Havemercy (17 page)

Also, he was going to kill me.

Whether he was going to do it on purpose or whether he was simply going to get a bit overzealous while torturing me, it didn’t really matter. These were trifling details. The end result remained the same, no matter how I measured the contributing factors.

I wasn’t ever going to sleep again—at least, not if I could absolutely help it.

Luckily, the first day I had slated for no more than observation, and so I sat upon my couch and watched as each man filtered out separately, went about his business separately, left separately, and returned separately, interacting now and then to tell a joke, or pick a fight about boots left by the front door, or shout about how that had been Ace’s sandwich and not Ghislain’s, and what sort of rat bastard ate a sandwich without making it for himself first in any case, whether he thought it had been abandoned or not?

Now and then I took notes, though what I thought they’d accomplish I wasn’t sure. A few of the men were early risers, and a few of them hadn’t appeared even now that lunch was long since over. Thankfully, Rook was in the latter category; I hoped, privately and cruelly, that he would sleep all day, or perhaps be smothered with his pillow. The way he treated his fellow men was reprehensible, the way he treated women even more so. He was exactly the sort of man I’d always loathed, both during my time in Molly and during my years at Primary, then at the ’Versity.

“This is often what it’s like during the off-seasons,” said Balfour, obviously taking pity on me. If I looked as tired as I felt, it was no wonder. “May I?”

I gestured to the empty space beside me. “By all means,” I said.

“Though I don’t wish to get you in trouble with the other men.”

“In trouble?” Balfour looked at me quizzically.

“For fraternizing with the enemy,” I confided, leaning in close as Evariste and Compagnon passed through the room.

“Oh, no,” Balfour said, a little too quickly I thought, then flushed. “Well, actually, yes. But it’s not really important. Have you eaten? What are you writing down?”

“Nothing much,” I admitted. “On both counts. Only I thought that I might first—observe you in your . . . natural habitat. Undisturbed by my presence.”

“As if we’re zoo animals?” Balfour asked, but I saw his smile at the corner of his mouth and knew he was only teasing me. “We are zoo animals, some of us,” Balfour added, and I didn’t miss his pointed look down the hall, in the direction of Rook’s bunker.

“Well,” I replied noncommittally, “it’s not entirely for me to say.”

“Ah,” said Balfour. “Yes, I see. What have you found out thus far about our . . . natural habitat?”

“You never really talk to one another,” I pointed out. “I mean, I’ve seen you. You all know one another very well, but during the morning like this, there aren’t”—I struggled for a way to explain it properly—“aren’t any lines of communication open among you,” I finished lamely. “Does that make sense?”

“Some of us aren’t the sort who feel friendly in the morning,” Balfour tried to explain. “At night, it’s very different.”

“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t really see how such vastly incompatible men who refused to talk to one another beyond the occasional explosive argument or filthy joke could possibly work together in the air effectively enough to save all our lives from the Ke-Han hordes. Perhaps there was something I was missing, but I was rather dubious, from what I’d seen so far. “If you don’t mind my asking, what was the outcome with Merritt’s boots?”

“Oh, no one was hurt too badly,” said Balfour cheerfully. “But I do think Merritt is going to need a new pair.”

“Why’s that?”

“Ghislain dropped them out the window,” Balfour explained. “It was better than if Rook had done it, any case.”

“Oh?”

“Well, because Rook would have thrown them, you see, with Merritt in them,” Balfour finished. “No, all in all, I believe it was good Ghislain was the one who dealt with it first.”

“Ah,” I said, as though I understood, which I didn’t at all. The general meaning I did take, though, was that not all the airmen were as unnecessarily cruel as Rook. They were products of the same system, perhaps—and therefore spent some time interacting with no more social grace than the zoo animals Balfour had suggested—but they were different, still. Better somehow, as though in them there was still the basic human instinct of decency, long buried perhaps, but in existence nonetheless. Nothing I had seen from Airman Rook gave me any indication that he had a soul, let alone any sense of human decency.

Still, this indicated some sort of a system among the men, under which it was recognized that it was better to have some men deal with certain problems than others. It was a start, at least, and pointed toward what knowledge they might have as to each member’s strengths and weaknesses.

I realized then that I’d been writing instead of speaking, and that Balfour was patiently waiting for me to finish.

“At the ’Versity, we learn to write things down as we’re thinking them because you never know what you might forget or what might end up as important later,” I explained.

Balfour nodded, then seemed to hesitate over something. “I’d find a safe place to put those notes,” he said at last.

My dismay must have shown on my face, for he quickly smiled, reassuring and nervous at once.

“Not that I think—Not that there’s any reason for you to be paranoid, certainly,” he went on, in a tone telling me that paranoia would be a very wise choice at this juncture, trapped in the jaws of the dragon as I was. “It’s only, if they’re important to you, you should keep them safe.”

That night, I began writing double copies of everything. This served a dual purpose in that it also kept me awake much more effectively than I’d expected. The gentle hum of the strip lighting even became somehow comforting, though I jumped much more easily than I’d have liked to admit when Luvander kicked down the door to the common room, announcing he was going to bed. He didn’t look at me as he passed my couch, where I’d set my cases one on top of the other that I might use them as a makeshift desk.

The building was suddenly much noisier with the door open.

I hadn’t realized quite how much sound was blocked by those particular doors, nor had I really even given it much thought, though of course any man who’d met the airmen would have certainly thought to provide them with as much insulation as possible. I didn’t want to think of what they’d have done to one another in the ’Versity, where the walls were thin as paper and everyone observed a strict noise curfew so as not to curtail studying.

Balfour had said things were different at night, and indeed they seemed so. The sound of a piano floated down the hallway, scattered and abstract as though it were a tune someone was picking out of his very own head, which explained why I didn’t recognize it. Over the music were layered voices: the airmen, in what seemed to be either fourteen different conversations, or one very large and tenuous argument. Every now and then, the voices would be punctuated by a bout of raucous laughter, and someone called something to do with points, which I understood to mean they were playing some sort of game.

More than anything—for the sake of completeness and my notes—I wished there were some way to observe them in this state, obviously much closer than the separate irritability of the morning. I wasn’t foolish enough to think, however, that my presence would be welcomed, or even tolerated, and I had no more of a mind to invite a show of open hostility than I did to tear up my notes and sleep like a baby.

I stayed where I was, on the couch as if rooted there, though my progress in transcribing went much more slowly with the noise. Once or twice I thought I heard a feminine voice, high and tittering along with the rest, for of course there were no rules regarding a female presence in the Airman. I wondered if any of the ladies present that night was the owner of the undergarments I’d nearly tripped over my first day. I wondered how any woman could come here and not be disgusted by the utter male essence of the place, and how they didn’t feel, upon entering, like foreigners on the brink of some strange and distant land of squalor.

Either they were exceedingly silly, or I was missing something—some small and hidden quality that made the airmen appealing.

At that moment, a voice unmistakable in its arrogance crowed victoriously above the rest. “Winner takes the redhead!”

The common room erupted in noise, booted feet stamping the floor, hands slapping the walls or the tables, or any surface they could reach by the sound of things.

I finished my notes, final punctuation jabbed with slightly more emphasis than was needed. The first set I folded, placed them inside a notebook so that they wouldn’t crease. The second set I slipped into an opening I’d sliced into the lining of my very first suitcase, which I’d come into possession of when I’d still been living in Molly. A safe hiding place could mean the difference between whether you ate or not the next day. I didn’t know how effective the tricks would be, but the best experiment was a live one, I felt.

Then, despite my best efforts and the noise emanating from the common room, I eventually drifted into a restless sleep.

When I awoke, my first set of notes had been transformed into a rather generous pair of papier-mâché breasts affixed to my chest. The breasts themselves proved rather difficult to remove, the properties of flourplaster not being adapted for the curious particularities of human skin. The sound of giggling haunted me all morning.

“You’ve got to sign up in advance for a shower,” Ghislain pointed out when I exited, feeling soggy and humiliated.

They’d told me and I’d completely forgotten, I realized with a pang of shame. There was no point in doing this at all if I wasn’t going to do it right, or if I was going to lose what little regard they held for me by making them wait for showers.

“My apologies,” I said, in what I hoped was a tone that conveyed my sincerity. Ghislain was very large and seemed quite clever enough that he could kill me and have it look an accident. “I hope you’ve not been waiting long.”

He shrugged broad shoulders before he smiled with a flash of white teeth, bright and mocking. “I thought they looked rather nice on you,” he said.

The next morning when I awoke, my hand felt strange, and a little wet. Following Balfour’s advice however, did not lend me that much help, as further examination found a large pan of what might conceivably have started out as warm water at my bedside—well, couchside—and my hand submersed in it.

“Oh no,” I said, quiet and desperate for this all to be a dream. Surely it was a dream, and grown men did not indulge in this circus-ring behavior. “No, no, no.”

A crack of laughter, sharp like a whip, snapped past my head from above. If this were truly a nightmare, it was doing its job with marvelous attention to detail.

“He’s pissed himself.” Rook stood over the couch, eyes glinting with such a malicious amusement that I had to look away. “He’s not even twelve; he’s a baby.”

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the unenviable position of having a long discussion with Chief Sergeant Adamo regarding the laundry services for the Airman, what constituted a true “emergency,” and no, I could not have my own room with a door that locked.

“Fourteen rooms, fourteen men,” Adamo said gruffly, in a tone that brooked no argument.

For the sake of my dignity, I had to try anyway. “Well, well what about the common room? That private one. It’s got a locking door on it.”

He leaned forward, raised one thick eyebrow. “If you want to be the one to tell the men what’s the reason they can’t bring their entertainment home with them. Of course, if it were me, I’d consider the fact that might make them mad enough to take the whole door down.”

“Ah,” I said weakly. I hadn’t considered that.

“Door won’t stop them,” he continued. From his tone alone, I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to be kind, merely informative, or whether he was trying to scare me. “Not if they’ve really got a mind for doing whatever they’ve got into their heads.”

“I see. Yes.” I was starting to get a clearer picture of what my stay in the Airman would be like, and the picture had very bleak colors.

“Nothing,” Adamo said finally, “stops them. Not in the air, not on the ground. Best to remember it.”

I nodded, eager to excuse myself from the conversation. It was a piece of information I would have to remember, write down, even as I wanted to protest that I was not a Ke-Han campaign, that such blind hammering force was not acceptable with civilians as it was with the Ke-Han warriors.

The problem with the airmen, I noted, seated in a welter of blankets on the floor while the couch was out being cleaned, seemed to be simply that they were men who had been trained in a specialized kind of behavior, for a specialized kind of environment, and no one had thought to mention that such behavior was unacceptable outside the bounds of that environment itself. It was a common enough phenomenon among soldiers returning from the war, or prisoners released from long captivity.

I began to realize the extent of what I’d been charged with—the rehabilitation of a group of men who had no idea they were in need of rehabilitation at all. As I couldn’t very well quit, I had two options open to me. Either I’d soon be very successful, lauded throughout the city as a man who’d accomplished the unprecedented, or I’d soon be dead, from my own shame or something more immediately physical. And then it wouldn’t matter.

When I woke up on the fifth day, they’d stolen my clothes and put them under the showers.

On the sixth day, there were beetles.

It was maddening to catch these glimpses—cruel and detrimental to me as they were—because in some ways they were picture-perfect examples of what I’d so desperately sought after: an indication that these men could work together as a seamless team to accomplish a common goal. Of course, the common goal of beetles in my hair was considerably less exemplary than, say, saving the city from the invading Ke-Han, but in some things it was just as important to examine the abstracts as it was to accustom oneself to the specifics.