"My God, Kieran. What did they do to you?"
"They tried to sell me opera tickets. What do you think they did? They beat the living shit out of me. What are you assholes staring at? Do you need your asses kicked too? Because I can provide that."
Ash put a tentative hand to Kieran's shoulder. "Let me help you over to the shady side. You should sit down."
"Quit hovering." Kieran shook him off. "You're making me seasick. Go play somewhere else."
"But -- Kieran, you --"
"Fuck off! Anybody gets within ten feet of me, I'll eat his fucking eyes!" With a vaguely threatening gesture and a vicious scowl, Kieran limped off toward the wall.
"Fine," Ash said to no one. He went to the opposite side of the yard and stood there with his arms crossed, doing his best not to look. Trying especially not to think of how attentive and sympathetic he'd be if Kieran weren't being a macho jerk about it. He understood that it would be foolish of Kieran to show weakness in public, but couldn't he have taken a friendly hand? Or at least not bit Ash's head off for offering?
Gibner made a deliberate detour around the yard just to pass by Ash and say, "Trouble in paradise?"
"I dare you to go make friends with him," Ash returned, and that ended the conversation.
--==*==--
When they were rounded up at the end of yard time, Ash didn't even stand near Kieran, let alone help him walk. Back in the cell, he busied himself with his book. The first couple of times Kieran said his name, he pretended not to hear.
Kieran gave up for a while, washed his face and hands, combed dried blood out of his hair. Then he tried Ash's name again. Getting no response, he threw the comb, bouncing it off Ash's forehead.
"Don't," Ash snapped, sweeping the comb onto the floor.
"Well, quit sulking."
"I'm not sulking. I'm just leaving you alone, like you wanted. So I don't make you sick anymore."
An exasperated sigh. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."
"Oh, I know. You can't let anybody help you, or somebody might challenge you for the King Shit of the Barnyard title. And then you might have to hit somebody again, which of course you hate to do."
"Oh for -- all right, I'm sorry, already."
"Well, that sounded sincere."
"Don't you want to know what I found out?"
"What, that if you stay behind the guards beat you up? I gathered that from visual evidence."
"No, dumbass, that the guards eat right after we do, and they get their coffee out of the same kettle. If I could get hold of something nasty and drop it in the coffee urn, I could poison them all."
"Too bad your personality's not water-soluble."
"Now look, you --" Kieran paused, then snorted. "Okay, that was funny. But you can stop now. I mean, would you be all sweetness and light after -- no, I bet you would. 'Oh, I might be bleeding internally, but that's not your fault.' Why am I apologizing to you? Do you know how hard it was to just sit there and let them kick me? But I guess that wouldn't be hard for you."
"No," Ash said sourly, "getting picked on kind of comes naturally for me." Then the rest of Kieran's speech penetrated, and he finally looked Kieran in the face. "You think you have internal bleeding?"
"Nah." He pulled up his shirt to examine a series of ovoid bruises on his torso, each the size of the toe of a guard's boot. "I was worried about it for a few minutes there, but it's not swelling."
He tried to grin, but it turned into a wince when his split lip began to ooze. "The look on your face is priceless. You can't decide if you want to go 'oh poor baby' or spit on my shadow."
"Sounds about right," Ash admitted.
"You care too much. That's going to wear you out if you keep doing it. So, did you find out about the gun post being empty?"
"I tried to ask Hartnell, but he was sick or something."
"Yeah?"
"Kind of vague and sleepy. He talked, sort of, but it wasn't really what you could call a conversation. Gibner said the Testing people have had Hartnell out two or three times a week.
Which struck me kind of odd, because he's been here longer than we have, and he has a really common Talent, so why do they want to examine him more often than they do us?"
"That is weird." Kieran got thoughtful. "Any other symptoms?"
"Not that I noticed."
"Did he seem upset? Scared?"
"No, that was another strange thing. He wasn't at all alarmed by his illness. He seemed pretty happy, actually. Made me wonder if he managed to get hold of some liquor, but he didn't smell of alcohol."
Kieran frowned at the dried blood under his fingernails. "No. He wouldn't."
"What do you mean?"
"Tell you later."
"No, I want to know."
"I won't tell you until I'm sure."
"But --"
"You think you can change my mind?" Kieran looked Ash straight in the eyes, and for just that moment his face was naked of masks; no wry superiority, no intimidation, not even the half-irritable patience with which he endured injuries. He looked like a boy cornered by a man's world, in that instant. Whatever he was refusing to tell Ash, he was scared to death of it. His voice was mild as he went on, "It might not be something I want to get you into. Leave it alone."
Ash didn't answer, because he couldn't breathe. Only when Kieran looked away was he able to draw breath. He let it out wordlessly. Not a single one of the things he wanted to say would have been welcome.
--==*==--
The next day, guards and inmates alike seemed to watch Kieran especially closely. Not surprising, Ash thought, after the stunt he pulled. A few more like that and the best escape plan in the world would fail because everyone would be watching for him to try it. Kieran didn't seem bothered by it, though. It was, Ash was beginning to understand, just the way Kieran operated, shutting out everything he didn't perceive as relevant. He moved through his constricted world like a forgetful man in the middle of a complex task, ignoring anything that might obscure his mental list.
Ash was glad, at this moment, to be excluded. He had some thinking of his own to do, and being ignored was the closest he was going to get to privacy. Time had given him a little perspective on yesterday's events, and now he wanted to know why he was riding an adolescent pendulum between elation and despair where Kieran was concerned. Was it just boredom and confinement exaggerating his feelings? An attraction and a friendship do not necessarily add up to True Love.
I had better stop thinking like a moonstruck schoolgirl, or I might begin to act like one, which would get me killed in short order. But how, when every time I look at him I lose the rest of the world?
To say Kieran had a forceful personality was understatement. Not a pleasant personality, but powerful. He had such strength, but it seemed brittle somehow. More flint than steel. Maybe it was the fragility Ash sensed beneath the armor of Kieran's cold confidence that made him so compelling. To be trusted with even the slightest glimpse of that breakable self was the highest honor. To be sent out of that trust was a slap in the face. Kieran was more real than anyone Ash had ever known.
He watched with careful eyes the way Kieran moved, slow and smooth and deliberate. The way he talked, soft and low in his amused drawl, but with a chill in his eyes that warned against taking that quiet for granted. The way he ignored his hurts, never probing his bruises or tonguing his split lip, favoring a pair of sprained fingers automatically but without tenderness.
No wonder he'd been famous as an assassin and highwayman. It had nothing to do with his Talent. He simply had no opinion about pain. Not only did he not pity the suffering of others, he was not interested in his own.
Sick, Ash thought. Very sick, and beautiful, and horribly strong. I hate the people who made the world in which he had to become this thing.
During their exercise periods, Kieran spoke to several people. Ash, told to stay by the wall, heard none of these conversations. He could only watch expressions pass over everyone's faces b
ut Kieran's. The others were variously belligerent, frightened, suspicious, obsequious. Kieran smiled sometimes, or raised one peaked brow to indicate some skepticism or irony, but these couldn't really be called expressions. They were as constructed as his long, slow stride and casual speech. Ash wondered, in retrospect, whether even the cornered look of yesterday had been calculated.
When, in the evening, Kieran would not tell Ash what he'd been talking to people about, Ash wasn't surprised. Hurt and worried, but not surprised at all.
Chapter Seven
Blue; infinite floating blue. Soaring, wingless, effortless, white-hot, straight up. A feeling of being known, of being crucial to the world, a piece of landscape or type of sky or subtle color without which nothing functioned. Coming home.
Then there was Ash, far below, stuck on the ground and searching for his anger. "I know where it is," Kieran told him, "but I'm not telling." As Ash studied how to change his mind, the first sweet breath of approaching rain took Kieran by the back of the neck and folded him inside out...
Back to the smell of sick-sweat and the taste of bile. Distant, a door noise, a quiet voice: "Sir, he's regained consciousness."
Testing. He was in Testing. He'd refused some order. The pain had given him such visions...
what was it they wanted him to do?
He was strapped into that chair again. In the other chair, the one that faced him, that poor bastard Hartnell hunched with bloodshot eyes. There was a smell of vomit and feces around the man, and he was shaking. Shaking and sick as Kieran himself had once been, which was why, Kieran now remembered, the order to kill Hartnell had caused him to demand payment. A useless smartass remark. But he remembered too well what it felt like in there. Hartnell was in opium withdrawal.
"Are you ready to cooperate?" The Colonel's tone hinted that more torture would not be difficult to arrange.
Kieran caught Hartnell's eyes and held them. Hartnell shook his head convulsively, muscles in his jaw writhing. He wanted to live, despite his discomfort, even if only a few minutes more.
Kieran could respect that. To Warren, he said, "Hit me."
Maybe he'd hoped that giving the order would cause the Watchman to withhold his power; people didn't like to do as they were told, especially when they thought they were in charge.
Warren, however, had his method.
The pain clawed through Kieran's guts, into his eyes and the roots of his teeth, every nerve in his body sending up distress flares at once. He felt his whole flesh go into instant rebellion, and an instant later he was nowhere to be found; absent and flying.
He'd never told anyone about this, about how he sometimes left his body to its fate and went somewhere else. Even Shan hadn't known, though Kieran had done it several times while kicking his tar habit. It was a sort of cowardice, he supposed, but what purpose did it serve to stay and endure? It had happened off and on since he was small, since spending fourteen hours watching his mother die. He couldn't do it on purpose, but when things got bad enough it just occurred.
There were places in his life that were blank, such as the missing time between Shan's death and his own capture. In those times, he was someone else, and had nothing to do with Kieran Trevarde's squalid scrabbling for survival.
High above the mesa, so high it was just one more blotch in a scrawled carpet of reds and yellows and green-grays. Moth-eaten lace of stone and sand. Brighter green in streaks where water ran. All of it belonged to him. His house, where he had always lived, his true body, his source. Due west, his heart beat, smoldering in slow rage like a coal-mine fire. Farther, over the mountains, clouds came skimming. Rain coming. A small, hard rain. Tonight, or early tomorrow morning. He longed for it to wash the dust from his soul.
He didn't have to wait. He could go there, ride it down the mountain and across the world. He could go anywhere -- but the vision was breaking up, and he woke to the ache and stink of his mortal flesh.
He supposed he must look like Hartnell now; twins in sweat and shakes and twisted muscles.
Warren was no longer in the room. He must have gotten involved in something else, which meant Kieran must have been out for a while. Hartnell was still conscious, though not so wide awake as before. Kieran took the chance to talk to him.
"Another one of those," he said, "and they'll have to give up on me for today. What are they going to do with you?"
"Dunno." Hartnell swallowed and blinked, too dehydrated now for it to do any good. His voice was a sticky rasp. "How come you're... why?"
"Why not?"
Hartnell managed the ghost of a laugh. It was obvious why not. "You'll have to. Sooner or later."
"Yeah."
"It'll hurt."
"Probably."
"More than this?"
"No."
Hartnell let his head hang. Kieran found himself hoping the poor doomed bastard would give up, because another shot of that pain might cause some kind of permanent damage. But he'd already made the decision to let Hartnell decide, to cut Warren and his minions out of the loop, to prove a point. He wasn't going to go back on that. So there was no point anticipating.
Door sound. Footsteps. Hartnell brought his head up, glaring hatred past Kieran at someone behind him. Then his eyes flicked to Kieran's face. He bared his teeth. "Do it. Do it quick."
Kieran was ready. He slammed into Hartnell's chest like a shotgun blast, found the edge and shoved hard. The snap as life's thread broke recoiled back into Kieran with nearly as much force as he'd put out, like bouncing a ball against a wall, and he swallowed it down. That quickly, Hartnell was gone.
"Did you see that?" The assistant sounded excited. "Did you see him catch that recoil?"
"I did indeed." Warren came around to take Kieran's pulse and peer into his eyes. "When the Director arrives, we shall have to see if Mr. Trevarde can reproduce the result. Preferably, next time, without a tedious show of childish defiance."
"Fuck you," said Kieran generally. When Warren and his assistant began the inevitable Survey, Kieran held in mind until the last moment his awareness of Warren's bad breath and the bags under his eyes. It was a tiny revenge, but it made him feel a little better.
--==*==--
They had to carry him back to his cell again, but at least he was awake for it this time, and knew where he was. When they dumped him on the floor, he was coherent enough to catch himself on his hands and knees rather than sprawling on his face. He grasped at Ash's offered hands, climbed up the white boy's clothing, and launched a headlong stumble from there to his cot.
Ash knelt beside him, hand on his arm. "Do you want to talk about it?"
The warm hand on the spasming muscles of Kieran's forearm felt far better than it should have.
Knots all over him started relaxing. He watched Ash's face as he told the truth, curious to see the exact moment of rejection: "They had me kill Hartnell. He was just about all in, but he didn't want to go. They zapped me a couple times. Then Hartnell said do it, so I did. Poor stupid son of a bitch."
Ash went still, eyes blank as blue sky, and stayed like that for most of a minute. He didn't look away, though. When he came to life again, it was to say carefully, "I'm surprised that a mercy killing would seem worse to you than this kind of torture."
It was his stubbornness Ash objected to? Not the fact that he'd killed Hartnell in the end? "I don't want to give in too easy. Gets to be a habit."
"What were you going to do, die in his place? Would it have saved him? Spare yourself the pain.
It doesn't do any good."
"Sure it does. Warren got so pissed off, he used adjectives."
Ash set his teeth in his lip, pleading wordlessly. Kieran instantly felt like a complete asshole.
Master manipulator, this kid, and I don't think he even knows he's doing it.
"It really bugs you, huh?"
Ash nodded.
"Guess if I go down, you're screwed. Pretty much literally."
"That's not it! I just don't like to see y
ou like this. No one likes to see a friend get hurt. We are friends, right?"
Kieran felt a dose of treacherous warmth run through his exhausted body, and knew he had to squash this line of questioning before it went any further. He forced casual heartiness, knowing what a slap in the face it would be. "Sure, we're friends. I got your back. Now get off my blanket." But he couldn't meet Ash's eyes as he said it, and he was too aware of where in the room his cellmate went when he retreated. He could feel Ash's wounded silence; leaning on the bars, not looking.