Havemercy Page 31

  “Oh,” the professor said. “What I said. At the ball. I said a lot of things. Most men do when they’re feeling, feeling cornered, attacked. We say a lot of things we don’t mean—”

  “Don’t fuck around,” I said. “You said it, you meant it. I don’t want to play any games. It’s too fucking late for that.”

  “Oh,” the professor said again. “I see. Yes. Too late, indeed.”

  “It’s just, the way I see it,” I said, swallowing back another laugh, “some of us aren’t lucky enough to get to the ’Versity and make fine, respectable civs out of themselves. What I’ve got is flying. Maybe you can’t teach me anything. Maybe you’re too fucking late.”

  The professor turned real quick, like he just couldn’t stop himself, like he just couldn’t help it, and I knew I’d hit him deep and hard and in the place that wondered—same as I did, but only when I wasn’t in my right mind—just how different we were. I knew the truth, because I was the one calling all the shots, and if I fed him the right combination of lines, gave him what he wanted, his standards would keep him here, trying to help me. As if I needed to be fucking helped. He was the one who needed help, and maybe after all this was over he could take a good, long look at himself and change his mind on a few things.

  None of that mattered now, though. What mattered now were his big green eyes staring up at me like I’d just admitted my mother didn’t love me enough when I was little, or my drunken Molly father beat me. Or no matter what, deep down, I was scared and alone and just lashing out so no one would see it. I wasn’t any of those things, didn’t have any memory of my parents and didn’t much care, but the one thing that was important here was to keep the professor guessing.

  “What are you saying?” he asked, eyes bright in the darkness.

  I chewed my lower lip for a little while. I used to be the best grifter on all of Hapenny, before I met Have and put an end to that business, but there are some things you never forget how to do, and conning a man is one of those things.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I do think about it. What I might’ve been.”

  “Oh,” the professor said.

  He wasn’t so brilliant, just saying “oh” all the time and nodding, staring at me like that could fix anything.

  I let the silence hang all heavy and important between us for a good, long while, then, without any warning, I stood up, leaving my boots behind.

  “Doesn’t fucking matter now,” I said, and left him where he was. I could feel him watching me all the way out.

  And that was how it started.

  I mean, if you want to get precise, you could really say it started on the balcony; but that was just the beginning, a kind of prelude to the main event. This was when I knew the way to keep the professor guessing and keep his loyalties all mixed up like signals in the dark. It would be by dangling what he wanted so bad in front of his nose, and that was exactly what I did. Most would say that being an airman must’ve dulled any kindness I ever had in me, but the truth was that by the time I came to sign up for the corps I didn’t have any of that kindness left, not even so much as a scrap, and it wasn’t as if that sort of horseshit mattered to me, anyway.

  I hit him with moments of my “vulnerability” like we hit the Ke-Han with the air raids, though it was more unpredictable than that; the Ke-Han pretty much knew to look to the skies soon as the clouds covered the moon. But with the professor, I had to be a whole lot less easy to anticipate and prepare for.

  What really throws people off is if you don’t give them any pattern to plan around. People are real routine-based creatures; they like it best when their days have some semblance of familiarity. So when you throw them off the scent like that, mixing it up every time, you get them below the belt no matter what they think they’re expecting.

  First and foremost, there were a couple of rules, and I made sure he knew them. One: I was gonna come to him, if I came to him at all. He couldn’t seek me out or he’d ruin it, get my defenses up and my blood hot, and there’d be no talking to me at all, just silence or the sound of me sharpening my knives. I don’t think the professor much liked those knives, since they were a reminder of where we both came from, and soon enough the professor picked up on the fact that if he was going to “get” to me, he’d have to be cagey. That made it pretty hard to go anywhere or meet any of th’Esar’s men in case he had something to report, so I had to be sure the professor didn’t want to miss a fucking minute of time just being nearby—just in case I did have something to say to him, some kind of admission to make, some kind of breakthrough thanks to his guidance.

  The professor could sense I was on the verge of something. Then again, the professor was real smart.

  Two: There was no talking about it. When everyone else was around and the sun was up and we were having a grand old time of it, he had to learn how to keep his eyes to the floor, as that was the only way he wouldn’t look straight at me like he was starving for knowledge, for any little bit of information that could explain who I was, and give the game away. This was private business. I was a private man. I wanted him to think I didn’t want the other boys to know I was questioning who I was.

  Three: We weren’t friends. We weren’t going to be friends. We didn’t talk about how our days were and we certainly didn’t say good morning or good night to each other. It didn’t change anything, just his allegiance to me.

  All I was doing was getting his hopes up, but hopes are a dangerous thing in a man, and the professor was too proud for his own good. He wanted to see he’d made a difference, and I was feeding him exactly what he wanted to hear—if only sometimes.

  A few days after I’d started, and was just beginning to “open up,” I let him think he’d almost lost me again—called him a pillow-biter and a Nellie and worse than the Mary Margrave and everything, until I could see the despair in his eyes like a gray shadow, like ash.

  “You’re insane,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said. “But you keep trying to change me, so what does that fucking say about you?”

  Mostly this was my neat and simple way of keeping an eye on him, even when I wasn’t trapping him in a box of his own making, giving him the idea that maybe this time I’d actually give him a little piece of me that would solve the puzzle and let him in, then snatching it back. I could feel him watching me all the time, careful and measured like he was trying to size me up and measure my actions against what I should be telling him, but he didn’t want me to catch him at it. One day he was doing it in front of a couple of the boys, Ivory and Magoughin and Merritt and Luvander, and I lost it with him afterward, just lost it.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” I snarled, close to his ear, my breath gusting hot back up against my own face. “I don’t want you fucking looking at me.”

  He didn’t stop, but at least he was smart enough to be more careful about it.

  So I guess that took care of the professor for the time being. I saw Balfour worrying after him a couple of times when he caught the professor sneaking out of my room late one night—since after all, that was the kind of thing I liked to do, just to keep him on edge all the time, keep him tired and careless, not paying attention to anything else but converting me or whatever it was he thought he was going to do. I guess it upset Balfour something special, seeing as how they were two bleeding hearts and he thought he was losing the one person who actually cared what he had to say. But for all his worrying, Balfour didn’t know what I knew, that the professor might’ve been a rat.

  I wasn’t too concerned about it.

  Other than that, there was the war to think about. Even though we’d been led to believe it would be over in a week, things played out just like I’d figured they might, and pretty much right after the ball, all the magicians that th’Esar’d called back from disreputable exile were deployed quick as that, and the air-raid siren was still ringing out every night so not a man jack of us was getting enough sleep. Most of the time we caught winks during the day
, long catnaps I liked to think of them, while at night we kept the Ke-Han busy even as the magicians made their way to the Cobalts, then through ’em, then right up to the front.

  Something didn’t smell right about it; it smelled like lying. A couple of the boys were thinking the same thing, but our job was to go where we were told when we’d signed our names for the week earlier, so whether we thought something of it or not it didn’t seem to make much difference. I signed up for a couple of extra shifts, and it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, coming back one night to find the professor waiting up for me, holding his own elbows, his knuckles real white.

  I wiped some of the soot off my forehead and cocked my head to the side, giving him a look like he was the crazy one, not me.

  “Do you know,” he said faintly, “you can sometimes hear the sound of the explosions, even here? The ground shakes.”

  It didn’t. Or, at least, it never had before, since Thremedon was nestled real cozy against the hillside and the water, miles away from the Cobalts. Most of the fighting since the creation of the dragons took place on the Ke-Han’s side of the mountains.

  “You’re making things up,” I said. “It’s pretty fucking far away.”

  He didn’t say anything, just sort of rocking in his place for a moment or two, then he surged off the couch all at once, like the tide.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  Have’d got me a swish-flick with her wing. Nothing crazy like that’d ever happened before—we knew where the other one was down to the barest hairbreadth of a centimeter—and it’d spooked us both pretty bad. It pissed me off that the professor’d zeroed right in on it, like he knew, or was just a damn good guesser.

  Then, because he was out of his right mind and straight into his wrong one, he started dabbing at the cut on my temple with the edge of his sleeve.

  I was tired and I was still a little biting mad, but for some reason instead of breaking his jaw I let him do it. It was stupid of him to get so close to me after a fight and I could see he knew it, breathing unsteadily, waiting for me to lash out at him or bite him or something.

  I figured not doing any of those things would freak him more than actually doing what he expected me to. When he led me over to his couch and went to get me a glass of water I stayed put like a little kid. Fuck, I even drank some of it.

  “Was it . . . very rough tonight?” he asked, like he thought I was in the mood for discussing it with him.

  “Not particularly,” I said, rolling out the tension in my shoulders. I needed a shower pretty bad, but now all of a sudden here we were, sitting and talking like it was afternoon tea. “Ivory almost took it chin-fucking-on, but Have and I got him out. What the fuck do you care about it?”

  “You can almost hear the explosions from here,” he repeated, like it meant something I just wasn’t picking up on. He colored, just a little, high on his cheeks. For a moment he even looked kind of familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “The couch is going to smell like grease,” he said. “There will be no getting it out, no matter how many times it’s cleaned.”

  “You’re the one who wanted me to sit down so bad,” I pointed out. “I gotta clean up.”

  “If there’s anything I could—” he began, then cut off short, like he thought now was the time to start being coy with me. That was what came of letting him come close even for a second, really. I had him in a bad place, cornered nice and good. “If you want to talk,” he finished finally, and winced, because even he must’ve known how pathetic it sounded.

  “Think I’ve been handling this for a long time on my own, professor,” I said. “Don’t fucking worry about it.”

  “I do,” the professor replied, almost fiercely.

  It was a pretty stupid thing to say, and I wasn’t predisposed toward excusing him for any slip-ups anyway, but he had a strange kind of courage, and it made me hesitate, which gave him some kind of idea, I’m sure, about how close we’d grown.

  Once that happened, the professor stopped trying to pretend he wasn’t over-the-moon distracted after something or other. He didn’t break the rules, though, no matter how many times the boys caught him at his notes, muttering to himself or looking after me the morning after a raid, asking me if I wanted breakfast, that sort of thing. The only thing that gave me some kind of amusement was Balfour, whose look of bitter disappointment that the professor had no time for him at all kept me laughing for hours after I saw it.

  Then things with Have started to get messy, and I wasn’t laughing at anything for a good long while.

  It wasn’t anything big at first, just the little things, like the first time when her wing had grazed my head. Only it didn’t stop there, like it should’ve. Have and I were the best because we flew like one being, metal and magic, flesh and blood, without a heart between us. Some days, when it all went right, I could barely tell who it was that did the flying, her or me. It wasn’t that the line was blurred; there was no fucking line at all. But that was before.

  Like I said, it wasn’t anything big. Leastways it wasn’t so big that I could mention it to any of the others. I’d tried sneaking it into a question about something else to Ace, Thoushalt being the closest thing to Have in all the world, but he’d only given me a strange look with those sleepy eyes of his, like he didn’t have a clue what I was on about and could he shower now?

  So it was only me, then, or whatever was off wasn’t so much that the others’d noticed yet. I wasn’t any kind of egomaniac, despite what certain people and professors chose to believe. And even if I was the best, I knew that if there was something wrong—really wrong—with our girls, then there wouldn’t have been a man of us not up in arms about it. I might’ve told myself it was all in my imagination even, only it wasn’t, ’cause Have was real enough and things on her weren’t working like they used to. We were flying like separate creatures, Havemercy and me, with no regard for where anyone put their hand or their tail. The scrape with her wing was the first, but it sure as shit wasn’t the last, and when I gave her trouble for it, she seemed real surprised and ’bout as concerned as something that can’t feel concern could be. She wasn’t even talking like she had before, only the muck-headed Handlers didn’t notice it, said I was making shit up or gone mad with signing up for too many raids.

  One of them even tried to say it was my fault for signing up for so many raids, and that Have was probably just out of sorts on account of being overworked.

  I broke his jaw.

  I thought for sure that’d get me in some kind of trouble with Adamo, but even our grand Chief Sergeant seemed distracted like he’d never been before, spending all his time locked up in command like some real war general and us too distracting or not good enough to strategize with him. ’Course I knew it wasn’t that, and that Adamo had been real good to me when he did hear about the fight, didn’t put me on tight rations or nothing.

  Instead of making it better, though, it just pissed me off even more. Nothing was acting like it was damn well supposed to.

  With all that anger in my head it might have been a good idea to stay away from the professor for a spell, but I got the uncomfortable feeling that he’d start following me around like some kind of dog that didn’t have another home if I stayed away too long.

  Then he started hanging around me anyway, not anything like the rest of the guys did on downtime, but more like a real persistent shadow in the back of my head, reading in the back of the room or writing his notes down or even just eating his lunch while I was eating my breakfast.

  With things going on with Have the way they were, and me coming back scratched or cut up or something most nights, it was like he’d forgot the rules. He was cleverer about it than he could’ve been, but not near as clever as he thought he was, like he thought he could look at me just because I had a bandage on my fucking face.

  I didn’t much care whether he was doing it on purpose or not, only it seemed worse if he wasn’t, ’cause just what kind of a weak-willed son-of-a did
n’t even do the things he wanted to on purpose?

  If he wanted someone to follow around, I told him one night when it’d especially worn on me seeing him there, calm as you please, then he could go and get himself some kind of a Cindy boyfriend. He got quiet after that—only the professor was always quiet lately—just clamped right down on his tongue and didn’t let anything past that didn’t force itself free.

  I could almost see him questioning himself after that, and I swallowed my pride for a moment.

  “Tired,” I ground out.

  “Oh, of course,” he said, like that made all the difference. “They’re riding you very hard these days, aren’t they?”

  It was like he thought he was getting everything he wanted just by sitting next to me and agreeing with me, making exceptions until the moment I saw the light, had my epiphany, and changed my ways. What he didn’t know was that I made the rules and I was holding all the cards. Neither of these things was liable to change soon, and he’d just have to get used to it.

  That night when I left, after dragging him along like a puppy on a string, I signed up for the next night’s crush shift that Niall had been complaining no one wanted, knowing it was probably his turn. Have and I just needed to get back into the groove of things, I thought, and it wouldn’t do no good ignoring the problem.

  Paying attention to the problem didn’t seem to be working any better, though.

  Things came to a head the night I was out with Compagnon and Raphael, though it didn’t happen for more than a flash and neither one of them noticed it, but I fucking lost control of Havemercy for all the time it took a man to sneeze.

  Someone once told me that when you sneeze your heart just stops, not long enough to kill you, not so long that you’re even aware of it, but it stops.

  Feeling Have streaking underneath me in the sky while knowing I wasn’t having a thing to do with it was a lot like a sneeze in that respect.