KOE

The Furn Faction is a paramilitary organization disguised as a chain of national charity boarding schools. To the public it is known as the Nationwide Furn Youth Association. To us, it is known as the Big House.

I found my way to the Silent Town division the winter of 2037. I had just turned seven years old, run away from the madman I knew to be my caretaker. Before then I lived with Vance Lupus in his bungalow in the Galigan Plains, where no one entered or left, because nobody lived there. When I left, I left behind a friend. I don't know where he is now.

I stayed at the Silent Town division until I turned 15. During that time I got promoted from Level 5 to Level 2. I guess you could say I'm a record-breaker, ‘cause it usually takes ten or so years, not to brag or anything.  At Level 2 we studied nanotechnology and biotechnology, learned to build computers, robots, and weapons. Nobody knows about the weapons because they think we're just weird kids that don't do anything productive with their lives.

Now I'm beyond a Level 1 Factionist-I'm a HEIST operative. I have generalship over all the lower ranks, and for that reason, the lower ranks seriously fear me. Naturally, I have few friends, but a plethora of enemies.

But I'm not telling you these things because I want your sympathy. This is just my prequel. My life is somewhat hard to understand.

For example, even though I'm this Level 1 HEIST operative and oh so revered for my prowess, I still have to wake up early in the morning to receive my daily reprimand. It's become a routine: each day, Spike (Heighton Furn's head honcho) finds out I did something questionable the preceding evening. He calls me in, while at the same time ordering his breakfast from the second-floor kitchen. Caspi wakes me up. I go downstairs, meeting the kitchen assistant (usually Camille) at the corner of the eighth floor wing where Spike lives. I grab a bagel or a piece of toast and Camille opens the door for me. I sit down in front of Spike's black marble desk as he broods and accepts his orange juice.

Then he starts to yell. The yelling begins something like this:

"How many times am I gonna hafta see you in my office, Pitellvest? HOW MANY TIMES?! Can't you, HEIST member, be a little more competent than you are? Just a fuckin' little?"

Then he scours his desk for a lighter. Usually he can't find one, but lately I've been bringing my own, which pisses him off even more.

All of this happened that morning, a week after the Leaders got together and accepted me into the HEIST. I offered him my lighter that morning and he stared at me like I'd dropped a bag of shit on his nice clean desk.

"Pitellvest, you damn moron."

I didn't say a word. The lighter sat on his desk in front of me. Camille had forgotten her duties and stopped to stare at me, setting down her pitcher of coffee.

"The only reason I voted for your promotion was I thought you'd behave better. But you're still running off after curfew, you're still tagging shit, you're still coming back drunk as a skunk and I just don't get why because you're fuckin' antisocial, man." He took a sip of his orange juice. Spike is not a man of stereotypes. He cusses like a sailor, dresses like a punk, and hell, he dines like an aristocrat. Pinky out and everything. "Shit. I mean, what do you need to get drunk for? You're a seventeen-year-old emo friendless goth kid."

My reprimands have gotten softer as Spike has. Every day he comes up with a new label to dish at me. No big deal. Some days, if what I did was really bad or stupid, he'll lock me in the detention cells. Dante's usually there. Then he gives me my orders for the morning. The pain about being in the HEIST is, even if I'm not in for a reprimand, I have to wake up early for my orders. If my roommate isn't there to wake me up, I don't make it in time.

But I always give a good performance in my work. You can count on that. We have fun in the Furn. We blow things up. We knock things down. We hack other people's shit, and then stand by and watch it fall apart. This is what we do. So I look forward to my orders.

"I want you to pick a group and take them to church."

No way. Anything but that.

"The Heighton Phoenix Temple is holding a peace demonstration this afternoon," he continued, putting on a stern face. He does this to combat mine, most likely, and he does it well. "We haven't looked too good in the news, lately, and if we want to be an ‘ordinary boarding school,' we've got to look semi-bad, not horrible. We've gotta look like we got a conscience."

At that moment I realized Camille had left the room. "But we don't have a conscience."

"All the more reasonable we should lie, then. Take a group of well-behaved Factionists to the temple to attend the meeting this afternoon. And try to be dignified. Can you do that, Pitellvest?"

"I got it," I said. I got up quietly and left.

#

Caspi-Jin Chimera is four feet tall, eleven years old, with big ears and big yellow eyes that girls squeal over. He comes with me everywhere I go, and is my roommate, and basically he wants to be me. Back in Silent Town, when he was nine, he cried when I told him I was moving to the North. So I brought him with me. He's been around me ever since.

Dante, however, is just a freak. He likes cars and bugs and girls and nothing else. He's still a Level 4. I would say he's fairly harmless as well.

I threw in five other Factionists, some nobodies that came to me asking for a slot in the meeting, including Tioma Resperia, a dog of a plugger, no brains and no brawn, just a nice car and a (supposedly) pretty face. He's one of those enemies I talked about. You know the saying: keep your friends close, and enemies closer.

So there were eight of us. Eight well-behaved individuals from the Nationwide Furn, come for a nice afternoon at a world-renowned Phoenician temple.

You know something's gonna go wrong.