A Brutal Justice

by Jess Corban

  The platform halts in front of Jase’s hut, built so seamlessly into an L-shaped crook of the main trunk and a supporting limb, it could almost pass for an appendage of the tree itself.

  Jase opens the front door. “We can rearrange the cots—the Gentle will have to take the floor—but you should be able to sleep comfortably.”

  “Are you sure you and Rohan don’t mind? I feel bad taking over your place.”

  “Naw, we’re happy to get kicked out. I mean, not that you’re kicking us out. I just . . . I’m glad you’re here.” He smiles sheepishly, his growing awkwardness endearing. “Make yourselves at home. I’ll be right back with the others.”

  When Jase disappears, Bri wastes no time getting right down to it.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Uh, surprise? Brutes exist.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Reina Pierce! This is . . . Do you know how—?” She paces the small room as she fumes, glancing nervously out the netted top half of the walls—which reveal only foliage—and knocking into the three hardwood cots as she sputters in frustration. “How could you drag me all the way into the Jungle without telling me we’d be captured by monsters?”

  “First of all, I didn’t drag you—you insisted on coming. I’m sorry—I really did want to tell you. I promised Torvus I wouldn’t reveal anything about them. But now that you’re here . . . Bri, they’re not like we’ve been told. You saw Jase. He’s . . .” I run through a list of adjectives I’ve come to associate with him: thoughtful, pleasant, eager to please, a little goofy, but definitely, “kind.”

  “Maybe they were all kind, right before they murdered women in their sleep! Geez, Reina, where’s your head? The foremothers wouldn’t have subdued them if they could be trusted.”

  “I know,” I say miserably. “I mean, I thought so too. But now that I know them . . .” Even as I say the words, I recognize what a thin argument it is. Know them? Hardly. I’ve spent less than forty-eight hours with these Brutes, and nearly half of that was spent drugged by one of their darts.

  I move to a safer, more compelling line of reasoning, building on the conversation we’d had following the Succession afterparty at Finca del Mar. “What about the Gentles? They don’t get a choice whether to take the vaccine. We force it on them. And once we do, they become completely docile and fragile. Who says we have the right to do that to them?”

  “It’s for their own good, to say nothing of ours. If they knew what they would become, they’d give themselves the shot.”

  Would they? “Then why didn’t the Brutes of old give it to themselves?” I ask the question as much to myself as to Bri. Why didn’t the Brutes of the past do something about their brutishness? If they were anything like these Brutes, they must have known what they were doing was wrong, but Tristan Pierce made it clear they continued to hurt women. She felt there was no other choice but to end their reign of terror.

  “I don’t know,” Bri challenges, “but you better get your head on straight. I don’t trust any of those beasts out there, no matter how ‘kind.’ And as soon as we get out of here, I’m telling Adoni.”

  Voices crest the threshold of the hut. I lower my voice to get in one last plea before the others join us. “Bri, you can’t. Teera will kill them all.”

  She turns away just as Jase escorts Jonalyn and Neechi inside.

  “Here,” he says, arranging the cots to make a little floor space. Looking at Neechi, he says, “It’ll have to do.”

  Neechi doesn’t meet Jase’s eyes as he says, “I’m plenty used to hard beds.”

  Jase stares at the slight Gentle, curiosity or pity—maybe both—weighing his mouth down at the corners. He looks like he wants to ask something, but decides against it. Instead, he fills a sack with the few clothes and personal items belonging to him and Rohan, then makes for the door.

  “I’ll be back by dark to take you to the fire meeting. Until then, you should rest.” And with that, he lowers himself out of sight.

  “He’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m going to stay here,” Bri says as soon as he’s out of earshot. She waits about ten minutes for him to descend the tree, then makes a beeline for the door.

  “And where do you plan on going?” I argue. “There will be Brutes all over camp.”

  She ignores me, throwing open the door and pulling at the rope with her bound hands to raise the platform back to the hut. The rope doesn’t budge. She tugs harder. Still, it doesn’t move more than a centimeter. Does the pulley have some sort of locking mechanism?

  With an exasperated groan, Bri shoves the rope outward. “Kind, huh?” she directs at me.

  I admit, being locked in a room at the tip-top of this enormous tree both surprises and unnerves me, resurrecting a familiar doubt about the trustworthiness of these Brutes.

  “He’ll be back,” I try to assure myself.

  Bri rolls her eyes. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  A knock on the doorframe wakes us from a nap—all except Bri, who refused to shut her eyes. Pulling myself out of groggy sleep, I find Jase peering apologetically through the open doorway. Late-afternoon sun filters through the leaves beyond the netted walls.

  “Reina,” he says quietly. “Sorry to wake you, but Torvus wants to see you.”

  Adrenaline snaps me fully awake. “Torvus? Why?”

  Jonalyn sits up. “Everything okay?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, picking my way over a prostrate Neechi to the door and joining Jase on the platform.

  “We’ll be back soon,” Jase reassures her.

  Bri gives me a look that basically conveys it’s been nice knowing me, and dramatically mouths goodbye.

  “I’ll be back,” I insist again.

  As we make the descent from treetop to ground, jerking meter by meter, he says, “You and your sister look alike.”

  “I take that as a compliment.” Being the younger sister, I’ve always admired Jonalyn’s beauty. “I guess that happens when you’re related. I mean—” I turn to face him—“that’s why you have our mother’s eyes, isn’t it?”

  His arm freezes mid-pull, but his eyebrows lift with relief as he sighs, “You know?”

  I nod. “I knew you seemed familiar from that first night after the attack, but I couldn’t figure out why. When I saw you and Torvus together, I knew there was some kind of connection there, too. I finally got to ask Mother, right before—”

  I focus my attention on the passing leaves, not wanting to relive the moment, knowing I must.

  He gently urges me on with a thoughtful sadness I can’t refuse to answer. “What happened?”

  I tell him about the guards’ pursuit, and how helpless it felt to watch her drain of life, and Dr. Novak’s insistence I leave them. I’m so caught up in my own grief that I don’t notice the tears on his cheeks until he stops drawing the rope to smear them away with a forearm.

  Brutes cry? The idea is so foreign—the sight so strangely moving—it momentarily overshadows my own feelings. To see this strong being express that kind of emotion undoes me. I have a strange urge to hug him, to comfort his loss, to ease his sadness.

  Are you crazy? my better sense chastises. He’s not a little girl—he’s a Brute. Still . . . she was his mother too.

  “Did you know her well?” I ask.

  He runs a rough hand down his face, inhales deeply, and just like that, any evidence of the sorrow I saw just a moment before all but disappears.

  “No. I only saw her from afar. When I was thirteen seasons, Torvus told me how the babies appear in the cradle on his porch. He said one of the women in Nedé rescues them and brings them to the Jungle to keep them from becoming Gutless, as he calls them. I asked if she left me there too. He didn’t want to talk about it then, but eventually he explained that she was my mother—that, unlike the others who came over the years, I was his boy. I could tell he didn’t like talking about her, so I let it be. But about a year ago I made him tell me more. I fou
nd out he met her at a place called Bella Terra, and that, last he knew, she still lived there. Dáin had been staking out fincas, so I asked him to help me find the place. I went a few times, just to see it. I made sure to keep out of sight—I just wanted to be near her. Wanted to see how she lived and what she was like. I was curious, I guess.”

  He dips his head, seeming embarrassed by the confession.

  “That’s why you were at Bella Terra the day you found me in the teak forest—you wanted to see Mother.”

  We’ve reached the Jungle floor. He hops down and offers me his hand in assistance, which I don’t need but take anyway.

  “I made Rohan go with me that time. We were supposed to be out hunting, but I told him if he came, he could see the Rescuer for himself. He didn’t want to stay long, and we were just about to leave when you got hurt. Of course, we couldn’t just leave you there.”

  I step around another dangling platform near the trail to Torvus’s house. “Oh, I think Rohan would have been just fine leaving me there,” I laugh, remembering the big Brute’s insistence that “girl or not,” I wouldn’t die from that blow to the head. He only helped me to pacify his friend.

  Jase’s grin admits my point. “But he wouldn’t anymore. Not now that he knows you.”

  I raise an eyebrow, doubtfully.

  “He wouldn’t,” Jase insists. “He gave you his knife. Do you know how long it took him to make that thing?”

  I’m trying to work out the connection when an unexpected voice interrupts the conversation, deep and low, but laced with a hint of amusement. “If she did, she wouldn’t have given it to that peccary.”

  I whip around to find Rohan closing the three meters between us with confident strides, his bronze chest smeared with crusty mud, dark hair mussed in impossible directions on its way past his ears. Stubbly hair darkens his jaw, and before he can reach us, the smell of unwashed Brute does. He’s filthy . . . and still, strangely bewitching.

  Jase jumps to clasp forearms with his friend. “You’re back early.”

  Rohan grins. “Dantès suggested we try the hollow. Got four pacas in a day. No point killing more than we could carry.” He glances back across the clearing at two equally dirty Brutes with a pole slung between them; it bows under the weight of several limp animals that could pass for enormous rats.

  I have a bizarre urge to say something at the same time I clam up. I want him to look at me even as I beg the ground to swallow me whole. How can I simultaneously crave and despise the way he makes me feel?

  When I finally muster the nerve to look at him, he’s slipping the white knife from its sheath at his thigh. Fixing me with a steady gaze, he offers me the handle. “This belongs to you.” The faintest smile plays on his deeply bowed lips. “Unless you really don’t want it.”

  “I want it,” I say a little too quickly, taking the handle, being careful not to touch his fingers. “I didn’t know how else to prove to Torvus that I was sending Dáin.”

  “It was a good idea, though I don’t think it had the effect you intended,” he says. “Torvus doesn’t trust women.”

  And I don’t trust Torvus, so I’m not sure why this offends me, but it does all the same. “Why wouldn’t he trust me? I kept my word—I didn’t tell anyone about you.”

  Rohan shrugs, then crosses his arms. “Maybe it’s not you. . . . Or maybe it’s because you showed up uninvited.”

  “Only because you drugged me!” Heat creeps up my neck. “It’s not my fault you knocked me out and dragged me here.”

  I realize a moment too late he was joking. He lifts his hands in mock surrender. “You asked.”

  The fact he finds humor in my defensiveness makes me even madder. I scowl and look to Jase for help.

  But instead of backing me up, Jase says, “You did lie to Torvus’s face.”

  “What? When?”

  “When you tried to cover for me, remember? You claimed running around Tree Camp was your idea.” He laughs at the memory with that unrestrained, free way of his that always extinguishes my anger.

  I do remember, and smile in spite of myself. “He didn’t buy it for a second.”

  “Nope.” He turns suddenly serious. “But that’s not what Rohan’s talking about. You can’t blame Torvus for being a little wary of women in general.”

  “Don’t soften it, Jase,” Rohan interjects, his playfulness gone. “Their kind took what wasn’t theirs and reduced the Gutless to shriveled shells of what they were meant to be. Torvus isn’t the only one with trust issues.”

  His fire makes me edgy. Does he mean other Brutes have trouble trusting women, or that “my kind” have our own trust issues?

  Before I can puzzle it out, Jase says, “She brought some others with her. I gave them our hut.”

  Rohan pushes a mass of unwashed hair from his face. “Of course you did.”

  “We need to test out our new hammocks anyway.” Jase grins.

  Rohan sighs, but not in anger. More like he’s used to dealing with his friend’s inconvenient ideas and is resigned to going along with them.

  I should thank Rohan for giving up his hut for us, but I’m too preoccupied with what he said. Torvus isn’t the only one with trust issues. I barely hear him ask, “Where to now?”

  “Torvus,” Jase says. “Oh, and there’s a fire meeting tonight. You better get those animals skinned quick.”

  “Alright.” Rohan nods at Jase, clearly avoiding my eyes as he turns toward his hunting partners and strides away. Maybe he’s mad about the hut after all.

  “Come on,” Jase says.

  I want to ask him what Rohan meant, but there isn’t time. Before I’m ready, we’re climbing the rickety stairs to the Brute leader’s porch. The state of this house stands in stark contrast to the rest of Tree Camp. You’d be hard-pressed to find a frayed rope or broken board anywhere else. But this building leans with neglect. Bushes crowd the porch, and the thatching is brittle as tinder. For some reason, Torvus appears to have stopped caring enough to maintain it years ago.

  We step past a slatted crate against the wall and Jase knocks on the door, just above the carved edge of a plumeria petal.

  The Brute who opens the door isn’t the same Torvus who thundered at us earlier today. The fire behind his gray eyes has been extinguished, the whites tinged red, the rims swollen. He turns his back without inviting us in.

  Jase closes the door, then swipes a billow of dust from a wooden chair before offering it to me. I decline, feeling immediately claustrophobic in the dimly lit space. The last time I was here, I was too terrified to notice the strange emptiness of the house. No piles of clothing wait to be washed, no paintings add color to the empty wood frames. Several tattered books occupy a single shelf, covered in so much dust I’m tempted to sneeze on their behalf.

  Jase retucks the chair under a round-top dining table, hand-carved, just the right size for two. A washbasin stands in the corner, empty of water, and no blankets cover the barren bamboo-slat bed. The only evidence anyone actually lives here is the hulking Brute standing with his back to us.

  The longer the silence stretches, the more nervous I become. Does he mean to punish me for bringing others to his camp? Banish me from returning? Or worse?

  Jase must be used to waiting on Torvus’s moods, because he stands straight and evenly balanced, unbothered by the stretching quiet. I, however, can’t take it anymore. Maybe Torvus is waiting for me to say something. To confess my error.

  “I’m sorry I brought the others,” I blurt.

  My words drift, unanswered, lifting and swirling with the dust particles illuminated in the ray of late-afternoon sun angling through the only unshuttered window.

  Why did he bring me here if he has nothing to say? Is that a Brute thing? I try to settle into the uncomfortable silence, but it just doesn’t work for me. Remembering the pendant, I try again.

  “My mother wanted you to have this.” I slip the charm from my vest pocket, holding it out in my upturned palm.

&nbs
p; The bait works. The great Brute slowly looks over his shoulder and, seeing what I offer, steps toward it, seeming entranced by the object. With shaking fingers, he lifts the gift to his lips. His thick fingers curl around the tiny tree, as if afraid he might lose it.

  “She came looking for you,” he says. The unnatural depth of his tone softens in a way I didn’t know was possible—the crack in his voice as unexpected as the words. Maybe he did care for her, as Mother said he did.

  Wait—

  “Mother was here?” For the briefest of moments I allow myself to hope that I was wrong, that she somehow survived—that she has been here recently. “When?”

  “Just after you left.”

  “Oh.” My momentary hope deflates like a ball kicked into a sharp stick. That would have been before our run-in at the Center. But still, why would she have come to Torvus? “She came looking for me here?”

  “She heard you went missing near the Jungle. Asked me to send a search party.”

  That doesn’t make sense. Then why was Mother surprised when I told her I had been to the Jungle?

  “Didn’t you tell her I had been here?”

  “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because she’s a headstrong woman!” His familiar temper ignites, then extinguishes almost the same instant. He mumbles, “And I’m a fool of a man.”

  I want to ask more—to learn what ties this foreign Brute to my familiar mother. The way she spoke of him proves there was more between them than anger and secrecy, but something warns me the topic lies out of bounds. Jase once said his relationship with Mother wasn’t his story to tell. Maybe that’s true of Torvus as well.

  Torvus’s jaw tightens, twitches. “I knew what a snake her mother was. I shouldn’t have let this go on so long.”

  Jase speaks, for the first time since we arrived. “It’s not your fault. We weren’t ready—we still aren’t.”

  Torvus huffs in rebuttal. “The day Leda brought Rohan and Dáin, I knew I’d be raising the answer to Nedé’s tyranny. They were ready last year, but I wanted a few more of age—needed a little more time to train them. It was my job to put an end to it, but . . .” His voice catches, and it takes him a moment to regain his composure. “. . . I knew if our existence got linked to her, I couldn’t protect her, not from this far away.”