Halo (Blood and Fire Series (A Young Adult Dystopian Series)) (2 page)

Beyond, a thousand homes spiral outwards from the city’s main focal point: the Colosseum. The towering sandstone building soars up on our right hand side as Falin Asha and I navigate our way through the gardens of the Sanctuary’s elite, approaching the inner boundary, just like we’re supposed to once our business with the technicians is at an end.

A guard with a riot visor and a baton gestures us quickly through the gate, as though our very presence is an offence to the peace and quiet of the hierarchy this side of the wall. We pass under more jagged razor wire that tops the doorway the guard opens for us, and then we are thrust into the real Sanctuary. The city is a dirty grey stain that its people are always trying to paint white. It doesn’t matter how hard they try, though. The elements have been conspiring against their attempts to beautify this place for the longest time, and for the most part the wind, rain and sunshine have been winning.

Falin Asha and I stand and stare at it for a moment—the smoke pouring up from the chimney tops; the narrow pathways that snake down the hill we stand upon, which lead to tiny market squares and water fountains; the crowds slipping in between the buildings, all Therin caste mainly, performing the menial labour required for their Households that others are too high-born to carry out. Huge screens adorn the sides of buildings, and smaller ones are erected in the squares, each displaying a rogues’ gallery of the fighters who will compete tonight. Details of the current betting odds follow each fighter, a series of spinning numbers that even the youngest inhabitants of the Sanctuary know how to read.

Groups of placid-faced children run between the trees lining the walkways, tying red ribbons on the branches they can reach and awkwardly lifting each other at the waist in order to dress the ones they can’t. The ribbons symbolise that it will be raining blood later this evening. Falin Asha pulls me forward and asks a little boy for a couple of the ribbons. The boy’s halo is tiny, so small it looks like it would be nothing more than a bangle around my wrist. It’s green. There are special instances when they will do that
―
make the children’s halos different colours. It shows that the boy can’t be more than four years old, and it also shows that he is Falin. He will be a fighter one day, like us.

 
He stares up at us with wide eyes and hands over some ribbons almost reverently. I hear his halo clacking away, and this is no great surprise. Children so young can hardly be expected to have mastered their emotions. Falin Asha takes the ribbons and passes me one, and the little boy’s expression evens out as the halo’s drugs kick in. He turns and wanders back to his task, tying messy bows around the very lowest branches of a young oak sapling. We tie one higher up for him and then move on into the city.

“Are you worried?” Falin Asha asks me. For the past twelve years he has walked me home from training, and today isn’t an exception. I twist a red length of ribbon around my finger and don’t say anything. I’m not worried, but it would be impolite to directly tell him so.

He bites his lip and stares up at the Colosseum. Red flags flutter from the arched tiers, waving on a breeze that never really penetrates the complicated mass of the city at ground level. It’s hot here, which seems at odds with how cold it was in the technician’s compound. I look up at Falin Asha.

“Are
you
worried?” We ask each other these questions, because it’s sort of expected of us. It’s everyone’s job to make sure those around them are complying with the emo-control standards. Occasionally, though, I half-expect him to admit to something. Occasionally, I think I will, too, even though it’s not true. He gives me a blank look and drags me through the crowds.

The streets are busy on match days. Scores of touts, Therin who have been tossed out of their houses for not working hard enough, sell twists of red tickertape and swatches of crimson cloth. The very poorest of people sell the faded, washed-out rags from match days gone by, having collected them off the floor once the fighting was over. No one really buys from them, and their rags get pinker and pinker and the people get thinner and thinner. You can usually tell when you’re unlikely to see a particular tout selling the next month.

Falin Asha holds his hand up as we weave through the sea of people, displaying the fact that we already have our red so no one will bother us. As we travel farther down the hill, reaching the mid-city, we veer off towards the river, where the richest people live beyond the boundary walls. Where I live. Falin Asha, too.

People nod as we pass them by, showing us respect as fighters of high status. The looks they give us are knowing, and I wonder if they’ve already been told that we are fighting. Have our faces already been doing the rounds on the betting screens? No one will be surprised. The Kitsch and Asha families have been playful competitors for many years. My True father, Lowrence, has probably been waiting for this day for a long time. He likes to win, and a lot of time and money has been invested into turning me into a well-honed weapon. It was probably all in preparation for this specific match.

The Kitsch house borders the waterfront, a position of high power. When we arrive, Falin Asha pulls me away from the glossy red front door, which I’m not supposed to use anyway, and drags me down to the embankment. Sitting on the bank has been a ritual we initiated eight months ago, one we stick to religiously, but today I don’t feel like dipping my feet in the water. It’s only noon, yet for some reason it feels like time is slipping away and it will be nightfall before I know it.

“What are you thinking?” Falin Asha asks, as he lets go of my hand and sinks with a complete lack of grace onto the grass. I flop down beside him and lean against his shoulder.

“I’m not thinking anything,” I say.

“You want to practice?”

 
I shake my head, which seems stupid really. We should be taking every opportunity we can get to suss one another out. Look for weaknesses. But I already know his weaknesses, and he knows mine. The part of me that is always logical,
always
reasonable, seems to be missing right now. Falin Asha’s breath comes out heavy, and I look up at him. His face is so familiar
―
delicate cheekbones and dark brows that arch a little too high for him not to look permanently surprised. His nose is slightly crooked where I broke it five years ago. He pulls his mouth into a smile but it doesn’t seem to reach his eyes. He shrugs me half-heartedly off his shoulder and yanks his shoes and socks off. Rolling his socks together into a ball, he stuffs them into one of his shoes so they won’t roll down the embankment and into the water. I slowly follow suit.

Shimmying forward on our backsides, our feet kiss the water. We plunge them in at the same time, knowing it will be cold. Knowing it will be shocking, but doing it all the same. He laces his fingers through mine out of habit.

“This is our place,” he says, his voice low.

“I know.”

He tilts his head back and stares up at the bare bones of the sky, the faint rippled clouds stretching across the bright blueness of it. “Just don’t do this with anyone else.”

I feel something bob in my throat, and I realise I’m trying to swallow. Trying and failing. “Of course I won’t.” Why he thinks I ever would is a mystery to me. Most of the time I can’t figure out why
we
do it.

A fleeting shadow passes over Falin Asha’s face. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his last red ribbon, which he then ties gently around my wrist. We stop staring at each other and gaze at our feet, magnified two sizes too big by the water as they turn blue. He’s too kind to say anything, but we can both hear it: my halo clicks like crazy.

COLOSSEUM

There are crowds the likes of which I have never seen before, swelling outside the Colosseum. There is an indistinguishable roar in the air, but it is not from shouting or raised voices. The people of the Sanctuary are orderly and peaceable. The roar is because there are simply
so
many
of them. It isn’t mandatory to attend the amphi-matches, but it feels like everyone is here tonight. Usually, there are families that don’t come, especially the poorer families who aren’t betting heavily on their Falin. Or, occasionally, as the richer Houses will do, betting heavily
against
their own, weaker Falin
―
the ones they suspect are getting too old to be of any use in the Colosseum. They call it the Death Bet, because your House will always find a way to pitch you against someone much stronger, much faster than you.

This match between Falin Asha and me is no Death Bet. It’s the culmination of some other kind of bet between our True fathers, made sixteen years ago when we were born. It’s no wonder Lowrence is so happy this evening, an emotion tempered, of course, with just enough disapproval to let me know he suspects I won’t win. His emotional indecision is cataclysmically confusing. Both he and Miranda remain with me as I warm up in the waiting chamber, Miranda eating butter biscuits and drinking tea, and I can’t help but stare at their naked necks. The open collar of my father’s shirt, displaying his bare skin, seems a little obscene.

“You know what you’re doing, don’t you, child?” he asks me again. He’s already asked me four times, and I keep telling him the same thing: I know precisely what I have to do. I have to kill Falin Asha.

He freaks out every time he hears my halo hum into life, and it’s uncustomary the way he keeps running his hands across it to make sure it’s still adhered to my skin the way it should be. No one,
no one
, should touch another person’s halo. Not even if that person
is
your father. He drags his hands back through his steel grey hair, looking stressed.

“Stop doing that, Low. You’re going to lose even more hair,” Miranda snaps. Hair is a prized commodity to my father’s wife, it seems. Whenever she is sitting, she plays with her own soft, golden curls. It was the first habit of hers that I observed when she appeared ten years ago, ushered into our lives out of the blue. I don’t listen to her telling off my father; it’s better for all parties involved if I pretend they don’t exist, and so I go back to my routine, trying to calculate how much money Lowrence has put on me this evening to warrant this level of worry. It must be a lot.

The walkways for the crowds entering the Colosseum are directly overhead, and the thunder of the noise is crushing. I imagine it’s akin to what a train would have sounded like long ago when they used to run on the skeletons of the old iron tracks that run through parts of the city. Lowrence and Miranda seem more affected by the noise than I would have thought, but then again they’ve never been down here with me before. Not once. They probably thought I’d be reading a book in tranquil silence or something. Definitely not practicing at slicing up a rubber dummy with a knife in each hand, trying to reach that warm point when my muscles are loose and I can move quicker than lightning.

At some stage I must have nicked myself because there’s blood on the floor, and Lowrence keeps staring at it as though it’s his and I’ve somehow managed to cut him. He checks his bare arms three or four times, and when he doesn’t find anything he laces his fingers behind his neck and stares upward. The noise of all the stomping people seems to fall into unison, like they’re actually part of some vast machine, churning and surging above us. I ignore him and keep slicing.

“You’re sure you’re not feeling conflicted?” he says.

I stop thrashing at the dummy and stab the tip of my blade lightly into the material covering my thigh. It doesn’t hurt, but I can tell if I push a little harder it will cut through. “No, I’m not conflicted.”

“You should tell us if you are, child,” he declares, and for a moment I think I see concern in his eye. This is a ridiculous thought because I have no basis to go off what concern might really look like, or any other emotion really, except for the obvious ones. Happiness and anger are easy to work out. Everything else is just messy and confusing. Lowrence’s mouth tics at the corner. His face reddens a little, which tells me he’s getting annoyed that I haven’t answered him.

“I’m not conflicted.”

“Good.” He blows out a deep breath. “Miranda and I have put a lot on the line for you, child. I hope you understand that.”

Miranda turns icy blue eyes on me and nods, like she has had some hand in raising me over the past ten years. As a rule, she barely speaks to my brother and me. I am usually not permitted to stand in her presence as I am taller than her these days, and she believes a True should never have to look up to a Falin. However, since today is a fight day, I am allowed to train, and she sits, observing the whole thing with distaste. I will never be a match for her own children, my half-brothers and sister, all of whom have names and emotions, and love trying to torture the rest of us at House Kitsch into submission.

I know the children understand torture isn’t necessary. It is our duty to be submissive to them, and we have no desire to disobey that duty. Being without emotions like jealousy and greed, there is nothing that might tempt us to strive for positions beyond our stations. But my siblings don’t care about things like that. They care about things I can’t comprehend.