Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

As soon as his stalker went by, Walter jumped out and jabbed the kid in the ribs, his knuckles pointed sharp. The unsuspecting youth jumped and hollered with the fear of discovery. Walter smacked him on the back of the head for good measure. “What the flank are you doing, Dugan?”

“Godsdamnit, Walter, that hurt!”

Walter jabbed him with another knuckle between the ribs. “I asked you a question.”

“Floods, man, I was just practicing for next week. I was gonna come ask you if you wanted to play some Rats with me and the other trainees.”

“You were coming to ask me to play a game of Rats,” Walter repeated.

“Yeah, I swear.” Dugan jerked his head toward the deeper markets. “Dalton’s uncle has the gambling parlor shut down until after the floods. He’s letting us use the pits.”

“And I’m invited?” Walter sniffed the air while Dugan thought about his answer.

“Of course,” Dugan said.

Walter smiled. He forced himself to think about cool baths and empty alleys and all the refreshing, happy things he kept at the ready. He exuded positivity and peace for Dugan’s nose. It was the Palan way of thinking: Sustain a world of lies on the mind’s surface and dwell on them while conversing. Use the back of your brain to hear the words of your speaker and form a reply, but do not actually think on them. Thinking on them causes the body to know it’s lying. If, however, you think on other things and just spit out your replies without truly contemplating them, you come out smelling fresh as a flood. Walter was better than most at pulling the trick off. One more talent for his dearest mother to be proud of.

“Lead the way,” Walter told Dugan with a smile. As he said it, he pictured being taken to piles of gold and heaps of fresh food—not to his fellow trainees.

••••

It wasn’t Walter’s first time in the casino, but it certainly felt like it. Without the haze of smoke and the perpetual dinging and clacking from the luck boxes, the place had an altogether different vibe. The absence of a crowd made the stained and threadbare carpets, littered with tables and silent machines, feel like a warehouse just storing things. Walter followed Dugan through the deliberate maze of gambling stations, back toward a distant ruckus.

As they rounded the poker tables with their individual, airtight, and odorless Palan-proof playing pods, Walter saw what looked to be his entire training group, three dozen Junior Pirates or so, gathered around the Rats pits. Those not playing were yelling advice to their comrades, pointing and shouting. Walter followed Dugan as the boy strolled up to the pits and weaved his way through to the railing.

“Look who decided to join us,” someone close by said.

Walter ignored whoever it was and leaned out beside Dugan to see who was winning.

They were playing one-on-one, just two boys matching wits and skill. Each of them had a long Rats pole in their hands with its small, flat paddle on the end. The pit between them was full of a few feet of water that had turned brown and foul with the signs of several rounds played. There were two rats paddling on the surface of the water, their noses twitching for air. One had been painted silver, the other black. The goal was to drown one’s own rat before the opponent killed his.

Walter watched with some interest as the two boys jousted from opposite ends of the oval pool. Neither kid seemed keen on playing straight offense by just holding their rat under. They took turns reaching out and knocking the other boy’s paddle away from his rat while corralling their own animal closer. Wielding sticks a dozen feet long was taxing after a while, so both boys had the same strategy of trying to get the rats to their side of the pool where they could wear out their opponent by forcing them to use a longer reach.

Someone bumped into Walter from behind.

“Excuse me, your heinous!”

Several of the boys nearby laughed.

“I mean, your highness.”

Walter turned and gave Dalton the finger. He’d know his distant cousin’s dry voice and even drier wit with his nose cut off.

“So, the Pirate Queen extended your curfew, eh?”

Dugan turned from the action in the pits. “Flank off, Dalton.” He yelled it over a sudden round of jeers from the boys paying attention to the match.

“I’m talking to my cousin,” Dalton said with a wry smile.

“You’re being a dick,” Dugan said.

“Nonsense. Why would I be rude to my future king?”

Walter ignored him and returned his attention to the pits. Both rats were gone, the boys’ paddles jostling beneath the water’s surface. He couldn’t tell who had what, but the crowd was furious with excitement.

“Forget him,” Walter told Dugan. He pointed up to the scoreboard where the vitals for the silver rat could be seen. Its heartbeat was racing. The betting line began to tilt in that boy’s favor, and a flurry of wagers took place all around, little of it with any potential payoff now that the end was near. The boy with the black paddle released his rat and began pushing and prodding the silver paddle, hoping to free the drowning Earth mammal and win it a precious breath. The silver player had excellent control, however. He leaned into his end of the paddle, flexing it as he poured on his weight.

The black rat bobbed to the surface and began panting furiously for air, kicking at the turbulent water with its tiny paws. The silver rat breathed its last. A steady buzz and flat pulse relayed its victorious demise.

Cheers and groans mixed as the game went final. Walter watched money fly back and forth between the boys, the sight of so much of it making him feel a rush of giddiness. Despite the half-truths of Dalton’s jabs, the reality was that Walter stood to inherit the poorest clan in the history of Palan pirates. What little his father had been able to forge had just as quickly been scrapped by the ineptitude of his uncles. And his mother, despite her drive and brilliance, had been sidelined by a type of pneumonia likened to a slow, inexorable drowning. The running joke, for those who were able to laugh about it, was that her clan was going to go down with her.

Dalton, meanwhile—the descendant of a Hommul clan outcast from so many generations ago—had now been born into the once maligned and now dreaded Smiths clan, which had ruled Palan for dozens of floods. The ironic reversal was not lost on Walter at all. Perhaps that was why he longed to be exiled from his own people: He was envious of what that long-ago action had done for Dalton’s great-grandfather and by extension, his greatest rival.

While Walter mused clan history, he scanned the crowd of forty to fifty boys arranged around the uneven rail of the Rats pit. He wondered which of them his uncle and mother would be able to land for the looming finals. The Smiths, by currently holding power, would get the top picks. The Savages would get next, and so on. None of the higher clans would take Walter, no matter how highly he had scored in prior examinations. Too many clans had been sabotaged from within as distant kinsmen wrested power for their own blood clan. At least it meant Walter didn’t have to do anything to try and impress the clan leaders or his peers. There was that.

“You’re nexssst,” Dalton hissed into Walter’s ear, in English.

Walter reached back and shoved the boy away, then dug into his ear to remove the invasive whisper.

“I challenge Walter Hommul!” Dalton yelled over the pits.

Walter watched the group of boys look up from settling their bets.

Murmurs grew to cheers.

Dugan elbowed Walter and hissed some foul-smelling good luck.

“I just got here,” Walter complained.

Boys normally waited hours for their chance to play.

“And it’s my uncle’s place,” Dalton said, “so I can challenge whoever I like.”

With a dozen prods and pushes, the gathering of boys ushered Walter toward one end of the pool. He hissed at the crowd, but found himself slotted into the little jut of railing leaning out over the black side of the pit. A ratpole was placed in his hands, and someone thumped him on the back of his head. Above the pit, the scoreboard was reset to zero and the names “Hommul” and “Smiths” blinked across the LEDs. Dalton took his place in the silver slot and grabbed his paddle from another boy. He waved the long pole out at Walter, taunting him.