Chapter 5
CHLOE
There's a trick to not thinking about a thing. I'd been practicing it all week.
You don't tell yourself not to think about it.
That's amateur hour. You think about something else so hard that the first thing can't get a word in.
So I scrubbed a clean cottage, and rearranged the kitchen twice, and started in on the parts of the house nobody ever looks at, anything to crowd the front of my brain.
The front of my brain was exactly where the memory kept trying to sit down.
A forge. A maroon hand the size of a dinner plate in my hair, and a mouth, and the floor going out from under me. Then the word no, and a door slammed in my face.
Damn it.
Already.
I straightened a shelf that didn't need it.
It worked, mostly. Discipline does, right up until it doesn't.
The pantry was a narrow stone box off the kitchen, a wooden bar dropping into two iron brackets to keep the damp out.
Zarcal had laughed when I asked about it: a bull doesn't lock doors, he just leans on whatever's bothering him until it stops.
I'd called that charming. I called a lot of things about Zarcal charming.
He was good to me. He lifted me clean off my feet to see over a fence I was too short for, grinning like he'd invented muscles, and he'd built me a smaller bed of my own and never once pushed for me to leave it for his.
He wanted a wife and a house with the lamps lit and someone who laughed at his stories, and I could be all of that. I could absolutely be that woman.
I needed it to take. The rest of my life had narrowed to this one roof, and if it came apart the way the other two had, they would put me on the next ship out with no chance of coming back.
So I didn't think about the forge. And I tried not to think about the two things I'd started tucking away where I wouldn't look at them.
One was the nights.
Zarcal didn't really sleep. I'd pegged him for the type that's out the second his head hits the pillow.
He wasn't. Twice now I'd woken in my own bed in the small hours to his voice coming low from somewhere in the house, even and steady, giving orders to a room with nobody in it. Hit them fast. Wait for my word.
I'd lain still and not gone to him; every animal part of me said don't. In the morning he was himself again, sunny, with no memory of it on his face.
I'd told Lorkin about it. The one thing I should've kept to myself, and I carried it across town and laid it on his workbench.
He was one of Zarcal's oldest friends, and I'd told myself I was doing it for Zarcal's sake.
Half true. The other half I wasn't ready to look at.
He'd gone cold and told me exactly what to do if it ever came at me in the dark, and then he'd kissed me and sent me home to be glad of my match.
The other thing was the cider.
Zarcal couldn't sleep without two glasses, and his shoulders only came down off his ears once the second was in him. A nightcap, I told myself. And when some quieter voice asked the edge off of what, exactly? I poured myself a glass too and stopped asking.
I was very good at not asking. It was practically my complete skill set.
The storm came in at dusk.
You feel them before you see them on Ceres-9: the static storms. The hair on your arms lifts, and then the light starts, no thunder to go with it, just sheets of purple and gold rolling soundlessly over the windows.
Zarcal went out into the yard to watch. He liked them, a sky that put on a show and meant nothing by it.
He was quiet. That on its own was nothing.
But I'd lived two weeks in his quiet by then, and it usually had a hum to it, a contentment that wanted, sooner or later, to turn around and say something.
This one didn't. It had a stillness in the shoulders I didn't have a name for and didn't like, and his cup was already empty, and I hadn't seen him fill a second.
"You want the lamps up?" I called, light, the way you'd call to anybody. "It's getting dark in here."
He didn't answer. The light rolled gold, then purple, then gold again, and somewhere in the gold he came back inside, and I knew before he was through the door that something had gone wrong with him.
"Zarcal?"
He stood in the kitchen, and he wasn't there. His body filled the doorway, the cup still in one hand. But whatever lived behind his eyes had gotten up and left, and what looked out now was fixed on something a long way off, something that wasn't this room and wasn't me.
He said a name, flat and quiet, the middle of it broken. "Garrum."
I didn't know that name. But the way he said it put an icy finger down the middle of my back.
"Hey," I said, soft. "It's me. It's just me, it's Chloe."
He didn't hear me. He scanned the dim room, and his voice came again, low and even and certain, talking to people who weren't there.
"The sand's already wet. Don't look at it.
Hold the line." A pause. He listened to an answer that didn't come.
"They want us to break in front of them.
So we don't break. We rise on my word and not before. "
The cup slipped out of his hand and didn't shatter, just rolled. He didn't react to it at all, and that small, ordinary sound was the worst thing I'd ever heard.
Get out of the room. Slow. Hands where he can see them. Don't touch him. Don't put yourself between him and the door.
I had it word for word. I'd lain awake with it more than one night this week, not admitting why.
I lifted both hands a little, palms out, and started to back toward the side of the kitchen, sliding my socked feet over the boards so I wouldn't make a sound, leaving the path to the front door open behind him.
I did everything right. I did exactly what I'd been told.
And then his eyes found me, and they changed.
It was like I wasn't a person to him. I understood that in the half second I had to understand anything. I'd stopped being a woman and become a shape that didn't belong, and behind that broken stare something locked onto me and decided what I was.
A threat. An empire's hand reaching into the dark to put him back in the pen.
"No," he said to me, or to the empire, or to whatever he saw where I stood. "Not again. Not you."
He came across the kitchen fast. All the careful was gone, the ducked beams and tucked elbows and cups set down soft, and there was just the speed and the weight, and his hand closed around my upper arm, his horns waving wild enough that one bump could gore me.
It was nothing. My arm was nothing in it. He could have folded me in half without trying.
You don't fight the whole hand. You'll lose. Drive at the thumb, the one weak place, turn your arm against it, step off his line.
My body did it on its own. A maroon hand had drilled the move into me by a workbench until I got it right.
I twisted my arm against the joint of his thumb, dropped my weight out of the grip, and turned off the line of him.
His hand closed on air. I was free, already moving, and some far-off astonished part of me had time to think it worked, the horrible drill worked before the rest of me hit the counter and grabbed the comm off the wall.
I didn't choose who to call. My hand hit the last thing the comm had reached, the redial, before the rest of me had a vote, and it was ringing before I remembered whose voice would answer it.
It connected on the second ring, the roar of the furnace behind it, and then a voice, low, the bottom dropping out of it the second he heard me breathing.
"Chloe."
"It's Zarcal," I said, flat and fast and small. "He came at me. I'm in the pantry, I locked the—"
The first blow hit the door, and the entire wall jumped.
I dropped the comm. It clattered by my foot and I left it. The bar had already bent on the first hit, the wood bowing inward. I got down with my back to the shelving, knees to my chest, as small and as far from the door as the stone box would let me.
He hit it again, not knocking now, taking the wall apart. No shouting, no roaring, just the flat, awful work of it, a man dismantling a wall to get at the threat behind it. The timber split up high, and a knife of purple storm-light came through the crack.
Don't put yourself between him and the door. Hands where he can see them.
I kept my palms turned up and open on my knees, a foot of stone and a splitting door between us, and it made no sense, but Lorkin's voice in my ear was the only thing holding the roof on. I pressed my spine against the shelf and shook.
I wasn't the loud one now, the one with a joke for everything. I was someone much younger, someone tiny on a cold floor, counting the blows.
The door cracked across the middle. I could see a slice of him through it, his shoulder drawing back for the hit that would finish it, nobody home in his face.
And the front door of the cottage came off its hinges.
I didn't see Lorkin come in so much as feel the house take his weight, a second enormous body in the small space. Then he was between Zarcal and the broken pantry door, and he didn't draw back to hit. He went in low and wrapped his brother up.
I watched through the crack, half out of my mind, but I saw it plain.
Lorkin wasn't trying to win. He was trying to hold.
Zarcal got an arm loose and caught him across the jaw, and Lorkin took it.
Took it and closed in again, giving nothing back.
He got his arms around the heave of Zarcal's chest, pinned both those terrible arms to his sides, and bore him backward, talking the whole time, low, the way I'd seen him gentle a goat with its head caught in a fence.
"It's done, brother. The hold's clear. You got them out. Garrum's out, you carried him out." Zarcal bucked against him, and his feet skidded on the boards. "You're not there. You're home. I've got you."
Zarcal sagged. Lorkin took him down to the floor carefully, controlled and gentle with him even now, and put him under with one short, hard movement I felt more than saw.
Then it was quiet, just the furnace-roar coming tinny out of the dropped comm, two gigantic men on the floor, one out cold and one bleeding from the mouth.
For a second nobody moved.
Then Lorkin found the crack in the door and found me behind it, knees to my chest, hands still open and turned up like an idiot. He looked at me a beat longer than he needed to, and whatever was in it, I didn't have the room left to read.
"The bar," his voice was rough. "Can you lift it?"
I made my hands work and lifted it, and the broken door swung in. I didn't get up. I couldn't, yet, and he didn't come and haul me out. He stayed crouched over his brother, blood on his mouth, and his voice came careful and plain.
"Pick up the comm. Call Kazan. Tell him to come."
My hands shook so hard it took me three tries to get the redial right. I heard it start to ring.
And behind it, on the floor, Zarcal woke up.
He came up with a sound I'd never heard a person make, and his eyes opened, and this time somebody was home in them, and that was worse.
He looked at the splintered door, the bent bar in my hands, the blood on his brother's mouth, and I watched it arrive in him piece by piece, and then this enormous man who'd lifted me off my feet to see over a fence curled in on himself and began to sob.
The line connected. Somewhere across the dark, Kazan said hello.