by K A Riley
“Here. Like this.”
Arlo shrieks like he’s on fire and lashes out, his arms spasming.
One of his elbows catches Ignacio in the solar plexus and knocks the wind out of him.
By the time Brohn gets over to check on them, Arlo is halfway across the room, cowering against the wall and tucked behind a wooden rack of knives, swords, mallets, axes, and hatchets.
Ignacio, meanwhile, is doubled over and busy trying to catch his breath. When he does, his eyes narrow, and he lunges across the room toward Arlo. He shoves the rack of weapons aside and towers over our quivering classmate. Grabbing Arlo by the scruff of his hoodie with one hand and with his other clamped into a beefy fist, he hauls him to his feet.
I’m expecting Brohn to intervene, but he stops in his tracks and stands back.
Ignacio blasts an uppercut to Arlo’s ribs, and Arlo folds in half, crashing down face-first onto the overturned wooden rack. A jet of blood explodes from his mouth and sprays out over the floor.
His eyelids quiver as he tries to hang onto consciousness.
Ignacio’s face is in a knot, and his fists are veiny with tight red bulges as he prepares to finish off Arlo, who’s gagging and coughing up phlegm mixed with spatters of blood.
Before Ignacio can take his second swing, Brohn steps forward, catches his wrist, and spins him around.
“Don’t.”
“But—”
“One hit is justice, Ignacio. Two is revenge.”
“But he—”
“We’re not pacifists here. But we’re not warmongers either. Don’t let all the combat and weapons training fool you. Our goal is to break the cycles of violence, not to perpetuate them. The only thing more important than knowing when to use your strength is knowing when to stop.”
Ignacio stares at Brohn with his steely golden-amber eyes, but then his gaze softens, and his eyelids lower.
To my surprise, behind him, Arlo stands up as easy-peasy as a morning glory rising up to meet the sun.
Just before he tugs his hood back up and over his head, I catch a glimpse of his face. It’s always scarred and sandpaper-rough, but now it’s pulsing with a weird purplish glow. In the space of half an eye blink, the fresh red cuts to his lip and jaw turn as dry, gray, and solid as stone.
He makes his way past Brohn and Ignacio to join the rest of us, who are gathered in a stunned huddle.
His voice soft and patient, Brohn grips Ignacio’s shoulder and asks if he’s okay.
I notice he doesn’t ask Arlo.
Maybe he doesn’t need to. Ignacio, I get. He’s a swollen-headed wanker. But what is it with Arlo, anyway? And how come, whatever it is, I get the feeling there’s more to come?
After standing the cracked weapons rack back on its feet, Brohn barks at the rest of us to stay focused and line up again at the firing range. He doesn’t say another word about what happened between Ignacio and Arlo.
With the chaotic moment behind us, we get back to our training, which goes on for hour after hour with Brohn bombarding us with a relentless barrage of tips, criticism, feedback, and promises that “failure in here means death out there.”
How does he expect me to load, aim, and fire when my shoulders and arms are burning, and I can’t feel my fingers?
After a few hours of crossbow training, we switch over to the longbow.
That’s harder, but more fun.
Once again, Ignacio is the best at it. He doesn’t hit any bullseyes, but he does strike the edges of the target a few times. The rest of us ninnies couldn’t hit the ground if we fell out of a fracking tree.
Toward the end of class, Brohn stops us and leads us over to one of the racks of weapons against the wall.
He draws out a dozen of the weapons, one at a time, teaching us about their origins, uses, plusses and minuses.
“You already know about me. What about your other teachers? What do they use?”
I thrust my arm into the air, eager to show off my knowledge and possibly to be useful as something other than a crappy archer or a human punching bag.
Brohn smiles. “Branwynne?”
“You use an arbalest. Kress has Talons. Those are special gloves with retractable blades. Rain has Dart-Drivers that fire little silver arrows. Terk uses a flail.” I swing around to face the other members of my Cohort who weren’t with us five years ago on our cross-country adventures. “That’s a giant spiked ball on a chain. And Kella…I guess she just uses a regular gun?”
“A sniper rifle,” Brohn clarifies. “But it doesn’t matter with her. She has perfect accuracy with any weapon. It’s part of her enhanced abilities as an Emergent.”
Libra’s eyes go wide. “Is it true she can really hit anything?”
Brohn suppresses a smile. “I have yet to see her miss.”
Libra mumbles, “Marvie.”
Hanging his arbalest onto two massive iron hooks on the wall, Brohn returns his attention to the long table and the row of racks in front of us.
“Now…it’s time to meet your weapons.”
13
Introductions
“These are all non-projectiles,” Brohn explains, taking down the various knives, razor-edged disks, axes, slingshots, long-handled clubs, and bladed weapons and showing them to us again, only in more detail this time and with a whirlwind of quick, introductory demonstrations.
He slips his hands into the handles of a pair of steel-black claws.
“These are called Bear Claws. But they have other names: Barbecue Claws. Pork Shredders. They’re supposed to be used for shredding meat.”
Sara fires off a sarcastic roll of her eyes. “Perfect…if we ever get attacked by a giant ham.”
I expect Brohn to get mad, but he chuckles. “Don’t forget, Sara. People are meat, too.”
Next, he introduces us to a pair of S-shaped, sharp-edged throwing weapons, each with a steel handle at the center and a curved, retractable blade, sharp and hooked as a raven’s beak, extending out from either side.
Brohn grips the central handle in his fist, leaving the two silver blades to extend from the front and the heel of his hand. “These are Serpent Blades. Think of them as kind of like frisbees. They can be used for close-quarters or distant combat situations. In some of the upcoming classes, I’ll be teaching you how to throw them with distance and accuracy.”
Libra’s hand goes up. “What’s a frisbee?”
“It’s a flying plastic disk kids play with,” I tell her with an impatient groan. But then I feel bad. After all, it’s not Libra’s fault she spent most of her life as a test subject in a Processor.
Of course, with her bouncy, perpetual perkiness, she’s bound to get on somebody’s nerves, so who knows? Maybe it is her fault after all.
After a brief description of a frisbee and a quick story about how he once caught one on the bridge of the nose when he was a little boy growing up in the Valta, Brohn moves on to the next weapon. “These are cricket bats with razor strips running along the edges of the blades. They’re homemade right here in the basement of the Academy. You can thank Terk for them.”
Brohn starts passing the weapons around for me and my Cohort to inspect.
“This is a three-pronged grappling hook. And here are a pair of Irish shillelaghs.”
He pronounces the name of the glossy black clubs with the thick knob at the top as Sha-LAY-lees. “It has a strap here to keep it secured to your wrist during battle. Great combination of lightness and strength. There’s an old book that talks about Shillelagh Law.”
“Shillelagh Law?” Ignacio repeats.
“Basically, it means your standard fist-fight just got a lot more interesting.”
Next, Brohn shows us what he calls a Masai rungu. “It’s a wooden throwing club. Often ceremonial but deadly if used properly on the battlefield.”
“These are Scottish sgian-dubh.” He pronounces the name of the stocky, two-edged blade as skee-en-DOO. “They’re originally ceremonial knives. According to Granden, one o
f the gen-techs on the team that started the Academy had a fondness for them and left a whole crate of them in one of the storage lockers downstairs.”
Sara giggles when Brohn shows us the next weapons: a cluster of miniature, needle-like swords he holds in the open palm of his hand.
“These are throwing darts. Kind of like what you would have found in a London pub. When there were London pubs. These darts are innocent-looking but handy, easy to conceal, and highly effective, especially when aimed at the eyes.”
Sara frowns and barks out a derisive laugh. She tells Brohn they look more like toothpicks for hors d’oeuvres. “I don’t suppose you have any cocktail wieners to go along with those little things?”
My Cohort laughs…right up until the split-second when Brohn—in an impossible blur of speed—flings the darts at Sara with two of them lodging into each of her shoulders.
She screeches and whips her head side to side.
What the—? I can’t believe he just did that!
As if he’s magically read my mind, Brohn says, “Believe it. By themselves, these little guys can distract or disable.” He draws a small vial of glowing purplish liquid from his pocket and bounces it in the palm of his hand. “Add a little bit of this homemade neurotoxin, and you can paralyze. Add a little more, and you can kill.”
Walking over to Sara to pluck the darts from her shoulders, Brohn invites her to boot down to the Infirmary to get herself looked at, but she declines and apologizes.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Brohn assures her with a gentle laugh. “But thanks for helping with the lesson.”
As Sara crosses her arms in front of her, one palm on each shoulder to stop the small trickles of blood soaking into her shirt, Brohn returns his attention to the introductions.
“These uniquely curved steel daggers are called kirpan. Traditionally, they were carried by Sikhs as part of what was known as the Five Articles of the Faith. Like you, the Sikhs were dedicated to ferocity on the battlefield but also empathy for the enemy. They were sometimes known as ‘Warrior Saints.’”
He calls the next weapon a mambele. It’s a ferocious looking two-foot-long throwing knife of flattened iron with an oddly-angled blade and a separate, smaller blade branching out from its middle. It’s like someone turned the letter “F” into a deadly weapon.
“The smaller blade is designed to ensure that the mambele stays stuck in the body of your enemy. The weapon originally comes from East and Central Africa.”
Brohn whips the multi-bladed dagger across the room, and we watch as it lodges in the black center of one of the thick, round wooden targets on the wall.
From under his hood, Arlo whispers, “Marvie.”
Brohn scoops up a set of Kunai knives. There are five of the arrow-shaped weapons, each with foot-long razor-edged blades, an iron ring at the base of each handle, and leather thread wrapped around the hilt.
“They look like throwing knives,” Brohn says, fanning the five knives out in his hand. “But they’re best used for stabbing or…”
Brohn sets four of the knives back down. With the remaining one in hand, he slips a length of thin white rope through the eye of the handle, ties it off with a flick of his fingers, and whips the slender knife across the room. The needle-sharp point plunks into the center of the same target as the mambele. Brohn tugs on his end of the rope and explains how the weapon, when attached like this, can be used as a climbing spike.
“Finally,” Brohn says, sliding open a panel in the wall to reveal a whole new set of tools and weapons on a board of hooks and shelves, “because of where we are, the Academy also comes with a whole supply of climbing and mining equipment. Some, we’ve set aside for actual, you know, climbing and mining. But these others here…” Brohn waves a hand at the rack and back down to the long table full of tools, “we’ve set aside as potential weapons.”
With rapid-fire explanations, he introduces us to pickaxes, sledgehammers, rope and carabiners, a whole family of serrated hunting knives, and a set of Ninja Weapons, including two katana swords, a sickle shaped tool called a kama, one with a chain called a kusarigama, and a manrikigusari, which is basically a chain with two heavy, plum-sized balls of steel on either end.
“Okay,” Brohn says with a soft smile, “time for you to learn, practice, master, and choose.”
14
Selection
After over a week of relentless, non-stop (and often ragingly painful) training, the day comes when we make our final selections.
Brohn has the entire buffet of weapons, gadgets, and tools laid out for us.
Ignacio nudges me with his elbow. “About time, eh?”
“You’re drooling.”
He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and smiles. “Can you blame me?”
We’ve come to know these weapons pretty well by now. We know which ones work for us and which ones don’t. More important, like Brohn’s been teaching us, it’s more than knowing which one feels right. We need to know which one make us feel right.
“After all,” he constantly reminds us, “Emergent or not…other than each other, your weapon will often be about all you have out there.”
And Haida, I remind myself. I’ll always have Haida. And she’ll always have me.
Brohn steps to the side, giving us a half-bow and a grand sweep of his arm in the direction of the stockpile of weapons we’ve been getting to know so well.
We accept his invitation and prepare to make our final selection.
Libra fondles the various knives, clubs, and cudgels. She drags the back of her hand over some of the farming tools and offers up exaggerated “Hmmmm” noises like she’s arriving at the single most important decision any human being has ever made.
To my surprise, she stops at the last weapon in the world I’d have expected her to pick.
She lifts up the sixteen-pound, hickory-handled sledgehammer in both hands and asks Brohn what he thinks.
He taps various parts of the hammer with his finger, calling out their names as he goes. “Well, as you know, this particular tool has a face, a head, a cheek, and an eye.” He pats the end of the handle with his open palm. “And a pretty nice butt.”
Libra laughs, and Brohn adds, “I’d say that’s one handsome partner you have there.”
Libra beams at the silver-headed hammer and says she agrees.
Brohn says, “Here,” and hands her a leather shoulder harness with a holster to hold the hammer. Libra slips it over her head and rotates it around, with the hefty hammer slung guitar-style against her back.
She grins again, pats the leather strap across her body, and says, “Marvie!”
Sara, looking unusually mousy for her, slinks over to the table and makes a beeline for the throwing darts.
Without saying a word to Brohn or to any of us, she slots the two dozen or so silver spikes with their stiff tail flights into their bandolier and buckles it across her chest.
It’s an odd choice, considering a week ago, she had one of them lodged in each shoulder.
Or who knows? Maybe it makes perfect sense. The other day, when I told Kress about my time as a little girl sneaking in and out of the Tower so I could witness the death and destruction of my city, she didn’t seem surprised. Instead, her voice got soft, and she said, “We’re often attracted to the things that hurt us” and then went back to teaching me how to use my Emergent abilities to walk through walls.
(I still can’t do it very well, and I can’t do it all without Kress, but with her help, I’ve been getting better.)
As Sara steps to the side, Mattea slips her hands into the handles of the pair of Bear Claws. The pointed tips of the slightly hooked talons glitter glossy silver, practically begging for something—or someone—to tear into.
Ignacio picks up a pair of the shillelaghs, bounces one in each hand, and twirls them baton-style until he looks like a twin-propeller airplane.
“Perfect,” he beams, giving Brohn a cocky wink. “In case we need to invoke Shill
elagh Law.”
Brohn’s lips twitch into a grin, and he tells him, “Good choice.”
Libra nudges me with her elbow. “What about you, Branwynne?”
I love hand-to-hand combat. But I don’t mind having a gun on me when one is available. A bladed weapon like the Talons Kress uses is tempting.
But I also want to add distance to my arsenal.
There was one weapon we worked with—a pair actually—that felt…right in my hands. During our target practices, I felt like I couldn’t miss with them. When we sparred, they worked just as well for defense as they did for offense. They’re perfect for close-quarters combat. They fold up for easy carrying. Plus, I can throw them. And if I miss, which I don’t intend to do, they come back to me, boomerang style. (It’s a good way to get my hand cut off, which Mattea nearly did when she tried them out a few days ago, but my enhanced reflexes enable me to pluck them out of the air as easy-peasy as pulling petals off a daisy.) They’re light, practical, versatile, and strong.
Plus, they look totally bad-ass.
“These,” I say, picking up the pair of Serpent Blades.
I feel the weight and balance of the weapons. The curved blades glint frosty silver in the room’s crisp white light. The handgrip in the middle feels like it was made for my palms.
Brohn hands me a thin leather belt with sheaths on each side to hold the weapons.
I tell him, “Thanks.” He calls me “Miss Deadly” and asks me if I want him to set me up for some private lessons with Kella, our resident, deadeye sharpshooter.
I tell him, “Frack yeah!” and slip my new holster over my hips.
Meanwhile, Arlo drags his fingers along the rest of the weapons and tools in the rack and then along the bigger ones hanging on the wall. He stops at a long-handled scythe, which he takes down gingerly with both hands. With the weapon in hand, his hood up, and his face encased in shadow, he looks like a seventeen-year-old Grim Reaper.
Sara points this out, and Mattea slings her arm around Arlo and agrees. “Cutest specter of death I’ve ever seen!” she laughs.