The slipshot nodded to the grassy arena. I was grateful to see the white flowers hadn’t turned into body parts. They were still flowers. That was the only good thing.
A giant man with a whip was leading out a long line of about a hundred people. They were dressed in white and covered in flower garlands. The arena filled with scattered cheers and jeers. The people in the line, though, must have been as mesmerized as Justice and I were, because they all laughed and smiled and threw flowers at the crowd.
“There she is.” The slipshot pointed toward a woman in white. “Having a great time, isn’t she?”
It was Last. It was the first time I’d ever seen her happy. Her face glowed, her eyes were bright, and she had a joyful, beautiful expression on her face.
“What’s going to happen?” Justice asked. His face was pale, and his freckles stood out.
If the slipshot hadn’t helped us, we would’ve laughed and cheered, until we’d . . . watched Last be slaughtered? Would we have known what was happening? Or would we have seen something else?
“Well, you see,” the slipshot said. “Every day here is festival day.”
“Every day?”
He nodded. “Every day. But when every day is a party, it gets kind of boring. Nobody likes cake if you eat it every meal. So if you have to serve cake, you should at least light it on fire. Better yet, put a bomb in it, give it to somebody, and laugh when they eat it and explode.”
Justice lifted his eyebrows.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Gerald.”
“Go on,” Justice said.
“Here’s the thing. People always think they want utopia. But give somebody everything they want—all the food, all the riches, all the luxury—and you bet, in two days, they’ll get bored and start lighting utopia on fire just to watch it burn. They’ll pull out marshmallows for the bonfire. For instance, everything here is free. It’s all ‘what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, free, free, free.’ You think I still steal? Heck yeah, I do. I’m a slipshot.”
Justice scowled. “Get to the point.”
Gerald narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled. Slipshots didn’t like being told what to do. They liked to steal, and they liked to kill. But they were also by nature pretty cowardly, so if you were someone like Justice, they’d back down. It was why they’d attacked me as a little kid, but less so as an adult.
“Point is, when you show up here, you get flowers and cakes. A little bit later, once you’re starving for more—literally starving—you go down a rabbit hole until you’re doing things you never thought you’d do for that lick of pleasure. It’s why those ones down there are potato-peeling each other’s skin?—”
I winced. “Don’t mention?—”
“Whatever.” He frowned at me as if he expected someone raised in Hell Gate not to mind the depravities happening in the arena. “Anyway, some of the cake and flower people get shuttled into the arena for the pleasure of the depraved. Dancing and laughing doesn’t do it for them anymore. They want to see the people dancing and laughing get torn apart by the forest beasts.”
I stared at the people in the arena tossing their flowers into the crowd. Last was laughing and blowing kisses.
“If you want to save your friend—the one you fell from the sky with? You have about . . . ehhh . . . two minutes, give or take.”
“Until the beasts are let loose?” Justice asked, frowning at Last a hundred feet below.
The slipshot grinned. “Tonight will be a massacre. They caught that jackaltooth that chased you in.” He shuddered. “Friggin’ Bard monsters. Hate ’em.”
A cold chill swept through me. I reached out and grabbed Justice’s hand, squeezing hard.
“Justice?”
“Yeah?”
What I was going to say caught in my throat as the arena erupted into cheers and howls. An arched wooden gate in the far stone wall was slowly opening, like a portcullis on a medieval castle.
The boom of a drum sounded, rattling and shaking the stone. People stomped their feet, vibrating the arena. It was so loud it sounded like we were inside thunder.
Then a dozen men pulling thick ropes rolled a cage from the dark mouth of the tunnel. The cage was ten feet long and five feet tall, made of warped and twisted metal. Spikes lined the inside, pointing at the creature within. The cage was barely big enough to hold the beast.
Justice let out a harsh breath.
