Chapter 32 Kali
KALI
My stomach churned as we entered Ilasall.
Saliva soaked with regret for devouring my dinner and two of the most heavenly cinnamon buns in the world before setting out on our mission, filled my mouth.
The pastries had been so freaking good, I couldn’t say no.
I bit the nail of my thumb. Was it too soon to pester Ryder for more?
As if he knew what I was thinking, Gedeon drew me closer to him.
“Ryder is baking today. I asked him to set aside a few cream puffs for you.” His hand on my waist scrunched up the gauzy fabric of the green dress—suspiciously similar to what Jayla had worn during my first night here—Ava had convinced me to wear, much to my chagrin.
Not my style, not my color, not even on the edge of my tolerance.
But the matching emerald band currently hanging on my wrist demanded certain appearances.
I looked up at him, dusk deepening the dips under his cheekbones. “Why?”
“You keep throwing up at night and they are the only thing that your stomach keeps down.”
Two layers of fabric were all that separated us, and it was too much.
He tracked which nights my dinner settled without protest and which forced me to expel it.
Brought me glasses of water while Zion rubbed my back.
Soothed me through the scorching tears after I’d vomited and didn’t push me to explain what haunted me.
“Thank y—”
“We have spectators,” Zion warned, cutting me off, and tugged the long sleeves of his pale blue button-up shirt—the one he’d complained about every ten minutes during the entire ride to the city as, apparently, it was unbearably restricting—to hide his tattoo and scars from the soldiers watching us from the other side of the street.
“Time to pretend to be nice and complacent citizens whose tiny brains cannot resist their brainwashing,” Ava gritted out.
We fell into a rehearsed formation, leisurely walking down the streets as two green-banded couples. A nagging need to tear them off and repeat it with every passing resident burned the soles of my feet, each step like a new blister bursting with a liquid scream to do it.
“Breathe.” Gedeon squeezed my hand as we turned a corner and our shadows twined into one on the brick wall.
“I’m trying,” I growled. Endless glints of passerby’s wristbands transformed into arrows with Alora’s image attached to them, flying straight into my heart, clattering against its cage of stone the overpowering shade of gray, identical to the color palette of this cursed city.
If wickedness had a smell, Ilasall would be it.
The foul stench of sweaty soldiers clad in their synthetic uniforms consisting of black cargo pants and skintight, dark green t-shirts as they patrolled the streets.
The nauseating odor of moldy concrete emanating from endless apartment buildings, all identical, ten stories tall, a maze designed to keep you wandering without aim, emptying you of questions except on surviving today and the next day.
The dreadful reek wafting from the open entrance to a nutritional bar shop, so potent the scent alone scraped at the back of your throat.
And those posters of the Head of Ilasall, the man named Peter, hanging on the walls in practically all establishments…
They weren’t obligatory, but most chose to plaster them on the sparkling-in-the-sun windows or inside their shops and stores and restaurants and service spots and offices to display their support.
Even the many—the count I refused to calculate—green-banded citizens I’d traded favors with had a poster of some kind in their homes.
One went as far as framing it above their bed, and the hour I’d endured splayed on my back…
The deep brown eyes of the city head tracking my every move had made it almost impossible to pretend that I’d enjoyed their hands on me.
The government had sanctioned countless versions of the pictures, yet they all were identical in one aspect—our city leader looked at you from above, his jaw stony, his eyes dark, his lips set in a thin line, his blond hair accentuating the paleness of his complexion, and his clad-in-a-white-button-up-shirt shoulders set back in an open display of power.
Lowering my voice to not raise suspicion, I seethed, “I loathe this place.”
Gedeon nodded in greeting to the four soldiers in formation marching past us.
The tallest of them, dressed in a uniform embellished with a triangle-shaped golden patch, cast us a once-over and vanished into the street we came from.
“Maybe this will take your mind off things: I have a surprise for you tomorrow morning.”
My heart stuttered. Another surprise? The last two had contained six orgasms and a murder drenched in torture. Nothing could be better than that.
And for what? They hadn’t promised me anything else as far as my memory carried me. And I already had puff pastries filled with cream waiting for me once we got back. I didn’t care what kind. As long as they were sweet, they were the best kind.
Nobody paid attention to us the rest of the way as we crossed the three blocks up to a small grocery store crushed between a lifeless residential building and a restaurant dedicated to the green-banded as others couldn’t afford it.
We grabbed a couple of red plastic shopping baskets and dispersed along the shelves brimming with fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and sweets in a game of pretend shopping.
A ding of a bell above the door signaled the last customer had left, and Zion and Ava rushed to chat with an elderly woman behind the counter.
“She has been working with us since she met my mother,” Gedeon said, as we navigated the shelves toward them.
“You knew your parents?” Like most, I had no idea who my parents were. Ilasall took the infants away immediately after birth and brought them to schools to be cared for and raised as part of a group. No family ties equaled no loyalty to anything but the city and its needs.
“Not like you think.”
My brow furrowed in question, but he shook his head in a silent answer—later.
“When do you need it delivered?” The woman hid her notepad and pens under the counter as we approached the cash register, and Gedeon placed our basket of groceries on top. If anyone came in, we’d resemble actual shoppers.
Zion slid the backpack off his shoulders and unclasped the cover’s buckles.
“No later than tomorrow or they will stink up your place.” He unloaded the cardboard boxes stained with deep red and wiped his hands on his loose black pants—also known as the second thing he’d made a fuss about during our trip.
Evidently, they were too airy. At least they could hide the scarlet streaks better than his pale blue shirt.
Her nose wrinkled as the woman poked the packages with a pencil. “What did you do? They reek.”
“Not my idea.” Zion moved away, making space for me to take the lead, and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. “She came up with it.”
A blush crept up my cheeks at his grin.
“Tell me then, what’s in there?” she asked me. The silver of her waist-long hair complimented the deep navy color of her half-sleeved blouse, like stars streaking a night sky, both pure and evil. “Or shall I ask who?”
“Do you really want to know?” Gedeon inquired, examining the gleaming shelves stretching to the entrance of the store, not a single soul in sight.
“Body parts,” Ava piped up, and waved Gedeon’s dirty look off. “What? Believe me, she’s seen and been through stuff worse than this.”
“She’s right. Now which package is going to whom?” The woman pulled out a large plastic crate from under the counter and placed it on top. “They’ll be delivered tomorrow morning. I’ll cash in some favors.”
I lifted the largest box up out of Zion’s backpack and deposited it in the crate she’d indicated. “We agreed this one should go to the Head of Military. It has pairs of feet and hands from one of their soldiers. You know, because they march and all.”
After Zion had come back from training his teams last night, he’d shared the idea of sending the soldier’s remains back to the Head of the Military as a message to not fuck with us. But I’d figured this could be a great way to send proper warnings to everyone I had my sights set on.
“This second one has a head, so, obviously, it has to be delivered to the Head of Ilasall. But the last is my favorite.” I lifted the smallest box out of the backpack and placed it on top of the other two.
“It has a pair of balls and a dick with green and black wristbands on it. I want to send it to the Head of Welfare, my former employer. Hopefully, he’ll choke on it. ”
The sun-spotted skin around her bright eyes wrinkled as she laughed in such a genuine way it warmed my chest. “Creative. Been a while since we had someone with an imaginative mind. These two are either too strategic or too crazy in their ways.”
Zion grinned at her. “You know you love us.”
Looking over our shoulders, she quickly stuffed the plastic crate under the counter. “How can I help you?”
I twisted on my heels and was promptly tossed like a doll. Zion shoved me behind his back as Gedeon hovered in front of him, effectively hiding us both from whoever had dared to venture into the grocery store.
Bending to my left, I peeked around them. A young and hollow-cheeked girl stood frozen in time, her mouth agape and a bag of shining red apples pressed to her stomach, the fruit curvier than her belly, partially camouflaged by the flowing light pink dress I’d seen before.
She was that scrawny girl I’d met in the bakery on my way home from work the day I’d been snatched from the city.
Her gaze bounced from me to Gedeon, Ava, Zion, the woman behind the counter, and settled back on me. “You,” she squeaked.
“I remember you. We met in the line at the bakery.” I squirmed out of Zion’s iron grip on my waist and walked around them, swatting away Gedeon’s outstretched arm for disobeying his crystal-clear instruction to stay behind them. “What do think she’ll do? She’s pregnant, for gods’ sake.”
Rooted in place between two shelves, she tracked my approach. “You escaped,” she said shyly.
“How do you know?” Gedeon’s harshness knocked her a step back.
“My,” she gulped, “friend had once mentioned a man with a forest tattoo on his arm could help you get away.” She pointed to Zion’s exposed and inked right forearm.
“Stop scaring her,” I scolded Gedeon. “And I didn’t escape. He kidnapped me and the other one helped.”
She staggered back, the bag of apples swaying in her grasp.
So that hadn’t sounded the way it was supposed to. I added, “But it’s all good now.” Kind of.
Zion and Ava snickered while Gedeon glowered at me.
“What? It’s true.” I shrugged. “Yes, their tactics are a bit…questionable, but they take care of their people.” The green band on her skinny wrist shimmered under the fluorescent lights, and I knew what I had to do.
The words tumbled out of me. “Do you want to get out of here? The city, I mean. You could live in our compound or with the others. Outside the wall. Wherever you want. But you have to decide right now; we don’t have much time. ”
“I—” She chewed on her bottom lip. Her gray eyes, matching the concrete residential buildings, a symbol of Ilasall, bore into the elderly woman behind the counter.
“Go,” she encouraged her. “Don’t overthink it. Trust me.”
“Ahm, o-kay.” She fiddled with the knot on her bag of apples. “Uh, my name is Malaya.”
“Kali.” I tapped my chest and indicated the rest of us. “She’s Ava, the brooding one is Gedeon, and the one your friend talked about is Zion.”
I plucked the poor bag Malaya was destroying with her nails and poured the apples out into the basket on the shelf, the faint thuds from fruit hitting fruit the only sounds disturbing the silence enshrouding our group. Maybe I hadn’t been clear enough.
“Malaya’s coming with us,” I announced.
“She is not.” Displeasure deepened each arch and dip of Gedeon’s face for acting the opposite of his orders—quick and quiet. “We cannot risk bringing someone unplanned and unscreened home.”
I strolled to him hovering in front of Zion, while Ava exchanged glances with the nameless older woman, like a silent this again?
“Please,” I pleaded, my lips an inch away from his.
His thick and impossibly lickable lips. A pair of which had stolen the world from underneath my feet and rendered me a ball of contrasting feelings, each a different shade of yarn.
A pair of which harbored his tongue, quick to anger and spit controlling words, yet caring and ready to give me answers to the questions I sought.
He sighed through his nose. “For you.”
Victory.
Or, in other words, the result of the lesson I’d learned years ago: using your body to your advantage. He had a thing for touching me, and if I could use it to get what I wanted, why not? Nothing came for free in this world.
“You do things to me, little death,” he murmured.
The strain abandoned his shoulders and the austere lines of his jaw I was stroking, his faint stubble scratching my fingertips.
He hadn’t shaved in the last three days.
The roughness of it roused thoughts about how it would scrape against my inner thighs and—
Nope.
“Thank you.” Pure will to not give in to temptation so recklessly peeled me off him. Usually, I didn’t ask for support. I simply sold and bought. Made deals.
I didn’t need his approval. Malaya was coming with us. Yet for some reason, it felt nice to have it.
I couldn’t pull Alora out of Ilasall today, but at least the city would have one person less in their clutches.
Zion had said they required more information about her besides her name to bring her out, and that, I didn’t have.
When you were a child confined in Ilasall’s schools, you had no use for a person’s identification code.
Their name was your universe, and all it entailed.
“Let’s go.” Ava made a circular motion with her forefinger and strode between the shelves toward the exit. “The curfew begins in ten minutes. We’re going to be too late to go out the way we came in, so the northern gates it is. Hopefully, we won’t die today.”
“She’s kidding,” I explained to a taken aback Malaya.
Hopefully.