Red Sky: Chapter 22
We were released just before the Festival of the Concubines. This was the pinnacle of Goodwell’s punishment and reward system. The box was the punishment, the concubines the ultimate reward. The three teams that mined the most ore the previous year got to experience that reward. For the rest of us the festival was merely an extra hour in the cafeteria at night before going back to our cells.
I don’t know how often the concubines visited the red moon, there were rumors it was every month for the guards. They were kept out of sight on those visits. During the annual festival for the prisoners, Goodwell made sure we knew of their presence from the first minute they were on the moon. There was a procession. It started when we were all in the cafeteria, after we picked up our food and were in our seats. The guards pretended they were escorting the concubines, or concs, as everyone called them, to their quarters for the night. But really, they were leading a parade.
The girls were led by Big Shoes. Big Shoes made sure his big shoes moved slowly so the concs could show off for the crowd below. Scores of inmates ran underneath the walkway to stare up into the grates. I didn't join the crowd. I watched from a distance at our regular table as they played their roles for the audience.
“Are they the same ones as last year?” The newt next to me asked. I shrugged. I honestly had no idea. I was so overwhelmed during my first couple weeks on the moon I didn’t notice the festival.
They were beautiful. A vision in pure white: white stockings, white skirts, white buttoned shirts. Even their wristbands were colored white to look like a fashion accessory. I couldn’t help but to look past the bouncy skirts and freshly cleaned shirts to the one piece of black on their body. They wore the same metallic collar around their necks that we wore.
We were being presented with the illusion of freedom. Goodwell wanted us to believe these women could walk freely. It was only for show. If there hadn't been an audience, they would have been tied to the same laser chain that takes us to the mine every morning. I felt a sense of desperation, the feeling that every new individual I would ever meet will have the same collar around their neck and the same cuffs around their wrists. The desperation that I would never meet a free man or woman ever again.
The parade reached the exit. The last couple of women slowly filing through the doorway. Most of us wouldn’t see a woman for another year. The last one in line stopped at the door. She had smooth black hair down to her waist and long fake eyelashes. She turned to the assembled inmates and curtseyed. Then her red lips glistened as her mouth drew wide and, to either torture us or to give us something to remember her by, she blew a slow kiss that hung in the air like a shimmering butterfly. The inmates were near riot. Com leaned in to me. “I bet Goodwell told her to do that.”
“I wonder how old they are,” Brin asked. Like the newt across from me he was new to our table. He had started sitting with us after I’d saved his life in the mine. “Old enough,” his partner, Dexter, the other inmate I saved, responded. Dex was from my class. I had never talked to him before we were both trapped in that air pocket. Now I talked with him every day.
Although it was hard to hear above the shouts and whistles ricocheting throughout the cafeteria, I could still hear the newt across from me as he said the word “goddesses” over and over again, hoping that by merely repeating the word he would make them magically reappear. They weren’t going to magically reappear just as no amount of wishful thinking would make our collars and bracelets disappear. They were gone for another year and it was time to return to a normal night in the cafeteria.
*
“What did you see when you were crawling through the dirt?” One of the newts asked the next night while we waited the extra hour in the cafeteria. Dexter and Brin were beside me once again. They clung to me now like we were still trying to escape the cave-in. Brin was a newt, and with Tamo a newt, many of the other newts migrated to our table. It didn’t hurt that the Lion and the Snake were both gone with the concubines, so they weren’t there to enforce discipline in their faction.
“What did you see?” I was asked that question many times in many different ways and never had a good answer. “Nothing,” I said truthfully. “What were you thinking?” A different newt chimed in. The questions kept coming: about Goodwell’s office, about how I knew the tether would hold, about what I said to Beetleface, about why I risked my life for other inmates.
“It all happened so fast, we only did what anybody else what have done.”
“Nonsense,” Dexter patted me and Max on the back. “These two gentlemen are heroes. No one ever survived a cave-in before. Now we’ve proven it can be done. They won’t have any excuse the next time it happens. They’ll be forced to look for survivors.”
“It’s not fair,” said one of the anonymous voices from the crowd. The others joined in. It wasn’t fair to put us in the box for saving a couple of lives. The newts were getting excited and talking over each other.
“We don’t deserve to be treated like this,” another one shouted, getting the attention of the guards. Festival night was lightly staffed. For obvious reasons none of the veterans wanted to work, so they made the new guards, the ones who arrived with the newts, patrol the cafeteria. The newts were testing them, sustained by their anger and sense of injustice. The chorus of voices grew like the catcalls and whistles of the previous night. Other inmates looked at our table warily. The newts were still young. They didn’t know what the red moon was capable of doing to them. They didn’t know what Hades was capable of doing to them.
I looked over to Max who was seated on the other side of Dexter. The look in his eyes was dull. He was different now. He was withdrawn and secretive. He tried to hide it behind a smile, but I could tell he'd changed.
Max wasn’t the only thing that was different. I had become a minor celebrity. Starting with the Festival and over the next several days newts continued drifting to our table. They seemed to feel a certain loyalty to me. Com was the first to notice.
The Lion noticed, too. I had become a threat. I could feel his watchful eyes following me when we walked to the mine in the morning and back at night. The Lion’s faction once had over half the inmates in the prison; by the end of my first week out of the box he had lost a dozen. There were only a few things for inmates to fight about on the red moon. There was the ore. There was the food. Then there was territory. I had taken the Lion’s territory no different than if I had broken into his home and taken his possessions. He would fight to get them back. How he would fight I had no idea. But he would fight. If I planned to spend the five years on the red moon with my head down, my dive into the mine changed all of that. I was no longer a master of my own fate. The Lion was coming for me.