Chapter 20
Theren’s head throbs. He probes at the corner of his eye to relieve some of the pressure, and looks up at the image of a man projected above the obsidian glass between him and Specialist Gylle.
Again.
The man in the projection is familiar in the way that some faces are always familiar, whether you’d encountered them before or not.
Theren has been searching the recesses of his memory for the man’s face for the past hour.
The problem isn’t that he’s coming up empty—-it’s that he’s come up with too many possibilities, too many meetings that Rava called him to, too many bland faces.
Specialist Gylle taps her neat fingernails on the table in front of her.
She’s a woman of precise lines, whether it’s the angle of her hair along her jawline or the shoulders of her jacket.
She feels, to him, like touching the pad of his thumb to the edge of a razor.
If he makes one wrong move, she’ll cut him.
Every day for the past week, he’s sat in this room for hours, going over every face she wanted him to recognize, every name she thought he might have heard, every detail he could summon from the miasma of memory that was the last four years.
There are no windows here, no adornments.
Just a table with an obsidian in its center and two chairs.
Just Specialist Gylle’s gray eyes narrowing every time he fails to answer a question to her satisfaction, and the ringing of her voice when she makes a demand.
“I don’t know,” he says to her, and she’s already shaking her head.
“You aren’t even trying, Mr. Forint.”
“Not trying?” he says. “A mind isn’t a mine; you can’t just chisel into it and expect to find a diamond.”
“At this point I would be thrilled to discover anything of value at all,” she replies. “So far you have brought me nothing of clarity, nothing of substance. Did you have your eyes closed for four years, Mr. Forint?”
He clenches his teeth so hard they squeak. “If you would just—-let me get some rest.”
She sweeps her fingers across the obsidian, and the image of the man between them disappears.
The first day he sat across from her, she told him his cooperation would be rewarded with restored privileges. The first of those privileges would be seeing his brother. At the end of every day, though, she informed him that he hadn’t been cooperative enough yet.
When will you give me something of value, Mr. Forint? she asked him at one point.
When I unearth this goddamn buried memory, he thought, but couldn’t say. Elegy said she would work on it, and he believes her. But he knows how crucial it is that he remember whatever it is Rava wants him to forget.
“I was told that your brother was dear to you,” Gylle says. “I see that’s not really the case, or you would feel more urgency about reuniting with him.”
He feels nothing from her. She may as well be a machine.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see Isre again, an idea he’d gotten used to when he was in Valla, but now that he’s home—-he feels like he’s going to be sick.
“You can of course rest, if you feel no such urgency,” Gylle says. “Or we can continue. The choice is yours.”
Theren takes a deep breath.
“Show me again.”
That night he dreams of a hand in his hair.
It begins tenderly, fingers scratching along his hairline, tweaking a curl above his ear. Teasing. You need a haircut. He can feel the whisper in his ear, Fenn’s whisper, and his warm hands.
The hands change, then, the fingers stricter, wrenching his head to the side. Look at me when I speak to you, an order spoken in a low voice. Satka, maybe, demanding his focus. Fucking get it together, Forint.
And then gentle again, but sickening this time—-his insides squirming, his skin crawling—-
He wakes with a start in his too--short bed in Losan Stronghold. He chewed his knuckles as he slept, and now the pillow is spotted bright red.
He knows where he is, but he also doesn’t.
He lurches into the bathroom, his shoulder hitting the doorframe hard.
He fumbles under the sink for the shaving kit and the scissors.
The scissors come first; he leans over the sink and grabs chunks of his hair and saws at them.
His hand is red with blood, but the wounds are shallow.
He just wants to look like a person no one ever touched in violence. Brand--new and unhurt.
He takes out the shaver next, fastens the right guard, and turns it on. The buzzing steadies him. His hands stop trembling. His breaths slow. Short, prickly hairs cover the sink. He changes the guard once, twice more. Cleans up the edges. Trims his beard.
When he’s finished, he looks older and harder.
He looks more like himself. He wipes the stray hair from the sink basin and throws it in the trash, cleans the shaver and puts it away.
He washes his hand and sits at the desk to dab at the cuts with wound sealant from the first aid kit he found in the bathroom cabinet.
By the time he’s finished, showered, and changed, Gylle has come for him. As usual, she looks him over, unimpressed, and leads the way down the hall in silence.
Theren still feels strange, like he’s not inside his own body. He taps his fingers together, one by one, to ground himself. His hands feel like they’re the wrong size, or on the wrong body.
“Forint?”
A hand falls on his shoulder. It takes Theren a moment to recognize Arias standing in front of him in the hallway. He pulls away, and Arias lets him, but leans in to meet his eyes again.
“Okay,” Arias says. “Gylle, I’m taking him to med bay.”
Theren finds the words out of nowhere, thinking of Isre. He wants to see Isre, and in order to do that, he has to give Gylle what she wants. “I’m fine.”
“Sure you are,” Arias says. “Gylle? Med bay.”
“This is in direct violation of the Sword’s orders.”
“File a complaint with General Thompson if you like,” Arias says. “But he won’t want to hear that you pushed a voluntary informant living in his stronghold into a dissociative episode.”
Gylle eyes him, then continues down the hallway, her shoes snapping on the tile. Arias’s hand settles on the side of Theren’s neck; he jerks back again.
“Sorry,” Arias says. “If I take you to med bay, they’ll give you a sedative. Is that what you want?”
Theren shakes his head. “My brother. She won’t let me see him.”
“I’ll handle it. Just tell me what would help you right now.”
“I need . . .” He feels an itch under his skin, deeper than he can scratch. “I need to move.”
“Okay. Let’s go, then.”
Arias leads him out of the barracks. He greets almost everyone that he passes with some degree of familiarity. They stare at Theren. He wears his last four years in some obvious way that he can’t control. But none of them say anything to him.
They walk through the orchard to the next building over, the training facility. The air smells sweet and sharp, guava and lemons. The branches scratch Theren’s cheeks.
The training facility, like all the other buildings in Losan Stronghold, is all concrete.
Straight lines. It smells like sweat and shoes, like the training room on Cedre Station where his mother taught him sword forms and made him watch the Talusar fight again and again.
The familiarity doesn’t help with the feeling of unreality. Where is he, and when?
Then he’s wrapping his hands, like he’s done a thousand times, and choosing a pair of gloves. He stands in front of a heavy bag and it’s all automatic, it’s all easy.
There, somewhere in the middle of a drop of sweat rolling down the back of his neck and the slap of his fist against the canvas, he finds himself back in his body again.
Heat builds in his muscles and it’s a relief to move, to do what he’s best at.
He can’t remember the details of every meeting with Rava, but he can do this.
The next day, when his door opens, it’s not Gylle waiting on the other side, it’s Arias.
They go to the bigger training room, this time. It’s a wide elliptical space that reminds him of a church sanctuary. Huge oval windows in the far wall let in the sun. All around the edge of the room is a track.
They run. Arias is faster, or maybe Theren is just recovering, but Arias also surrenders after just a few miles.
Theren keeps going, his body remembering.
He’s used to running at higher altitudes, where the air is thinner and the ground is uneven.
This smooth, flat plain feels like nothing beneath his feet.
When he finishes, Arias is sitting in the corner, a bottle of water against his lips. Theren didn’t ask why Arias was at his door earlier; it didn’t even occur to him to try.
“What happened to Gylle?” Theren asks.
“It takes you a really long time to ask questions,” Arias says.
“I’m not used to receiving answers.”
Arias swallows more water, then offers the bottle to Theren. Theren is shocked by the offer, at first. Not many Cedrae will even share bottles with each other, let alone with someone who’s Fevered. Theren can’t pass the Fever through his saliva, and Arias knows that, but still—-the fear runs deep.
He takes the bottle and drinks.
“General Thompson intervened on your behalf,” Arias says.
Theren frowns. “Why?”
“Because Ahn—-sorry, Her Grace—-asked him to, and he trusts her.” Arias gets up and straightens his shirt. “Gylle’s tactics aren’t working. We all know that. Elegy wanted to try a different approach.”
“So you’re my new interrogator.”
“I was under the impression you agreed to be cooperative, and you don’t need an interrogator. Was I wrong?”
“No. No, you’re not wrong.”
“Then I’m just here to help you make sense of things. That’s all.”
The doors to the training room open, and a few soldiers stumble in, sleepy--eyed and barefoot. They freeze at the sight of Theren, falling into each other. Arias jerks his head to the side, an invitation to follow him, and Theren does, slipping past the soldiers and into the hallway beyond.
Arias says, “Do you know how Elegy and I met?”