Chapter 6

Day 10

For the first time on the island, I awoke feeling almost as if I were back at the Academy. I had a man’s head on my mound, 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. Grant 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 Grant 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, “Amy, 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 anywhere 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 Noosemeister—even more so since Grant had introduced his special brand of choreography, and Shawna, Jana, Melissa, 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 Noosemeister’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, Amy! 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 Grant. 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, Amy! 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, Amy.”

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 slave, 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 bought 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 slaves.

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 fresh meat in our diet. Runner’s grin widened as he reached into the bag again. He had to fumble around for a moment: the sought-after treasure had 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 slaves were not identically keyed, I didn’t want any slave 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 slaves 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 slaves I had seen had their hair 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 hair; 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 slave 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 slave, 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 hair 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.