CHAPTER 21

DURING BREAKS FROM their fight sessions, the smaller aki lug gourds and push barrels of water for the drinking pool and the bathing area. The little ones struggle to keep the water from sloshing over the edges. They know how precious that water is, so they take extra care. Their shoulders are stiff, arms straight as iron rods. Some of them look to me for guidance. Sitting on a small boulder that looks out over the grounds, I nod in the general direction of the drinking pool.

It’s free time right now. I watch as one young aki with a long braided ponytail throws combinations against the leather padding of an older aki’s mittens. Another group of aki comes by, rolling a barrel along, and I silently direct them to the bathing area.

The aki, at one point or another, marked the trees, some with lettering and others with symbols, showing what dahia they come from. Cliques are forming. Already, I’ve had to break up a few fights between some of the rowdier ones, and the little aki sometimes don’t know where to go or who to turn to, so they move with the older aki from their dahia. Mages occasionally wander through here, like where we aki live and train is some sort of shortcut, but they mostly leave the order-keeping to me. A lot of the time, it’s boring. Just me telling some of the kids what to do and acting tough when they decide not to do it.

Another young aki pushes a broom around a clearing, sweeping away the discards from a previous meal: chicken bones and uneaten pieces of moi-moi, and the bugs that cling to it all. In a sandpit in the distance, an older aki helps a younger one wrap his hands with cloth to protect his knuckles while he trains.

Some days, I’m the big brother; other days, I’m the joking friend; others still, I’m the strict overseer. On those days, all I need is a whip.

Truth is, there’s too many of them for just me. I think about naming some of the older aki as my lieutenants, dispatching them to oversee the smaller groups, but power corrupts. And I like being the guy in charge.

Besides, they all have to be here. They have no choice. And if I don’t train them properly, then they’ll have to fight a sin that will beat them, a sin they won’t be able to Eat. It’ll stand there in front of that paralyzed aki, jaws wide open, saliva dripping fat raindrops from its bared fangs, tongue lolling in anticipation. Young aki are pretty easy for an inisisa to digest.

I leap down from my perch.

“All right. Break’s over,” I shout. Time to work. “Now, who’s ready to take me on?”

A dozen training fights later, I let the kids catch their breath, and I take a rest myself beneath a large tree, part of a circle that rings a small clearing. Some of the training happens here, but for now, it’s all peace and quiet. I think nobody rests here because the pine needles prick their backsides and the skin behind their knees. Some of those kids really wore me out, so I don’t have the energy to move my legs, just adjust them slightly so the needles sting less. It’s a battle, really, between me and the pine needles, to see which one of us moves first. But I’m too tired to lose.

The Wall is a circle, with watchtowers connecting the swaths of stone at certain points. The towers are topped with observation booths. Some days, I catch older aki climbing the forest trees while the younger ones trail behind and watch the sentries and sometimes even the Palace guards amble back and forth. Patrolling. Sometimes, when they’re all sleeping and I can’t, I climb up to where they sat or hunched or hung, and I watch the guards and listen to them talk and argue. Complain about their children, complain about how little they’re paid. I watch them get tired. I watch them worry about how their sons are doing in school, which daughter is hoping to train as a scholar with the Ulo Amamihe. Sometimes, I track when they come and when they go. I don’t know why, really. It’s not like I’m plotting my way back into Kos. If I leave, then someone’s dahia gets Baptized, but I don’t know. . . . Seems like a small-enough act of rebellion.

Right now, however, I’m just trying to get feeling back in my arms and legs.

Something moves in the tree in front of me—a rustling on the branches right below my line of sight. The breeze whistles through the leaves, and I swear I hear something or someone whisper. I try to sit up and focus. Nothing. Just a breeze.

Then again. A shadow leaps from one branch to another. One branch bows beneath new weight, then the shadow doubles back. Passes over me, then continues off into the distance. It moves way too fast to be an aki, even another human being. But it’s bigger than any forest animal I’ve seen out here so far. My stomach drops with fear. Could be an escaped inisisa. If it is, I need to get after it fast.

The branches have grown still.

It was a blur of brown and black, the thing. Leaves rustle again. Closer. I push myself to my feet, aches and pains and all, and flick my daga from its strap into the palm of my hand. The beast leaps down, then lands in a small copse of brush right at the base of the Wall, beneath a mural of a horned mammoth crashing through a painting of a wall. Movement stops. I step closer. Closer.

I gasp.

Out slinks a small form. Slowly, it uncurls itself, standing up straight. What? It’s a person. She wears gray rags, and every inch of her skin is covered in sins. I can’t even tell if, beneath her sin-spots, she had been born with the light skin of the wealthy hill people or the dark skin of Forum-dwellers. A tattoo of a spider marks her forehead, a single black dot with long jointed legs that arc around her eyes and down her cheeks all the way to her jaw. Her hair falls down to the small of her back. She stoops to pick up a twig and, in a few deft movements, twists her hair into a loose bun atop her head. More sins wash down her neck, along her collarbone, and deep into her shirt.

She has even more sin-spots than me.

“You’re their new Catcher,” the other aki says to me. Her gray rags sway in the breeze, and neither of us has moved. I don’t know her name or anything about her, but she feels so familiar. She wears a blue stone on a bracelet around her left wrist.

“You’re here to help out?” I ask her, because I can’t think of anything else to say. I don’t realize how stupid the question sounds until it leaves my mouth. Questions trip over one another in my head, and suddenly I want to know how long she’s been out here, what dahia she originally comes from, what the Mages have her here for, what else lies beyond the Wall. Like most aki, there’s very little of her past written on her other than the sins she’s Eaten. She wears no gemstones in her ear. She doesn’t have any coal either, to commemorate the dead. She’s the only aki I’ve ever seen who’s older than me.

She flexes her fingers into a fist, right hand, then left hand, then right again, twisting her wrists. She looks restless all of a sudden, like even though she’s not going anywhere, she needs to be moving. Her arms settle at her sides, but she still looks poised to strike. She reminds me of Arzu. She flexes her right ankle, cracks her knuckles, then starts to limp past me.

“It is sad what they plan to do with you,” she tells me as she walks past. She drags one leg in a semicircle with each step, and I wonder if she hurt herself coming down from one of the trees. She looked fine a moment ago.

“Hey!” I start after her, but suddenly she’s able to bend her legs, and she sets off at a run, then leaps into the trees, higher than I’ve ever seen anyone jump.

By the Unnamed, what was that lahala? And why am I so sure I’ve seen her before?