Chapter 42 #2
“No. The place... it was extreme. It’s not exactly the kind of place where you get to go home for Christmas break, either.
A lot of troubled kids were sent there. The sort of kids whose parents didn’t want them to go to military school and acquire any sort of skills that could be used against them.
I didn’t know that then, but it seems obvious now.
And maybe that’s how they got my mother on board, telling her that it would be rigorous instruction, which there was a lot of.
History, math, languages. Classics right alongside rigorous discipline methods.
In the end even she didn’t lift a finger to get me out of there.
And they knew what was going on. If not at first, they surely knew from the letters I smuggled out to them. ”
“They were whipping you, and your parents don’t see fit to get you out?”
“Nah.”
“And nobody ever noticed that suddenly this clan family’s son had disappeared into thin air?”
“It would have been a problem if not for this prophecy that was circulating at the time. That the youngest son would blind the king and then kill him.”
“I heard about it. It’s like a really mixed-up version of Oedipus.”
“You have done your homework.”
“I’m a diligent student.” She shrugs. “You said they went too far. Which is hard to imagine considering the whipping.”
“People are adaptable. You’d be amazed at what a human being can get used to. Them going far wasn’t about draconian punishments or deprivations. It was what they did to the girl I loved then. Her name was Sara.”
“Oh no.”
“She was a student—an inmate like us, really—at the girls’ reformatory connected to the place where we boys were.
The girls had it worse than we did.” I pause and force myself to look her in the eye for this confession.
She needs to know. “Sara died because of me. Because of my carelessness, my selfishness.”
She reaches out for my hand. I let her take it.
She says, “ Tell me.”
“I didn’t think. I wanted what I wanted.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re the one who killed her.”
Of course, she’d say that. “Sara was from a town south of Tucumayo. She was a year younger than me but eons more innocent. I mean, a little ruffian, but she’d never even kissed a guy. Things never got much further than that.”
“And you loved her.”
“To us, it was love, or whatever love is when you’re sixteen and seventeen.
There was a huge wall between the girls’ wing and the boys’ wing, but there was a hole in that wall we’d use.
Kids sneaking out wasn’t unheard of. You put a lot of teenagers in a cage, they’ll find ways to do things.
She was always really nervous about it, but I promised her she’d be fine.
I had no right to make that kind of promise. ”
“You were just a kid.”
“Still,” I say.
“So what happened?”
My phone pings right then. It’s the doorman asking if he should let this charcuterie delivery team up. Within minutes, there’s a dizzying spread of cheeses, dips, crackers, and chocolates, and Edie’s eyes are wide as saucers.
“Eat,” I say, loading up a cracker with cheese and some sort of jam and handing it to her.
“For me?”
It’s all for you. But I don’t say that. I shove a chocolate into my mouth and continue.
“We were discovered one day, kissing in a nook in the chapel. I was punished, but Sara? She disappeared. I searched all over. Even snuck into the girls’ wing to ask the girls what they knew.
I wondered if she’d been sent home, but they said that she hadn’t, that she was simply taken away.
A few weeks later, one of her friends smuggled a note to me telling me that I had to come.
That it was about Sara. I followed the directions the girl gave me to a small stone room at the far end of the basement, adjacent to the cemetery. It was full of caskets.”
“Oh, Luka,” she says.
I can’t believe I’m telling her this. I haven’t spoken of it to anybody, not even Orton, though he knows what I saw.
“I started throwing open the lids, wrenching them apart with my bare hands. That’s when I found her body. She’d been beaten. Killed.”
“No.”
“Savaged, really. I couldn’t see straight, and I went wild.
By then, the alarm was up. Three of the schoolmasters rushed down to subdue me and bring me back.
They had stun guns they’d use on the boys, and I don’t know if they missed or if they jammed some electricity into my veins and I just had too much fury for it to even matter.
I ripped those things out of their hands, and I bashed in their heads with a small boulder.
I just bashed and bashed. I was so angry, so grief-stricken, and killing them? It was beyond cathartic.”
“Is that when you made the bag of rocks that you swung around by a rope?”
“Yup. I was an unstoppable killing machine making my way down through the main hall in the chapel. I grabbed keys at one point and started letting boys out of their cells in the basement, and that’s when it became a full-on bloody uprising.
The schoolmasters and priests employed guards from the local area, but once these guards saw what was happening, they simply left. ”
“Wow.”
“Someone thought to let the girls out, too, and they went for their teachers and nuns. They’d been amassing weapons, as it turned out, making knives out of pencils and combs.
We all had a lot of pent-up rage, which was very unfortunate for the people running the place when the shit finally hit the fan.
Calls were put out for help, but the local officials were slow to react.
Nobody liked the church down there—not this church, anyway.
I killed so many people that day. Once I started, it was hard to stop. I suppose it was in my blood.”
“They were your tormenters. It would be in anybody’s blood.”
I kiss the top of her head, just fucking loving her style.
“Orton was in there, too. He was my friend. Once we got out, we fell into the mercenary life. Twenty years we were in the field.”
“Fighting for whoever hired you?”
“We had our standards, but that didn’t mean we were good guys. We met Storm a few years in. He’s been with me since.”
“You inspired two loyal followers before you even took over the Ghost Hound Clan,” she observes.
“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. Orton has a dream, and Storm has a debt, at least in his mind.”
“Oh, yeah, okay. Nothing about you.”
“Everything’s a transaction,” I say. “That’s what you learn out there.”
She takes a chocolate-covered strawberry, inspecting it from all sides before deciding to take a bite off the end.
“Anyway, we weren’t planning on coming back.
Orton wanted to because he always felt like our place was in the clan.
But I wanted nothing to do with the Zogajes.
We were in Tunisia one winter and ran into someone from one of the rival clans.
That’s when I found out what really happened to Sara.
It wasn’t the schoolmasters and priests who did that to her. It was two men sent by my own brother.”
She straightens up, eyes wide.
“Not that the schoolmasters and priests were blameless, but it turned out that my brother was getting reports about me. When Sara and I were discovered meeting in secret, he sent people after her.”
“He went after Sara just to... be cruel to you?”
“That was very on-brand for Alteo. Not that I’m trying to excuse myself. Ultimately, it’s my fault she died?—”
“No, nobody could fault you for having a girlfriend. ”
“I asked her to meet me. I engineered all of our meetings, and I got her killed. And I didn’t even avenge her death well—if I hadn’t been so rash, so quick to unleash maximum bloody chaos, I might have taken the time to ask a few questions and get to the truth.
My brother and those who helped him kill her wouldn’t have been walking free for so many years after.
” I grab a cheese square. “Not that I’m sorry I killed the St. Neri people.
I just would have liked to kill Alteo and his guys sooner. ”
“Do you think Alteo knew it was you who destroyed that place?”
“It’s hard to say. The official story was a rebel militia attacked the place. That story was more convenient to the authorities from a propaganda standpoint, and it certainly worked for us. Most of us were presumed dead.”
“So you killed your brother to avenge Sara.”
I give her a level look. “Is that really what you want to ask?”
She slides a finger down the foggy side of her glass and back up again before meeting my gaze. “Why did you poke out his eyes?”
I gaze out the window. What I did to my brother is not something I like to talk about or even remember, but I find that I want to tell her. I want to know her. I want to be known by her.
I say, “This part is just for you.”
“Okay.”
I pick up a toothpick with a bright little bit of cellophane on one end and twirl it back and forth. “If Orton were to tell it, he’d say that an unseen force moved my hand, that it was predetermined rather than a decision.”
“But it was a decision?”
“I got him out on a boat. I had to trick him to get him out there.”
“Do you think he knew you wanted to kill him?”
“Once we were out there, he did, but by then, it was too late. I was battle-hardened on every possible level, and he’d spent the past two decades smoking cigars and ordering people around. ”
She picks out another strawberry. It comes to me that she’s hungry. “You need some real food.”
“I need the rest of your story. I need to know.”
“You like to know the bloody things.”
“I like to know the real things. The true things. A lot of them just happen to be bloody.”
“Like medieval invasions.”
“Yeah, we know why you think I study that.”