Chapter 25: Fair Is a Scale

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which somebody makes the game fair, and everyone is grateful, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry across the asphalt. What is the difference between fair and equal? The answer is whoever is holding the scale, and which side he happens to be standing on.

The collector took his time.

He took it the way a man takes it when a thing he has built is leaking, and he has decided, calmly, that the leak is the problem of whoever is standing nearest. He stood by the flagpole with his cap on and his hands behind his back. He did not look at the ring of six children on the yellowing grass. He looked at the clock tower, where the hands had crept to twelve-twenty, and then at the hummingbird.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "A brief intermission."

The camera’s glass eye turned toward him with a small whir.

"The Game of Life prizes balance. A Stage must be fair, or it is nothing at all. And at present..." He sighed, as though the arithmetic grieved him. "Six players have found one another. Two have not. Six against two is not a game, folks. It’s a picnic."

"Excuse me?" said Jaquan. "I’m pretty sure we’re the ones who got kidnapped."

"Which is why I am going to even the odds."

He took a card from his inside pocket, wrote on it without looking, and pinned it to the corkboard with a thunk that carried across the entire yard.

RULE SEVEN. Security. Eight monitors patrol the field. They follow every rule the players follow. They keep whatever they take.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the hedge opened, with a rustle, and the monitors walked out of it in a line.

There were eight of them. They wore yellow safety-patrol belts with silver whistles, exactly like Lyra’s, and each of them held a lunchbox with a gray screen in the lid. The screens read 2000. They were all different ages: one boy of ten, one gaunt teenager who had been twelve three years ago and looked it, a woman in her twenties with a bruise-colored ring under each eye. They had one thing in common. None of them looked at the sky. All of them looked at the players, steadily, the way people look at a door they have been locked behind.

"Past losers," said the collector, to the lens, with quiet pride. "Former players of the Game, who failed to return their loans and now serve as employees. Today they will be security, and they will be paid by results. Eight on the field. Eight against eight. Isn’t that better?"

Pia, who had been standing alone since the walls came down, let out a long breath. "Finally," she said. "Something that adds up."

"Thank you," Owen whispered, to nobody in particular. He had left his chalk circle without noticing.

The odds were balanced. That was true. And it is a curious fact about balanced odds that they feel wonderful to the two children who were losing, and awful to the six who were not, and neither feeling has anything to do with whether they are fair.

"No," said Arthur.

He said it quietly. It reached the flagpole anyway.

"No. I’m calling it. This is garbage."

"Mr. Specter—"

"We didn’t cheat." Arthur had stepped out of the ring, and the grass under his shoes stayed green. "It was luck that we know each other. Pure luck. If you want to say it wasn’t, then it was Matt’s passive, and that’s still a passive. He’s using it. That’s allowed. Everyone in this yard is using theirs. You told me yourself that anything can be made to sound right or wrong if you talk long enough. So talk. Tell me what’s unfair about a boy being lucky."

"It isn’t unfair," said the collector, patiently. "It is merely unbalanced."

"Same thing."

"Not at all."

"Fine. Nobody said life was fair." Arthur’s voice was very even, which was worse than if it had been loud. "Nothing is fair. It’s never been fair. I’ve been on the wrong end of the scale more times than I can count. Pretty much my whole life. And I never once got a man in a gray jacket stepping in to even it up. Not once. The one time it tips my way, for about five minutes, you show up with your rulebook and your sermon, and tell me you’re doing it for balance."

Nobody said anything. Hadjer looked at him, with her head tilted, as if reading a line she had not known was in the book.

Carter cleared his throat. "He’s not wrong," he said, grudgingly. "For the record. Knowing somebody isn’t cheating."

"Thank you, Carter," said Arthur.

"I still don’t like this."

"I know."

The collector, who had been listening with a pleasant, attentive, empty face, took off his cap, turned it once in his hands, and put it back on.

"Everything is relative, Mr. Specter," he said. "I did tell you. And I’ve made a rule. It’s up on the board. I’m afraid that’s the end of the conversation."

It is a very old trick, played by very old men:

to break the scale and call it justice, then.

It was one of the monitors who spoke next.

She was the woman with the shadowed eyes. She stepped out of the line with her lunchbox held in front of her in both hands, like a person carrying a bowl of something that might spill. Her voice was low, hoarse, and perfectly polite.

"Sir. If you want it fair so badly." She swallowed. "Why not free us? If we win. If we take enough from them, we go home. That would be fair."

A ripple went down the line of monitors, small and electric. Eight faces, which had been fixed for some time, moved.

The collector looked at her for a long moment. Something crossed his face that was not a smile. It seemed to be pain, and he did not hide it from the camera.

"I’m sorry," he said. And then, to everyone’s surprise, he pushed back the cuff of his gray jacket.

On the inside of his wrist, the same pale mark that sat on Hadjer’s skin, on Lyra’s, and on each child’s on the benches, glowed steady and white, like a wire that had been picked up at the other end.

"I am not the owner of this Game," he said. "I’m a slave, just like you. That’s well above my pay grade, I’m afraid. I can’t release a single one of you." He pulled the cuff back down. "But the coins I can do. Whatever you take on this field is yours, to spend as you wish, as long as it’s within the Game’s rules. That much is in my power. I’ll see to it personally."

The woman looked at him. Then, slowly, she smiled.

The rest of the line smiled too. It was not a pleasant sight. It was the smile of people who have been given a very small door in a very large wall, and have decided to be grateful.

At the edge of the yard, Lyra had lifted her head for the first time that day.

"Sir," she said. Her voice was thin and tentative, and all of it was hope. "Can we use this? The job. Can we use it to move up? Higher. In the Game."

The collector turned and gave her a long, careful look.

"Of course, young lady," he said gently. "As a matter of fact, I recommend it."

Jaquan, on the grass, said to the sky in a flat voice, "Wow. Now that is fair."

"Shut up," said Arthur.

"I wasn’t going to say anything else."

"I know. I mean it with love."

The yard went quiet in a different way.

The monitors fanned out, without hurry, in a line that stretched from the sandbox to the swings. They did not run. They did not need to. They watched the players the way a person watches a bus they are about to catch, with something between hunger and arithmetic. Most of them were here because somebody had won a Game once. Somebody had gone home with a prize, and they had been left holding the bill. Every one of them knew what it meant to be on the wrong end of a scoreboard. Not one of them intended to be there again.

Matt, with his lunchbox against his chest, had gone gray under his tan. "That’s eight," he said. "That’s actually eight. I only had the one passive."

"You have the one passive," said Jaquan. "It’s a good one."

"Don’t say it. If you say it, it stops."

Pia counted the monitors again, from left to right, and it came out the same. Bliss stood next to Hadjer with her chin up and a piece of chalk in her fist and, for the first time since the benches, looked like someone ready to be in a team.

The second bell was about to ring. Everyone could feel it.

Then someone left the line and walked towards the ring.

She did not run, and she did not hurry. She walked with the yellow belt crossed over her chest, a whistle on a cord, and a hole in the cuff of a sweatshirt that had stopped being gray. The monitors let her through. Arthur’s hand went to his wrist, where the serpent was already tightening.

Lyra stopped five feet from Hadjer. The grass between them was dying, in a slow circle, from the outside in.

"I was thinking," said Lyra, "about our situation."

Her voice was quiet. It was not, as it had been on the couch, the voice of someone who wants to wound. It was a voice with nothing left in it to defend.

"So many what-ifs. What if your father wasn’t the bad guy. What if mine was. What if I was the bad guy." She smiled a little, as if the idea were funny. "What if. What if. What if."

Hadjer said nothing.

"And I must say, I don’t care anymore."

She looked at Hadjer, directly, for the first time that day.

"I hate you. I have hated you for so long that I don’t know who I am without it. If I stop, I’ll be empty. There’ll be nobody here." She tapped her chest, once. "So I’m going to keep going. Just so I can still be me. I don’t even need a reason anymore."

Behind her, seven whistles rose to seven mouths.

"I just want to watch you burn."

TO BE CONTINUED...