Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3)

by Casey Matthews

  “You were talking about power,” Ronin said. “You said disparities bothered you, and we both know there is a disparity between us—and not the one you were worried about. If anything, it’s you who are weaker. I only sought to differentiate my guardianship of Eliandra from what I have with you.”

  “What you have with me?” My pounding heart made an attempt to eject through my ribcage. “What… exactly do you have with me?”

  “What would you like to have with me?”

  “Uh.” My face flushed and my brain came down with a bout of the stupids, possibly because the phrase “what would you like” sent a rush of blood to my nethers. My imagination—unhelpfully—answered the question with a sumptuous image of Ronin’s naked body pinning me to her bunk and wrapping her athletic legs around me. The vision lit my tingly places before I could grab it, wrestle it into its cage, and return to the fact that she stood directly beside me.

  “Be honest, Isaac.” Her hand rested on my shoulder again, and I remembered her ability to track my pulse. “I have your baseline.”

  “I don’t care about power, because I’m super attracted to you,” I breathed out.

  She didn’t speak for a while. Then she just said, “Hm,” in a half-interested way—like she’d just learned her favorite breakfast cereal contained two hundred percent her daily vitamin C. Then: “Hold the ship steady until you’re relieved.” Her touch ghosted off me and she headed down the stairs and below deck.

  I blinked twice.

  Chapter Three: Racial Penalties

  I asked Kyra to stow Leo downstairs in my bunk and sailed for an hour before Ronin sent an Akarri to relieve me; however, I hadn’t yet filled up on the view. The wind teased my hair and sleeves, snapped the sails, and left a cold, clean taste on my lips. Our vessel cut a swath through silver-bright clouds beneath our feet and I set elbows to rails, transfixed first on the smoky cloud lapping against our hull; and then above, at a sky close enough I could have stroked my fingers across the moons. Big Red was three-quarters full and stole the show, with her orange bands stirred into cream striations.

  “Gas giant?” Dak stood beside me, having somehow sneaked up on quiet, huge orc feet. It was like being surprised by a rhino, but I guessed he’d maxed his stealth score too.

  I shrugged. “Maybe?”

  “Too much mass. I’ll bet the physics don’t work out.”

  “We’re not dead, so they must. Somehow.”

  “It’s gorgeous at least. So’s the ship. But that we should fix.”

  I glanced at his hands. They were knotted to the rail. I could tell it wasn’t the ship he thought was broken. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Let’s go eat.”

  There was a rhythm to our friendship. Dak couldn’t just talk about things that bothered him. We had to be doing something else first so he wouldn’t have to look me in the eye. Driving and video games usually worked. Eating, too, but we discovered the Akarri had gathered for a meal. Dak barely fit into the galley and they all tensed at his presence.

  “Relax, ladies, orcs have to eat,” I said.

  Quinny went to say something.

  “Cannibalism remark,” Dak said, pointing at her.

  Quinny frowned and shut her mouth, like Dak had snatched the words away.

  “You know what I hate most about racist jokes?” Dak muttered to me. “They’re predictable. I’ve been an orc for like ten minutes and I’m already bored.” He considered the tight bench seating and just sank onto his knees at the edge of the table, forearms slapping down: Whump. The silverware rattled. “Contrary to popular myth, Northern Spine orcs are omnivores. We do consume, on average, about fifteen to twenty percent more meat than humans, but only because in cold weather, it’s harder to keep a steady supply of fresh fruits and vegetables.”

  “Interesting,” Kyra murmured to herself.

  “I love fruit juices, for instance,” Dak said. “Particularly when served in the skulls of my enemies.”

  “What do you plug the eyeholes with?” Elsie asked, chipper as ever.

  “Smaller skulls.”

  “Ooh.” She beamed at Dak with big brown eyes and a mischievous smile that made me want to give her a present. “If I help you slay some enemies, will you make me a pretty skull cup?”

  Dak’s jaw opened to retort, but I could tell he was trapped in her cuteness rays. My only defense was knowledge of Elsie’s sexuality and the fact that my brain was unnaturally gifted at moving women into off-limits categories that kept me from pining over them at full power.

  Tammagan chose that moment to duck into the galley, briefly assessing the situation.

  Her presence made Elsie straighten. The brunette stabbed at the oat mash everyone was eating and jammed a spoonful into her mouth.

  “Captain Tammagan,” Quinny said, grinning. “Elsie was just putting in a formal request to turn our enemies’ bones into dinnerware. Think she’s trying to butter up the orc.”

  Elsie rolled her eyes to comical heights.

  “Aw, c’mon,” Quinny said, cheerfully elbowing her. “You can admit to wanting to surf the great green sea.”

  Dak and Elsie both bristled.

  “Stow it,” Tammagan said.

  “Hey,” said Quinny, “I was just—”

  “What part of ‘stow it’ did you miss, soldier?” Tammagan snapped.

  Quinny’s face went flat, but some offense registered in her eyes. As the oldest, most veteran Akarri, she wasn’t used to being chastised. “Pardon, Captain.”

  “The sexual habits of subordinate officers are not a topic of discussion or an object of concern,” Tammagan continued. “Mind your rank.”

  Her every word had screwed the tension tighter and tighter in Elsie, but at that last bit, she abruptly stood. In the galley’s tight confines, she bumped into Tammagan behind her. The contact seemed to scald them both.

  “Elsie, where are you—”

  “None of your goddamn business,” she shot off.

  “Field officer,” Tammagan barked.

  The title froze Elsie in her tracks.

  “Would you care to repeat that?”

  The room had gone deathly quiet. Most of the Akarri averted their eyes to the table. Elsie, for her part, shut hers and lowered her face, clenching both hands into fists. She almost shook with the effort of restraining something. She bit out the words one at a time: “None. Of. Your. Goddamn. Business.”

  The words seemed to strike Tammagan across the cheek and she lifted an eyebrow, incredulous.

  “I kind of like the small, feisty one,” Dak whispered.

  That was too bad, because Tammagan was about to kill her.

  “The activities of a subordinate on a ship flying through a warzone are most certainly the business of her commanding officer. You disgrace yourself.”

  “You just said our sexual habits are none of your concern,” Elsie said, and she looked at Tammagan with something reckless in her eyes.

  The color drained from Tammagan’s face.

  “…and as I fully intend to look for someone to screw, I guess it’s none of your goddamn business.”

  Quinny guffawed, glancing at Dak, then me. “The orc or the wizard? Please tell me the wizard.”

  Tammagan looked ready with a frosty remark, but Elsie beat her to it: “No, Quinny. I’m going to figure out which of you likes tits and I’m going to shag her into a state of blissful torpor, ’cause guess what?” She threw her hands in the air. “I’m a walking stereotype. I’m an Akarri who likes vaginas. Oh no!”

  The Akarri were all silent. Quinny stood slack-jawed; Tammagan pinched the inner corners of her eyes as though a migraine had struck.

  Dak looked to me, pointing at Elsie. “Can we keep her?”

  Kyra cleared her throat. “I think that’s great, Elsie, but no one here’s going to shag you if the Captain throws you over the side for back-talking her. You’re an Akarri. You’ve trained in war for over a decade and you’re behaving like a schoolgirl. We’re o
n a mission. Act like it.”

  Elsie flinched.

  Kyra added, under her breath, “Though it’d sure make things smoother if everyone in this room were as brave as you.”

  The second part made Tammagan clench her fist. That and a twitching eyelid were her only tells.

  Quinny stirred her oat mash angrily. “Sure hope it’s not me you think you’re shagging, fieldy.” She glared over her shoulder at Elsie. “Good gods, woman, we’ve showered together!”

  A muscle in Dak’s jaw hardened. “How many bigoted things can you say in five minutes, lady? She didn’t join the Akarri and train for however-long to molest you in the shower.”

  “I totally wouldn’t molest Quinny.” Elsie hugged her arms around her middle. “She’s, like, thirteenth on my list.”

  “Wait.” Kyra frowned. “You rank us?”

  “Shut up, Two.”

  Kyra brightened.

  “It’s just disturbing is all,” Quinny went on. “Rather have the orc betwixt my thighs than another Akarri. Think it’s all those fool stories you read; you spend a week of shore leave with ol’ Quinny, and I’ll set you straight.”

  “Enough!” Dak stood and slammed one fist into the table, splintering it, and every Akarri not pressed back to the wall shot to her feet. Quinny’s sword came out in a flash and so did three others. Even Kyra’s hand was on the hilt of hers.

  I stared at all that glittering steel and then at my best friend’s narrowed eyes.

  “Really? You’re going to point weapons at me again?” Dak asked.

  “You’re big and scary looking,” Kyra said evenly. “We know you mean well, but you could tear any one of us in half with your hands.”

  “What do you think staring down a bunch of swords is like?” Remembering he had one of his own, Dak drew it, and at that, Quinny lunged in front of Kyra as if to protect her from the blade. “See? No fun, is it?”

  “Everyone put your weapons away,” Tammagan ordered.

  They did—though some of them reluctantly—seeming to wait until Dak put his away first.

  “Elsie, report to your bunk,” Tammagan said. “You’ll stay there until I figure out what to do with you.”

  Elsie saluted, glanced around the room once as if to memorize all the looks she was getting, and fled.

  “Dakrith, you can’t punch through tables or draw weapons,” Tammagan said. “It makes my soldiers nervous. Surrender your sword, please.”

  “What?” Dak asked.

  “Yeah, that’s no fair, they drew on him first,” I said.

  “There’s not a woman here who hasn’t had an orc try to cut her to ribbons,” Tammagan said. “Dakrith makes them jumpy, and I don’t want someone skewering your friend because he loses his temper.” She looked at Dak. “It’s for your own protection.”

  “Bullshit,” he muttered.

  “Do you have a ‘Captain’ before your name?” Tammagan asked.

  Dak shook his head and unstrapped his sword and its sheath, tossing them onto the table. “Oh look. Scared white people just disarmed the colored dude. That’s never fucking happened before.”

  If my Uncle Scott were here, he’d have a Second Amendment–flavored conniption, but I doubted a lecture would get Dak his sword back. Instead, I glanced around the small room. “For the record, the most dangerous person on this boat isn’t Dak. It’s me.”

  They all stared.

  “I can use a pencil and a piece of paper to kill everyone here. It’d be easy. I can summon rune stones; I blew off a dragon’s head; I killed a guy with the same exact power as me using a cat full of razor blades. Dak is my best friend, and I love him more than all of you combined. So maybe you shouldn’t skewer him by accident. Just food for thought.”

  I’d never threatened anyone before. Kyra smiled my way, but the Akarri who didn’t know me glanced at Tammagan to confirm whether I was lying.

  “He’s not wrong,” Tammagan said. “Anyone who harms the orc will answer to Magister Grawflefox and then me.” She picked up Dak’s iSword.

  We decided to take our food to go.

  ***

  Dak and I camped in the ship’s cargo hold, which was spacious enough to accommodate his size and private enough to lose ourselves in redesigning the sky ships. It peeled Dak’s mind off the casual racism above deck; as for me, I kept hoping Ronin would ambush me in a dark passageway and order me to go steady.

  She didn’t, of course.

  Dak and I butted heads as we always did, pitting his pathological demand for functionality against my rather modest aesthetic preferences. “Sails are a nonstarter,” he said. “We should update to propeller-driven technology. More dependable, more defensible.”

  “But sails are gorgeous.” How could I give that up? Just the thought of it lifted my fine hairs: an expanse of white bowed into a taut curve by the wind—the sound when the air shifted, the canvas going flick, ripple, and snap. I shivered. “We need sails.”

  “I don’t care about your creepy sailboat fetish.”

  “It’s not a fetish. It’s not arousal, it’s frisson.”

  “Frisson is just a decentralized boner.”

  “Everything is boners with you. You call hunger a stomach boner.”

  “It basically is. Anyway, sails are as dumb as capes. Just think about it: how would we manipulate rigging from a closed cockpit?”

  “No way we’re doing that either! We’re not stuffing everyone in a metal tube. You’re taking away everything fun about sky ships.”

  “You know what’s not fun? Incineration by dragon fire. Closed cockpit.”

  The armaments we mostly agreed on. I adapted Dak’s blueprints into a sketch, adding guns to the nose, tail, and waist, plus a ball turret on the dorsal and ventral sides. His specifications were modeled on the B-17 Flying Fortress, which was designed to cover itself in three dimensions—especially from a box formation. Of course, that assumed there would ever be more than one; I hoped once I summoned the first ship into existence, it could be reverse engineered.

  “Do you think this will stop dragons?” I asked.

  “A few at least,” Dak said. “The Nazis used high-speed dive maneuvers on B-17s, but these lightning guns badly outrange dragons. A squad of these puppies covering one another over a standing army would give you pretty good air superiority.”

  We fought over whether to give them bombs. I loathed the idea of adding the brutality of bombing tactics to Rune. However, Dak had gone through books on Runic warfare and they’d already figured out how to drop explosives over the rails. Our compromise was to add a bomb bay under the castor turret. The bombs would eject into the anchor chain’s ray and be guided directly to the anchor rod’s resting place. Precision bombing seemed better than just dropping stuff off the side and hoping for the best.

  Dak was right that sky ships weren’t up to snuff against dragons; but once these designs entered the world, there was no undoing it. There would be no more flying pirate ships—they couldn’t possibly compete with the magical equivalent of World War II killing machines.

  It bothered me. I didn’t feel like an artist anymore. Every artist is different, but I’m playful by nature; to make art, my imagination has to run ahead of my good sense. But my works weren’t just art anymore, they were real. That realization murdered my lighthearted creative spark. I’d had wonderful-but-preachy people—Christians or progressives, usually—tell me art had to go a certain way or it hurt people. I liked to think the things I made were forces for good, but my art had grown fastest once I’d learned to ignore holy men and listen to my own stubborn heart. I could never be sure if my art was ethical, but at least it was mine, and it was honest.

  Thinking on boring, cigar-shaped, propeller-driven B-17 knockoffs did not stir me. It wasn’t honest, it wasn’t me, and my interest imploded. I started to doodle.

  My great-grandfather in World War II was a Christian pacifist—but also a German-American, who had to fight, lest he be accused of Kraut sympathies. His family’s rif
le shop was nearly torched by a mob that didn’t trust weapons in the hands of people who umlauted things. Pap-pap took a job in an engine room, where the Nazis shot torpedoes at him, but where he didn’t have to shoot back.

  In the furnace of that ugly war, surrounded by death and witnessing people sucked into the cold Atlantic, he’d drawn himself a tank schematic. It hung in his workshop before he died. The centerpiece of Pap-pap Rohrer’s tank was where he’d installed in its armored skin a picturesque four-paned kitchen window with polka-dot drapes and a flowerbed planter. A quarter century before Flower Power, my grandfather was putting daisies in his dream tank. It was his stoic engineer’s answer to the world around him.

  That was the tension in my heart. I wanted my kitchen window and flowerbed planter; Dak wanted missiles.

  I scratched at my pad while Dak sat on a crate, focused on my line work. I was used to his audience. To my chagrin, he’d even trained me to answer questions while illustrating. He liked to watch while brooding, my canvas settling his attention on one thing. Eventually, after watching a while, Dak opened up about what was bothering him. I already knew. But that was yet another rhythm in our relationship: deep currents of understanding, sometimes formalized with conversation, but many times not.

  “Being an orc sucks.”

  I wistfully penciled another sail, listening, but not so closely as to embarrass him.

  “Nothing’s changed.” Dak rocked his weight onto both palms, the box groaning. He glared at it. “I don’t fit places. Can’t have a normal room. Still need a special setup, even if it’s a giant hammock and wider hallways instead of ramps and elevators.”

  I pondered over the sail. “Is it that or the racism?”

  “The racism’s worse than usual.” He examined his massive orcish mitts. “Being nonwhite in rural Ohio is one thing. A few legit racists, a big dose of ‘Hey, you’re different, let me remind you every time we talk.’ Still think Mr. Waldman had it out for me. Okay, admitted, I goofed off in his class.”

  I looked up from my sketch, annoyed. “You weren’t the only one goofing off. He only came down on you, though. Pretty sure there was a reason for that.”