Day 10
For the first time on the island, I awoke feeling almost as if I were back at the Academy. I had another male's head on my penis, and my head on his. I had awakened like this so many times at school. The momentary flash of joy quickly subsided, as I recalled where I was. Some of the feeling hung on, though, and I realized how close to Runner I was beginning to feel.
Runner began stirring, stretched, and separated from me, but quickly gave me a warm hug as he sat up. "I'll go get some nuts."
He stopped to do something I was working hard to get used to: he stood and peed on the ground. I had decided to try not to seem uncomfortable with it. After all, I had needed to do the same in front of Runner over the last few days. It seemed easier than explaining the tradition of privacy to Runner — he wouldn't be able to make sense of it. And maybe, I thought, it is more a matter of boundaries than privacy. Maverick had often come into the bathroom for one reason or another while I was using the toilet, and vice versa, and neither of us had given it a thought after the first few times. But with Maverick and me, or any other roommates at school, each was accepting the other inside the boundaries that strangers had to stay outside. But Runner had never had the boundaries to begin with. That concept would be even harder to explain to Runner than the privacy he had never experienced. I shuddered at the vision of Runner piddling in the middle of an Academy hallway. There are so many things that Runner is going to need to learn when we get home.
It occurred to me that my thoughts of the Academy, now, always included bringing Runner along when I returned there. It was increasingly hard to imagine leaving him behind.
Minutes later, Runner dropped the last shattered shell on a pile, and asked eagerly, "Wynn, can I watch you hang now?"
I smiled, and swallowed the nut from my breakfast. Now that I felt free to hang again, I'd been looking forward to giving another demonstration. I stood and put on the single vine that I thought of as my "trap protector." I didn't want to walk any distance without it. I picked up the braided vines I used for hanging, and began looking for an appropriate fallen-log-and-branch configuration. I found one, and tied the noose onto the branch.
I stood on the log and adjusted the vine with the noose hanging down at head level. Runner asked if I wanted my hands tied, as I had tied his yesterday. I shook my head. "Not this time, but maybe later. With my hands tied, I'd want you standing next to me to help me when I finish. This time I just want you to stand back so you can see how I do it." I would always be unwilling to describe the techniques of hanging to a non-student, but there was no problem with anything Runner might pick up simply from watching me hang.
I stepped off the log and started kicking. I'd been right. Runner's concentration was intense, and he was looking exactly where hanging audiences so rarely did. People watching a hanging were usually enthralled by the sexually charged wriggling and kicking of the Hanging Boy — even more so since Maverick had introduced his special brand of choreography, and Shaw, Zuchter, Marcus, and Holden had begun adding to it. It was like the way a magician performed tricks, directing the attention of the audience away from the clever sleight-of-hand that left them stumped and amazed afterward. Obviously nothing was really preventing anyone from watching the Hanging Boy's head closely. It was just that there were so many other interesting places to be looking.
But here was Runner, his eyes unblinkingly fastened on my head movements. Not masturbating this time. After last night's talk, Runner must have known that I knew a way of freeing up the windpipe and carotids, and he was determined to see what it was. And he knew where to look.
About halfway through my performance, Runner's hands suddenly clenched, and a big grin spread across his face. After that, Runner, still watching raptly, was making tiny, probably unconscious movements of his own head in time with mine.
As soon as I stepped back onto the log and began taking off the noose, Runner came to me, saying almost breathlessly, "I get it, I get it, Wynn! Can I do it now? Let me do it again!"
Minutes later, I watched Runner squirming in midair as the vines held him up by the neck, I shook my head in amazement. Runner had a long way to go, of course, but he was doing things that many of the First Years could only do after a teacher had given them a week of classroom instruction first. Runner had needed a visual demonstration like the one I would give the students, but he hadn't needed any verbal explanations, except those about how the body works. For the first time, I realized that Runner could bring something very special to the Academy. Like Maverick. Like Holden.
I let Runner go a full minute. Afterwards, Runner seemed ready to float away with happiness. As soon as I untied his hands, Runner threw his arms around me and kissed me, a much better, more practiced kiss than his first one yesterday. "I breathed a little, Wynn! And I don't feel dizzy like I did last time! Can I try it again?"
I couldn't suppress a grin at his excitement. "Runner, we really need to get going. I want to find that trail today. We need to find a way back to the Academy..."
"Yes!! The Academy! Let's go, Wynn."
At least Runner didn't try to drag me along this time. He immediately began gathering his clothes.
Around late morning, as we were pushing through an especially dense patch of undergrowth, I stopped, squeezed my eyes shut and sighed in exasperation. I've been such a complete idiot!
Just ahead of me, Runner stopped and looked back, then turned to look in all directions, instantly alert, whispering, "What is it?"
I shook my head. "No, I didn't see anything. I just thought of how we could make this so much easier. Maybe. We need to get a key."
"What's a key?" The word was a little beyond the range of Runner's vowels, and he pronounced it closer to "kay."
I held out my wrist. "These things are called 'padlocks.' The bosses can take them off, and they use a key to do that." I had no idea whether all padlocks on the island were identically keyed, but it seemed a strong possibility. If a farmer found a runaway slaveboy, it would be easier to unlock his hobble chain — I knew they did that on occasion — if the farmer already had a key to it. An even better reason — surely keys were lost sometimes, and it would be so much easier for the farmer who lost one if he could just drop by a central supply and pick up another. I was sure that Andrew had obtained authentic Island slaveware for me. It was manufactured on the mainland, and that would include whatever padlocks the farmers used. So it seemed as though there was a very good chance that, if there was a common key, my locks could be opened using the same key as for all of the slaveboys.
If I can get a key for these, I'm as good as home. I can get out of these cuffs and the collar, Runner can get me some clothes, and then we can just be two teenagers off on an adventure, hiking over the mountains and through the countryside to the boat docks on the far side of the island.
Until I met Runner, I never gave a thought to obtaining a key. I couldn't have imagined a way to do so. Now that I had Runner to steal things for me... I didn't know why it had taken so long for to think of this.
"I don't know where they would keep their keys. They might carry them around with them, but they don't really need them very often during the day, so they might just leave them in their cabin." I knelt on the ground and carefully drew an outline of a generic key in the mud. I drew it oversized so I could show detail, and said, "It's really a lot smaller than this, probably about this big." I drew a smaller version about two inches long. "It's made of metal, like the padlock," I went on, teaching Runner a new word to replace "the shiny."
Mid-afternoon, I saw Runner returning from raiding the nearest farmhouse. The huge grin on Runner's face made the answer obvious. I jumped up and hugged Runner. "You got one!"
He was ecstatic. "I didn't find one in the first cabin, so I went in another. I looked all over. I found this too." He retrieved a steak from his bag. Runner had discovered the kinds of places where farmers stored meat in their cabins, so I suspected there would be a lot more preymeat in our diet. Runner's grin widened as he reached into the bag again. He had to fumble around for a moment, as the sought-after treasure had apparently settled down below some of the bag's other contents, but at last he found it. "Here's the kay."
I took the key and hugged Runner again. It was coated in grease and salt from the meat, so I popped it in my mouth to clean it, and rubbed it between my hands to dry it. I raised my left wrist to try the key in the lock, but my hand was shaking too badly. I sat on the ground, tried to relax, and tried it again.
My heart pounded harder as I saw that it did seem to be the right kind of key. Its tip fit perfectly into the keyhole on the padlock. I frowned as it slid partway in and stopped.
I pushed harder, and realized something felt wrong. If it was the wrong key, it might go all the way in and fail to turn the tumblers, or it might be blocked by some internal impediment. In the latter case, it should be blocked firmly, not in the mushy way I was sensing. I kept trying, pushing harder, still meeting with some soft sort of resistance.
I withdrew the key and looked at it. I saw something I couldn't quite account for on its tip, so I held it up close to my eye.
There was a tiny glint at the tip that didn't match the rest of the key. It seemed to be a small flake of a different type of metal.
My jaw dropped, my eyes closed, as the puzzle of the key resolved itself in my mind.
The resistance I was encountering was metal shavings jammed well down into the keyhole.
Glumly, I tried the rest of my locks. I wasn't surprised to find that they were all fouled up in the same way. Andrew's last little prank. These locks couldn't be opened.
I wondered why I wasn't crying, then told myself, because I knew all along. Among all of Andrew's preparations, this one was kind of a no-brainer.
I heaved a long sigh. Holding the key out to Runner, I said, "It's not going to work. Could you take this back and put it exactly where you found it?" Just in case the locks of the slaveboys were not identically keyed, I didn't want any slaveboy to face the same problem of unremoveable locks that I did.
Day 12
When Runner returned from his latest cabin raid, his face had a smile that said he had met with partial success.
We walked back to our encampment beside the forest/mountain break. Runner showed me the latest meat steak, and then held out an implement that glinted in the rare sunlight. "I still didn't find the... boltcutter, but is this the right other thing?"
The idea of finding boltcutters in a cabin seemed an extreme long-shot. I strongly suspected that a farmer faced with padlocks he couldn't open on a slave just shrugged and said, well then, I'll leave them as is. It was really just a matter of whether a slave's hobble chain could be removed — I suspected that none of the other hardware ever was taken off anyway. Still, I had Runner look for boltcutters on each raid and would continue to do so. But I wasn't going to delay the mountain crossing for it.
But Runner had found scissors, on his first attempt. I reached for them carefully, avoiding jabbing myself with the sharp point. I smiled. "This is it." I decided not to try to explain to Runner why scissors were somehow plural.
The need for scissors had just occurred to me as we watched the slaveboys laboring to push a wagon up the mountain trail. This was the first one that Runner and I had seen together. I had known there was a good chance of finding scissors, imported from the mainland, in a farmhouse. All of the slaveboys I had seen had their headfur trimmed very short, and there surely would be tools around to do the trimming. You could do it with a knife, as Runner had done to get his to farmer-length, but it would be a lot more work.. (It had originally hung down a little below his waist, he'd told me.) As with the key and boltcutters, I hadn't been able to describe scissors to Runner with just words, and I'd drawn outlines of their shape in the mud, both open and closed, again pointing out they were made of metal.
I hadn't given much thought to my headfur; I'd realized early on that it neither helped nor hurt me. I was going to look like a runaway slave on sight in any case, and while the length stood out in contrast to local slaveboy styles, it would only mark me as a long-term fugitive rather than an outsider. But with Runner to provide cover as my "owner," I realized that I needed to look exactly like a slaveboy, in every way, or risk drawing that close attention that traveling with Runner was supposed to avoid.
I sat on the ground, holding the scissors, and tried to force myself to start. I have to do this, I really have to, and however bad it ends up looking, the salon can fix it when I get home. There were several students at the Academy who kept their headfur very short, and the salon helped them style it so it looked really cute. Well maybe not quite as short as mine's about to be. But it'll grow out.
With a sigh, I lifted up a handful of headfur and began cutting through it.
Runner was watching intently, and after a few minutes, asked, "Can I do it, Wynn?"
Maybe that would actually be better. At least he can see what he's doing, to make it look right. As I handed over the scissors, I had Runner touch the point carefully. "Watch out for that, you can really hurt yourself, like the knife. And don't get your fingers in here while you're cutting," I finished, putting one finger between the blades. "I need it to look like the slaveboys we've seen." Runner frowned in concentration and after several tries managed to get the fingers of his right hand through the handles. He took a large handful of my headfur and tried cutting it, unsuccessfully. I told him, "Don't try to cut so much at once. Try about this much." I took a strand of headfur between my fingers and held it out toward Runner.
After a few attempts, Runner managed to cut through the strand of hair, and gasped excitedly, "I get it!"
About thirty minutes later, I felt my hair with my hand, suppressing a groan. Anybody who knew me was going to say "What the hell??" when they saw this. I walked to a small nearby pond and knelt to take a look. I winced. Yes, this looks really awful. My hair varied randomly in length, nowhere as long as two inches. And it was absolutely perfect for my current needs. I looked, in every way, like a Purity Island slaveboy.
I looked, thoughtfully, at the scissors Runner was still holding. Then I stood and reached for them. "I want to try something."
I inserted one of the blades of the scissors into the shackle of the padlock on my left wrist. Gritting my teeth, I pulled up on the handle, the blade's point aligned along the metal wristcuff for safety. I tried to lever the padlock open.
With a sudden loud snap, the scissors came free. For just a second, the words Yes! Yes! floated through my mind, until I saw what had broken. The blade itself had snapped, across its width, the last two inches of it missing... there it was, on the ground, about five feet away. The padlock was intact, barely scratched. A burning sensation on my wrist caught my attention. The sharp remaining stub of the scissors blade had scratched the skin on my wrist just above the artery, not quite breaking the skin. Just a little deeper and I could be bleeding out from a slit wrist now, leaving Runner to his own devices once more.
My heart sinking, I told myself I was not trying anything like that again. Especially on my collar. I wasn't about to take a chance on cutting my throat.
At least I hadn't managed to kill myself. I sighed in relief, kissed Runner, and said, "Thank you for finding that. Now let's eat some of that meat."
Day 14
Runner rose up on his knees briefly to see over the rock wall, through the light rainfall, then sat down and shook his head. He and I took turns occasionally watching for approaching wagons.
I looked over the game board, frowning. I couldn't see any way to a move without Runner winning some rocks, either on this turn or the next.
I thought of the playing surface, mud with a light coating of standing rainwater, as a "board" out of habit, remembering the board games of my childhood. In this case I was simply looking at a half-dozen finger-drawn rings in the mud, arranged in a circle, some of them containing marble-sized pebbles and some pebble-free. Yesterday Runner had eagerly introduced me to the game. It helped fill the time while we watched the occasional small groups of settlers and slaveboys traveling up or down the mountain trail.
Runner had learned the game in the pen, and he loved it. He'd had trouble finding someone willing to play it with him. He always won. Runner couldn't tell me how old he'd been when he had first persuaded one of the bigger boys to let him play. He said he'd learned the game when he was "a little." I guessed that by the time Runner was five or six and the bigger boys thirteen or fourteen, the older boys might have trusted him to be serious about the game and not just throw the rocks playfully at other boys. In any case, Runner said that he'd soon been beating the Big Boys most of the time. And he'd never lost to any boy his own age.
I sat hunched over, the fingers of both hands pressed against the sides of my head as if I could goose my brain into working harder. I'm a professional school graduate, I told myself. I was number two in my class. I got all A's in high school. I should be able to beat him, at least once anyway. Okay, okay, Runner has had years of practice at this. But it's such a simple game.
It was indeed simple, in the sense that Runner had explained the rules yesterday in five minutes. But strategically it was deceptively complex, like checkers. I couldn't see how to set the kinds of traps that Runner kept making me fall into.
I heard a sound and rose to my knees. I gestured for Runner to join me. Side by side, we watched from behind the tangle of shrubbery we had set up atop the three-foot step. From the trail it would look like a normal bush grown up from below — or so I hoped — and it gave us cover to watch the trail without being observed.
A teenaged wolverine was coming from beyond the farm co-op that sat directly across from the beginning of the trail. He was followed by a gopher slave and a dogboy on all fours, to watch for any false move by the gopher. The wolverine was using a long, straight tree branch as a walking stick, and carrying what looked like a paddle strapped to his other arm. The slaveboy was the beast of burden for the trip, not surprisingly. He had a bag slung over his shoulder by its strap, of the same type Runner used to carry the various items stolen in raids. He was pulling a wheeled cart behind him at the end of a long handle. The cart could better be described as an open basket, and was filled with peaches.
As they drew closer, I saw that the slave's wrist cuffs were fastened by chains to the handles of the cart. Unlike the teams of slaveboys pushing the larger wagons, the gopher wore a hobble chain.
This was the second such group we had seen in nearly four days of watching. The other group had come down the trail from the other side of the mountains. This was a different group, not the same farmboy and slave as before.
All of the other expeditions had consisted of an older settler driving a six-slave wagon, with one or two dogboys riding along or trotting alongside.
I thought about this pattern. Possibly, the larger groups were supplying an entire co-op. They would travel to one of the trading posts and exchange farm products for the supplies. The teenager-and-slave groups might be from a single farm. It made sense that the farmer would send a teenaged son out on the trip rather than leaving his farm leaderless.
The boys' fathers might have insisted on the accompanying dogboy. The slaveboys were hobbled, so escape wouldn't be easy, but both times the slave had been bigger than the teenager who accompanied him. They might not be afraid of the youngsters, and like nearly all of the slaveboys I'd seen, these looked to have the strength that came from years of hard work. But all of the slaves were afraid of dogboys, at least based on my observations.
Or maybe every boy had a pet dogboy, and wouldn't think of going on a trip without him.
Runner whispered, "We could be like them. I can get one of those... what do you call it? What that boy is pulling?" He pointed at the trio now making progress up the trail.
"A cart."
"Cart. I can get one. Settlers leave them next to the cabins. We can take one and fill it with peaches, and then we can go up the trail."
I hadn't been ready to suggest that when we watched the first such group yesterday, but seeing a second one confirmed that it wasn't unusual for a farmboy and slave to travel together. I bit my lip and whispered back, "Except it looks like we'd need a dogboy too. Every group we've seen always has dogboys, even little groups like this." Runner and I couldn't afford to attract any undue attention. If the lack of a dogboy in a traveling party raised eyebrows...
"Dogboys like me."
"Because you're wearing clothes. But even if they like you, I don't think you could get one to leave the farm for you."
Runner was silent for a time, then shifted gears. "That one wagon yesterday had an empty space."
I nodded. I knew Runner meant that he could approach another such wagon and volunteer my services to help push.
One of the previous day's wagons had indeed had just five slaves pushing instead of the full complement of six, but it was probably only temporary. There was a sixth slaveboy trailing behind the wagon — very unhappily. His wristcuffs were joined behind him, and a chain was attached to them that ran through his legs and was secured to the back of the wagon. If he didn't keep up with the wagon, the chain would pull taut against his balls. He was managing to keep pace, even though he had a hobble chain and the other slaves didn't. He had to take quick, short steps, lifting his feet high on each step so the chain wouldn't snag on the uneven ground. He was winded, and crying. It was obvious he was being punished for something, most likely not trying hard enough. The other slaveboys looked back to glare at him periodically — his absence from his post was making all of them work harder.
I shook my head slightly. "They might let me push for awhile. Maybe until we could get to the other side of the mountains. But the settler would ask you a lot of questions you don't know the answers to. Things I don't know the answers to. Like, you can say we want to get to the trading post, but I'm not sure if they call it that. Oh, and he'd want to get my chain off if I'm going to push." I reached down and jingled it.
"We can say we lost the key."
"It's probably pretty easy to get another. He'd know that. And he'd probably still wonder where our dogboy was."
"So let's go get one."
I closed my eyes. "Runner, it's not like taking a piece of meat. You can't just stuff a dogboy in your bag, or expect him to stay quiet while you're leading him away."
Runner turned his head slowly to look at me. "Wynn, do you want to get back to the Academy?"
I gasped, stung. I wanted to return to the Academy so badly that the thought of it occupied every waking second, no matter what else I was doing. But here was Runner questioning my will, questioning my desire to return, as if Runner wanted it more than I did.
I saw, then, how scared I was. Terrified of making a false move that would lead to permanent captivity on the island. I'm so afraid of being caught, that I'm freezing up, just when I need to start taking action.
I may have to take some big chances. The time is getting closer when I have to make some dangerous moves. Either that or get used to spending the rest of my life here.
Taking a deep breath, I said, "I want to get home. More than anything I've ever wanted in my life."
Runner simply nodded, and waited expectantly.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply again. As self-sufficient as Runner was, I knew he was still looking to me for leadership.
I put my arm across Runner's shoulder, pulled him closer and rubbed my cheek against his. "Okay." I turned and sank down to sit with my back leaning against the rocky wall. "Let's start talking about dogboys. How we can get one."