His hands hung slack at his side, but he was ready to fight, eager. I could feel my own pulse pressing at the vessels of my neck, the eagerness woven through my own flesh. Eagerness for what? I wondered. To feel him pressed against me, fucking or fighting, his elbow locked around my neck, my fingers binding his wrists. It had been like that in the ring and in his bed; hot and cold all at once, dizzying, euphoric.
But not love, I reminded myself, then wondered if I was right. Maybe love was just this: the fury, the delicious anticipation, the release. I wanted to scream, clenched my teeth hard around the sound tangled on my tongue, pouring up through my throat. When I finally spoke, it was only two words, two quiet syllables to set against his own.
“I did.”
“On a mission.”
“A mission I requested.”
His green eyes were black in the shadow. When he moved, they glinted red. “Why?”
The bold answer was obvious, laid out before me naked for the taking: Because I wanted to see you. Because I needed you. Because I love you.
I couldn’t say it.
The problem wasn’t the lie; I’d lied to Ruc about a dozen things since returning to the city. I couldn’t say the words because I was afraid of them, afraid that once I’d shaped them on my tongue, laid them on the air between us, that I wouldn’t be able to live up to them. As long as they remained unspoken, they could be denied, disowned, but saying a thing gives it strength. What if the story I told about myself proved more vibrant than the life I’d lived? What does it mean, when the lies one tells about oneself are brighter than the truth?
“I was curious,” I said finally, loathing the word—its vagueness, its smallness—even as I spoke.
“Curious?”
“About you. To see if you’d changed.”
He turned away, back toward the Pot. “Everyone changes.”
I shook my head, put a hand on his arm. It was a dangerous position, overextended. If he tried to break my elbow, it would be hard to stop him. I left it there anyway. “You seem the same.”
“The same as what?” He didn’t even glance at my hand. “You didn’t know me then, and you don’t now.”
The words hurt. I wondered if that was a good sign, if the pain and shame were handmaidens to something more. It seemed possible. Or maybe the pain was just pain.
“So tell me,” I said, “what I don’t know.”
“There’s a list.”
“Tell me what you want. What you believe.”
I hoped he would say something about me, but that door, open momentarily, had swung silently shut while I groped hopelessly for the right words. When he spoke, it was with his customary calm, that perfect reserve, the wry glance that was his best defense.
“What I want is justice.
“What I believe is that people killed those legionaries and priests. Not gods. Not monsters from the delta. People. I want to find them and I want to stop them before they do more and worse.”
The words left me hollow, cold. They were noble enough, sure, but I would have preferred his rage, would have preferred him to roar at me, to try to break my hand, which was still perched like a brainless bird on his arm, than that impossibly distant civic devotion. Of course, preferring a thing doesn’t make it so. I exhaled slowly, silently, feeling my excitement drain out with the air, turned my attention back to the dull business of massacres and lost gods.
“If you believe that,” I said finally, “if you believe the Vuo Ton are really behind the attack on the transport, then going to find them is like laying your arm in the croc’s mouth. If they’re the enemy, they’ll kill us the moment we arrive.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I shook my head. “You’re not a fucking idiot, Ruc. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“And because I’m not an idiot, I’m going to continue not telling you.”
“You still don’t trust me,” I said wearily.
He shrugged. “You haven’t tried to kill me yet. And I’ve given you chances.”
I shook my head. “But it doesn’t matter. You don’t trust me.”
“Would you?”
It was a vexingly good question.
I was lying, of course, doing everything I could to see his city burn just for the excuse to be close to him. He was smart to distrust me, but surely love, whatever it was, transcended being smart. In all the songs and plays, lovers were forever ignoring the sensible, pragmatic course, spurning the advice of friends and family, ignoring a thousand signs and signals that whispered stop, go back. Most of the time it seemed that love was inextricable from bad judgment. Any love that left the rational mind intact seemed a weak, watery thing, not really love at all. And Ruc’s rational mind was still very much intact. Of course, so was my own, and I was the one who needed to feel the emotion.
I let him go, spread my hands, as though inviting an attack. “If I’m lying, if I’m not Kettral, then what do you think I’m doing here?”
“I don’t know,” he replied after a pause. From someone else, in another situation, the words might have been an admission, even a capitulation. From Ruc, standing on that dock beneath those lanterns, they were a wall, a fucking fortress.
Out in the harbor, hulls rocked on the small swells. A polyphony of discordant voices filled the night: a woman screaming over and over, demanding that someone—a lover, a child—just leave her alone; the rumble of old men grumbling into their clay cups; shrieks that might have been fear or delight; so many lives crammed so close together. Down below us, on a long, narrow barge, a group of children were playing a game involving dice and a knife, chanting the same refrain between rolls:
One for your heart,
Two for your eyes,
Three for the ones
Who will weep when you die.
Four for your limbs,
Five for your lies,
Six for the ones
Who will laugh when you die.
Dead Man’s Dice, we called it when I was a kid, or sometimes just Bloody Cuts. I remembered playing in the alleyway a few streets over from my shack, the quick, eager thudding of my heart as the dice flew, the scramble to grab the knife, the hot, warm wash of the blade slicing my fingers when I failed. I never really liked Dead Man’s Dice, but every night I could I snuck away to play.
Caught up in the chant, seized by some impulse I couldn’t quite explain, I turned to Ruc.
“Come with me.”
He didn’t move. “Where?”
“Not far. Just the other end of the Pot.”