Chapter 6
The courtroom is huge, with its black walls and white seats and lights dangling from the ceiling thirty feet above Becca’s head. She sits behind a black desk and in a wooden chair carefully painted white. Black masks seem to almost float on the sides of the room, the jury, as their cloaks blend in with the walls behind them. It reminds her of her dream…
In the seats behind Becca, her parents shake their head disapprovingly and shy away from every movement made by the people wearing the black masks beside them. She doesn’t have to see their faces to know that they’re disappointed in her, scared of her even... If only they believed her…
At the front of the room is a tall white stand, where she guesses Quill will sit, way up at the top. The chair behind it is pitch black. A big mask with the right side painted white and the left painted black is mounted just above it. The black half of the mask wears a frown and the white half wears a smile. It looks down at her accusingly, and as she stares at it, it seems to almost grow bigger, but she knows it’s not actually happening; it’s all in her head.
She touches the mask she has never been able to remove, the blood now dried on her pale hands. It smells horrid, and she cringes away as tears leap into her eyes.
This is it, she thinks, feeling a tear fall and stick between her mask and her skin. This is where my life ends.
Quill walks out into the room as he walks up the stairs to the top of his pedestal, the people in the black masks and cloaks clapping and cheering. He raises his hands to silence everyone, and the room dies down as he sits in his big, black chair.
“Welcome ladies and gentlemen of the Dark Clan. We are here today to welcome a new member to your lifestyle and to your world. However, if decided by myself and the jury, there is a possibility she will be sentenced to death.”
Clapping and creepy laughter echoes throughout the room, sending chills down Becca’s spine. She closes her eyes and laces her fingers together, pressing her nails against her skin to keep her from crying out or sobbing.
“As the jury knows, only a white mask can accuse someone of a crime. This is what has happened to the girl before you. Her name is Becca Reed, and she has been accused of murdering another white mask, Marlyn Nean.”
Becca shakes her head and closes her eyes. She didn’t do it, and she knows it. Everyone should know it. Will she be able to stand up for herself and explain what happened?
“Now before a verdict is reached, we must hear out what happened from both a witness and Becca herself. The original witness that first saw Becca kill this man fled from the sight and was not seen again. However, I was there, so I will stand as a witness.”
The Dark Clan around Becca applauds Quill as he stands. Becca’s mind is on overdrive as she looks up at him, trying to work her story out, trying to get it exactly right, as he walks down to stand at the base of where he had been sitting.
What if she says something that doesn’t match up to him? Would something bad happen to her? Would she be thrown into the Dark Clan anyway? Would she be killed?
She looks around the room at the many masks as they stare at either her or Quill. One of them catches her eye.
The mask covers the entire face of that one person in the jury, but around the edges, there is a light blue color in the shape of triangles, shifting to a darker blue as it reaches the inside of the mask. Halfway past the outer corner of the darkened eyes, it stops, letting the black show through as if it were a crack through a door to a darkened room.
“Eduard,” Becca whispers to no one.
“I saw Becca Reed today at her party,” Quill starts to talk, and Becca snaps her head to look at him. “She started walking away from the crowd and disappeared between two trees. That’s when I heard a man screaming.
“I rushed through the crowd that was forming and saw Becca standing over the dead man with blood all on her arms and on her hands. She tried to tell me that the man who had been screaming had killed the man, and not her. But the man didn’t have a spot of blood on him.”
Becca thinks back to the incident. She remembers the man’s hands, rough, almost like a material. Had he been wearing gloves? And his mask had nothing on it, aside from its white color and tinted eyehole lenses. But she remembers the man on the ground, lifelessly staring through his broken mask, and she knows she was not the cause of that.
“And now that the jury has heard my story, Becca, would you stand and explain to them what happened to you?”
Becca looks out at the jury, who lean over to one-another, probably whispering something back and forth, and many of them shake their head. She sees Eduard do nothing, unlike the people around him, if he really is Eduard. He stares at her, or at least she thinks he does, his eyes are unable to be seen because of the tint in the eyeholes that hide them.
She faces Quill once again and stands up on shaky legs. The breath she draws in is ragged and cold as it makes its way to the back of her mouth and dries it out. Her heart beats in her chest loud enough to where she can hear it over the breathes that are breathed behind the masks and as the air hits the inside of the plastic, the ceramic, whatever the faces are made of, and as they somewhat whistle slipping through the small mouth hole and nose holes between the fake lips and nostrils.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she takes one more breath, she blocks out all the sound—no distractions.
And then she begins.
“I was on my way to my party. I was turning eighteen at three-oh-one today, and that was the moment I would be masked.” She doesn’t look away from Quill, who stands very still, almost statue-like, with his hands behind his back and his mask seeming to smile in mockery at her. “Ten minutes till, I was talking to the people in white masks around me. I didn’t know very many of them, only the few friends I had had growing up that hadn’t fallen to the Dark Clan.
“And then it was almost time. I was talking to a few ladies about the decoration of the mask, and if I should keep it decorated how I have it now.
“And then I saw something shining. It was only for a split second, so I decided to ignore it. But then it happened again, and I guess curiosity took over. I walked in between these two trees, and when I reached them something moved. It was the man that had been… murdered…” Becca swallows as a tear falls down her cheek. “A man with a white mask and brown hair looked at me and started rubbing my arms and he had something on his hands. I was in shock as I looked at the man—I froze… I didn’t know what to do. His hands were rough and felt like material, and when I finally looked down at myself, I was covered in blood. I guess the man was wearing gloves because no one had said anything about him and he didn’t have any blood on him…
“But I didn’t do it. I’m completely innocent…”
The Dark Clan is silent, and so is Quill. For a moment, he doesn’t move, almost as if he’s pondering something.
“Why would another person in your clan lie?” He asks. “Why would another white mask want to kill someone and blame you for it, Becca? Why are you so special?”
“I’m not,” Becca says, recognizing the humility trap. Answering wrong to those questions could mean her permanent placement on the Dark Clan. “And, as you said when you forced that boy named Eduard to go to the Dark Clan,” She says, her heart pounding, hoping it really was him in the jury. “Everyone has at least a little bad inside them. There’s always going to be evil as goodness lives on.”
Becca can feel her mouth starting to form the words in an icy way, each syllable argumentative and accusational.
“And what makes you so special, Quill?” She asks, not able to stop herself. “What makes you leader of both clans? You can’t be all good and all evil at the same time.”
The crowd bursts into laughter and oohs and awestruck noise. No one ever talks to the Leader like that. No one. Period.
Especially not a low-level girl who is suspected of killing a man.
“What makes me so special, Becca,” She hears him laugh from
behind his mask. “Is that I control whether you live or die today.”
“Do you?” Becca asks. She doesn’t recognize this part of herself, but she doesn’t want it to stop either. If she’s already doomed to death or the Dark Clan, why hide anything? “Because I thought both you and the jury have to decide whether I live or die today.”
Quill turns calmly and walks back up the stairs to his chair. As he sits, he laces his fingers together, his white gloves blending in with the white wood in front of him.
He turns, his chair apparently able to swivel around, and faces the jury. They look up at him, all of their different faces and decorations like a sea of dark colors, constantly swaying back and forth from Quill to Becca, but always going back to Quill. Becca looks out among them, spotting two masks obviously staring at her more than the others. The boy she thinks is Eduard in the back row, and a plain black mask in the front.
Banshee! She thinks, and her heart starts to race even quicker. He could ruin this for her. Could he possibly sway their decision and make them want to kill her? Would he?
“The voice…” She says, dawning on an idea. “The voice of the man was familiar.”
Her eyes don’t move from Banshee’s still mask.
“The voice wasn’t the voice of a white mask!” She shouts, walking in front of the table. “It wasn’t! Someone was hiding behind a white mask. Someone framed me!”
“Enough, Miss Reed.”
“Quill—”
“I said enough!” He shouts, and the room falls silent. “Jury of the Dark Clan court, say kill for a death sentence,” He says as he looks at Becca. She cringes away, the fire still burning inside of her. “Or dark for her to join you. Go down the row, starting with Gary Tither.”
“Kill.”
“Dark.”
“Kill.”
“Dark.”
“Dark.”
The next one is Banshee, who has not looked away from Becca. The other black masks look at him, waiting for his answer.
“Kill,” he says slowly, the l’s most prominent in the word, and Becca watches as he cocks his head to the side.
“Dark.”
“Kill.”
“Dark.”
“Dark.”
“Dark.”
“Kill.”
“Kill.”
“Kill.”
The momentum stops again at the boy with the blue triangles. He picks at his hands, not yet gloved.
Becca hears him sigh. He’s the tiebreaker. The same amount of people have chosen to have her executed, as to have her join the dark clan.
She holds her breath as the seconds tick agonizingly away.
“Dark,” he finally says.
Quill turns back to Becca, peering down at her from where he sits. She breathes a heavy sigh of relief and sets her head in her hands. This isn’t the end. Not yet.
“Seven kills and eight darks. If I put my vote in,” he sighs. “We would have a tie.”
He unclasps his hands and stands up. Becca can hear the thumping of his shoes as he walks down the stairs to return back to the ground.
“So, Becca Reed,” He says as he appears from behind the wall where the stairs are hidden. “Consider your life saved. For now.”
She looks up and nods slowly.
Quill produces a black mask from behind his back. It is a blank, full-face mask, and the eyeholes are filled with tinted glass to hide her eyes. There are indentions of long eyelashes framing it, helping give it a feminine look. The lips are small and its corners are pinched a bit upward, as if smiling is painful to do.
“Face the audience and remove your mask,” Quill demands.
With shaky, hesitant hands, Becca reaches up to untie the knot for a moment she thought would never come in her lifetime. The skin under her mask is immediately cold as the hard material of the mask leaves her face, and she can feel the spots where her tears had been trapped on her cheek. She wipes them away as she brings the mask down.
She looks up and her eyes dart to her parents, who look away from her bare face and stand up. They make their way down the rows and out the doors, ashamed of what Becca had become. Suddenly, she feels abandoned and alone, her heart hurting and tears burning her eyes as they travel down to the floor in embarrassment.
“Don’t be ashamed!” A voice says.
Becca’s head snaps up in the direction of the jury. The boy with the blue on his mask is standing up and looking straight at her.
“Never be ashamed of the mistakes you’ve made!”
He raises a fist into the air. Blue triangles cover his hand and well beneath his sleeve as it starts to slip downward.
“Silence!” Quill shouts, and he places the mask over her face, tying the black ribbon behind her head.