The Half-Class by Kayvion Lewis

Chapter Three

Islammed my hand down on the tree stump. “Read ‘em and weep, my friends.”

Brison’s eyes went wide. He glanced down to the cards, up to me, and back to my excellent hand.

“This game is rigged!” He threw his cards down on the stump. Richal, at his side, laid his cards down too.

A warm smile slipped over my lips. I loved nights like two nights ago, riding with Jace, but this was just as special. In our little corner of the forest, an hour’s ride from the city, we might as well have fallen into a different world. A place where the swirl of people in the mansion behind me, and the soft-eyed, freckle-faced sugar brown boys in front of me, would have come together normally. Not as a way to escape the city behind us.

“Only losers claim their games are rigged,” I said, pulling in the two sweeties they had bet against me.

Richal looked longingly at the little candies while Brison reexamined the cards, including the ones his identical brother had had.

“Next time, maybe you boys should try taking on someone your own age.”

“You are our age,” Brison said.

“You’re thirteen. I’m seventeen. Big difference.”

“This isn’t fair. You play cards every night,” Richal murmured, still staring at my wrapped caramels.

“You should have thought of that before you challenged me. And I don’t play cards every night.”

Brison glared. “Then what do you do every night?”

I reached across the tree stump and tugged a clump of his curly hair. “Don’t worry about what I do.”

In petty fashion, I dropped all the sweeties in my hand into Richal’s lap. His eyes lit up, flickering brighter in the firelight outside the mansion. Brison clenched his jaw and furrowed his brow as Richal unwrapped one of the candies. Richal, the sweetest of the two twins, took pity on his brother and handed him the unwrapped candy. In an instant, all wins, losses, and jabs were forgotten.

“If we come by Jen’s one night, will you let us play with you?” Richal asked.

“Your mother’s never going to let you come to Jen’s.”

Saddy, the twins’ mother, barely let them come to these late-night meetings of Gilow’s. In fact, of all the half-classes I knew, Brison and Richal were probably the most sheltered. They had to be.

The twins were born right before Ryland’s class ordinances took hold. Had they been born after, as the product of a union between a light-class woman and a dark-class man, they would have been born illegally. Though the twins were thirteen and fortunately legal, they looked younger than they were. It would be too easy for some officer to see them and assume they were illegals. If they happened to forget their paperwork, the officers would ship them to one of the work camps with the rest of illegally born half-classes.

Richal’s eyes dropped to the beaten grass. “You’re right.”

“Evie!” Maxine stuck out her wind-whisked orange head through the back door behind me. “We’re starting.”

Right. Playing with the twins was a fun detour. But there was a more pressing reason I was here.

Leaving the cards scattered across our playing stump, Richal, Brison, and I trekked over the trodden grass and into the dim, back corridor of the manor house. Riding a fresh sugar rush, they bolted ahead of me, sprinting through the kitchen and toward the glowing light of the foyer.

I trailed my fingers along the wall as I went. Ash and burn residue built up on my fingertips, growing the closer I got to the light until finally, I stepped out into the room.

The dozens of candles and lanterns dotted the walls and perched in hands and on the remnants of the furniture. Their flames swayed and flickered over at least a hundred different faces and figures. Shadows, tall and long, stretched over the floors and walls, almost rivaling the high soot marks climbing up the walls. With the fiery glow and the greasy soot, I could almost imagine I’d been thrown back in time and could feel the reality of the fire that tore away the glory of this once-proud mansion. But even years later, there was a new fire growing here. I saw it in the eyes of all the people around me and could feel it licking up my own chest even now.

The twins pushed their way to the bottom of the grand staircase, where Saddy tapped her nails against the ornate banister. She forcefully asked her boys who had given them all that candy.

I settled about halfway up the steps next to a familiar face.

“I was beginning to think you’d missed a meeting,” Luke said. A lantern rested on the steps just above him and flickered over his chestnut-brown skin.

“As if.” I waved to Jace, who smiled and waved back down to me from the second step from the top.

She whispered something to Gilow, who stood tall at the very top of the staircase. He nodded and folded his hands over his black wool coat. With even the littlest movement, it billowed behind him like the cape of an emperor. Perhaps even it knew to tremble on the shoulders of the man underneath it.

Before I met him, I’d never seen a dark-class man stand with so much pride. In fact, I thought it was only possible for statues of kings to stand so proud.

But he was no king. Quite the opposite.

“Firstly,” Jace projected over the entirety of the foyer.

The chatter quieted.

“Let me say how happy I am with last week’s outing.” She smirked, and her audience erupted.

We whistled and yelled at the top of our lungs. Luke and I drummed our hands against the steps above us. Jace let the celebration roll for a minute before she lifted her hand, and we settled down.

“I hope we can do it again sometime,” she said.

“When?” a voice called from the back.

“Yes, when?”

“What’s next?” Luke asked, beside me.

“When are we riding again?” I added. It was like I couldn’t yell the question loud enough. Everything I was dealing with at the barn was in that question: my inevitable birthday, Auntie forcing me to find work, and finding a solution to these looming problems. My fate felt as though it hanged upon one word—when.

“Patience, Loves. Please,” Jace said, with the charm that only she could hold. “I promise our next act will be even bigger and bolder than the last.” She threw a handful of her long braids behind her back. “But, for the time, we’re going to wait.”

Wait?

All my muscles froze. A flutter of whispered confusions rippled through the room. Why would we wait for anything? Jace and Gilow were always talking about what was next. Always planning another move.

I didn’t have time to wait.

“Do you think we messed up last week?” I whispered, brushing my sleeve against Luke’s.

“No,” Luke said. He was focused on Gilow. “He’s got another reason.”

Worried whispers swelled around us. I peered across the steps at Thomas and Maxine. They looked just as confused as the rest of the group. Whatever was going on, Jace nor Gilow had told them about it either. I didn’t know whether it was worrisome or comforting that Jace had kept this from everyone.

“It’s the King.” Gilow’s voice boomed over all of us. The room quieted. Gilow remained perfectly composed in his spot, dead center above us all, hands still folded over his coat. “Thanks to us, he’s coming to Bexbury.”

I stiffened, and I couldn’t have been the only one. King Dreux was coming to Morra? He hadn’t been here since Ryland took over. Our demonstration at the municipal building must have been concerning enough to warrant an in-person visit.

“We’ve captured his attention,” Gilow said. “That means we're making strides. If we’re doing enough to get him to come all the way here, then we’re doing something right.”

Gilow let the sentiment settle over us for a moment. The entire room went quiet as if they were breathing in his faint praise. His commendation sparked something warm and desperate in my chest. Like a tiny bead of hope had swelled in my heart.

We were getting close. The king wouldn’t be visiting if we weren’t close to sparking some real change. Close to getting rid of these class rules. Close to me getting a chance to do whatever I wanted with my life.

“That being said,” Gilow continued. “We can be sure that some things are going to change around here when he and his men roll in. Life, for all of you, is going to get a lot harder. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but it will. Both your lives as half-classes and as rebels. He’s going to put his boot down on us during the day and ravage the streets, searching for us at night. That’s why we have to wait. We can’t go gallivanting around as we have been. That’s how revolutions get squashed and rebels get killed.”

Gilow dropped his hands and took a step down beside Jace. He scanned over all of us as if he were searching for a rebuttal.

“But,” Gilow said, “our situation isn’t without a silver lining. A sparkling one.” He raised a hand and pointed toward Bexbury. “He’s on our territory now. And he hasn’t been since Ryland took us and set this horror in motion nearly a decade and a half ago. If we ever had a chance to strike him directly, this is it. This is our chance to do real damage, but we can’t waste it acting impulsively.”

He paused. “They think they’re smarter than us. Because their god says light makes right, because it’s only natural that they would be.”

I cringed at the mention of religion. I wasn’t a believer in the old texts. I don’t think anyone, even the Rylanders genuinely practiced anymore. But it had left a mentality in Ryland that had spread over its new territory just as quickly. All it took was a few verses in the old texts about the god himself being paler than the moon and the devils and servants under him being dark as dirt to give the former rulers of Ryland—and now Morra—a good reason to decide people of different colors were innately separate. More than that, it gave them reason to believe that those two very different groups of people were never, ever meant to mix.

“We’re going to take this one day at a time. We wait. We watch. We live. And when the opportunity presents itself, and it will present itself, we’ll take it. But I need you to trust me. Do I have your support?”

A murmur ran through the crowd yet again. With the king coming, changes were inevitable. But we had enough determination to make sure the end result was in our favor. There was no going back. We’d come this far with Gilow. So why not follow him further into hell, and perhaps sooner or later, the fire would give way to gold.

My chest pounded. I stood from my spot on the steps. The room quieted as all eyes fell on me. “You have mine.”