Scaeva ignores my last comment. “Or maybe I hate the Dvi more? But that would be love/hate, since I bed so many of them. What would be worse? Spending a life picking up someone else’s garbage, wiping snot-nosed kids’ asses, and generally cleaning up after people who are better than you, or singing and dancing like a mindless idiot for your entire existence, only stopping to lie on a pallet and spread your legs?”
“Both necessary.” Logic. Facts. Training. I repeat it like a mantra. I’m not about to take his bait and argue about his inflammatory comments. I put my goggles on after a few grains of sand flick into my eyes. “Get your respirator out in case this wind picks up.”
“It’s already dying down, and you’re so wrong. What’s so necessary about a Dvi girl? I can roll on the pallet with an Eka and at least have a conversation about something other than the song she sang before I flipped her on her back.”
“Then bed Ekas,” I shrug. I have to keep my voice bored and nonaggressive, because Scaeva loves an argument, and I’m not about to discuss the relative merits and shortcomings of the three underclass groups when we might be about to face a full blown sandstorm. Plus that, the feeling in my gut hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s getting more persistent, and I want to know why I’m feeling it so insistently.
“That’s not the point. Plus that, Ekas are too much work to bed. Too competitive. Dvi girls know how to do what they’re told. I just can’t imagine a life so empty of any meaning. It seems unfair that we have it so good.” His dark hair is coated with a light speckle of sand, but he isn’t making a move put his goggles over his eyes.
“As Ekas we have the weight of Romulus on our shoulders, and we’re bound to protect it at any cost. That’s the price we pay for living so honorably.” I sound like a stiff, no-fun soldier, but Scaeva has never brought out anything good in me. Of all the people I could have been assigned to field assignment with, he’s the worst, hands down. Scaeva is one of those Ekas who doesn’t really understand what’s honorable and good about our blood level, and he abuses his power position. I’m all for force when needed, but Scaeva takes it to a darker level, and I don’t want to go there.
He’s stopped talking to me, his focus is intense, and there’s a wide, sick smile on his face. I grit my teeth and will the sandstorm to become so intense we have to leave this area. All of my internal worry suddenly makes sense to me, and I feel a nauseous clench in my stomach. Scaeva is about to go haywire, and I know all the signs. I’ve seen them often enough to be sure.
I’ve seen Scaeva get this exact look before, mostly when we were boys together in training. During outdoor survival, among the cool shade of the greywoods and whispering leaves shed by Romulus’s ancient trees, he always separated from the rest of the crew during rest time or recreationally sparring to prowl the forest. Sometimes I followed his trail and found animals, staked and panting with panic, their skin split, their eyes bulged, the carrion already circling. The only thing I’d been able to do back then was slit their tiny throats quickly. When he sat next to me at fire hour, the blood caked under his fingernails made me shake with a rage that never really left me. When I look at him, all that old anger surges back, and now we’re so much older, all alone, no one watching our every move.
Where do logic, facts, and training fit? My head aches and I just want out.
It’s time to go before this whole situation gets out of hand.
“Scaeva, let’s pack up and move camp.” I nudge my brown-eyed, brown-haired Eka poster-boy comrade with my boot and start to pack my gear.
“How can they stand it?” His voice is muffled by the bandana he tied over his mouth and nose. He pulls it down, and repeats. “How can they live this way? It’s disgusting.”
“Their needs are different than ours,” I answer, textbook training camp stuff, nothing that will set him off. “Caturs do less work, have no training schedules, no enforced physical standards, so they don’t need the same facilities and provisions Ekas need. Simple. Pack up. Now.” My blood is racing. The wind picks up and slams a burst of sharp sand crystals into us. They bite at my face and hands, the exposed skin on my neck. I swipe my goggles clean.
Scaeva ignores me and swings the gun left, then right, slowly. I stuff my gun into its holster, fold up the maps, put my goggles back in their case. I prod Scaeva with my boot a second time, but he’s trained on something down the river like a hunthoud with a scent to follow.
Down by the bank of the brown, sluggish Erie River, just off the dusty path there’s a girl and a young boy with a wooden bucket in his hands. She’s maybe sixteen or seventeen; our age. He’s younger, maybe thirteen. I can’t see her eye color from this far away, but she has light red hair. A recessive, like me. I stop packing my things and squint down the river to get a better look at her.
Her face is fine-boned and her body curves in every way a girl’s body should. What is she doing in a lousy Catur colony when she could be enjoying the easy life of a concubine in Romulus? Then she turns and I see her defect. It’s too bad, actually; she would have been pulchra, beautiful, except for the fact that her left arm ends at her elbow. That’s why she’s Catur – damaged level. I wonder if she started out a higher level and sustained an injury, or if she was born that way?
I wonder what it would be like to be Catur level, lowest of the low. Being born that way would be bad enough; but it would be even worse if you had started at a better level and been damaged and sent to the colonies. It would feel like you’d been robbed. Caturs definitely make me uncomfortable, so I am more than ready to head down the river when I notice Scaeva is pointing his gun at the girl.
The girl takes the bucket from the boy, leans down, and puts it in the slimy water at the edge of the river. The boy beside her laughs at something she says, break a reed and starts slashing at the water with it. They’re so innocent, so completely oblivious.
I glance down and see Scaeva’s sight trained on them, focusing in on the girl.
“Are you kidding?” I laugh, but it sticks hard in my throat. In a flash, I see the internal slideshow of staked animals, remember the way my hands shook when I ended things for them. Scaeva’s little boy cruelties have had years to grow. “That kid is maybe twelve, and they’re both unarmed. Frat, she’s debilita.” Logic. Facts. Training.
Cripples were pitied, pushed out of the way, and ignored. You didn’t kill a cripple. Maybe to put it out of its misery. At that thought another grainy image of a bleeding, tortured animal screams through my brain, makes a new layer of sweat slick my skin that’s already coated with a fine sheen of sand and grit.
This girl isn’t miserable in any way. In fact, if she’d been wearing different clothes and I hadn’t noticed her arm, I might have tried my charm on her to help pass the long hours in this miserable hovel. She moves like the dancers from the Dvi colonies, the pretty girls who don’t have the stomach for battle or the muscle for work. They serve as entertainment for the troops, and I always love to watch them dance. This girl is delicate, precise in her movement, addictive to watch. I tear my eyes away and nudge my comrade again.
“Seriously, Scaeva, let’s move.” He’s not paying me any attention. My nerves sputter and flicker. Gory, miserable pictures of his cruelty blur my vision; the animals, his bruised Tri care-woman, the Dvi girls who ran from his pallet sobbing while he laughed, the Eka sparring partners he hammered a morten syringe into after he crushed an appendage beyond repair. I’ve witnessed it all, and I never did anything.
No one’s ever stopped him. No one’s ever controlled him. And now he’s going to torture again, and I’ll be left with more blood-smeared images hot in my brain. My body shakes hard. I need to pull myself together.
He’s already cocked the rifle. I look over his shoulder and can see his sight is trained on the pulchra’s head. He’s about the blow the brains out of her skull. The wind picks this minute to die down enough to give him a perfect shot.
Suddenly, a cold calm freezes through me, dries the sweat on my body and
steadies my shaking arms. The command of every superior I’ve ever had marches in my brain. Never kill a blood brother needlessly. Never. I’ve grown up next to him, eaten and practiced and fought at his side. There’s a small core of me that feels loyal to him, this person whose life is worth more than a pile of tortured animals, battered Tri care-women, abused Dvi girls and weak, injured Eka comrades, and especially two no-name, no-importance Caturs. His blood makes him valuable, more valuable than all the others. My training tells me that.
Logic. Facts. Training. I should be able to count on them. I’ve lived my life following the Eka rules; so why can’t I get the rules to work for me now?
Because something deeper than training short-circuits all of those controlled thoughts, and when I look at him, all I see is a worthless coward.
“Stop it now, frat,” I warn. My hand closes around the handle of my knife. I know a dozen ways to kill this stultus, and I’m on the edge of ready to do the unthinkable.
I will kill Scaeva, my blood brother, if that’s what it takes to stop this madness. I will.
He adjusts the rifle and closes one eye slowly, then flicks a glance my way, daring me to stop him. My resolve shakes, the sweat pours back. If it comes down to it, if I follow through and kill him, I will kill a sacred vow. I will kill a part of myself, the part that is unflinchingly loyal to my own people, my own blood. And they won’t take that betrayal lightly.
I’m a field-trained warrior, so I know when it’s time to weigh my options. That time is now.
Killing another Eka level warrior is punishable by death.
Not just any death.
You get tied out on a stake and they slit your skin open so that your blood runs. Then they leave you for the wild animals. You’d better hope that there’s a lupus pack nearby, because the vultures take forever and they tend to want to start with your eyes. As a first year cadet, the militis leaders made us watch the execution of a Dvi man who killed an Eka. I have a pretty hard stomach, but I had to puke after three hours of watching him scream and beg while the carrion tore the flesh off of his bones. Scaeva watched it all with glee, and then replayed it in the forest with the animals.
My body runs hot and cold, the knife hilt slides in my palm, and I have to tighten my fingers and keep my mind from snapping. Focus. Focus or he’ll kill more than just the girl. You know what he’s capable of.
I’m balancing the imagined visual of my own horrific execution with the strange beauty of the damaged Catur girl and the fact that driving my knife into the base of Scaeva’s skull will go against every lesson in loyalty and life preservation I’ve ever learned.
He’s an Eka, I remind myself, my genetic brother, and she’s just a throwaway Catur. A nobody. A cripple. Below my notice. The wind suddenly hurtles across the dusty banks, whips reeds and dirt and sand all over. It looks like they might leave, and for a minute, relief makes my muscles sag. All I have to do is keep Scaeva preoccupied, and there won’t be any needless blood spilled. I step in front of him and he looks up at me with a sneer.
“I’m sick of the heat. I’m sick of the dirt and the river sludge. I want a kill. No one will notice one less cripple in the middle of this sinkhole. No one will even care when we get back, so quit trying to talk me out of this,’” he says clearly, his eyes flat and hard. The wind howls, I move to pick up my respirator, and suddenly, Scaeva turns the gun on me. Now it’s my skull in his sight, and the cold prickle of sweat soaks my collar and down my neck and makes my shirt stick to me. “Drop your gun.”
I manage to stick my knife up my sleeve when I’m putting the gun down on the ground. I’m at a disadvantage weapon-wise, but Scaeva is as stupid as he is cocky, and there’s surprisingly little wrong with my brain. I keep my hands out in front of me and Scaeva smiles, satisfied that he has the upper hand. He’s used to torturing, used to making other people and things squirm under his power. I let him think he has the upper hand for now. The sand flying through the air makes me cough and choke, which is a good thing. It means the girl and the boy are gone if they have any brains in their heads.
“So you’re going to leave me out here with the Caturs? Or are you going to kill me first? You know the punishment for an Eka murder.” I hope the mental image of a staked execution distracts him long enough for me to get my knife into position. I look back at the girl and boy, willing them to run away while I’ve got Scaeva distracted, but they don’t seem to notice us at all.
“You know there’s a reason for all of these missions, Regulus. The last five you’ve been on? They were testing the cadets, trying to see who had the guts and the brains to do it.” He shakes his gun at me, and it takes every ounce of willpower I have not to startle. “But they picked me for this mission because they know that I’m loyal to the Eka. They know that I’m not going to let you and your tainted blood bring down what Romulus has worked so hard to build up.”
He’s so wrapped up in this speech spittle is flying out of the corners of his mouth. This is one crazy guy, and he has enough ammo on him to take out an entire Catur village. One wrong move and I’ll be scattered in a thousand meaty pieces all up and down this dirty river.
“So you think they sent you on a Nex?” I ask. A Nex is an assassin mission so covert, the assassin only knows he’s to assassinate based on a single clue he gets in the field. There is always a slight anomaly on the target’s uniform; a blue anomaly somewhere in our regulation khaki, olive, black or white. I look down quickly and see what Scaeva is staring at; my third button is sewn on with blue thread. Blue is the color of weakness, and Ekas never wear it. My throat goes dry and my mind reels, putting the facts together into what makes sense, what should make sense, and what actually happened. Nothing is what it seems, but I know before I try to explain that Scaeva is not going to listen to my explanations.
Regulation thread is olive, and I’m sure Scaeva thinks that this is from the laundry rooms, where it would have been done covertly to mark me as a Nex target. I can’t tell him now that I’m the one who sewed the button on, the last night before our mission. It’s blue thread because the Dvi girl I shared a pallet with had a blue scarf on, and she pulled it from the scarf so she could sew it before I was late for mission. I was already on thin ice, and I figured no one would ever notice. The possibility of being the target of a Nex was the last thing on my mind.
“The button? That’s your reason to blow my brains out?”
“It’s clearly an anomaly in the uniform,” he says. “I’ve been waiting to see if you were going to prove me wrong, frat. But here you are, being just as weak and pathetic as you were when you were a kid. You think I don’t know you had to go back and end it for those poor little fuzzy animals in the forest? Weak. You’re weak, Regulus.”
Doubt clouds my mind. There’s too much to process and it’s pulling me under, drowning me. Even if this is a Nex, there’s no way they would have chosen Scaeva. He’s level B, for one. And he doesn’t have the skill or the training to do what needs to be done. I would have added that he doesn’t have the guts, but he does have a rifle shoved in my face. Despite that fact, I snort with disgust. I know that’s pushing my luck, but if he’s going to blow me away, I’d rather he knows that I think he’s a complete joke.
“I can outlift you, outrun you, outthink you, and outdo you in every other measure, frat. What makes you think they’d send someone lower than me to kill me off?” I taunt.
“It’s my blood, frat. I’m so pure, I bleed Eka. But they’ve never known about you for sure, have they?” His face spreads in a smug, dangerous smile.
A rush of pure hate makes my blood boil. My class division has been questioned over and over again. It’s my damn blue eyes that bring it up. “Blood doesn’t lie, Scaeva. I’m Eka, tested and verified, just like you. Just like any of them. And I’ve proven that I’m better than every one of you pure-blood brown-eyed jerkoffs.” I feel like kicking his ass right here, right now in the mud of the river just for questioning me.
“That little on
e-armed whore,” he sneers, waving the gun at the pulchra girl across the river. Damn! She’s still there, watching with quiet intensity. Run, I will her. Run before he kills you. “When I had my sight on her, you went soft. You didn’t want her to die. Some piece of crap, one-armed, Catur cripple was about to die, and you wanted to stop it. You’ve always been so weak, it’s embarrassing.” He laughs and shakes his head. “Don’t you see? That’s gotta be the reason there’s a Nex on you. Your blood is so tainted, you probably have some lowlife Catur in you! I would have given you the benefit of the doubt, frat. I would have said you were at least Dvi level with a little pure Eka mixed in, but it’s worse than the rumors, isn’t it? You’re worse than a half-blood. You’re completely tainted.”
My hands itch to grab his throat and strangle him to death, and just when I make up my mind to lunge, Scaeva swings his gun and trains it on the girl. The wind howls with such ferocity, he’s kicked to the side for a minute. He readjusts his bandana and flips his goggles down. “I’m going to kill this little stain,” he says calmly, jerking the gun at her. He smiles wide, then laughs through the sand pelting his face. “What do you think of that?” He looks at me expectantly, his trigger finger itching to spill some blood. “Or you can do it. Blood sacrifice to prove your loyalty? What do you say, Regulus?”
It’s a disgusting test. Scaeva will be forced to abandon the Nex if I take his dare and sacrifice her. Once it’s done, we could go back to camp together. If I keep my mouth shut, all of Romulus will wind up hearing Scaeva’s story. How we were sent to patrol desert rats but bagged some river rats on the way.
He’ll brag about how her skull exploded, how the brains burst out. He’ll laugh about how her blood soaked the boy, how the crimson marks created a splatter target that made following him through the rushes beyond easy. He’ll brag about killing them, two undesirables who weren’t needed.
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