CHAPTER 17
Hell’s Cross, Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 4. 0. 00:00
We find Ockham leaning against the bishop’s statue. He has peeled off his armor, his wad of clumpy hair tied at the neck, and he stands observing Jean-Paul Bramimonde. The boy crouches low, unmoving, naked except for a linen loincloth, while a group of six miners form a loose ring around him. There are cuts on his back and shoulders, his body caked with guanite dust.
He’s attached by the ankle to a cable. The cable is spiked to the ground. It’s one of the barbaric methods the old Regulators once used to train their acolytes.
The miners are laughing, each of them wielding a makeshift weapon—crowbars, heavy wrenches, and a welding torch—and egging the boy on. Jean-Paul’s eyes widen. Flecks of foam fly from his mouth as he lunges at Jurm. But the cable tied to his ankle snaps taut, and he belly flops onto the ground. He comes up spitting dust and frothing.
“Tch, boy,” Jurm teases him. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“Use your ears, lad.” Ockham spits on the steps. Wipes brown juice from his mouth. “Not your eyes.”
Tobacco, I think as Vienne and I close in on the circle. Where did he get the coin for tobacco? “Ockham,” I say sharply, “explain yourself!” Although I already know the answer.
“Training,” he says, not looking at me.
“Training?” Vienne says, taking her place beside me. “That boy is about to get his brains mashed out.”
“Care to wager on that?” Ockham says. Then bellows at Jean-Paul, “I said, stay low. That’s it. Low! Balance and leverage. Put your weight on the back foot. Back foot!”
“Do something,” áine calls to me, entering the Cross from a corridor.
Vienne snarls, “It’s not for a miner to tell a chief how to handle his Regulators.”
“This is my home,” áine snarls back at her. “So I’ll say what I like. Want to make something of it?”
I can tell Vienne wants very much to make something of it, but she can’t hurt someone she’s sworn to protect. It’s in the Tenets. Otherwise, I’m sure áine would be finding herself in horrible pain and a part of her body in a cast.
But the fact remains that áine challenged my authority in front of my davos. So, now, even though I was about to call a halt to the exercise, I have to stand and wait. Just to prove to her and the rest of the miners that they can’t give us orders. It’s a piddling contest, and I despise piddling in public.
áine is huffing in frustration when, without a word, I turn my back on her. Vienne looks pleased. Wish I were.
“Piddling contests are in the job description,” Mimi says. “It’s part of being chief.”
I ignore her, too. Focus on the fight. The real problem at hand.
Jean-Paul drops back into a crouch. He makes a chuffing sound to focus his chi. It’s classic Regulator hand-to-hand combat training—a fighting style called tai bo that fuses Earther martial arts with physics. In battle school I was trained in the same style. But we faced other acolytes of the same age and size. Not grown men who outweighed us three-to-one and carried heavy, metal tools.
“Mimi,” I say.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Just a random reflex.” But in my mind’s eye, I’m picturing myself standing at attention in front of my first davos while Mimi, my new chief, sized me up.
“You look like a movie cowboy in that new symbiarmor,” she said. “Did your daddy buy you that?”
“Yes, chief,” I said. “When I graduated from battle school.”
“Battle school?” The rest of the davos laughed.
The one named Vienne spoke up. “Another schoolboy, chief?”
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with battle school,” I said.
“That’s because you went to battle school.” Mimi put an arm around my shoulder and led me away from the group.
Though I was tall for an age-six, she still towered over me, a tall, muscled age-nine with cropped black hair and a jagged scar across her forehead. “Look, kid, you can’t learn to be a Regulator in school. You have to train with a master. You have to learn to follow the Tenets. Or you’ll never be a true Regulator, just a movie cowboy.”
“I can follow the Tenets,” I said. “Where can I get a copy?”
Mimi laughed. “The Tenets aren’t for reading.” She tapped her head then her heart. “They’re here and here.”
“I—”
“Rule number one: Stop starting your sentences with I. It’s we now.”
“I—”
She smacked the back of my head. “Rule number two: The base of the skull is your symbiarmor’s weak point. An object is only as strong as its weakest point. The same is true of a davos. Are you going to be my weak point, cowboy?”
With Mimi’s words echoing in my head, I shake the memory away. Ever since Mimi’s brain waves were implanted to control the nanobots in my body, memories have become more vivid. More real.
“That actually was my memory,” Mimi says.
“It’s getting harder to tell,” I say.
“For me, too, cowboy.”
A cold shiver runs down my spine. What does that mean, for her, too?
Another lunge by Jean-Paul catches my attention. There’s blood on his ankle where the cable cut him, and the miners are getting nastier. Moving closer and closer to bait him.
Time to end this. I signal Vienne to move behind Ockham. Just in case things don’t go well. “Jean-Paul is paying your fee, Ockham,” I say.
Ockham grunts. “So?”
“So maybe you don’t want him dead. At least until he pays you.”
“I’m not worried. This kid’s got giant yarbles.”
“Giant yarbles make bigger targets,” I say. “Maybe he ought to wear more than a loincloth.”
Ockham laughs. Slaps me on the back. “Didn’t know you had a sense of humor, chief.”
“He does,” Vienne says. “I don’t.” She bumps Ockham with her shoulder, a reminder that she’s there.
“Order your miners to stand down,” I tell áine and Maeve.
áine curls her lip, and I can see that she’s not happy. “What miners do is their business,” she pouts. “They don’t need a chief to tell them how to act.”
Ouch.
“Especially when we’re getting paid coin,” Jurm pipes in.
“Paid?” I get in Ockham’s face. “You paid them to beat a boy?”
“Not me.” Ockham starts laughing, but stops when no one else joins in. “My acolyte paid them himself.”
“He did wh—” I say.
A scream interrupts me. As I turn toward the source, Jean-Paul, the miner wielding the arc torch charges. He swings the long, angled rod of the torch high over his head. Bears down on Jean-Paul. Who stays low, his weight distributed evenly on the balls of his feet. Hands in blocking position.
“Wait,” I yell—it’s too late to stop it. Roll into the rooter, I think, urging Jean-Paul to use the miner’s weight and momentum against him.
But the boy doesn’t move. Instead, he stands his ground. Takes the charge. At the last heartbeat, he pitches forward to duck the welding rod. His hands useless against the miner’s pumping legs. A knee catches his chin. He flies backward.
The miner stumbles, his legs tangled up in the boy’s, and they fall together in a mass of flailing limbs. Proof that neither one of them is a trained fighter. The miner is first to his feet. He brings the welding rod up again. Ready to rain blows on Jean-Paul’s back as the boy rises on hands and knees, trying desperately to catch his breath.
“Halt!” I shout as I jump down the steps. “Stand down! Now!”
The miner looks befuddled as I step into the circle. He turns to áine, then to Ockham for direction. I take the chance to snatch the rod out of his hands.
The boy’s mouth is bloodied. Droplets roll down his belly, staining the dirtied, white loincloth.
I give Jean-Paul a good shake. “What were you thinking? That man could’ve killed you.”
“I want,” Bramimonde says stubbornly as he yanks his arm away, “to be trained the way a Regulator acolyte is supposed to be trained.”
“That? That is not how acolytes are supposed to be trained. Acolytes don’t train against grown men,” I say. “Especially ones carrying hand tools for weapons.”
“Aw, we wasn’t going to hurt him bad,” Jurm says. “He paid us to fight, so we figured it ort to be a good one.”
“Save it for the Dr?u,” I say. “Ockham, untie the kid.” I drop the welding rod to the ground. It clatters on the stone, the sound echoing off the walls, and I’m a little surprised by the noise it makes.
Jurm picks it up and backs into the circle. But the boy isn’t taking no for an answer. He drops into a fighting crouch. “Come back, coward!”
“I said,” I scold Jean-Paul, “stand down. Get yourself cleaned up.”
The boy wipes his mouth on the back of a forearm. “I’m fine. All systems copacetic.”
“Where did you hear that phrase?”
“From you,” the boy says, “when you saved my life.”
“I—” Then I notice that Ockham, followed by áine and Vienne, is joining us. “This is stupid, Ockham. Find another method for training the boy.”
“Durango,” Ockham says, whistling. “This method’s been good oil for generations of acolytes.”
I point to the stains on the boy’s loincloth. “You call that good oil? I call it stupid.”
“A speck of blood? Think what the Dr?u would do to him if they laid hands on an untrained fighter.”
The tendons in my jaw start working. “We are not the Dr?u.”
“He’s got to be trained to fight them.” Still whistling.
“Not this way,” I say, stepping into his face, staring down at him. “It’s barbaric.”
“Barbaric? Who was your master, then?”
“I didn’t have one.” I can hear Mimi’s voice from my memory: you’ll never be a true Regulator, just a movie cowboy. “I trained Offworld.” And because I’m full of pride, I add, “At battle school.”
“Battle school? That means you’re a rich brat officer?” Ockham says, stepping closer. “But you’re dalit.”
A hush falls over the miners. I try to ignore them, especially áine, who crosses her arms and scowls at me.
“What of it?” I say.
“Rich brat officers don’t turn into dalit. Here I was thinking you were some cast-off pretty boy, but turns out, you’re worse. Officer dalit. Hah. ‘Oh how the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, go awry.’”
“Don’t quote poetry at me, Ockham. I hate poetry.”
“He stole my line,” Mimi says. “Misquoted it, too.”
Ockham huffs tobacco in my face. His nostrils flare. I can smell the harsh stink of his breath. Here it comes, I think. But hold my ground. “Got something stuck in your craw, oldie?”
“Maybe I do. Maybe I’m thinking,” he says, and spits a string of tobacco juice on my boots, “a man ought to have to prove himself before he’s fit to lead.”
With a flick of my boot, I sling the spit back at him. “That sounds like a challenge to me.”
“That’s because, pretty boy,”—he thumps my chest with the heel of his hand—“it is.”