7. SEVEN
SEVEN
CALVEROUS
Location: Jiradesh Desert
In the moonlight, a mile from the encampment’s stop for the night, a rocky outcropping shielded Calver from prying eyes.
He pressed through his routine as he had every day since the Red Wing’s embarkment.
No weapon meant improvising. He wielded an imaginary dowaga, and every time it made its imaginary mark, that mark was Thyatira’s face.
He’d taken Calver’s childhood. He’d taken Raimee. For all Calver knew, Fankalo had cozied up to him, too—how else would Dreiden corporation have replicated the distortion plates?
He gritted his teeth. He’d looked for opportunities to snuff out the bastard the moment he’d been set “free” in the encampment; it would have been the fastest way to solve a lot of problems. But Thyatira’s evening compound was well guarded.
Were something to go wrong, taking Thyatira down would be Calver’s final act.
Fall-out with Fankalo or not, he would be at the Tera’thian coronation in a year’s time, and he would hold up his end of the deal: helping her bring down the empire that had torn them apart. The Casowhatan would stop being wet before he failed his sister again.
But first he had to get out of this desert.
Calver’s fingers bit into his palms. Fankalo had reported that Cul’Mon was amassing forces in the Rollard Isles.
Their timing would align with the Red Wing’s arrival in the city of Steila in two months.
A trap. The Red Wing always ended its annual recruit training in Steila on the first day of spring.
But death in Steila would be nothing compared to Calver’s capture by Tera’thian forces again. He shivered, thinking of the barbs, the bruises, the broken bones. Blood, all the time. Cul’Mon had always known how to find him and, no doubt, he knew where Calver was heading now.
Chaos, did he miss the dowaga. He was far better suited to solving his problems by slicing them in half, not waiting them through.
Get a plate. Escape this fated desert. Bring intelligence back to Fankalo. Forget about Raimee. Four impossible tasks. He’d seen worse odds, though that last one was formidable.
For the third time in three days, the feeling of someone watching sent spiders down his spine. After long moments, the Azadonian boy climbed over the rocky ridge and dropped to the gritty sand, already short of breath.
“I’m going to… try this… a different way,” he panted. “I’m Thedexemore… Dex. I would be happy to make service of your training, if you would have me. I promise to keep your illicit activities undisclosed. And if something else comes up that I can offer, you’ve got it.”
Calver might have run into the desert again had he not been struck dumb by the sheer density of the young man’s spinal column.
He hadn’t just been bluffing before; he had been desperate.
Calver had more than enough desperation to go around all on his own, thank-you-very-much.
Whatever this boy needed, he didn’t have time for it.
Calver continued his movements without acknowledging the boy.
The boy watched.
After two rounds, he mimicked Calver from a distance.
Despite a nameless ire that spiked Calver between the eyes, he went through all his standard exercises, pointedly ignoring the Azadonian.
The boy would give up, surely. He wasn’t going to do this for the remainder of the caravan…
Unless someone had explicitly told him to.
After all, there was no chance Thyatira wasn’t monitoring Calver’s every move.
Before the sun breached the horizon, Calver pulled on his pack and fast-walked towards the encampment without looking back.
A glistening shower of meteors skated through the inky black and into the lightening blue of the morning sky.
He thought about Raimee—he couldn’t help it—squeezed next to him on the roof of Chira’na’s repository that night, talking about galaxies.
She’d made him feel complete and astray all at once.
So completely and utterly, hopelessly… lost.
When Calver ultimately ran, just as he had always run from everything, he would do so knowing he’d left Raimee to the fate he fled. That was why he couldn’t seem to uncramp his stomach. Why everything seemed to ache, even though he was in sounder health than he had been in weeks.
He trod on, head down, with only the would-haves and the could-haves and the maybes for company now.
No point stopping to stargaze with them.
They offered little in the way of quality conversation.
He doubted he would like hearing what the stars had to say about the matter, either.
That he was losing his mind. That he’d never be able to think in a straight line if his thoughts constantly dodged from one thing that pissed him off or he was afraid of to the next.
If there was anything he’d learned from the Ruxian, it was that he had to stop fixating on the things that couldn’t be saved and focus on the things that could. He settled on the silent belief that there were things in the world worth having, even if their only value was to have had them.
Each day, the traditional recruitment march toward Steila was a stifling misery of placing one foot in front of the other.
Each night, Calver sojourned west from the caravan into whatever new part of the desert they’d chosen to make rest. Night because he knew they kept eyes on him during the day; west because, should he finally act on impulse, he’d have less distance to travel to reach the sea.
Against his will, the Azadonian, too, became a part of Calver’s low-moon routine.
Calver was sure this boy—Dex—was Thyatira’s doing, now, flailing along to whatever Calver did, rasping like a torn bellow, face controlled but eagerness burning through his eyes.
The boy had no idea how to distribute his weight.
If this caravan did face an ambush in Steila, he would be among the first to die.
Four days into the young man’s not-so-silent pantomime, he fell while copying Calver’s flying guard.
He always fell. This time, for some reason, the tiny space between Raimee’s front teeth blipped into Calver’s mind.
He imagined her jabbing an elbow into his side and muttering, “for Fates’ sake, is it truly easier to keep watching this than to stop being an asshole”.
Kretch. Hallucinations were to be expected with hard travel and no sleep—more so for the mentally unstable.
But imaginary Raimee’s point was reasonable.
He’d thought her to be an agent against him, too, at the start.
Calver’s grunted. It cost him nothing to teach the boy how to save his own skin—which wouldn’t survive ten seconds under Tera’thian attack. He was so noisy they could probably hear him breathing from the encampment.
Call it loneliness, call it foolishness, call it humanity. Calver strode to Dex, whose spine pulled rigid at his approach. Frowning, Calver demonstrated the proper form.
Dex tried to follow, but Calver sliced into his forearm with his hand.
Wait. He forced a slow breath—loud—through his nose.
Dex mimicked as best he could. Calver waited until the boy’s gasping breaths finally slowed, then kicked at his boots and jabbed him with fingers and elbows until the stance was satisfactory. Then he stepped away.
Calver returned to his own routine, back turned. He didn’t watch to see whether Dex was successful. He didn’t need to. He heard a gritting—a shifting stance—and a soft landing in place of the usual body flopping against compact sand.
When the sun rose over the distant dunes, Calver slung his pack over his back to leave.
“Thank you,” the boy wheezed.
Calver was careful not to look at him, but as he made his way towards the encampment, the corners of his mouth twitched. It was a strange feeling—like it might crack open the hardened skin around his face. Certainly not comfortable, but somehow it made the morning seem a little brighter.
Another five suns passed. Calver returned to the desert earlier each day to train himself—as his usual training time had inexplicably disintegrated into coaching Dex.
The boy was disciplined. Attentive. He didn’t speak much—that was preferable.
When he did, it was usually to confirm the meaning of Calver’s pushes and prods: widening his stance, rolling with his body’s momentum, keeping his hands high, redistributing his weight.
Good. Novice, yes, but not inept. His limbs were weak, but his core and control were strong. Time would correct the former.
When the sun rose, they parted ways, usually with little more than a word from Dex. Sometimes without words at all. Training then began for the rest of the encampment. Calver would make himself seen, then try to sleep for the short hours before the daily march began.
They walked from highsun to lowsun. The Red Wing could have walked at night, but the purpose of this traditional recruitment was not to do what was easy, but the opposite.
As a boy, Calver had thought that was a grand thing.
A challenge—one he would surely rise to meet.
As a man, he’d seen enough in the way of challenge.
As a man, he believed it weakened morale more than it strengthened resolve.
Walking gave him time to think—think for himself, as he hadn’t been able to for a long time.
There were advantages to controlling his mind for what had become the longest stretch in the fourteen years since his union with the Survivor.
Not ripping the spines from the backs of honest civilians and using them to flay their comrades, for one. But there were disadvantages too.
His thoughts were a jumbled mess. He thought about Fankalo. What he’d put her through, and how things might have been different if she had seen him like this all along: functional. All on his own, without spending every waking moment trying to hold back the Survivor for worry of what it might do.