The Combat Codes (3 page)

He looked Cego in the eyes and spoke to him condescendingly. “Who’s your mammy, little gold-eyes? What sort of line are you from? Got some Grunt in you, maybe?”

Cego stared at him blankly.

“Just another street boy, then.” The man turned to Aldo. “You said you found him down by Lampai? Are you sure he isn’t one of ours, or maybe escaped from Saulo’s Circle across town?”

Aldo shook his head. “Neither, boss. We scanned him, checked the archives—nothing in there. Real strange. Usually got some light trail on these kids.”

“Where did you come from, boy?” The man continued to eye Cego.

Cego met his gaze silently.

“Always such anger from some of these boys.” Spittle flew from the man’s lips as he spoke. “You don’t realize that pappy Thaloo here is helping you, little gold-eyes. I could throw you back on the streets. Let you end up sweeping the floors or serving food on a platter for some bit-rich Daimyo. You’d go through life with a hole in your heart, always feeling the pull of the light, not knowing why you felt so empty.”

The man called Thaloo paused, licking his lips. “You can fulfill your lightpath here, your destiny. Fighting is what you were born to do, little gold-eyes. I’m helping you; can’t you see it? If you do well, you’ll be treated well. Maybe end up even getting bought by a patron, serving a family or business with honor. Doing some good in this world! Don’t you understand?”

Cego’s gut told him to stay silent.

“They never see.” Thaloo sighed, a horrid croak of a noise. “You’ll thank me some day, little gold-eyes.”

Thaloo swiveled his chair and started to thumb through images on a handheld lightdeck. “Put him on a crew. Let’s see how he does with Tasker Ozark, shall we?”

Thaloo turned back to Cego as the guards began to pull him out of the room. “Keep your eyes open this time, boy. You’ll need them.”

*

The yard had tall stone walls with high grated windows that opened up to the Underground’s street level. Trails of faintly glowing moss ran along some of the walls, crawling up toward the light of the street. The yard’s ground was made up of compacted red dirt.

Eight boys with shaved heads were running in a circle around the perimeter of the yard. They were tied together with a knotted rope looped around their waists.

When one boy at the end of the line tripped, he was dragged along the dirt floor by the other boys, who kept moving, unknowing or uncaring of the fallen. The boy running in front looked like an ox, his leg muscles bulging and a vein in his forehead pulsing as he dragged the rest of the line forward.

A man stood in the center of the running circle. He yelled in a gravelly voice at the boys to move faster, to pull harder, and to get up off the floor. He did not seem like a pleasant man.

The guard pulled Cego over to him. “Tasker Ozark. Got a new recruit here for your crew.”

“My crew is already full; must be a mistake,” Ozark replied without taking his eyes off the runners. Cego could see Ozark had a strange audio device implanted in his throat where his grating voice vibrated from.

“Boss’s orders, Ozark; he says this boy here is to be placed in your crew for acclimation and training,” the guard pushed.

“If the Boss says so, fine. That means these boys will be splitting their food for nine instead of eight.” Ozark turned his faded yellow eyes on Cego. The man’s face appeared to be locked in a permanent frown. “Other boys won’t be happy about it, though.”

The guard nodded and left Cego standing in the yard with Ozark.

“Whoever you think you are, or think you were, forget it now, boy. What you now are is the property of Thaloo, and as his property, you are now my property. I’m your Tasker, meaning my word is your task. When I say crawl, you crawl. If I say swing, you swing.”

Ozark stopped to yell at the boy at the end of the running line. “Get out of the dirt and start moving again, you little maggot! Move or you’ll end up doing sloth carries until blackshift!” The little boy looked like he was about to pass out. He had tears running down his dirt-streaked face as he was dragged behind the line. He managed to barely pull himself up with the rope and started moving again.

Ozark continued, “I have one task, and that is to make you strong enough to win in the Circle. You winning means I did my job. You winning means you are worth more for Thaloo loo loo loo loo loo—” Ozark’s voice box was stuck in some sort of loop. He slapped the back of his neck and it stopped repeating.

Cego couldn’t help but crack a smile at the strange occurrence.

Ozark’s frown cut even deeper, which Cego hadn’t thought possible until he saw it. “Halt!” the Tasker called out robotically, and the eight boys came to a sudden stop, panting with relief. Some keeled over and others fell to the ground in exhaustion.

“Circle Crew Nine! You have a new member. I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is…” Ozark waited.

Cego looked up from the ground at the eight boys. “Cego.”

“Cego! Your new friend here, Cego, thinks what you’re doing is funny. He was over here laughing at you, telling me that you looked like a bunch of halfwits running around in circles. Says he could do twice the job of any one of you.”

The boys glared back at Cego. The big, heavily muscled one in front of the line flexed his shoulders and stomped the dirt like a bull ready to charge.

“How do you think we should welcome Cego to Circle Crew Nine? After all, he’ll be spending every minute with you now, training alongside you, eating your food, pissing in your pot. He deserves a fair welcome, no?”

Ozark tugged at the scruff on his chin, made up of several long, wiry hairs. “Ah, I know. In honor of Cego’s welcome, we’ll continue your training for an extra two hours. You’ll probably miss your dusklight meal and go to bed hungry, but I think we should put Cego’s interest in catching up first.”

A visible slumping of shoulders shuddered through the crew. They already looked worn as it was.

“Let’s get our friend Cego right onto task. Back to rope runs,” Ozark barked.

Cego was tied in toward the middle of the pack. The rope had small metal hooks on it, which latched directly into the loops on Cego’s pants. Ozark tightened the rope to decrease the slack between each boy.

The boy in front of Cego with a scar running across his jaw turned around and whispered, “You be slaggin’ us bad. Crew’s gonna make you pay.”

The big ox at the front of the line turned back toward Cego before surging forward with a jerk, causing a chain reaction of boys bouncing into each other. One boy at the front of the line stumbled forward and Cego turned to see a boy behind him fall to the ground, immediately getting dragged in the dirt without any chance to get back to his feet, which created even more work for the entire group.

Ozark sat back with a dirty grin on his face, watching the entire ordeal, yelling at the crew to pick up their pace.

After Ozark was sufficiently pleased with the crew’s fatigue from rope runs, most barely able to stand, he screamed, “Sloth carries!”

Each of the crew was to lift and carry another boy around the room until he fell to his knees.

Cego was paired with the scar-faced boy, who glared at him and refused to cooperate. When it was time to pick him up and run, the boy made it extremely difficult for Cego to get under him, shifting his weight and falling like a sack of turnips.

Cego breathed out, frustrated, while the boy stood back up with a smug grin on his face. Just as the scar-faced boy turned away, Cego shot at his legs in a quick motion and threw him onto his shoulders—classic entry into the kata guruma shoulder throw.

The boy let out a grunt of surprise. He settled in to let Cego jog around the room with the rest of the crew. As he ran, Cego had a vivid memory of the old master making him drill kata guruma over and over for hours.

These boys were using a variety of inefficient methods to carry their partners. The ox was sweating profusely as he carried one of smaller boys under his arm.

Ozark’s final task was called “last boy hanging.” There were a series of ropes draped from the ceiling around the perimeter of the room. The boys were to climb to the top of a rope and hang there for as long as possible.

“The boy who falls first has piss pot duty for the next week,” Ozark threatened.

Cego didn’t exactly know what piss pot duty was, but he knew he didn’t want it.

He scaled his rope in nearly a second, using his hands and feet in unison to crawl up it like a spider monkey. He knew he could hang there for longer than the rest of the crew, perhaps well into the night.

From the top of the rope he could see the street’s light filtering through the window grates. It cast crimson shadows on Circle Crew Nine, each boy hanging from his rope, muscles shuddering from hours of hard work.

Why shouldn’t he beat them? Cego could certainly hang until the rest fell to the ground. He could show them he was strong. Perhaps then they wouldn’t turn on him.

Cego looked to his right at the small boy hanging next to him, the same one who was dragged at the back of the rope line. The little boy’s body shivered with strain and Cego could see tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.

Another of the boys, one with haughty yellow jackal eyes, taunted the crying boy. “Weep! Weep! You might as well drop now; you know you’ll be the first anyway. You lacklights were made to clean piss pots.”

Cego could see the little boy’s arms trembling. He wouldn’t last more than a few moments longer.

The old master’s voice echoed in Cego’s head again, this time louder than he’d ever heard it before, as if he were standing in the yard.
We fight so that the rest shall not have
to.

Cego dropped to the ground, landing nimbly on his feet. He was the first boy to fall.

His golden eyes gleamed as he met Ozark’s stare.

*

Cego’s plan didn’t work out as he had envisioned. By showing weakness, he thought the crew might forget the extra hours of training and shared food rationing. Instead, like a pack of wolves that smelled blood, they went after him.

After the grueling training session, Tasker Ozark held Cego back to drag all the equipment from the yard into storage for the night. Cego’s stomach rumbled as he finished the work. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

Cego finally returned to the Crew Nine bunks and found himself without any place to rest.

Although there was an extra cot for him, a strange assortment of metal cans lay strung together on top of the bed. The scar-faced boy popped his head out from the bunk above. Using his finger, he spooned a glop of green sludge out of a can and let out a loud burp. “That there be Modek’s bed.”

“Modek?” Cego asked.

“Right there, that be Modek,” the scar faced boy replied, nodding to the pile of tin cans on the bed. The boy had an accent that Cego couldn’t place. “Crew decided he gets your greens tonight.”

The ox from the front of the rope line chimed in from the bunk across from them. His voice sounded like Cego thought it would, like a hollowed-out log. “Modek probably could’ve held onto that rope longer than you, weakling! That’s why he’s got your bed and you’ve gotta sleep on the floor,” he said matter-of-factly.

Another of the boys slowly walked over to Cego with his arms crossed and his lips pursed. Cego recognized him as the jackal-eyed boy who had taunted the crying little one in the yard.

“Ah, now, Dozer, Knees, let’s see that our new crew member has a better welcome than this, as Tasker Ozark instructed.” The boy spoke like a snake, with a hiss following every breath. “No need for childish games. After all, we all will be tasking with… Cego here, for who knows how long.”

The ox named Dozer interjected, hooting, “Till I get a patron!”

The jackal boy stared Dozer down, “Shut up, Dozer. Don’t interrupt me. And you won’t be getting a patron anytime soon.”

Dozer looked down at the floor. “But, Shiar…”

“As I was saying, we need to welcome Cego to our crew, especially because he’s been so kind as to volunteer his piss pot skills for us,” Shiar said.

“I say, why don’t we further our welcome to Cego and let him take on his new task tonight? After all, I am especially stuffed after polishing off all those cans of greens.” Shiar licked his lips. “Dozer, why don’t you start off with that famed stench of yours and head over to the pot?”

Dozer clapped his hands together and headed for the adjacent bathroom, glaring at Cego as he lumbered past. Shiar moved closer to Cego and hissed in his ear, “Don’t think I couldn’t see you let go of that rope on purpose. You won’t find any pity here, lacklight.”

A few others boys made their moves to the chamber pot after Dozer. The scar-faced boy, Knees, smirked as he brushed passed Cego. “You be deepshittin’ it now.”

Shiar was the last to go and returned with a small wire brush, which he offered to Cego. “The pot is almost overflowing out there. I think more than half of it is Dozer’s. You’ll need to make sure it gets emptied out in the drain and then made sparkling clean with that brush. The dawnshift guard is quite the stickler, so make sure you get every spot in there.”

Several of the crew laughed in glee. Dozer thudded his hands against the metal bunk post.

Cego didn’t take the brush. He kept his hands down by his sides.

Cego knew fighting techniques, ways of movement, breathing, energy conservation, but never had he been taught how to deal with other boys like this.

As if on cue, the old master’s voice spoke to Cego.
You may need to give up position to gain position. Don’t be afraid to retreat, give in, let your opponent dictate your pace for a moment. Then, when they think they are in control, use momentum to your
advantage
.

Cego looked Shiar in the eye for a moment and then with lightning speed snatched the little brush from his hand. Shiar flinched but laughed it off.

Cego took on the task, emptying and cleaning the pot with the tiny brush. He was surprised at how difficult it was to hold his breath while trying to scrub out every stain on the chamber pot. By the time he was done, his arms felt weak and he saw white spots from the lack of air.