Havemercy Page 13

  But I liked being allowed in the bars more than I liked stabbing men in the gut, and soon enough we came to a sort of compromise.

  Didn’t stop me from laughing fit to burst when the one-eyed man nearly lost his other eye, though.

  I ended up on the road back to the Airman much quicker than I’d’ve liked, the whole night having constituted nothing so much as one giant disappointment. At least, I reasoned, I’d be getting a good night’s sleep and maybe tomorrow would be less of a complete fuck-up.

  I lost sight of that notion the minute I walked in the door. Something in the air smelled different.

  The people in the streets—laypeople as they’re called, in technical terms—are always yammering on about the Dragon Corps and what we can or can’t do. I’ve heard stories so wrong that I was sure they’d mixed us up with magicians or the Ke-Han or worse. Anyway, we can smell fear-sweat, but it’s not like it’s some mystical power; it just smells different than anything else. Train any animal early enough, and there isn’t much you can’t teach it. In the end, people are animals too, no matter how they dress themselves up or teach themselves to speak proper, and we’re the same as anything else when it comes to training. The airmen got trained up real special to smell the things most people don’t, but it didn’t mean we were some bogeymen with Talents like magicians.

  Anyone with a nose could do it. Anyone with a brain and a nose could do it, which unfortunately cuts out a good portion of Thremedon since there are a whole lot more people with noses than with brains wandering around.

  Merritt’s boots were in the doorway, and I’d’ve tripped if I hadn’t been expecting them. They were always in the doorway, no matter how many times I broke into his room to throw them at his head. I even tried jamming them down his throat once, but Magoughin and Ghislain had pulled me off. I kicked them out of the way, and cursed, loud as I pleased ’cause anyone awake wouldn’t care and anyone asleep had thick steel doors between them and me, but it still hadn’t made an impression.

  But then: “Oh,” said a voice, and worse it was a voice I recognized, ’cause there were only about fifteen voices I bothered to recognize in this world, Have’s included. The rest fell by the wayside unless it was someone I really hated.

  The professor and all his hugging-kissing philosophies definitely qualified.

  “Bastion fucking cunt,” I said, soft this time, like I knew I didn’t need to be loud to intimidate this one. No, the ’Versity brat intimidated real nice and easy on his own. He had too much imagination for his own good.

  From down the hall, something made a scraping noise against the ground. I thought it must have been that curtain thing Raphael’d dredged up from fuck knows where. Probably stole it from a whorehouse, seeing as how it had cranes and snowy mountaintops painted on it, and that sort of business had gone out of fashion about five years ago.

  That didn’t matter though. What mattered was: They’d moved him in. Brought him right into the fold like he wasn’t some outsider, which anyone with eyes could see perfectly well he was. I picked my way down the hall, neat and quiet like some big Ke-Han panther. Little-known fact was that I could be as quiet as I pleased when it suited me. Just so happened that it didn’t suit me often enough.

  Zeroing in on the source of the noise came easy enough, as the halls weren’t exactly dark and there was only one body moving in them. Everyone else—due to another rule they’d instated a couple years back—was doing their moving behind closed doors, shuttered and locked as was proper and decent. He’d moved the screen aside, to find the source of the noise, I guessed, and was in the midst of moving right into his little corner, making everything all home-and-cozy-like.

  Just looking at him got me so twisted around that I wanted to hit something. No, what I wanted to do was get up into the air again, only there was a strict policy against flying by night unless we heard the raid siren. Strict enough that I stuck by it, same as everyone else. Don’t take your girls out for pleasure unless they’re tearing the place apart for a fly, and it’s during the day.

  “What do you want?” The professor didn’t look up, just went on digging in his beat-up old trunk.

  They’d got him set up on the couch they’d had put in when Niall started complaining that the walk from one end of the building to the other was too long. It was almost appalling what a man could obtain if he implied to th’Esar that he was unhappy. ’Course it all counted for horseshit if you couldn’t convince Adamo first, but he picked his battles. Knew when giving in might be the better option.

  It was, as he was often fond of saying, what made him so much smarter than me, though I couldn’t see what he was going on about. I got on just fine.

  “Chief Sergeant said you were out tonight,” the professor added, which wasn’t an answer to the question at all. He’d made himself a fortress—a stupid little wall with his two suitcases and the screen—like he thought it would actually stop anyone wanting to get in. The whole idea made me so mad I kicked one over, just to show him.

  It landed on the floor with a satisfying smack. I showed all my teeth, but it wasn’t a smile.

  The professor made a noise in his throat that sounded like he’d thought the better of something, which ticked me off. I wanted him to say whatever it was he wanted to say. I’d been spoiling for a fight since the one-eyed man in Pantheon, and my nerves were humming with alcohol, thick and golden.

  “He’s not my fucking nursemaid,” I said instead. “And neither’re you.”

  “Yes, well, thank the bastion for that,” he muttered, unfolding a pathetic homespun blanket and throwing it over the couch.

  “What was that, Cindy?”

  “My name—” he began, like he was doing me a favor by acting all patient.

  “Let’s get a few things straight,” I cut him off, marching over the suitcases and sitting square in the middle of the couch.

  He turned to face me, glasses catching the glare from the low red emergency lights they kept on and burning in the hallways. He looked angry, which was funny, and more than that it was stupid. Rule number one: I could sit anywhere I liked, and he’d have to learn to get over that if he was going to survive any longer than a day.

  Which he still probably wasn’t.

  “You’re not a guest. And you’re sure as fuck not one of us, so you know what that means?” I leaned back easy on the couch and spread my arms across the back, in case there was any dispute as to whose couch it really was.

  “I can’t imagine,” he said, throwing on his professor look while he bit his words sharp, kept what he meant back there in his throat, all for himself.

  The professor had a pinched look to his face, small and hard. Real stuck-up, like he belonged on the face of some coin instead of breathing and living around real people. Even in the red light, with nothing proper to ’lumin him, he looked younger than the boys running about with their nanny-nursemaids in the city. I wanted to spit in his face.

  “Means you’re a waste of space,” I said instead. “Means you ain’t never going to get done what you came here to do, and you might as well go back to the ’Versity while they’ll still take you back, all in one pretty piece.”

  “Your concern,” he said, dry as a Ke-Han desert, “is touching.”

  There was rage coming off him now, clear as a waving flag—it had a different smell than fear, anger—and it stopped him saying whatever it was he’d been about to say. He turned his back to me, went back to arranging his suitcases, and picked up the one I’d kicked over.

  “Not very many men who’d turn their backs on me,” I said as a point of interest.

  He didn’t say anything, but his shoulders twitched together like he was getting his hackles up about something. Then they evened out again and he answered flat and calm, “I’m not afraid of you.”

  That was just about the stupidest thing I’d ever heard anyone say. I laughed to prove it, quiet and sweet and taking my time, because the longer I took, the more scared he’d be. That’s the w
ay to get someone to provoke you—you just wait it out. It’s the only kind of game I’ve got patience for.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “’Cause it sure smells like you are.”

  He stiffened, his hands stilling on what might’ve been a pair of socks. Real intimidating. Not scared of me at all; him and his socks were going to mess me up good and proper. “Perhaps you’re imagining things,” he said at length. “I certainly don’t smell anything.”

  “Try again,” I said. “Breathe in deep, get a good whiff of yourself.” I didn’t lean forward; I didn’t have to. “You stink of it.”

  I saw him work his response around for just a moment; it was too split-second for him to do much thinking beforehand, and it was a big mistake he was about to make. I didn’t even have proper time to relish the anticipation of it.

  “You,” he said, “smell rather like a whore.”

  That was when I came off the couch, quick as a Ke-Han panther could be when he wasn’t lounging back nice and easy and tracking every movement you made before the pounce, and grabbed him by the collar, threw him up against the wall. “Say it again,” I snapped. It was easy this way, to let the anger out piece by pretty piece. The blood was pounding between my ears and I loved the sound, the feel of it.

  “You smell rather like a whore,” the professor said, but there wasn’t nearly the same venom in it as the first time. Maybe he’d finally figured out what a stupid thing it was to say, just him and me, and no one around to vouch for me having killed him. No witnesses: That was the fancy way the Provost would’ve said it, or one of his wolves.

  “That’s ’cause I’ve been with whores,” I said, drawing each word out sweet and mean, vowels like they’d pronounce them in Molly, all long and hard-edged. “I’ve been with whores all night long and, you know, sometimes it’s so good I don’t even have to pay them.”

  “I sincerely doubt that,” said the professor. It seemed like he already knew he was going to die, like he felt it wouldn’t make no difference if he went down swinging than if he went down meek and mild as a babe in arms. “I’m rather well acquainted with the system of prostitution and, if I recall, the frequenter is required to pay before the act. So unless one or two individual women who know you by name harbor a particularly soft spot for you—But even then, it’s the madam who takes the money, and not the woman herself, so you see that’s rather an empty and unnecessary boast. We both know better.”

  I tightened my fist in the front of his shirt and shoved him back against the wall so his head knocked against it and the fear rolled off him in waves.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “You’ve been following me? You know how I get it done?”

  “Well,” said the professor, who by now was just babbling and waiting for death to come, and if he’d’ve been anybody else, I might’ve grown to admire him a little for it, “it’s just that unless you climb in through the windows and rape the madams, what you’ve said is rather impossible. But, considering your style, it’s not all that unlikely you would do things that way, in which case certainly you might not have to pay at all. Except of course there are bars on the windows, for keeping both deranged rapists out and kept women in. So once again we find ourselves at a fork in the road of logic—a logistical impasse, if you will—wherein you say one thing and I counter it very effectively with, ah, the truth.”

  I was gearing up to hit him. “Like you’ve spent all your school trips getting used to the way they do it in Hapenny,” I snarled. Our faces were real close, and I could see his eyes get panicked, like he thought I was going to bite him.

  Not likely. I don’t put my mouth on just anybody.

  “Actually,” he said, in a squeezed voice, all reed-thin, “I have done much research on Tuesday Street, so you see I am rather well acquainted with the way things work in that particular business, Messire Rook.”

  If he thought he was so familiar with Tuesday Street just because of doing some research, I thought—all blind rage and preparing my fist to break his face—then he didn’t know anything at all.

  I raised my fist and let him take a good look at it. I was still wearing my flying gloves—it gets a man better service no matter where he goes—and I watched him square himself against it, when of course the real way to let yourself get hit is to go soft and relaxed to try and keep any bones from breaking.

  It was kind of like hitting a puppy.

  “No,” I said finally, “I don’t think I’m gonna.”

  He looked startled; even more so when I released my grip on him and let him slide down the wall, his knees shaking, his eyes not trusting my sudden relenting. That was smart of him, at least. “You’re not going to—What?” he asked. Like he hadn’t been pissing himself about what I was about to do this whole damn time.

  “Later,” I promised him. “Don’t sleep too deeply or nothing, ’cause, well. You know.” I flashed him more teeth than I needed to.

  “Do I?” he asked, struggling to regain his composure.

  “On the point of a pin, like,” I replied. “And sometimes I get up in the night and look after unfinished business. That’s all.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  And, quick as you please, I turned on my heel and headed back to my bunker, where I locked the door and lay down and slept nice and easy, while he was no doubt still shivering in his socks right there in the common room, by his couch and his fancy screen that wasn’t going to help him none soon as I got the other boys behind me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THOM

  I was doomed.

  I’d always been doomed, and to be honest I’d always known it, but it was really the words we exchanged my first night sleeping—or trying to sleep, rather—in the Airman compound that I realized just how doomed I was. Every time something creaked, every time a sound infiltrated my troubled sleep, I jerked awake with a start, my heart pounding. And that, of course, had been Rook’s plan all along, which made me realize how clever he was and how I might have underestimated him, thinking he was no more than a common hooligan raised above his capabilities to control himself. No, it was quite the contrary; Airman Rook was a dangerously clever sort of person, without any formal education or moral upbringing, so that he was something like a live wire without any outlet, no backbone of kindness upon which all his intelligence could be structured and thence put to good use. He was exceptionally smart, which meant that his brain was naturally frustrated because he’d never known the right way to channel his own intelligence or expand his mental horizons. This frustration made him angry, made him lash out at people, made him punish them without enough self-awareness to understand why.

  Also, he was going to kill me.

  Whether he was going to do it on purpose or whether he was simply going to get a bit overzealous while torturing me, it didn’t really matter. These were trifling details. The end result remained the same, no matter how I measured the contributing factors.

  I wasn’t ever going to sleep again—at least, not if I could absolutely help it.

  Luckily, the first day I had slated for no more than observation, and so I sat upon my couch and watched as each man filtered out separately, went about his business separately, left separately, and returned separately, interacting now and then to tell a joke, or pick a fight about boots left by the front door, or shout about how that had been Ace’s sandwich and not Ghislain’s, and what sort of rat bastard ate a sandwich without making it for himself first in any case, whether he thought it had been abandoned or not?

  Now and then I took notes, though what I thought they’d accomplish I wasn’t sure. A few of the men were early risers, and a few of them hadn’t appeared even now that lunch was long since over. Thankfully, Rook was in the latter category; I hoped, privately and cruelly, that he would sleep all day, or perhaps be smothered with his pillow. The way he treated his fellow men was reprehensible, the way he treated women even more so. He was exactly the sort of man I’d always loathed, both during my time in Molly and during my years at Primary, then a
t the ’Versity.

  “This is often what it’s like during the off-seasons,” said Balfour, obviously taking pity on me. If I looked as tired as I felt, it was no wonder. “May I?”

  I gestured to the empty space beside me. “By all means,” I said.

  “Though I don’t wish to get you in trouble with the other men.”

  “In trouble?” Balfour looked at me quizzically.

  “For fraternizing with the enemy,” I confided, leaning in close as Evariste and Compagnon passed through the room.

  “Oh, no,” Balfour said, a little too quickly I thought, then flushed. “Well, actually, yes. But it’s not really important. Have you eaten? What are you writing down?”

  “Nothing much,” I admitted. “On both counts. Only I thought that I might first—observe you in your . . . natural habitat. Undisturbed by my presence.”

  “As if we’re zoo animals?” Balfour asked, but I saw his smile at the corner of his mouth and knew he was only teasing me. “We are zoo animals, some of us,” Balfour added, and I didn’t miss his pointed look down the hall, in the direction of Rook’s bunker.

  “Well,” I replied noncommittally, “it’s not entirely for me to say.”

  “Ah,” said Balfour. “Yes, I see. What have you found out thus far about our . . . natural habitat?”

  “You never really talk to one another,” I pointed out. “I mean, I’ve seen you. You all know one another very well, but during the morning like this, there aren’t”—I struggled for a way to explain it properly—“aren’t any lines of communication open among you,” I finished lamely. “Does that make sense?”

  “Some of us aren’t the sort who feel friendly in the morning,” Balfour tried to explain. “At night, it’s very different.”

  “Yes,” I said, though I didn’t really see how such vastly incompatible men who refused to talk to one another beyond the occasional explosive argument or filthy joke could possibly work together in the air effectively enough to save all our lives from the Ke-Han hordes. Perhaps there was something I was missing, but I was rather dubious, from what I’d seen so far. “If you don’t mind my asking, what was the outcome with Merritt’s boots?”