Conformity

One soldier followed me into my room, while the other followed Coyote into hers. I made sure to shut the door. Then, I took the Melhnora map and pocketed Lyla’s necklaces. Coyote’s internal thoughts informed me she planned to ambush the soldier on the third floor and asked me to keep the soldier in charge of me in the room. The existence of the third floor had evaded my mind for the entire time I was here, even though it was obvious in the outside view of the building.

I glanced around my room for anything I could use. My room was plain and contained only the bare minimum of objects, since I got everything I needed from the ground-floor store. My gaze drifted to the closed windows. Maybe I could make use of them to stall.

“Hey, have you heard about the window worship?” I said nonchalantly.

The soldier needed a moment to register that I was addressing him. He shook his head. Of course he hadn’t, because I made it up on the spot. Coyote started a countdown from ten in her mind. Ten… Nine… Eight…

She should learn to give people some leeway, but delaying the ambush could present other problems. The window of opportunity passes quickly. I was already doubtful of whether she could overpower a soldier. It wouldn’t be smart to push her luck further.

Five… Four… Three… I slid the windows open and yelled at the top of my lungs, “I love my goddess!”

Two… One… I slammed the window shut with as much force as I could. The impact synchronized with a faint thud I barely heard from above. The soldier covered his ears at my sudden outburst of sound, not noticing the softer noise.

Coyote’s internal thoughts told me that the ambush was a success. The soldier watching her was knocked unconscious, but she needed time to reset the trap. A trap? What did she do on the third floor? And what would have happened if I had decided to explore the floor? A shiver ran through me at the mere thought.

The soldier interrupted my internal questions with a yank of my arm, pulling me towards the door.

“Enough games. We’re leaving,” he said with a firm voice. He was really treating me like a kid. Maybe I could take advantage of that.

“No! I wanna stay! I wanna!” I began throwing a tantrum, which even most ten-year-olds wouldn’t do. Letting my body sink to the floor, I let my weight drag the soldier’s hand downward, and it got more difficult for him to move me.

“Stop this, or I will kick you.” The soldier barked a threat of child abuse. I didn’t want to be kicked, but Coyote hadn’t finished resetting her contraption involving a cloth, a pipe, and… slime? The snippets of thoughts weren’t enough for me to understand how the trap would function, but since she had already knocked out a soldier, my only choice was to trust that her plan would succeed.

I stood back up, staring coldly into the soldier’s eyes. The façade of a child dissolved away. “How can you say that you love Lady Res if you don’t even know what the window worship is?” As long as you act confidently, especially on matters that the other person is unfamiliar with, they will at least question whether they are in the wrong. That moment of confusion was all I needed.

“What is this window worship?” The soldier stopped hauling me to the door and gave in to his curiosity.

“It is a tradition my mother taught me. You open the window, yell as loud as you can the name of the person you love the most, and then slam the window shut as hard as you can, to show your devotion.” It was scary how easily I lied.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. “Who is the goddess that you love so much?”

“Lady Res, but for caution’s sake, I couldn’t say her name to the public.”

“I don’t believe that. You only just met her. WE have known her for much longer.” Uh oh, he was the jealous type, but in this case, it might work in my favor.

“Then do the window worship.”

“I won’t do something that looks so embarrassing.” In truth, he was right. It was embarrassing, but I wasn’t going to let him brush it off so easily.

“If you truly love Lady Res, you can overcome the embarrassment. Also, embarrassment will only come after the fact; the moment you declare your love will be blissful. Unless you are saying that you are worried about the future.” When a belief is core to group identity and endorsed by an authority figure, it is difficult to defy it. All I had to do was bring the violation to attention. Disregarding the future was one of Res’s core beliefs, so violating it should-

“Oh, I don’t believe in that past and future stuff,” the soldier’s answer cut off my self-assuring thoughts. My mouth gaped at the bold revelation. Then, why was Res so obsessed with getting Coyote and me to believe in her worldview? A hazy trace of memory reminded me that Res mentioned something along the lines of wanting to teach children to distrust memory. That meant most, if not all, soldiers had the ordinary belief when it came to the past and future. The group pressure to conform didn’t exist at all. I severely misunderstood their group dynamic.

“Then, if it’s not because of her beliefs, why are you following her?” I asked.

“Simple. Because of her thighs.”

“Her thighs?” I prepared myself for the upcoming conversation that would probably end up in a weird direction.

“Her thighs… looked so soft and welcoming… like… like… the home I was kicked out of. The parents who disowned me. Why… why did that happen? Lady Res!” He hurried to wipe his tears. My mouth gaped wider than before. Did Res somehow create this association in his mind? My whole body froze, confused as to what to do next. I almost forgot my goal of keeping him here and slipped out the door to escape this uncomfortable atmosphere.

Coyote’s voice distracted me from the awkwardness. She notified me that the trap was set, and so now came the part where I had to lure him up the obscure third floor. I patted the soldier’s pauldron. “You don’t have to do the window worship.”

“But I want to do the window worship,” he said, still half-sobbing.

Why was this guy such a pain to deal with? Well, I was going to lead him into a trap, so maybe I should cut him some slack.

“Sure, do it quickly. I still have something to get on the third floor,” I said. The soldier’s eyes lit up, toning up the guilt I felt, but of course, not enough to join a cult for it. And I reminded myself never to ask for his name, so my guilt wouldn’t get even worse.

“Thank you so much,” he said, like a boy who got his parents’ permission to buy the new video game release. He repeated the ritual meticulously as I did, but instead of confessing love to a goddess, he shouted, “I love thighs!” I could neither laugh nor feel bad for him, and I started to doubt the authenticity of his self-proclaimed sad backstory.

Coyote was getting impatient. I led the way out of the room, while the soldier practically skipped out, humming a pleasant tune. First, I needed to find a way to the third floor. The hallway had three doors, each leading to a bedroom. That was what I had always seen.

Pull the cord! Coyote kept repeating the same instruction over and over, and I began to appreciate firsthand how much of a hard time psychotic people had. As I squinted my eyes, I noticed an inconspicuous string dangling at the end of the hallway.

That must have been it. I sprinted through the hallway to the string, eager to put an end to Coyote’s constant nagging. With a pull, a ladder pushed through a ceiling trapdoor and dropped, centimeters away from hitting me in the head.

Good job, Coyote proceeded to another set of instructions. Now when the soldier climbs up, yell “Go quicker”, and if you are climbing up first, yell “Oh, I’m so scared of the dark.” The part about me being scared seemed unnecessary, but this was a one-way line with no way of complaining.

“Hold on,” the soldier suddenly said in a serious tone. And I froze in place.

The soldier was surveying Coyote’s room from the doorway. “Where did they go?”

“Maybe Coyote needed to… I don’t know… expel something? If you know what I mean,” I said, purposely vague, taking revenge for Coyote’s awful codewords. I couldn’t exactly tell him the soldier was unconscious and on the previously unknown to me third floor.

The soldier nodded solemnly. “I get it.” I didn’t know what he got, but good for him.

I pointed back at the ladder. “Maybe we can go back to getting up there? The sooner we are done here, the sooner we can go find them.”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

Stepping aside, I gestured for the soldier to climb up first.

“You climb up first,” the soldier said. “I need to watch you.”

“But…” I stopped after one word. Why do I care? This isn’t even in the top three most embarrassing things I have done in this world. After reassuring myself, I reached out to the rung and climbed. “Oh, I’m so scared of the dark,” I shouted with no particular emotion.

Coyote didn’t laugh at me, but she critiqued how poor my acting was. Guess this was the downside of listening in to people’s inner thoughts: I got to hear those unfiltered, mean comments too.

The third floor was shrouded in darkness, illuminated only by the light from the wall-lanterns from the second floor. Coyote’s voice asked me to continue forward until I could touch the wall.

The armor of the soldier clanked as he climbed up after me. “Is there a lantern lying around-” A splat cut his question short. And there was the sound of muffled speech and metal grinding against the wooden floor. Then, the clash of two objects reverberated in the room, and repeated three more times. The struggling stopped; all was quiet except for light footsteps.

My eyes were adapting to the dark, but the next moment, with the strike of the flint, Coyote kindled the candle of a lantern. The room was scattered with closets and chests. A slimy sheet covered the soldier, with bloodstains from his head leaking through the fabric. Coyote had a metal pipe in her hand. Help me tie him up. She didn’t even bother to open her mouth.

I didn’t ask about the trap, because I already knew it from her thoughts. She had a home-alone-style contraption that would release the sticky slime blanket on the victim, then she would beat the victim’s head with a metal pipe until they passed out. The design was more brutal than I expected a twelve-year-old could come up with. Remind me not to get on Coyote’s bad side.

It was right after I heard the soldier’s sad backstory too. I hoped he wouldn’t die from this, so I could find a way to undo his brainwashing one day. Still, we couldn’t afford to seek medical help for the unconscious soldiers, because escaping was our priority.

For the remorse and tinges of fear brewing within me, I had no idea whether they came from my own mind or Coyote’s. She was wholly focused on untangling a pile of manila rope. Her mind was silent, too silent. The place was too dim for me to observe her facial expression clearly, but I felt a hardened tension emanating from her, a culmination of all her years living on the streets.

I hurried to help her with her task. “You can count on me from now on. I’m your accomplice, big… big sis,” I said something embarrassing again, because it just felt right in this moment. She didn’t respond, but I heard laughter from her inner voice, and her thoughts made themselves known in my mind once again.

It turned out that the first unconscious soldier was stuffed into the closet. After tying up both soldiers, we tossed the second one to join the first. Thus, that concluded the first part of our escape. “We should find a place to stay until it’s night. Then we will leave the city under its cover,” I said.

When gathering dried food from the storage room, I noticed dark purple robes in different sizes. We could wear these to sneak around the city. Speaking of sneaking around…

“How come you’ve never told me that there’s a third floor?” I asked.

“It’s a backup plan I made in case…”

“In case of what?”

Her inner thoughts already provided the answer, and it wasn’t a pretty one, but at least now she trusted me enough to share her mind with me.