45
I lay back on the bed in my room with closed eyes. I need a moment of peace before I enter the games, but I find myself looking into a memory. One that I have always remembered vaguely. Now that the receptor in my brain was removed, it’s clearer.
I see myself helping my dad with fixing the roof of our house after the heavy rain the night before. We were poor enough, we couldn’t afford hiring someone to fix the house. Dad loved fixing the house to clear his mind, and I loved to help him.
I see myself hammering a nail next to my dad, wondering if he knew about the big secret in our family. And if he knew, how could he just be so calm about it?
My mother cheated on my dad, ending up with having my brother Jack. But then again, of course he must have known.
Jack looked a lot like my mom, but not like my dad. I didn’t look like either of them, but somehow I was sure that Jack wasn’t my brother. Not just because he was a predicted Nine, while no one in my mom and dad’s family had ever been more than a Seven. And not just because Jack was always favored over me in the family – at least no one wanted to kill him. But because I didn’t feel like Jack was my brother. It’s hard to explain, but I always knew he wasn’t. I think mom must have slept with a Nine, to save the family after I arrived. It must have showed on me that I was going to be a Monster, and that the family needed rescue with another child that could not have come out of mom and dad’s Seven and Six genes.
Did dad just accept that? Was this part of a bigger deal that I didn’t know about?
I didn’t care. I never felt related to Jack, like my parents never really felt related to me. I was a black sheep. I almost didn’t mind since I had no choice, thinking that one day when I got ranked, I would leave this family for good, and create a real one for myself.
Protecting my family in the game was more of a duty than heart-felt love. It was ironic how I never even looked like them, even when it was Jack who was an imposter. In Faya, we didn’t trust our logic and instincts. You only trusted the iAm.
If my mom had cheated, it still puzzled me how another parent gave up on his child who was a Nine. But like the soldier boy, Bellona’s friend, had told me: this is Faya, and it’s nothing but a big joke. It’s like Wonderland. Alice was trying to learn the rules and the logic of it, while there was none. It’s all nonsense.
So I was a Pre-Monster when I was Seven, but with Woo’s chocolates and training, I became a Seven. Why Woo did that and how it all started still escapes my memory. I guess you don’t remember everything at once when you get your receptor removed. But I remember the suspicious way my mother looked at me the day Woo found me in the homeless neighborhood my dad had sent me to, and brought me back home. I had been eating his chocolates for months, as he took care of me in that little boat by the shore. That was before he had decided to live in a treehouse in an abandoned garden nearby. Even though Woo was eight years old, he fished and ate from the sea by himself. But he was too young to fully take care of himself – although he took care of me – so he still lived with his mysterious dad. I had never seen Woo’s dad, and Woo didn’t allow me to visit his house. Ever. He was just the mysterious rebel boy who found me in the gutter, and taught me how to fool my parents into thinking I’d been following the rules so I could get home.
I never forgot that look on my mom’s face when she checked my iAm a month later with results of a Pre-Seven. It was as if she didn’t want me to be a Pre-Seven, or as if she suspected Woo’s manipulation, although she never met him but briefly many years later. That was when her looks started easing up. The features on her face were like saying, “Don’t mess this up, Monster, or I swear this time, I really am going to kill you.” Then she would feed Jack the best food she could buy.
What I remember clearly is joining Woo in the treehouse he lived in. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear. As usual, Woo was listening to his favorite song, “Follow the Sun,” by the Beatles. He was also fumbling through old books and papers that meant the world to him, while Carnivore’s picture was hung on the wall.
I didn’t have anyone who cared for me but Woo at this time of my short life. We lay next to each other on the treehouse’s floor, watching the sky above.
He was fifteen that year, I was fourteen. I gushed all night about how beautiful the stars looked, and he laughed. He believed that everything in this world looked ugly, and although the stars were of the rare beauties, they were far away.
My eyes were one of the rare beauties, he said, and they were never far away. That’s why he always wanted to see through them, because I was capable of seeing the good in the world, while he claimed he couldn’t.
I remember the bruise on his face that night. Was it his dad? Was it the Pre-Monsters he insisted on hanging out with? I didn’t know. Woo was always wounded and barefoot, and I doubted I could change that. He once told me he wanted to be like a boy named Peter Pan, who rebelled against the world and had his own followers, the Lost Boys. Peter Pan owned a place called Neverland. Woo owned nothing… yet.
“You’re messing things up, Woo,” I told him, staring up at the sky. “You don’t follow the rules, have bad grades in school, and insist on spending time with those Bad Kidz who are going to be Monsters. I don’t want you to become a Monster.” I didn’t know I was brainwashed by the chocolates at the time.
“Maybe it’s my destiny to become one,” he said, also staring at the stars.
“Don’t you ever say that,” I turned to face him and he turned back, looking at me as if he was crying with those grey eyes. “You promise me!”
“Promise you what?” he wondered. I could sense he was keeping tons of secrets from me.
“That you never let me go,” I sighed, and held his hand.
“That,” his eyes smiled at the thought. “I can promise you.”
“It means you will work hard this year, so you become the Seven you always dreamed of,” I assured him, and he nodded.
“I promise,” he shrugged.
“Promise me what, Woo?” I insisted that he said the words.
“To never let you go, Tender,” he nodded, and stared back at the stars.
***
By the end of this memory, I feel like my life is a pile of confusing moments and actions. I can’t really say who I am, because I haven’t had a full chance to become who I really am. If that makes any sense.
For God’s sake, I am only sixteen, and I had my first kiss in a battlefield. In order to know who I am, or who I want to be, I need time. A precious amount of quality time, so I can decide who I want to be, and what I am made of. Not because I am pressured by the idea that I am going to die sooner than I think, but because I made up my mind to be who I want to be, and no one else. I guess that I, and my friends who died today, were driven by the moment of inertia. It’s a concept I learned in school. To me now, it basically means that once someone is pushed to fight for their lives, they might end up doing wrong things like killing other innocent people, still driven by the power of that first strong nudge. And when your life is nudged into the wrong path, all that follows is just a set of random and illogical actions.
At a young age, we were driven to stay alive, no matter what. All our actions in between were only filling the void. They were not really decisions.
I am saying this because although I am a sixteen-year-old girl, there is one thing I know for sure right now – and thank God that there is at least one thing that I am sure of. I know that I am not fighting Carnivore to win this game. I am not fighting it to become a Ten, and I am not fighting it for Leo, as I have persuaded Xitler. I am here, fighting Carnivore, for Woo.
It’s hard to believe that after all that I went through, I can’t give up on wanting to find Woo for the silliest reason in the world, to ask him why he broke his promise. But it’s true. Deep in my mind, the longer the game runs, the longer I survive, I still have a chance to find Woo and ask him: Why did you give up on me, although you promised to never let me go?
Because if Woo had no reason to let me go, who am I here for? Or with? I am not particularly enjoying this world alone.
If I die, I won’t have a chance to ask him, and that would kill me much slower and painfully than Carnivore itself.
So what was all that about with Leo, insisting on knowing if his kiss was true, while he was dying on the cliff? I guess a girl always wants to know why she was kissed, especially if it’s the first. And again, I am not sure that everything between me and Leo was true. I mean, if we had met out of the Playa, things might have been really different. In the real world, in my school, boys like Leo don’t even look my way.
You put a girl in a death game and put a hot guy next to her, when both of them are destined to die within hours... how do expect them not to want to fall in love before they die. Whether Leo’s emotions are true or not, I can’t neglect that I wasn’t here for him. Ironically, he was here for me, sent by lunatics who think that I am special.
Another reason for wanting to find Woo might be that I need to win to go back to my life – or what’s left of it without a family. I need to live normal days and weeks, not pressured by screaming that I am alive in some machine. Maybe then I can know who I love, and who I don’t. I mean, the way I was attracted to Leo from the beginning was weird. Even though I don’t know many girls who could resist such a hot – and pretty much good guy – like him.
So here I am, hours away from fighting a one-eyed tiger who might have killed Woo. If you ask me if I know what I am doing, I will say no. If you ask me how I plan to do it, I’ll say I don’t know. If you ask me why I am doing it, I’ll hesitate and think it over. But I’ll tell you it’s because I am planning on one thing, only one thing is on my mind: staying alive.