Authors: Mikael Aizen
He had to conserve his energy.
It didn't matter how he won, only that he was the only one to walk out at the end.
He got food after he won, and so the quicker he won, the quicker he'd eat.
The more he ate.
The more he fought.
They wouldn't open the grate until Kyle or his opponent couldn't fight anymore, and for most the kids, starvation was just as big a possibility as dying from the fight.
Kids like the one who looked at Kyle now were desperate, and that made him dangerous.
"Just lay down and I'll put you out quick," Kyle said.
"Look at me.
You can tell I keep winning.
You can tell I eat.
You can see that you won't beat me so just lay down and I'll make sure you're alive for your next fight where you might have a chance."
All the rooms were the same.
They were dark, cold, and isolated.
Steel pits that only opened from grates above where they'd lift them out after somebody won.
The other boy stared at Kyle blankly, and the faintest bit of reason colored his eyes.
He moaned and hugged himself and shook.
It was the hunger pains, when your belly started to eat itself for energy.
When the boy looked up again his eyes were wild again.
But to Kyle's surprise, he laid down on the ground, face up and spread eagle.
Kyle didn't approach carefully or eagerly.
But swiftly and powerfully.
It saved energy this way.
He kicked the boy across the face and stomped on his windpipe in one pass.
Then he sat in the corner and waited for the kid's gasping burbles to ease.
Kyle's hands shook.
They always shook.
The metal grating from above dropped a few pebbles into the pit and a harness lowered and floated down in front of him.
Kyle looked at it, considering.
Knowing that if he took it, he'd have to fight another boy.
They never rushed him, never told him to hurry.
They'd wait, days if they had to.
Kyle had waited for three days, once.
That was the hungriest he'd ever gotten.
He took the harness and slid his butt under it.
The harness' motor made a low hum as it lifted him from the pit.
At the top he was in a square wooden cage with trees and other cages around him that had paths between them.
It was a "sunny" day.
There was a table in the middle of the cage with a piece of bread and a bit of raw meat.
And a sticky-note.
He walked to the folded piece.
Someone had left a note...
Written on the inside it had one word: "Merciless," a smiley face instead of a period.
He stared at the words, holding the page.
He'd done the other kid a favor.
That boy would've died anyway.
If he was in so much pain that his stomach was eating itself, and if he'd been willing to lay down without fighting, he had no chance.
Not in any fight.
Kyle had saved him a slow and painful death.
He'd lied to the boy, yes, but it was better not to know or expect.
As Pa used to say, be like a duck.
They must think he'd done it because of the meat he got each time he killed a boy.
Kyle took the piece of bread but left the piece of meat.
It'd cost him energy, maybe his life, but the note told him they were watching.
Someone was watching.
Kyle tore up the sheet of paper and walked out the cage down the path to the next cage that was open.
He never saw the people that managed the harness, or opened and closed the cages, or took away the bodies of the kids that died.
Not from the first day he'd come here.
Not a shadow.
But
someone
had left a note.
And he could guess who.
The next cage looked exactly like the last one.
The harness came floating down through the top of the cage and stopped right over the pit.
It was suspended by something way past the top of the trees, where he couldn't see.
But the rope always hung straight, and it was always the same harness.
Kyle was small and young, but not dumb.
A forest this big would rain a lot more than it did and with different sized raindrops.
A forest would smell like dampness and like flowers and leaves and other things.
There should be a million smells that Kyle didn't recognize.
But here, it only smelled like trees.
He wasn't in a real forest.
Kyle sat in the harness, and the grate underneath began to slide out.
He looked down into the dark pit, his senses sharp to see if he was the first down.
He wasn't.
He could see the other kid in the corner, bundled in a ball where the shadows were darkest.
He'd be coming at Kyle as soon as he could reach Kyle.
It was a bigger, taller boy.
Skinny and with...a ring through his lip.
The memory came to him as sharply.
He'd brooded daily over what he should've, could've, would've done, instead of running from Del.
Running from his mom for such a silly reason.
This kid in the pit with him was one of the boys who put him here.
Who'd made him and other boys suffer.
It was someone he wanted to kill even if it was a test like all the other tests had been.
Kyle felt angrier than he'd ever been in his life.
This boy and the others were why he was here, why he'd tried to kill himself a hundred times rather than keep fighting and keep hurting other boys.
They'd pushed him and pushed him and made him do horrible things until it wasn't even hard anymore.
And now, he could make one of them pay.
The lip-ring boy wasn't skinny.
Not by standards here, at least.
He was a little beat up, but he wasn't like most the other boys here.
No, he was new.
Kyle could tell because he was scared.
You forgot about fear here.
Hunger and survival became everything.
For Kyle...
Calm.
Calm became everything.
Calm like a duck.
So the strangest thing happened when he got angry, he smiled.
Because he'd been calm so long that it felt good to be angry.
And when the kid with the ring through his lip saw Kyle grinning at him, his crouch became a crumple, and he let out a whimper.
Kyle wasn't worried about the other boy's size.
He'd beaten kids bigger than this one.
Here, size was a bad thing.
You got tired quicker, and you needed more food, and you were slower.
Kyle was small and fast and smart.
And there was something about fighting that he just understood.
It made sense to him.
It was easy.
As the harness lowered him into the pit, Kyle hopped out of it.
"Remember me?"
He let his grin get bigger.
"I'm going to kill you now."
The other boy stood up and laughed.
"You're gonna kill me are you?
Stay back pip or I'll mess you up and fuck your corpse for dessert."
His voice cracked and his eyes shifted.
He didn’t act like the other boys did.
Kyle walked right up to him and stared the boy in his terrified eyes.
"Do it."
The kid screamed with freakish eyes and threw his wide and slow punch at Kyle.
Kyle caught it and pulled the boy forward and down so that the boy lost balance and sprawled out flat onto the ground.
Then Kyle stomped on the back of the boy's elbow.
It snapped and crunched.
The boy screamed and cried.
And sobbed.
And begged for mercy.
Kyle walked around the boy and lifted the other arm.
The boy began to resist, so Kyle dropped his whole body weight on the arm, hard.
It crunched too and when Kyle let go of it, the arm poke out from the ground at an odd angle.
Kyle took the boy's head and slowly spun it, forcing the face down boy to roll.
A boy Kyle's size could only kill a few ways, crushing the windpipe was easiest.
The boy let out an agonizing scream when his body rolled over his broken arms.
Face up, Kyle saw tears rolling down into watery snot.
He listened to the blubbering and begging and mews.
He thought of how the boy had kidnapped him and treated Jess.
How Del must be worried sick.
How he probably wouldn't ever see Callie again to explain what had happened.
How he'd killed and hurt other boys for food because of this one.
How cold-hearted he'd become after the injections they'd given him.
Del had told Jess that the one thing she wanted Kyle to always remember was that he always had a choice.
So far he only had killed for mercy.
Some of the boys had asked him for his help, and he helped them.
Kyle looked at the blubbering boy, he felt sick.
He backed up to the opposite corner and took a seat.
His hands were shaking again.
Kyle looked up and waited for the grate to move and the harness to come down.
He waited for several hours.
The other boy's sobs had slowed, his breathing grew deeper, and he was sleeping.
Something fell through the grate above.
It was yellow and it fluttered like a butterfly.
It landed right besides the other boy's head.
Kyle stared at it.
He knew they should've opened the grate by now because he'd won and the other boy couldn't fight anymore.
But inside he knew what the piece of paper would ask him to do.
He knew.
So he didn't go pick it up.
Not for another few hours at least until the "sun" began to set.
Kyle crept forward on hand and feet, cautiously, right by the other boy's head.
He picked up the sticky-note.
It read "Merciless."
Except instead of a smiley face, there was a sad face.
Kyle went back to his side of the pit and squatted by the wall, holding the paper in his shaking hands.
The other boy kept sleeping.
Whimpering and crying.
And Kyle waited.
When Kyle got out of the harness, Jess was standing there.
He could tell it was Jess even if her eyes had changed, and she'd gotten taller, older looking like an adult.
She didn't look so sad anymore either, not on the outside.
She smiled at Kyle.
He didn't smile back, he didn't know how to smile now, not in a nice way.
"Hi, Kyle."
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm here to take you to your mom."
The words kind of hit him and bounced off and then came back to hit him a second time.
"What do you mean?"
"Your mom found a way to get them to let you go."
"I don't know who 'them' are."
After killing the lip ring boy, he still didn't know who'd put him here.
Grown ups had to be part of this.
Grown ups with a lot of money and power.
Jess held out a hand.
"Come on, Kyle.
Let's go."
"What about you?" he asked.
More because he was curious, less because he cared.
He'd given up caring about a lot of things some time ago.
"I'm not so lucky," she said.
"I still don't understand what's happening."
She smiled at him again and he detected a little bit of that sad-sweet he remembered.
"We're the pawns in all this, we aren't supposed to understand."
She pointed at the table.
There was food on it, a lot of food.
He hadn't even noticed.
"Hungry?"
"No," Kyle said.
She nodded.
"Follow me then."
They walked right up to the house with dark red trimming and a tiny yard that Kyle used to play in and think was too small.
Now, it looked big.