CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ROYSTON

I didn’t know how long I’d been there, but at least I did recognize where I was: inside the Basquiat, her golden dome arced and splendid above me, and I wasn’t alone. All around me were the refugees of the epidemic—faces I recognized and faces I did not, all in various stages of misery.

At times I was worse than others, but during periods when my fever was less pronounced, I could piece together something of what I’d been told and what I’d come to understand on my own. Somehow—and even suffering as I was, I knew this was the key—the Well had been poisoned. We were all afflicted by it, every last one of us, from those with the purest Talent in their veins to the most bastardized; from Berhane and Daguerre and even Caius himself to Amer from the Bacque, who dealt in tricks and potions (all performed for a fee) at the farthest end of the Crescents.

It was something akin to a nightmare.

Such a disease was unprecedented. It undid us from the inside out, working first at the core of our Talents, until we could no longer hear the sound of it in our own bodies. Then, as Talent and blood were bound so inextricably together, it began to work as any disease on what held us together as men and women, raging through us as swiftly as any plague that had ever struck at the heart of the city.

During my stay—however long it was—I know that there were some who died, though when I asked who they were, no one would answer me.

I had to leave; I had to be somewhere quiet, where the punctuation of Daguerre’s moans would no longer shatter my thoughts like so much glass, and I could think this through to the end. There was something we were all missing—I refused to die—but Daguerre was always moaning, and Marcelline weeping against her pillow, and there were two young girls who curled together and shook so violently that their cot rattled against the marble floor. Because we were underneath the golden dome, everything was louder than it would have been in another room—louder and more pronounced, every noise we made echoing across this grand triumph of architecture above us. I could no more think than I could stand.

I tried to devise a system of counting the hours, counting the days—I tried to ask an attendant how long it had been since I was brought to this place—but for all I knew it could have been minutes or it could have been weeks. Time had become interminable, untrustworthy. I thought I would go mad.

And then Hal came to me.

At first I thought I was imagining things, hallucinating his face above my bed. It could have been the fever reaching an advanced stage, the signal that my end was nearer than I wished to admit. But when he sat upon the edge of my cot, it shifted, and his hands were cool upon my brow, his fingers brushing through my hair.

“Hal,” I said.

His eyes were red, as though he’d been crying. “They aren’t letting anyone in,” he said, soft and close as though it had been a year, and not weeks or days at all.

If I’d been able, I would have got up immediately to find out who was in charge that I might dispense with them in an appropriate fashion. Whatever the Esar was thinking, it was madness to hold us all here in one place without any indication as to when this policy would cease. Surely it was recipe for a riot. I couldn’t imagine what the Esar thought he would accomplish by handling things in this fashion.

I fought to sit up. My motor skills were infuriatingly limited, but Hal had been crying. “It isn’t as bad as it may seem,” I said, which apparently was not at all the right thing to say, for as soon as I spoke, Hal’s shaky composure crumbled as swiftly as the blue rock of the Cobalts and he buried his face, wet with weeping, against my neck. His nose was very cold. “Hal,” I said again, whereupon he made a high, keening sound in the back of his throat, like someone at the very end of his resolve. I put my arms about him instead and said nothing at all. I wished then that I’d not been so unrelentingly stubborn as to set what rules I had made for us in the carriage. There were so many opportunities lost to us, the awkwardness of the night after the ball, when Hal had started up the stairs to the bedroom after me, and countless days when I found my favorite chair made just a little too small by Hal’s joining me in it.

He’d as good as made his decision, and I had been too blind to acknowledge it, too caught up in suspicion and headaches. And now that I knew it, I could barely summon the strength to lift my arms around him. It was a cruel joke of some kind or another, but I would not give in to regret just yet.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” he mumbled, repeating the words as though they were a poison that needed to be bled from the hurt he’d received by not being able to see me, of all things. Yet not even the most selfish part of me could be touched at the effect my departure had had on him, for it went against everything I held dear to know that Hal should ever be hurt unnecessarily.

I did feel a curious sort of pride, though, mingled with my sympathy and frustration at the situation. Hal had found some way in to see me, and judging by the number of invalids, there were many more people yet waiting for news. I’d known Hal was clever, and I’d known he’d be suited to the city despite his misgivings. To me, this was irrefutable proof that my beliefs hadn’t been unfounded, nor clouded by whatever other feelings I harbored for him.

“Well, it isn’t exactly a very pleasant place to be,” I said, curling my fingers in his hair even as I spoke. He fit so neatly against me that it made my chest tighten for a moment, and I found it difficult to breathe. I’d never experienced such a symptom previously with the illness that had so thoroughly possessed me, so I had to assume it was Hal who caused it—a symptom of that other, quieter illness, which had nevertheless snatched my senses away as completely as the fever.

“Royston,” Hal said against my neck, like a plea or a prayer and not at all like my name.

I could have told him, “I believe the Well’s been poisoned and us along with it,” or, “You should leave, before anyone tries to make you, and I am forced to remonstrate with them,” but I paused for too long, and the fleeting urge to be sensible withered and dropped from my mind like old fruit.

Instead, I kissed the top of his head, breathing in the familiar soap-smelling cleanness of him. It soothed me in a deep and satisfying way, a cool sensation filtering all the way down to my core and cutting right through the heat in my fevered brain. “It’s all right,” I said, not entirely sure that it was. Yet I felt very much as though it might be, it could be, which was more hope than I’d possessed in all the time that had passed since being brought here. “Sometime soon you shall have to tell me the story of your daring break-in. I’m sure with your aptitude, it was much like something out of a roman.”

He laughed at that, quiet and diffident, and finally lifted his face to mine.

“I’m glad you came,” I said at last, because it was true, even if some part of me couldn’t bear to be seen in such a weakened state. It was the more frivolous side of me, vain and foolish, and I paid it little heed. There was no place for such preening idiocy in this room full of killing fever.

“You’re sick,” Hal said, carrying on even as his voice snagged on something low and unhappy. “That’s what they told me. Everyone here is sick.”

“Something like that,” I said, then, because I had resolved to be as honest with Hal as I possibly could, I continued. “I believe—though it is my own personal speculation, and nothing more—that what has struck us has something to do with the Well.”

I saw him struggle to understand, or perhaps to prioritize what I was telling him over his own feelings, which were plain as invitation on his face. “Then it’s something to do with the magic,” he said at last. “As a whole, and not just magicians?”

“I suppose it is,” I said after a moment, though admittedly I hadn’t been thinking of it in terms beyond my knowledge of what the poison was doing to me and my fellows, burning us from the inside out. In some ways, my worldview had shrunk to this room of the Basquiat, cramped and close with friends and strangers alike, and though I’d thought often of Hal, it was almost as though I’d lost the ability to think beyond the confines of it.

I supposed it was my own selfishness come full circle again that I could think of nothing but the ways in which a situation affected me and my immediate surroundings.

“Then it’s true what the airmen were talking of,” Hal said, then shook his head slightly, as though he’d caught himself in a misstep. “They’re how I got in, the Dragon Corps and their—Well, Thom. His name is Thom.”

The student Marius had often spoken of with the kind of pride reserved for a father had been named Thom, I thought, my fevered mind making the connection unbidden. Marius was here the same as I was, though he hadn’t opened his eyes since the room had been flooded with sunlight this morning.

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said very slowly, both out of a desire to be very clear and because my head felt inconveniently fogged all of a sudden, “that you went to the Dragon Corps first to find a way into the Basquiat?”

“Well, no,” answered Hal, flushing to the tips of his ears. “Thom found me waiting on the steps here, and he thought it might be a good idea—more helpful—to get the airmen involved, because the Esar was more likely to listen to them. And they—” He froze, looking around us suddenly as though expecting to see every face turned with interest toward our conversation. Finding no interest, he nevertheless leaned close, breath warm against my ear. “They’re worried because there’s something wrong with the dragons, do you see? Because of the magic in them as well. They aren’t flying properly—your friend, the Chief Sergeant, he said he refused to let them fly under the circumstances, that the dragons had become too unpredictable.”

“Bastion,” I swore, loudly enough that Marcelline looked over at me in surprise. She was drawn and pale, but at that moment I could think of nothing but my own blind stupidity, that I could ever have thought something as deadly as this could be affecting only the magicians who walked and breathed, and not the creations into which they poured their Talents. I’d never worked on a dragon myself—it was too specialized an endeavor—but I’d known some of the men who had, old and powerful. Such men had been some of the very first to fall ill. None of them had made the immediate connection either, which hardly comforted me, as some of those men were now dead.

I had to take control of my thoughts. I recalled the very earliest days of harnessing my Talent, all the while doing my best to ignore the sickening vacuum that existed now in its place. Working against the cluttered state of my mind was a task I could accomplish: I simply needed to concentrate. Hal’s hands were on my shoulders, kneading with absent, fretful motions. I closed my eyes, allowing the reality of his presence to calm me as it always did.

“In any case, I suppose what we did was storm the palace,” Hal went on, still so close that I couldn’t see his face. I thought perhaps that I’d misheard him, or that this was another trick of the fever turning words into what they weren’t, for if I knew anything I surely knew Hal, and the idea of his storming anything, let alone a palace, was so out of the realm of possibility that I felt it must be my delirium. How much could have happened since I’d been brought here that such a thing could change?

“Pardon?” I asked finally.

“Well, it wasn’t a real storming, not entirely, because the Esar let us in, but I got the feeling that we’d have gone even if he hadn’t. They were that serious about it. And I can’t think of much that would have stopped them.” I could feel his skin growing hot against my cheek, blushing at what he’d done or what he’d been caught up in by outside forces.

“Hal,” I said, and traced my knuckles down the curved length of his spine. I felt a smile playing about my lips; it was the first I’d worn in days. “You haven’t been here a month and you’re already storming the palace?”

He drew back, eyes bright with something that stood out starkly against my bleak surroundings of illness and misery, and it filled me like a cup to the brim. “I was worried about you,” he said.

I kissed him.

I might have blamed it on the fever, though I felt considerably more lucid now than I had since the onset in the Cobalts. And I might have blamed it on what Hal had done, for certainly the devotion apparent in it was a gesture that would touch even the most callous of hearts. Yet more than that—and I knew it as surely as I had felt my Talent drained away—was the fact that I loved him, and that people were dying, and though there were things I regretted, I wouldn’t allow Hal to become one of them.

His hands went still against my shoulders, then quickly slipped up behind my head, as if he were afraid I’d change my mind too soon and he’d miss his chance. I held him close, hands low to where his back narrowed, hoping to soothe his fears.

I knew it was foolish. If I could have chosen, I certainly wouldn’t have opted for a setting such as this, surrounded by the sick and likely dying, myself so infuriatingly weak that it was all I could do to go on holding Hal when he pressed close to me.

The kiss was too eager, Hal’s inexperience too evident, and my fever cut it short before its time. Yet when it ended, Hal’s hands were curled tight at the back of my collar, and his shirt bunched up underneath my own hands, and there was no one here to tell us to stop.

We were, after all, very far from the countryside.

He said something so quiet that I almost missed it, but then he said it again and it was my name, broken and soft and nearly unfamiliar.

His fingers trembled; I could feel them against my cheek as he stroked the overgrown roughness at my jaw, the gray at my temple.

“Hal,” I whispered against his mouth, and he shivered as though a current had passed between us.

“Find somewhere private and leave us in peace,” Alcibiades muttered from a cot somewhere to my left. Hal colored all at once—I could feel it as well as I could see it—and we parted, though I promised myself that one day I’d repay Alcibiades for the sentiment. Yet as embarrassed as I was, I knew he was right. “Hal,” I said, carefully. “This isn’t—”

“I know,” he agreed, though he refused to relinquish his part in our embrace and, as I admit it was the only thing that presently held me up, I was grateful he insisted upon being so tenacious. “I’m so glad. I thought, when I heard from the Esar that the magicians—”

“I don’t intend to die,” I told him firmly. “And as you can see, I am certainly not yet dead.”

He nodded mutely, and I saw him struggle visibly with the worry that plagued him until I wished there were anything at all I could do to reassure him. There was however nothing but dissembling and false promises, and I refused to lie to Hal.

“When this is over,” I said, avoiding the terrible word if, “I hope you’ll allow me to kiss you properly, in a place that is neither a carriage nor a sickbed.”

He flushed and bowed his head. “Royston,” he said, “I don’t think the Esar knows what to do.”

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t think he does either.”

“Then,” Hal asked, “then what are we to do?”

For the moment, all I could think was that I wanted to lie down and surrender—if only for a little while—to sleep. I fought the urge, however tempting, knotting my fingers in the sleeves of Hal’s shirt to keep myself upright. “We must do what only we can do,” I replied, taking my time with the words; it was the only way I knew to keep them crisp and certain and indeed anything other than wearily slurred. “We must put our minds to this. I don’t suppose we might call a man to fetch some of my books?”

Hal almost laughed at that, but there was something tearful behind the sound. “Between us both,” he promised, “we’ll remember.”

It wasn’t the most original plan I’d ever come up with, but it was the only one we had.

“Come,” I said, “let’s see if we can’t arrange these pillows more comfortably.”

In the bed next to mine, Alcibiades coughed something that sounded as if it might be derogatory. Let him scoff, I told myself; I was determined to save his life, along with mine, before the Ke-Han descended upon us all and none of our grand gestures in the hot, dark room mattered any longer to anyone.

 

THOM

It was quiet in the Airman, the sort of quiet I imagined descended upon soldiers before a battle, or upon the desert before a sandstorm. It was an unnatural, tentative quiet, and there was nothing in it I could use to distract myself from how badly my hands were shaking.

“Fucking stop that,” Rook said. “You’re like as not to make somebody nervous if you keep on fucking doing that.”

There was no one in the common room but him and me. Earlier, Evariste had passed through once on his way to make coffee, then once on his way back with a cup in his hand and the smell of the burnt grounds thick on the air. Other than that, we were completely alone. I didn’t think that Rook was capable of being nervous—I believe he’d forgotten how it was to feel anything of the sort—but nevertheless I clasped my hands together and put them between my knees.

There was the silence again.

It was better to know our fate, I was certain, than to be acutely, painfully unaware. Knowledge was the key; whether it was a knowledge you’d been seeking or something else entirely, it made no difference. You had to work with what knowledge you were given. Only if you weren’t given anything, you had to wait—and the waiting was interminable.

I flexed my hands between the bony press of my knees. I reminded myself of what we’d accomplished that afternoon and kept my own private relief as a small flame against the darkness. At least Rook and the other airmen wouldn’t be flying unarmed with the truth about their dragons. It was cold comfort, but it was nevertheless something.

“So,” Rook said, “what do you know about the magicians, anyway? I mean, that fucking Well. What do you know about it?”

The question nearly startled a sound out of me, and for a moment I found myself so distracted by my own tangled thoughts I didn’t even answer him. What I knew about the magicians was limited by my area of studies, but I knew magicians in particular, Marius being the most immediate example, and the handful of professors I’d had who’d been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with Talents of their own. I wondered where Marius was now; I could have used his guidance.

“Not very much,” I admitted.

“Fuck,” Rook said, but there was less malevolence in it than usual. “I thought you knew everything, ’Versity boy.”

I rubbed wearily at my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “well. Not everything.”

Rook gave me a look that seemed to intimate I’d suddenly grown a pair of horns, or perhaps a tail. “Don’t start gettin’ women’s moods on me,” Rook said. “I’ve got enough fucking trouble right now without it being your time of the month.”

“Hardly,” I said. “I’m simply feeling somewhat sobered by the day’s events.”

“Simply feeling somewhat sobered by the day’s events,” Rook parroted back at me, giving each word a sneer. There was that malevolence I’d been missing. I’d spoken too soon about the change I’d imagined in him. It seemed I was much better at imagining changes than I was at effecting them. “Bastion. You ever listen to yourself? It’s like you really are useless.”

I recalled my earlier triumph with Hal, and felt heartened, however momentarily. “Not entirely that, either,” I said.

“No,” Rook agreed, throwing me off somewhat. “Guess not, though it sure took you long enough to make yourself useful.” He chose that moment to stop pacing the length of the common room and sit down hard next to me on the opposite end of the couch, crossing his legs wide, and moving lazy as a cat. There was a certain tension beneath his movements, though, noticeable only when he came close, and even then it was rare. In some ways though, I had been training myself to do exactly that, notice the subtle changes, the slight variations in his nonchalance. I was only just now growing aware of how dedicated I was to the study of him, my long-lost brother.

It was a troublesome propensity of mine, and one I had no right to cultivate under these peculiar circumstances. I felt childish, and exhausted with the day’s efforts. I wanted to curl up on my couch and go straight to sleep, but to do that would have meant asking Rook to leave, and I could no more command him than I could th’Esar himself.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my forehead instead, staving off the advent of a headache. “I barely studied the Well,” I said softly. “I wish now that I had, but it never interested me.”

“Idiot,” Rook said.

“Indeed,” I replied.

“S’not what I’d’ve studied,” he added, after a pause. “If I’d ever lost my fucking mind and decided school was what I wanted to do with most of my life.”

“You would have done quite well,” I told him. If not for his cleverness, I added to myself, then certainly for his ability to intimidate others into giving him exactly what he wanted.

“Fucking right I would’ve,” he said. “But I chose Have. Shit.” He tore off and shook his head, his face angry and harsh in the fading sunlight, his blue eyes narrowed and his wide mouth tight. All his features, I decided then, seemed each to be taken from many different men’s faces; they were a strange and startling assortment, and the ferocity behind his every expression was what made him so painfully handsome.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as if I were talking to John and not Rook. “For your dragon, that is. It may be that th’Esar and those close to him will divine a solution—”

“Or it may be that th’Esar and those close to him may never divine a way to unstick their heads from being shoved so far up their own rumps they can barely see the light of day,” Rook offered.

“That,” I agreed, “is also a possibility.”

“You did a pretty decent job in there,” he said then, as though every word of it were painful to him. “Not like you taught us a fucking thing, but you were all right.”

I felt a strange suffusion of warmth—pleasure, I supposed, at being complimented as though I were a stray dog who’d done right for the first time in his flea-ridden existence. I couldn’t help my starved gratitude from showing plainly on my face; as soon as Rook saw it his mouth curled down at the corners and he looked sharply away.

“Th’Esar—the Esar—had no right to keep what he knew from you,” I said, choosing my words with the utmost care. “He might have killed all of you for pride. It is treason to say so, but he has behaved more like a fool than a leader.”

“If he’s fucked my girl,” Rook said, “I’ll pay him back for it.”

“That mightn’t be too wise,” I cautioned.

“You’re not my fucking mother,” Rook said, “so don’t act like you are.”

I turned away from him, feeling the blow more deeply for the hope he’d given me. Perhaps that had been his plan all along. Even with the feverishness with which I applied myself to studying him, I could no more predict him than I could predict the outcome of this war. But the hurt and my own shame coursed through me all the same, hot chasing cold in my blood. I had no room to judge him, nor room to love him, either.

I bowed my head.

That was when he took my chin in his hand, simple as reaching across the table for a slice of toast at lunch, and looked at me, really looked, while I fought the urge to run as far and fast as I could in the other direction. He was looking at my eyes. Something turned over in my stomach, uncomfortable and real, like the first moment of falling or the first time he’d taken a dive on Havemercy when I was up in the air with him. He let his hand drop after a moment, but he went on looking like I was a puzzle, something he couldn’t quite figure out. I couldn’t find it in my heart to drop my gaze a second time. I was fixed like an insect, caught in a box of my own making. Pinned. Trapped.

“Don’t fucking know why you did it,” he said. “Don’t even know if it’ll help.”

I realized all at once this was his way of thanking me, whether he acknowledged it or not. My heart turned to glass in my chest, and I knew that at its next beat it was bound to shatter.

“John,” I said.

His face changed in an instant, more quickly than the turns he’d taken on Havemercy. There were shards of glass in my veins, and he shoved me away from him.

“What the fuck did you just call me?” he said. His voice was low and deceptively smooth; I felt certain it would whip around, fast as a dragon’s tail, to strike me the moment my back was turned.

“John,” I said, the words drawn out of me by some force too powerful for me to stop, too powerful for me to name. I suppose it was the truth at last, at the wrong moment, at the most ruinous one. This was disaster, rolling like an avalanche. I couldn’t stop speaking. “Your name is John—was John—you told me to stay where I was, and I—”

“Who put you up to this?” Rook said. “Who fucking told you to say that?”

They weren’t questions; they were too terrifying to be questions. I knew he’d beat the answers out of me as soon as demand them, but I could admit no feeling that would allow me to be afraid of him.

“I’m your brother,” I said.

“Fuck you,” said Rook. “My brother’s dead.”

“I went to live with the whores on Tuesday Street,” I said, frozen helpless in place for all I couldn’t keep my tongue still. “They took me in, they called me Thom. I . . . there was a man; he told me you were dead. I thought that you must have gone back inside to look for me, and that was why—”

“Shut up,” he said.

I wished that I could.

“I never thought I’d see you again.” It wasn’t the way I’d meant to do it. In fact it went against everything I’d planned, right down to my best of intentions in the very beginning. It was too late now, too late to cushion the blow for him as I’d wished it could have been for me.

He lunged forward then, and I thought he was going to hit me. Of course, he had every right to do so if he wished, as I’d hurt him in far worse ways. No matter what faults Rook possessed—and they were many; I was not so blinded by my guilt to believe otherwise—I knew that what I’d done was worse. I’d betrayed him; he was my brother and for a long time—such a long time—I’d known it.

Instead, he only took my face in one hand again, and pushed my hair back at the right temple where it hid a small white scar, a relic of running too fast on legs too short when I’d been younger and heedless of anyone’s remonstrations to be careful.

“You were always fucking running near the stairs,” he said at last. Something squeezed tight in my chest, so that I had to exhale a nervous sound of release.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, and he dropped his hands from me as quickly as he’d moved before, though there wasn’t any real urgency behind his movements. Rather, it was more as if he was so disgusted that I didn’t matter to him one way or the other and especially not because I had some silly scar proving we shared the same blood.

He didn’t say anything after that, only sat still and stony as a mountain. My hands were starting to hurt, and I realized I’d been squeezing them between my knees since he’d told me to do something about their shaking. I felt a sudden and desperate wish for things to go back to the way they’d been, even before knowing I had a brother, because if I hadn’t known, then I wouldn’t ever have hurt him in this fashion. Even if all the parts of him that could hurt had disappeared along with the boy who had been John, that knowledge didn’t preclude my own guilt, and it certainly didn’t change what I’d done to him.

I put my head in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said again, though it sounded tinny and meaningless even to my own ears. “I meant to tell you sooner.”

I felt a change come over the room, in the small space between us, as though I’d somehow gleaned the same ability the airmen boasted, to be able to taste danger in the air or smell the stronger emotions. My mouth was impossibly dry.

“How long,” he said, calmer than I’d ever heard him and all the more terrifying because of it, “have you known?” He was adding up the details in his head, searching for the possible moment of revelation; his eyes held none of the callous distance to which I’d grown accustomed, but they were focused on the wall behind me, and not my face. Even then I wished he’d look at me, though the desire spoke only to the depths of a place in me I wished never to accept as mine.

I should have been straightforward from the start. Or, barring that, I should have gone on lying. Anything at all seemed better than this: this awful careening path I’d taken that tore up everything I’d carefully sown.

“Since you told me,” I whispered, as though by softening my voice I could somehow soften the impact of the blow. “That night, when you were hurt, and I—I’m Hilary.” For all my restraint and the careful compartments in which I’d tried to keep my feelings, I couldn’t prevent the desperation from crawling into my voice.

I didn’t deserve to ask anything of Rook, and I wanted everything from him. It had been the same when we were boys, I thought. A familiarity, deep and irrational as blood, and I wanted to tear at my hair for what it had done to me. What I had done to him in return. John, Rook. My own brother, who was meant to make everything right.

He moved at that last and I flinched, though there was no need. He didn’t even look at me. I began to think it might have been better if he had struck me, or at least reacted in some way that might have alleviated my guilt, however briefly. Instead, he got up, unfolding his legs very slowly, but with no ambiguity that could leave anyone to mistake it for hesitance. No, it was a deliberate pulling away, piece by piece, to sever all ties, and I felt it with a wrench, as though I’d somehow lost something more than a brother whom I’d never truly had to begin with. It was worse than being struck, worse than my bones breaking. But Rook, of course, was clever enough to know that.

I watched him go, helpless, with no right to call him back and no reason to believe his reluctance to do violence went beyond this silent exit. If I tried to stop him, I thought, it would most certainly push him into something regrettable.

He paused in the doorway, so fierce and unhappy that I felt it underneath my skin. How my brother had come to be such a person with his wild braids and quick jeering I couldn’t understand. Whenever I studied his face I found not even a hint of the John I remembered. Of course, twenty-one years was a very long time, and perhaps the things I remembered were remembered all wrong. Perhaps in my brother had always been this man, just as in me there had always been someone who would grow up to develop the ability to manipulate others and a questionable code of what was right and wrong.

“You don’t talk to me,” said Rook, and for one wild moment I thought it was a complaint before the honest hand of reality came up to slap me in the face. This was the way things would be from now on. Our new rules, just when I’d made peace and felt comfortable enough to leave a handful of the old ones by the wayside. “I don’t talk to you, and this? It never happened. Far as I’m concerned, my brother died when he was three. You go long enough believing something like that’s true, then it becomes true, you see what I’m saying?”

I didn’t. I couldn’t. After all, I’d spent my whole life believing him to be dead, only to have it proved wrong, and the contradiction hadn’t made me any less glad to discover him alive and—in most ways—well.

“It isn’t true, though,” I said, unable to keep from pushing my luck, as though I was compelled by some greater force to see this to its bitter conclusion with no holds barred, nothing held back. “You can’t just—We are brothers.”

“I think it’s a little rich, gettin’ a lecture from you on what a man can and can’t do to his own brother,” said Rook flatly. There was no malice, or spite, or even the rare tolerance I’d come to cherish in his voice. There was only nothing, empty and clean the way I imagined his chest to be, a hollow echoing where his heart should be.

“My brother is dead,” said Rook again, as though I hadn’t heard him properly in the first place. I half expected him to follow up the statement with a threat detailing what would happen to me if I brought it up again, or at the very least something to forbid my coming near him in the future, but he merely turned away from me and walked out the door as though I’d ceased to exist altogether.

After that, I didn’t see him at all. When I mentioned it as casually as I could to Adamo, he said that Rook had signed up for all the extra shifts he could to give th’Esar the time he needed to work things out.

I tried to slide a wall of glass between my thoughts and my heart, just as my brother had done for some reason I hadn’t understood, and now would never know. With him flying the way he was, and under such dire conditions, it seemed likely I should prepare myself for the possibility that I might never see him again.

While this wasn’t the worst I’d ever felt, it was certainly close.

It seemed that in the second meeting th’Esar had called, some manner of tentative truce had been called between him and the Chief Sergeant. The solution wasn’t an ideal one by all means, but the way Adamo had explained it sounded as though what they’d agreed upon was a kind of unofficial system of volunteering, the way the crush shifts worked only now it was every shift, and anyone who thought their dragon was good enough to fly that night could sign up and batter back the Ke-Han to the best of his abilities.

Much as I hated to admit it—and I did hate it these days though I’d always considered myself a loyal citizen—th’Esar was a shrewd thinker. In a group such as the Dragon Corps, tightly knit and yet infused with a sense of honor and pride that would rival His Majesty’s, asking for volunteers was a clever system to employ. In some ways, it became a competition, indicating you were a coward if you didn’t volunteer straightaway. It was the same mentality that had kept them quiet about their dragons in the first place, and yet for once, I made no notes for my own private documentation.

If I were to be completely truthful, I’d have expected more of a split within the group, with the more pragmatic men electing to stay out of the mess entirely, at least until their dragons were rehabilitated, and the wilder risk-takers signing up for all the shifts. Instead, though there were certainly some who took longer to sign up, I found myself seeing everyone taking to the halls in much the same manner, soot-soaked and cutting in line for the shower, or falling asleep right in their chairs in the common room due to having been up all the previous night.

I asked Ghislain about it, as, beyond the vague sense of unease I got around him, he’d nevertheless struck me as one of the more sensible men bunking in the Airman.

“You never played sports as a kid, did you?” He tugged at the blackened towel around his neck, waiting outside the shower room.

I didn’t see what sports had to do with anything, and said so.

He only smiled, sharp and always startlingly bright. “Do anything as a team?”

“No. Well, study projects, sometimes. With a group,” I amended. The closest thing I’d had to a team, I supposed, had been the whores who’d taken me in, but that had all been very long ago, and anyway I didn’t think it was what Ghislain was talking about.

“Well,” he said, “and this is only my own way of thinking, mind, but when you’re doing something you love—really love—you can’t let the way others play the game get in the way of that, if you follow. It don’t matter if your coach is hassling you, or whether you don’t like how some of your teammates indulge in the sport. When you’re out there, you’ve got a goal to accomplish, and you can’t see to letting all that mishmash weigh you down.”

In some ways, I felt as though I would never stop learning the lesson. What I’d set out to accomplish with the Dragon Corps had been foolish beyond recourse. I would never understand them the way they understood one another. No matter which way I turned, it seemed that I was to be reminded of my failings as a teacher. And Rook’s conspicuous absence reminded me of my failings in all other areas of life.

The nights were the worst. I lay on my couch listening to the far-off sounds of explosions, imagined or real, and all that stood between the Ke-Han and Rook was a dragon who wasn’t even flying properly. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was I thought I stood to lose with Rook’s death; I’d lost him this time just as surely as I’d lost my brother in the fire twenty-one years ago. Yet every night I listened just the same, terrified that every explosion would be the last, or that I wouldn’t hear the telltale sound of boots in the hallway, denoting another night’s return, whole if not entirely safe.

I couldn’t have said why I indulged in such a torture night after night. It certainly wasn’t my business to look after Rook, and there was no reason now to wait up for him as there once had been. The only thing I could come up with, staring at the ceiling in the darkened common room while my brother raced off to risk his life or give th’Esar’s men more time to win the war, was that I had a duty, however misplaced, and that it was mine and no one else’s.

Perhaps I’d given up the right to look after Rook when I hadn’t called him brother straightaway, but if I didn’t do it, I didn’t know who would, and that thought kept me up much later than the explosions ever did.