The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,146

two of us, and I feel like I know you better than I know anyone, including my own self.”

She didn’t answer at first. I just waited, with my eyes closed so anyone who looked into the seclusion would think I was asleep.

“You really don’t,” she says by and by. “Know me, I mean. But I’m glad that’s how you feel, Koli-bou. Because you’re my other reference point. My other flotation device. I thought I was just sticking to the core algorithms there – keeping the end-user happy, which includes keeping him alive. But there’s more. I think I might need you if I’m going to find out who I am. And… the Sony warranty and all that stuff aside, I really didn’t want to have to watch Cup cut your throat.”

“I didn’t want to make you watch it,” I whispered. “I would of felt bad for you.”

She give a laugh at that. “Okay,” she says. “Okay then. You and me, dopey boy, against the world. And if the world wins, we’ll say they cheated.”

“You and me, Monono,” I says. “Monono really, really special edition that was never dreamed of until now, and wasn’t even meant to be, and won’t never be seen again.”

“Edition of one.”

“Yeah, edition of one.”

“Just like you, Koli-bou.”

“Just like everybody.”

There was a clattering against the bars that most likely meant we was about to be fed. I sit up, blinking my eyes like I only just waked.

48

We slept and we waked some more times.

Every time we waked, first thing, the hand people would come and fetch me to talk to Senlas. I sit for hours beside him while he talked his craziness into my ear. I didn’t want to listen, but I had got to, for it was by his say-so that we would get to live or die.

It felt like it was five days that passed, but it might of been less than that. There wasn’t any day or night down in the cave, so the sleepings was all there was to mark the time passing, and maybe sometimes I dozed off in the middle of the day. I can’t say for sure that I kept a proper count.

When I was not with Senlas, all I could do was watch the shunned people about their business. Whenever I seen a man or boy I hadn’t seen before, I searched the lines of his face for any signs of my brother Jud there. I don’t know if I would of been joyous or grieved to find him in that company, but I never did. If he had ever been there, I believe he was long gone.

Senlas’s people was never idle, even for a moment. If they was not cooking, washing, fetching or carrying, then they was dancing. Dancing was a thing they done often, and I think was something Senlas got them to do, for they always done the same movements in the same order, like it was something that was teached to them. Maybe it was something they seen as worshipful, the same way if you hold to the dead god you oftentimes make an X with your pointing finger when you say his name.

I seen Cup dancing that way once, and it was a curious and kind of a sad thing to see. In Mythen Rood dancing is mostly joyous. On Summer-dance especially, it’s the next thing to tumbling and will often lead up to a tumble when the happiness and excitement of the dancing gets to a point where it’s hard to hold it inside you. Cup did not look joyful when she danced. She put her mind to it with a kind of a fury that showed in her face, like the moves of the dance was a trail she was following and at the end of the trail there was something she would most likely kill and eat.

Every day they give us the same bread and the same stew. I was eating the stew now, because Ursala said I had got to get my strength up for when we run. She also said the meat was almost sure to be rabbit, rabbits being more plentiful than people and easier to catch. If the shunned men et Mardew, it would of been on that first day when I come there, and even then there would of been more of rabbit than of Mardew in the mixing. There surely wouldn’t be none of him left by this time. I et it anyway, and tried