I spent three days in the confines of my rectangular cage. I danced around once an hour as promised, unless the boss came by to check my progress, which seemed to be quite often considering all of the other concerns he had in the park. I could always tell when he was out there. It was always within five minutes of a regular performance and he always wore the same cloak, hoping to fool me. I danced my heart out during those performances, remembering he had the power to get rid of me at a moment's notice, and not in a good way. Survival instinct kept me going. After all, the pain from the cattle prods was quite real. I wasn't pushing the issue where death was concerned.
When the park closed we were all released from our duties. The patrons disappeared the moment the park stopped operating. As one of the Exceptionals, I ranked higher than a normal performer and lived in special circumstances to ensure my continued success of a high-calibre artist. There were eleven of us in all: two fire eaters, the bearded lady, three contortionists, one daredevil, one opera singer, a tiny lady whose dance and look were both exotic, and another dancer like me who occupied a music box at the other end of the park. We ate dinner together, we lived in a special wing of the dorms together; we even shared five bathrooms in our special wing. The only thing we did not do was share rooms. Calperal suffered difficulty in the past with particularly jealous performers losing roommates to vicious and unexplained accidents, so he separated each of the Exceptionals into their own rooms, locking them in at night so they couldn't escape or harm the others.
This was probably a very good thing for me, because the other ballet dancer Anastasia hated me from the beginning. She would glare at me from across the table, twirling her butter knife in her hand as if she could turn the dull blade into a lethal weapon if given the opportunity. She was blonde like my sister or the Langston sisters, but she had the steeliest pair of grey eyes I had ever seen. And those eyes glaring at your from across the dinner table could scare the hell out of anyone, even in one so beautiful as Anastasia.
One of the fire breathers was very nice to me. He helped me find my way to the correct dorms on my first night as a performer. He showed me the way to the former dancer's old room when Calperal had gone mysteriously absent. Of course he did not step inside, as the rules were very plain. None of the other Exceptionals were to grace the doorway of another exceptional, especially males in the female rooms. The punishment for that was, as he informed me, "quite final."
His name was Luke. We were like old friends from the jump, settling into a nice conversation at dinner that first night. He was the one who filled me in on the hierarchy that Dream Land had become. He began his tale with a brief history of his home and childhood, and the coup that began almost from the time I had been taken away from my paradise. A few months after I stopped coming to Psitharis an army marched onto the shores of my beloved world and took over without much of a fight, as there had never been need for an army in my dream world. They overran the amusement park in the span of a day, enslaved the stronger men for soldier training or to be future workers in the new regime, guarded over the women and children in the huts they were provided and watched them like hawks. The rest of the troops proceeded to the Cerulean Palace and, though nothing was said about the fates of the occupants, most people surmised the Counsel had met a bloody end. Once the palace was secure, a great ship arrived on the shore. A luxurious, silk-lined litter containing the self-proclaimed queen and her daughter was carried by twenty men on their shoulders across the sands, through the park and up the mountain to the palace. And thus the tyranny was born.
As time moves much quicker in the world of Psitharis, each year in my world was doubled in the land I used to love so dearly. So while eight years had passed for me, sixteen years had passed in Psitharis. Pollution began to run rampant, coming from the palace and from the camps that housed all of the soldiers, so everything in the ocean died as a result. Visitors had been banned from the shoreline for fear that people would try their escape over the waters or, worse yet, prefer drowning to their new existences. The queen forbade the subjects to be happy, so the park became just another prison, another way for her to exert her inexplicable power over them. The energy that ran the park was diverted to the castle, and all the rides and attractions were eventually set up on a grid that continued operation through the blood, sweat and tears of the underground slaves. The clones were created next; one after another the hideous monsters were produced in replication machines to enforce the laws the soldiers weren't able to enforce. Too lacking in intelligence to do anything meaningful, they made perfect enforcers, dealing out brute force whether necessary or not.
Calperal had always been one of the overseers of the park, possibly one of the first residents of Psitharis itself. However, when the regime change came he was the only one who chose to adapt. The others had been brutally murdered for their refusal to conform to the queen's new world, and yet Calperal was more than willing to go the extra mile to ensure the queen and the princess were exceedingly happy with the everyday operations of the park. Therefore he was practically handed the key to the place, along with full reign, as long as he kept everything in check. He did the job quite well, plunging Dream Land into a dark age as the patrons continued to keep the park functional for the survival of Psitharis and nothing else.
Psitharis was dependent on Dream Land, and Dream Land was dependent on the people of Psitharis. And after I abandoned both sixteen years ago in the Psitharis time span it had been running on auto-pilot, having lost the imagination of the little girl who kept it carefree and happy. And now that this queen had taken control of everything I held dear it would take more than my mere presence to turn things around. I was going to have to fight to regain control of my cherished childhood home, and that might mean putting myself in harm's way to get things back to normal. And as I listened to Luke's stories my purpose in returning was becoming clearer.
"So, Calperal visits our villages yearly to mark us," Luke was telling me as we mulled over our dinners. We were fed quite well because of our status, but I rarely ate much. "You know, figure out where the children who have come of age will fit in and if he needs us. Most of the girls are marked as seamstresses or patrons, the boys are marked for patrons, underground or soldiers. And then there are the very few who, like you and me, are marked as performers. Only most of them wind up as costumed characters or as the operators. I was the first from my village to be marked as an exceptional, along with another boy named Jake. Taken from our homes that very day to begin training as fire eaters. Dasha was taken the same day from a different village."
"Dasha?" I questioned. "Which one is she?"
"'Was.'" Luke responded. "You are her replacement. Word is she got too old for the part, she began to fall a lot, even when it was just the patrons and the queen wasn't around. When she did it in front of the queen, well, that pretty much did it for her."
"How old was she?" I asked. "I mean, if you got discovered on the same day, she couldn't have been that old."
Luke's eyes saddened. "She was twenty years old by my reckoning. She was a year older than me. We've been here ten years, were trained for two. It was nerves that did her in. The pressure of being one of us can be very difficult to deal with. I've seen many an Exceptional fall apart under the stress."
"Are you telling me you were taken away from your family when you were seven?" I asked, shocked.
"Yeah, doesn't seem like it." He said with a small smile. "I'd like to say I missed them, but it's been so long I don't remember them. I had two little brothers and a little sister. I wonder what happened to them. She probably got marked two years after I was. The boys probably wound up marked a year after her."
"I only know one person other than you in this land. He's a soldier who was sent to..." I stopped, not wanting to get Luke into trouble by association. Just knowing me could be dangerous. "...he was given a special job by the queen, sort of like a bounty hunter. But he's in his twenties at this point. Definitely not one of your brothers. But I wonder if he knows them?"
"Could be." Luke replied nonchalantly. "My brothers were pretty stout for their age, so they're likely in training to be soldiers now." We both sat for a few minutes saying nothing, eating as the others spoke about idle things.
I looked at the other fire breathers. "Hey, is that Jake?" I asked, motioning to the other fire breather, who was noticing little else but his plate.
Luke shook his head. "No. Jake – well, let's just say Jake didn't do so well during training."
"What do you mean by that?" Whatever it was, it couldn't be good.
"We were learning the part of how to breathe fire and how we had to be very cautious when we spat out the fuel to ignite. The trainer showed us several times then made us do it. Said if we could do it we could do it right the first time. I did it right; Jake didn't." He stopped, the memory of what happened bringing a tear to his eye. Quickly he brushed it away. "I stood there and watched as my only friend in this place burned to death. They stood there and listened to his screams, and every time I lunged to help him they held me back. They just waited until the fire died down and threw his body in the compactor, what they could salvage of it. Soon after that Norand arrived." He said, motioning to the other fire breather. "Norand was taught by his father, in the hopes he would get a job as an exceptional. By that time word had spread about the select opportunities afforded to children who possessed the abilities Calperal was always on the lookout for. If you look closely you'll see where Norand has scars from his father's training. His father was only out for the prestige of having one of us in the family; he never was very nice to his son. Needless to say Norand was more than happy to join the ranks and leave his home as far behind him as he could. He's a good guy. I just wouldn't bother him too much if I were you."
"Oh, okay." I thought about poor Jake and how Luke at the age of nine had to watch another little boy burn to death. All of this happened while I was gone. Things would have been so much better if I had tried to hold onto Psitharis instead of letting it go to live life in the real world. I stared at the damaged young man my twisted world had created and I knew I had to fix this, all of it. I just had to figure out how. The waking world would just have to wait.
