives of an entire society, if they resulted in attacking your best friend after he saved you from the man who was threatening to kill you, a man you thought, for some reason, was your friend.

A few minutes later, he heard the sound of the door unlocking. Two large men came in and grabbed him, one on each shoulder. They pulled him down a dark hallway. He remembered what the king had said about having an army whose job it was to stay home and do nothing. He imagined these men had been called into active duty now that there had been an assault on Crap Kingdom. Or it was possible they had already been called up under the new Kyle regime, but he doubted it. Kyle’s regime had mostly seemed to be about fireworks and underwear art projects and Beatles music. It was totally harmless. Why had Tom disliked it so much? Just because it wasn’t his?

They walked up some stairs and around a corner and they were in the throne room. Tom was almost relieved to see the little Igloo cooler full of towels that served as a throne. He was almost relieved to see the king sitting on it. He was definitely relieved to see Kyle standing next to him. He was happy to see Kyle was alive, though he had a very clear recollection of Kyle knocking him out, and not the other way around. He was even relieved to see Gark standing off to the side. None of them seemed very happy to see him.

“
Traitor!
” the king yelled.

Tom just stood there.

“You will
not
just stand there. You
will
tell us everything!”

He didn’t know where to start, but he figured he’d better start anyway.

“Just, I just have to say . . . I am so, so sorry. I can’t even tell you how sorry I—”

The king held up his hand. “What. Happened.”

Tom paused for a second, realizing that there would be no apology that would suddenly make it all better, and that the only reason he was, or should be, allowed to speak would be to confess. And he was not being asked to confess so that he or anyone else could feel better. The confession was only useful if it contained information that could protect them from future attacks.

So he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, realizing that large parts of the story implicated Gark and Pira and Kyle. He knew that only honesty could help at this point, but he knew that certain kinds of honesty could hurt, and he had no desire to hurt any of them. What sickened him more than anything was that he knew at some point, under Ghelm brainwash, he had had a desire to do just that.

He would implicate only the person at fault: Tom.

He started with the texts.

“. . . and my other self,” he said, halfway through his story, “had sent me this text message with instructions on how to soul-swap. He said it was a better spell than the one we’d been using. One that he said he hadn’t really had time to complete, which it later turned out was really true, because I got here and I was completely—”

“Stop,” the king said. “Say that part again.”

Tom said that part again.

After he had finished, the king looked at Kyle. Kyle looked at the king. Tom was relieved when Kyle did this, as the way Kyle had been looking at Tom, with a mixture of disappointment and sadness and love and hate and worst of all, fear, had been destroying Tom more completely than any spell could ever hope to.

“His other self is J!” the king said, suddenly sitting straight up, in contrast to his normal question-mark-shaped posture.

“Are you sure?” Kyle said.

“Quite sure,” the king said. “J had been working on a new soul-swap spell immediately before he . . .”

“Wow,” Kyle said.

Was it true? The man who was better at being Tom than Tom could ever be was J, the only man who was ever worth anything in Crap Kingdom? A great man had chosen his body to live through. Did this mean Tom was worth something after all?

“It follows, actually,” the king said. “The soul of a great man would need a character that was completely vacant to inhabit. Your former friend is barely a human being and thus he would allow lots of space for J, the greatest man I or anyone who remembers him has ever known,” the king said, and Tom could swear he watched all the lines fade from his face. “This is most miraculous news! We must discuss.”

Something about seeing a man so generally depressed and so definitely old suddenly become so young-seeming fooled Tom into thinking, for a second, that he would be part of that discussion.

“Gark, take this man away. We may need him later but not at the moment.”

Gark, flanked by the two presumed army men, led Tom back to his cell.

“Thank you for not mentioning that I saw you in the kingdom,” Gark said as Tom reentered his tiny windowless cell.

Tom turned, still having so much apology to make and so much story to tell.

“Please don’t speak to me,” Gark said.

The door slammed and the lock clicked.

A tiny Tame Flame had been stuck to the ceiling of the cell. Tom wished it would go out. He did not feel deserving of light or heat.

He thought about the king and Kyle and their conference. For a moment he let himself feel a little left out. Then he remembered what had happened the last time he felt left out. What he had done.
The reason you feel left out a lot,
Tom thought,
is because people leave you out a lot, because you deserve to be left out. If they left you in, you’d destroy everything. You’d make them regret it sooner or later.

He sat in what he wished was darkness for a long time thinking that exact thought, or thoughts very much like it. There was no way of telling how much time had passed before the two men appeared at his door again and dragged him back to the throne room.

“I am,” the king said, “maybe for the first time, happy you came here. Through no conscious effort on your part, in fact, entirely due to Kyle’s ingenuity, you may have brought the greatest citizen this kingdom has ever known back into our midst, and for that, I thank you. I thank you for having a slim enough soul. Despite your treacherous attempts to destroy this kingdom, you may have given us the opportunity to do the very opposite: to vanquish the Ghelm tyrants once and for all.

“Shortly before he was killed, J was working on a plan to do just that, a plan that we once again have the ability to put into action. Your part in this plan is simple, and you will submit to it willingly, if there is any residual bit of honor in your treacherous soul.”

“I’ll do it. Whatever it takes.”

“Good. Tomorrow morning, you will be sent into the void, which is J’s current resting place. When our mission is over, you will go back to your world, never to return, and J will return to the void, where I am happy to learn his soul resides, for at least it is not absolute oblivion.”

“All right.”

“Now. It’s late. We need our rest. And you, I suppose, need yours. I do not know how strenuous it is floating in limbo. I suggest you pass the time thinking about all the wrong you’ve done.”

Half an hour later, Tom was trying to focus on his part of the plan and how he could void-float in the most helpful way possible when he heard the lock turn and his cell door opened.