Rations came out short at the sixth morning’s muster, and Drest chose that moment to make it public.
He had the crate open on the trestle and the crew in their rows, both suns already high enough to burn, and he counted the blocks out loud so nobody could miss the arithmetic.
Thirty men.
Twenty-two blocks.
He held the last one up between two fingers where everyone could see it.
“Eight short,” he said.
“Eight.
Again.” Nobody moved.
Kael stood in the third row with his boot slit open along the seam and his bad leg bearing about a third of him, and he watched the foreman’s free hand drift back to the baton before the man himself seemed to know it had.
“Now I’ve had a look at where they go.” Drest walked the front of the line.
“And they don’t go to the trading post, which is what you all think, and I’ll thank you to stop thinking it.
They go to the low drift.
They go to the men on half-shift who can’t clear tally, so those men can keep clearing nothing at all and stay on the crew list.
Somebody’s been carrying eight blocks a week down that shaft on his own back.” He stopped in front of Pell.
“Say it.” “It’s eight blocks,” Pell said.
“That’s not what I asked.” “It’s the only part that matters.
Sarn’s mother still gets a deduction slip and there’s no Sarn.
Eight blocks is nothing against that.” “It’s theft.” “It’s eight blocks off my own share and the shares of men who agreed to it, and you can check every tally I’ve ever signed.” Pell’s voice never went up.
“You want to write me off the list for it, write me off.
I’ve been expecting it two years.” “I’m not writing you off the list.” Drest took the baton off his hip.
“The list is the corporation’s.
This is mine.” Kael saw it coming a full second before the first swing and did nothing, because a full second is nothing, because he had a slit boot and a swollen leg and thirty men standing frozen either side of him and no plan at all.
The first blow took Pell across the ribs and folded him.
The second came down on the side of his skull and put him on his knees in the dirt.
He didn’t scream.
He didn’t beg.
He got one hand up, not to block it, to hold it off long enough to say something, and Drest hit him a third time through the hand and the eye behind it, and after that Pell wasn’t holding anything up.
Thirty men stood in their rows.
Not one of them moved, because five years of muster had trained the movement out of them, and Kael knew that, and understood it, and was standing exactly as still as the rest.
Six days ago that man had put a shoulder under Kael’s arm in a flooding drift and hauled him to the cage, and had asked for nothing, and had then told him to keep his mouth shut and his strangeness quiet, which was the closest thing to protection anyone had offered him in either life.
Kael had put that in the column of things to be repaid at a time of his choosing.
The column was open.
It was going to stay open now.
“He’s down,” somebody said, low, from the second row.
“Sir.
He’s down.” “I can see he’s down.” “That’s enough, then.” “I’ll say when it’s enough.” Then Pell stopped breathing in the dirt, and something behind Kael’s sternum that had been packing itself down for six days came loose all at once.
Not the cold stir.
The cold stir was nowhere in this.
This was hot, and it had been banking behind the same wall where he had put every single thing he’d swallowed since he woke inside a dead man, and it went through that wall without slowing down.
The air cracked.
Blue-white came off his right hand in a serpent with no sound at all, and it didn’t go where he pointed because he hadn’t pointed.
It went where the hate went.
⟦ASCENDANT⟧ ASCENT — EMBER I RESERVE — 3 / 40 DRAW — RAGE, UNAIMED SLIP.
THE ARC WENT WHERE THE ANGER WENT COST.
THREE DEAD UNINTENDED, THE RIGHT ARM BURNED WITNESS.
THIRTY, AND ONE WHO COUNTS Drest died on his feet.
The arc went in below the collarbone and out through the back of him and left a hole a fist would have fit inside, and he dropped beside Pell with a sound almost gentle for what it was.
The lightning didn’t stop there.
It branched.
Two tendrils, the spill of a thing that had spent its main weight and still had somewhere to go, and they took the two men standing nearest to Drest and put them down the same way.
One of them had been holding a ration block.
It was on the ground and still burning.
Three bodies.
One detonation.
Two of them had done nothing at all except stand in a line where a line was mandatory.
Kael’s arm was on fire.
Not the arc.
That was gone, spent, leaving the yard smelling of ozone and the dirt scorched outward in a wheel-spoke pattern from where he stood.
This was his own nerves, cooking under the skin from fingertips to elbow, the forearm already blistering along the exact road the thing had taken out of him.
He got his left hand around the sleeve and held it there and didn’t make a sound, and the not-making of it took more out of him than the standing did.
The yard was smoke and silence.
Thirty faces through it.
He knew what he had to say before he knew he was going to say it.
The strategist came back online first, ahead of the horror, and that was its own piece of information about what he had become.
Somebody at the end of the row started praying.
“It was the charge,” Kael said.
Loud, flat, aimed at everyone.
“Blasting cap in his vest.
He carried them.” Nobody answered.
Nobody believed it.
He hadn’t expected them to, and it wasn’t for them, it was for the story they’d be repeating in eight hours when a man from the office started asking questions.
“You were standing three meters clear,” someone said.
“I was.” “Then why’s your arm cooking.” “Because I was standing three meters clear.” A woman at the edge of the smoke hadn’t looked away once.
Kael had seen her before without ever putting a name to her.
Three years on this crew, head down, mouth shut, a face built for going unnoticed.
She had watched Drest skim her rations and said nothing.
She had watched Pell go down and said nothing.
She was looking at Kael now and what was on her face wasn’t fear, which he could have used, and it wasn’t horror, which he could have used better.
It was arithmetic.
She had seen all of it.
The hand.
The absence of any weapon in it.
The two dead men who hadn’t been in anybody’s argument.
And she had seen the arm, the burn crawling up under the sleeve, which meant she had also seen the price and knew there was one.
The alarm went off across the camp, three rising tones, the shift-boss’s board tripping on a heat spike in the yard.
That broke the rows.
Thirty men moved at once, in every direction, the first thing any of them had done in years that hadn’t been an order, and Kael was suddenly standing alone in the middle of a scorched wheel with three bodies inside it.
The woman was still there.
“They’ll be here in two minutes,” she said.
“I know.” “You should be gone in one.” “Why are you telling me that?” She looked down at Pell, and at Drest, and then at Kael’s arm.
“Because I’ve been on this crew three years and that’s the first time anything’s ever been done about anything.” Her mouth twisted.
“It’s not the same as being on your side.
Don’t take it for that.” “I won’t.” “Good, because I haven’t decided yet.” She was already backing away toward the shed line.
Somebody was shouting for her from the doorway there, one syllable, twice.
Mara.
“Cover the arm.
Not with a rag.
A sleeve.
Something they’d expect you to be wearing anyway.” Kael ran.
Not because running was a plan.
Because there was no plan, because the cold thing behind his sternum was scraped down to nothing and would not answer if he begged, because he had killed three men in front of thirty witnesses on a world with a professional buyer of Force-sensitives asleep four buildings away, and because the pain in his arm was climbing toward something that was going to take his legs out from under him within the hour.
He made the tailings ridge with the alarm still going and his vision narrowing at the edges, and he went down on one knee behind the slag and got his teeth into the collar of his shirt.
Behind him, in the yard, the boots arrived.