Chapter 18 Never Gone
NEVER GONE
COMPARED TO WHAT he’d given, Peter had never asked much from her, but his one request had required more from her than she thought she had.
She still had bruises to prove it, spread over her body like green and purple paints. New ones appeared each week as she trained at Amiel’s mercy.
“You still resent me?” Peter asked as he caught the look in her eyes. He entered his study on commanding strides.
Baker jolted from her book at the study table, having not seen the man for several weeks. He’d been deep in the lab below the Bleeding Grin, a practice in which he lost himself and could vanish for up to a month at a time.
Baker knew her responsibilities, scrambling for a large wooden bowl beside the sink.
She filled it with warm water as she grabbed two cloths and draped them over the edge.
She moved as fast as she could manage back toward the white table, clearing off her things before setting the bowl in the center.
Sitting down, Baker glanced across the table to find Peter still standing, gazing out a nearby window over his desk as he slowly wiped bloodstained hands in a cloth he carried with him.
Blood spotted up to his wrists. She waited for him to return from his thoughts, a rare lightness in his eyes.
For a fraction of a second, Baker was reminded of her father, a mechanic.
She’d recollected broken memories of him as she’d recovered her voice, as if her past and her words were connected somehow.
He'd return from work, sometimes with a similar white rag sticking out of his pocket. He’d wipe his hands on it to remove the grease from repairing machines.
For a moment Peter held the cloth in his hands and she watched as he rolled it slowly, the cloth dissolving into mist until his hands were empty.
He only used his powers to serve himself so casually when he was in an excellent mood.
It always came and went in a flash, Peter emerging from the deep, burdened mire of his thoughts with a gasp before they pulled him back down again.
Peter glanced over at her and Baker hid her eyes.
“You’re getting better. Amiel told me,” he said.
Amiel is a cruel teacher. A despicable monster. She must have thought in similar words because Peter caught the thought and replied to that. Baker had never known she could hate anything as much as she hated Amiel. She knew the feelings were mutual.
“The world will hit harder than Amiel. It isn’t the way I would have things, but it’s the way that things are.” He’d told her the same when he’d made the decision to have Amiel train her. He’d flipped the coin. It had landed on heads, and he’d promptly ordered the arrangement.
He relied on that coin frequently. He relied on chance frequently, citing to her multiple times that she’d be better off with chance than with his choices. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that meant.
He pulled out a chair, legs dragging across the carpet before he sat across from her, resting his hands in the water.
Baker took his hands and used the cloth to wipe the blood off them.
She pushed the truth from her mind that the blood belonged to someone else.
Peter was a mechanic in his own right. For the past few weeks, he’d used his hands to exchange and fix pieces of a different sort.
“I don’t want to fight,” Baker said out loud. Lately, Peter had required her to use her voice, not just her thoughts.
“You’re trapped in the mind of the victim,” Peter replied. “In this case, fighting is the only cure, I’m afraid. You can’t express yourself through words. You’ll learn to speak with your body.”
Baker didn’t object. She didn’t know if Peter was right. All she knew was that Amiel was a severe teacher of the martial arts and that her fear of pain was constant.
“You don’t know what it’s like to fight Amiel,” she said.
“We fight constantly.”
Baker looked up. “No one fights you.”
“With wills,” Peter explained. “Constantly.”
She’d much rather Peter rule than Amiel. She looked down, and in her mind, she urged Peter to keep fighting. She couldn’t imagine a more awful place than one where Amiel had final say.
The water and cloth turned pink as she washed his hands, revealing the marks he often hid under gloves. The black, broken arrows extended past the first joint of his fingers to the next.
“We pay the price for our limits, regardless of if we know them or not. Most times, other people know more than we do. Trust me when I say that the fighting is good—maybe not for everyone, but for you it is.”
“That’s not fair,” Baker whispered and then she copied him just as he said the words, “Life’s not fair.”
“You’re learning,” Peter said, humor in his voice.
“I don’t like what you’re teaching me,” she replied.
“These weren’t lessons I enjoyed learning either,” he said in genuine relation to her. He spoke to her as if she were an adult. No one else ever had. His mixture of severity and kindness confused her.
It was much like the scene in the woods, burned in her mind from so long ago. It was the scene with the ROSE hunched over the dead Strike in the middle of a beautiful forest. The beauty and horror of the scene didn’t fit together. It didn’t make any sense.
Someone knocked on the door.
“In,” Peter said simply, and a familiar face entered.
It was Perilous, dressed in black with vibrant, gold hair braided over her shoulder.
She inspected Peter and Baker with ever-curious eyes as if she were watching a show.
Playfully, she skipped once toward a nearby couch and lounged over the armrest into it, her athletic body stretching out like a cat.
“Congratulations,” Perilous said. “I heard the news.”
“Are there any new ones that have potential?” Peter asked and Perilous propped her head up on her hand with a raised brow.
“You can’t celebrate, can you? Shame.” She stood up and traversed the room, opening a cabinet before removing a green vial and shaking it at Peter. “Want some anger?” she asked.
He chuckled as if it were an inside joke.
“Something less...humorous. Is there any amazement?” Peter replied. “Mix it with shock, obsession, a powerful memory with a drop of heartbreak,” he said, and she nodded.
She sorted through the vials. “Memories. Traumatic or ecstatic?” she asked, sorting through the memories. “We’re almost out of obsession. I did just get a fresh batch of amazement though.”
“Ecstatic,” he said and then quieter, to Baker, “Obsession, trauma and heartbreak make for a painfully redundant drink.” With a mischievous smirk, he then added above a breath, “She has poor taste, doesn’t she, Baker?”
Baker couldn’t help but smile, because when Peter was in light spirits, she saw what she perceived to be his power. His charisma was painfully infectious, and though he was always kind to her, in these times she felt strangely cherished.
“You wound me,” Perilous said, flattening her hand over chest dramatically as she delivered the drink into his hand.
They started talking again about the creation of Strike. It was Baker’s least favorite topic.
Peter had at first described it as a delicate process that wasn’t always successful.
That hadn’t been alarming, but then, flatly, he’d divulged a gruesome sequence of events. Thankfully, she had understood little of it, but phrases like ‘organ chaining’, ‘rubbering of the spine’ and ‘artery peeling’ had been enough to stop her from asking questions for a few weeks.
The reason why the Strike in the Bleeding Grin were so dependent on Peter was not only because he was so powerful, but it was because he’d created them. Only Amiel was Peter’s equal in this, discovered by Peter in the deep caves of a mountain centuries ago in the North.
Amiel had destroyed entire armies of men when the first Strike had taken the North.
Each powerful Strike had assembled colonies and established themselves as warlords as they battled over resources.
Baker heard only bits and pieces of these secret histories, but it sounded much worse than what had happened here.
Baker sometimes wondered if Peter was so invested in his people because his creator had died in those early wars.
“Easy,” Peter whispered and she realized she was furiously scrubbing his fingers.
She corrected herself and took a deep breath, still refusing to look at him.
Apparently, it was a sacred privilege to touch a Strike’s hands.
Perilous had taught her this, and Baker could hear the reminder now as Perilous smirked in amusement from the couch
Peter had shown her nothing but kindness and patience, and yet he’d twisted a human being into something else. That was his goal, always, more Strike, and to him it was noble. In his mind, he was solving the problems of the human race.
Baker was surprised Peter hadn’t tried to turn her into one. Her hands slowed as she finished her work, the thought lingering. She’d never asked the question before.
Was he one day planning to make her a Strike?
He always talked about how he wished every human had such potential, and he would do everything he could to help them reach their potential.
She made the mistake of looking up as she dried his hands, only catching his eyes for a moment but knowing he’d seen her thought, a question that must have sounded to him like a blaring horn in his head.
He didn’t say anything, waiting like he often did when he saw such an emotional thought. His silence prompted Baker to look up again, only to find a smirk on his face, as if amused by her question. His eyes didn’t give her any answers.
Baker pulled the drying cloth over his hands as she withdrew it to her chest. Peter didn’t move.
“Perilous,” Peter said, leaning back as he took a sip of his drink. “Would you excuse us?”
“Of course,” she replied, looking between them with a subtle smile before leaving the room.
As the silence settled, Peter spoke up. “Sit up, Baker. Look at me.”
Baker listened, straightening in her chair and glancing over at him.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked.
He must know the answer already. Baker tried to search for it.
“Every Strike must learn the lessons of power and fear. The entangled relationship of these two things builds a world all around us that you must learn to recognize. I had to learn these on my own, but you won’t.
You wanted to face your fears. The culmination of this learning would make you a suitable Strike. ”
Baker clenched her fists around her pants, her heart leaping in her chest.
Peter took a sip from his glass. “You don’t trust me?” he asked. “I’m very good at what I do.”
“That isn’t what I want,” she said resolutely.
“How do you know what you want?” he replied.
“Choices,” she said. “You keep your coin for choices. Let me have mine.”
Peter chuckled. He drew the coin, and her breath caught in her chest as he flipped it and caught it in his palm. He took another sip of his drink as he inspected the result.
“Alright,” he said. “This victory is yours, but I have several years to convince you.” He eased out of his chair, drink in hand, and left.
Somehow, his later proposition was more threatening.
She started to clean up the bowl and towels, picking them up together.
Baker.
Baker gasped, dropping the bowl on the table as she heard Peter’s voice in her head. The water sloshed out of the bowl and splat onto the table.
Don’t do that! She thought impulsively, staring down at the water.
Sorry. I startled you. I’m already down in the courtyard and didn’t feel like coming back up.
She rubbed her face.
Take a break from training tomorrow. Rest. I don’t want you to misunderstand the reason you train with Amiel.
“I understand,” she said, using the cloth to wipe up the table. She was relieved to have a break, though any interactions with Amiel loomed in the future like a dark, boiling cloud.
Finish your lesson and take a break. Think about what we discussed today.
“Okay,” she said. She collected the towels and put them into the bowl. After a moment of silence, she carried the bowl over to the sink. She started to wash it as the minutes passed.
“I’m going to think about it forever,” she whispered into the sink.
Incorrect.
Baker startled back, dropping her washcloth.
Sorry. I got distracted. Last thing. I won’t be back for a few weeks. Keep close to Perilous, will you?
“Where are you going?” she asked.
Hunting. Research. A bit of both.
She refrained from asking why. Neither of those words were friendly in her mind and she knew she’d regret asking.
“Okay” she said.
Take care.
That was the last he spoke, but even then, it never felt like he was gone.