The visitor’s a big, swarthy man in a suit and long coat. He has hair like an oil slick, gathered back into a low ponytail at the nape of his neck. Peering down through the gaps in the carved banister, he recognizes the man.
(No, he didn’t recognize the man. He did not. There was no man.)
He’s one of them. His father had been right— it is impossible for a hunter to fool another hunter. The shadows welcome the man readily.
(There was no man. He was dreaming again. Stress made it so much worse. More lucid, less controlled.)
The stranger in the suit sees him crouched behind the railing on the top of the flight. They make eye contact. His are a startling shade of blue.
“Mal, right?” The man asks, and he hears Italy and New Jersey in his voice, though he’s never seen either place for himself.
(Had he?)
He nods.
“You pick that name out yourself, kid?”
“Yes,” he says as he works his royal blue band around his wrist. It’s getting very tight. “Per my father’s suggestion.”
“That’s what I thought,” he man says, the corners of his eyes crinkle up with amusement. It’s a genuine smile, though he isn’t sure what it was that he’d said that had been funny.
The Rook must have heard them talking, because suddenly he’s there, angling himself protectively between him and the stranger. When he’s in his own skin, his father is only an inch taller than him. He doesn’t make a very good shield.
“Give me one good reason, Sal. Just one”
The Rook doesn’t say what to give him the reason for, or what a satisfactory answer may or may not prevent. The warning is in his voice, low and explicit.
The thunderous expression darkening his eyes behind his glasses says that his father and the stranger— Sal?— know each other well. Since he knows him, the man knows better than to think that the Rook’s shorthand threats are any less dangerous than the ones he spells out.
“This is just a social call,” the stranger in the suit says, both hands raised in treaty. Spread, his fingers are ugly, his joints swollen and misshapen. His big hands had been broken, once. Thoroughly. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”
Surprisingly, that’s enough to convince the notoriously paranoid Rook. The quick double squeeze of his fingers around his upper-arm says as much. It’s an all-clear signal disguised as paternal worry.
“Scotch is in the study,” his father says, and it’s both an instruction and an invitation.
Of the many bolt holes that his father has moved him to, this is the only one that has a study. This is where he keeps his books. His favorite weapons. His spoils of war. Bolt holes are not supposed to reflect the personality of the owner, but he has spent the most time in the Nest safehouse, so his father allowed himself to permeate.
Believe it or not, the bookshelves were for me, not for ‘Mira. Even a high school dropout from the Goonies’ boonies likes to feel like he’s made some progress in life, his father had told him once, after a beer or two. People respect a man with bookshelves. S’true.
The Rook leaves him with so many slightly flawed pearls of wisdom. After counting to one hundred in his head, he follows them. The door has been left ajar, leaving a convenient wedge of visibility.
Night comes early in the monotonous gray winter outside of Foundation, so even though it’s only mid-afternoon, his father has a fire lit in the study. He can only see the Rook’s thin face and part of the man’s profile from his vantage point, but it’s enough. He knows that this stranger is his father’s—
(No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know this man. He thought that he did, but he didn’t. His brain was a liar.)
— and he knows that he’s—
(“Just call me Saint Sal,” he laughs, when Corbin introduces him by trotting out the regal procession of his full name. “Mama was a wishful thinker.”)
— so he must know what he’s doing here. How had he found them? They’d been so careful to cover every last trace of their tracks. So meticulous.
“Single malt scotch, neat,” the Rook says, pouring two glasses. “You’ve switched up to good suits and better scotch since the last time we talked. I’m happy for you. I mean that.”
The man laughs. Again, it sounds confusingly real.
“How’d you know?”
“Made a point of keeping current with your poison of choice.” The crystal decanter chimes, almost musical, as his father replaces the stopper and passes him his single malt scotch, neat. “Just in case.”
The man, Sal, takes a drink. The fireplace shines through the cut crystal of his tumbler, turning the glowing amber alcohol luminous. He wipes the glistening bristles of his mustache off with the back of his hand.
“Just in case?”
He grinds out something gravelly that falls short of a real chuckle.
“Just in case life gave me a reason to season your poison of choice with a few drops of mine.” The Rook sips his drink. “I would’ve made it quick and mostly painless. Mostly.”
“That’s the difference between you and the rest of us. You never shelved your old bag of tricks when you went straight. You never compromised.”
It hits him, then. He remembers where he has seen Sal’s face before. It rushes up like acid, and he has to press his hands against the doorframe to keep from pitching forward and bursting into the study. His instincts scream at him to do it, to use the element of surprise, to strike, because the man is—
(“Had to happen sooner or later,” he says, rubbing his arthritic knuckles. “The other side of the fence is a young buck’s game. Me? I’m looking forward to having a pension one of these days. Retirement. Now, that’d be a hell of a thing.”)
— and he’ll follow his orders. They all do.
But his father has to know. He must know. And since he’s calm, he has to breathe and follow his lead. His position of authority requires him to trust him, and he does.
(No, he doesn’t. His father had been weak, his father had been a failure, his father had ruined his future. He’d wasted his time. He’d set him up for failure. That was his truth.)
So he waits. It takes everything in him, but he waits for a signal.
“I didn’t see the point in pretending to be nice,” the Rook says, finishing his drink. “That’s the difference between us.”
His father takes his glasses off, grinding at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He heaves a tired sigh.
“I’m not feeling very fuckin’ generous at the moment, and you’re going to miss our morning appointment if I don’t tell you what my poison of choice is. So if you want to do this, let’s do it.”
(No, there had been no man, no visit, no poison, no deal; this was wrong, this was all wrong, and he was too tired and shaken to understand the difference.)
“I hope you were just thirsty” the Rook continues, annoyed. “‘Cause I know that I taught you better than that. I practically told you it was dosed.”
“I figured it’d be. I also figured that you won’t let me die without hearing me out. So now that we’re both in danger of being dead men come dawn, I’ve got your full attention, don’t I?”
He fills their glasses again.
“And you all called me the reckless one.” His father laughs, but it’s brief and weary. “You want to make a deal with me that bad? Let’s hear it. For your sake, I hope you lead with a strong offer.”
Sodden black feathers finally blot out the last of the weak gray light from outside. The firelight stretches the Rook’s shadow long and dark.
(But it’s okay. It was just a bad dream.)
°
Mal couldn’t be sure whether he’d jerked himself out of his nightmare, or if it was the fall that’d done it. Either way, he woke up on the cold, slippery tile floor in the boys’ locker room. He was naked and bleeding under the running water, so it was fortunate that the locker room was empty.
He’d fallen asleep standing up, Mal realized as he carefully pushed himself
to his feet. His dizziness, coupled with the thin pink stain of bloody water swirling down the drain, spoke to him having hit his head. It’d been the sound, probably. As empty as the room was, it amplified and bounced the drizzle of the showers until it almost sounded like heavy rainfall.
It would have been funny, had it been any less pathetic. Taking microsleeps in class— naps that lasted just fractions of minutes— had been a stopgap measure, but it no longer helped keep him alert. Exhausting himself with training had stopped working, too. He’d reached the point of sleep deprivation where his body fought him like a cranky child.
Mal had hit a wall. His body demanded restful sleep, but he didn’t seem capable of anything but tossing and vivid, migraine-inducing nightmares. The emotional and physical strain of the Night Games had pushed him over an edge that he hadn’t seen coming. The sleeplessness and bad dreams were getting progressively worse, and he was beginning to fear that it was out of his control.
As irony would have it, he’d taken the shower in an attempt to wake himself up. Worry and guilt had kept him standing vigil in Zipporah’s room well after her initial awakening. She’d eaten her pudding and napped, but he’d been reluctant to leave her. Taking a nap himself hadn’t felt like an option, so he’d prayed.
He’d recited Ayat al-kursi over her. The Arabic felt right in his mouth, the shape of the words familiar, if underused. He had been so young when his mother had taught him to pray, he could not remember the process of learning it. It felt as though he’d done it from birth. It had been an automatic act for him, mechanical. His father hadn’t shared his mother’s faith, so when he’d been with him, he’d lapsed. But training and physical acts of protection were failing him, so praying over Zipporah was better than doing nothing.
It’d woken her up, though. His partner had told him that his singing was pretty, but that if he had time to sing, he had time to go eat, shower, and take care of himself like a reasonable person. He hadn’t bothered to correct her.
Finding the already-healed gash on the back of his head, Mal washed the remaining blood out of his hair, then turned the shower off. He briskly dried himself, wrapping the towel around his waist before going to get dressed.
The presence of another person in the locker room itched at him until his skin broke out in gooseflesh. There was someone there— he could feel it. The squeak of the sole of a wet shoe on the tile advertised the nearness of another body, but he didn’t see anyone. The scent of musk and spice was so cloyingly thick, Mal gagged when he breathed in deeply.
What a moron. What good was invisibility if it only masked one sense? Furthermore, why would a person capable of invisibility ruin the effect by rolling in cheap cologne?
“I don’t need to see a threat to make them,” Mal told the stinking air, his nostrils flaring. “You may have fooled my partner, but you do not fool me.”
Clay Dillinger, the Bystander, materialized. He sat on the low bench separating the aisle of lockers, loose and amused. Not a hair was out of place, as per usual. Clay was very aware of his physical attractiveness, and he thrived on the attention that it got him. That vanity was where their conflict had its roots. Clay did not take kindly to sharing the stage, and Mal did not take kindly to anyone trying to stand between him and his goals. Clay had left him alone for the first few months of the term, but he’d hovered at Mal’s periphery ever since the rock-paper-scissors sparring match.
Probably due to the fact that before that match, he and Zipporah had been barely functional, their grades in freefall. Since they’d started working together, their standing among the other paired teams had been on the rise. They were getting better.
Good enough to be seen as a threat, apparently. It was a mixed victory.
“How’s she doing?” Clay asked, with only the weakest feigned interest. “I heard she really struck out last night.”
The emphasis wasn’t necessary, but it confirmed a few things. By emphasizing those words, Clay was trying to feel out how much Mal knew. It was an admittance of involvement, though it was too circumstantial to use as proof.
No one but Mal himself knew that Zipporah had been hit with a bat, but Clay’s smirk said, do you get it? Do you get the joke?
Clay had been involved, and he wanted Mal to know. He was stupid enough to gloat, but smart enough to cover his tracks. The latter was a new development. Either Clay had generated a few more brain cells since the first block, or he’d made a smart friend. Neither boded well.
Mal took careful breaths— enough to keep him calm, but shallow enough that he didn’t have to coat the inside of his nose and throat with Clay’s cologne. He couldn’t afford to pick a fight, though he dearly wanted to make Clay swallow a few of his own bleached teeth.
“My partner does not concern you,” Mal said, opening his locker without fully turning his back on the other blue-band Alpha.
Clay leaned back on his hands, crossing his legs at the ankle. His body language was loose, but Mal knew better than to put any weight on the posturing of an idiot who saw himself as a grand illusionist.
“Damn, man,” he said, whistling long and low. “Now I see why you skip the shorts and tanks. You have gotten messed up.”
Mal pulled his clothing on as quickly and discreetly as possible. He didn’t want to give him an opening, but he didn’t want any further commentary aimed at his scars. He neither liked nor disliked his scars, but he’d found over time that they elicited questions and emotional responses from others that he didn’t enjoy. The simple answer was that he had trained hard from the very beginning, but his healing abilities hadn’t always been as robust as they currently were. As a child, healing had taken longer, and it’d left marks. Many, many marks. The number of scars on his upper-torso and arms tended to unsettle those who did not know him, so he covered them up with clothing. That was it.
“People are going to wonder what the hell screwed you up so bad, buddy,” Clay said, sounding like he was trying to pass himself off as someone who genuinely cared about Mal’s future. “The glamorous life of a public hero, am I right?”
“Again, that does not concern you,” Mal growled through his teeth. He ran his palm over the bottom of the locker, trying to remember where he’d put his belongings. His short term memory had suffered terribly from his insomnia. He would have sworn that he’d put his money, switchblade, and necklace in the cubby at the top of the locker.
“You want to know what I heard, Underwood? I heard that it was your old man.”
“What?”
“There’s about a thousand different rumors, y’know,” Clay said, conversationally. “Everyone’s got their own theory about why the Foundation knocked off the Rook— seriously, that hit will be a conspiracy theory goldmine for years. But me, I think that it’s simpler than that. A mentor’s supposed to push their ‘kicks, right? So I think he tried to see how much you could take.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. He wanted to, wanted to desperately, but that was clearly what Bystander wanted. Clay was throwing nasty implications like knives, switching to new subjects until he hit something vital. He was trying to get his goat, as Zipporah would say.
Mal kept his calm center. He breathed. He reminded himself that others had made worse claims about his father— much worse. He bit the inside of his cheek until it tasted coppery-raw, but he didn’t lose control.
“Did he give you this for being such a good Little Bird and not telling?” Clay pressed, his smile coated in the greasy film of his self-amusement.
Clay had his necklace. He’d wrapped the leather cord around his fist, the lopsided wooden rook dangling between his fingers.
He had been through his locker. He’d touched his things. He’d stolen from him.
Mal’s stomach clenched. Of his possessions, Ellie’s gift was the only one that he could not replace. He was careful with it for that very reason, making sure to take the necklace off before he showered, so that water wouldn’t damage the pendant.
“Give it back.”
“Give it back?” Clay laughed. He clapped his hands together, once, and the pendant vanished. “Give what back?”
The necklace was still there, Mal told himself. Clay could only make it seem like it’d disappeared, bending light to suit his needs. It was a trick. A stupid, shoddy, childish prank.
“If you don’t return my property and stop talking immediately, you will get the fight that you’ve been attempting to draw out of me for the past five minutes,” Mal said, baring his teeth. “And if I fight you, believe me when I say that I will make it worth the detention I will undoubtedly earn.”
Clay’s laughter scuttled up Mal’s spine. His face felt hot, the skin pulled too tightly over his cheekbones. Mal knew he should breathe through it, should let the anger pass and leave him, but he didn’t want to. There was a terrible clarity to his rage.
“Brave words for a sixty-seven,” Clay said, and finally earned himself a fight.
He outstripped Mal in both height and weight. The ‘magician’ had the physical advantage, technically, but Clay had chosen a poor place to challenge him. It had been an attempt to mitigate the chances of a staff member stumbling in on them, but the environment worked to Mal’s tactical advantage.
He loved bathrooms. There were so many satisfyingly hard surfaces to work with.
Before Clay had even stopped laughing, Mal grabbed him. Using his forward momentum to twist, he fisted his hand in his hair and slammed him face-first into the floor tiles.
The Rook had been convinced that his youngest son would be cursed with his natural build, so he’d taught him how to win a fight against someone bigger and stronger than he was. The Rook had lacked the Queen’s sense of fairness. That was why he had been both the best and worst teacher for his Little Birds. He’d been the best in terms of maximizing his sons’ inborn talents, but the worst influence on their sense of morality. Ultimately, Marshal had crossed the line. And Mal...
Well, Mal had his days. This was one of them.
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 29