CHAPTER 14
In Which Evan is Befriended
EVAN. FUCKING LATE.
About fifteen minutes after they woke Evan up, he and Chris were walking out of the hospital. They had given him a sleeping draught[1], sewed up his hip, and then woken him up and immediately given him something non-alchemic and non-narcotic.
[1] The Fredonian Alchemic Association still uses the Western Isleic spelling of draft for some reason.
His hip was surprisingly without pain, even as he walked, though it would still take a while to heal properly. The alchemic salve of protection they prescribed him would allow him to treat his body relatively normally (as long as he didn’t engage in a significant amount of exertion), allowing the wound to heal as well as if he were on full bedrest, more or less. He’d already grabbed it from the hospital’s pharmacy, wincing at the price.
Evan could barely believe Chris had given him a healing potion, though he would have done the same if the situation had been reversed. True healing magic wasn’t cheap. It could be fifty or more silver eagles for even the weakest true healing potion. And Chris had just, like, given him one without thinking about it.
They walked in silence to the hospital’s Link[1] station, and stood silent there for a moment too, until Chris said, “So. We’re finally getting into it, yeah?”
[1] The Seattle light rail system. The two car trains are also referred to as Links.
“Yeah,” Evan said.
“Do you wanna start, or…?”
“Ask away,” Evan said.
“Well, what even the fuck? You were ‘the Exiles?’ Part of that was that you, Angie, and Ryan were all estranged from Megan?”
The digital sign at the stop said the next car would be there in two minutes. At one end of the stop, a militia watchwoman sat in her watchtower, shotgun hung on the wall, the screens connected to the cameras monitoring the station illuminating her face. Her partner was not visible.
Evan took several breaths before replying. “Yeah.”
“Until this morning,” Chris prompted. There was a faint sound of bells in the distance, the Link at its stop before theirs.
“Yeah,” Evan said, intentionally not taking the hint. He checked his phone. “Yesterday morning.”
“But you used to be good friends,” Chris said.
Evan looked off into the darkness for a long moment. After a bit, he glanced at Chris and said, “The best. Since kindergarten. Megan and Angie and me.” He sighed. “It was, was just always the three of us. Always together at school. Always over at each other’s houses. Ryan came along in third grade, and then it was always the four of us.”
The crackle of the gas lamps was audible in the night’s still air. “Yeah, we were best friends.” Evan spoke flatly.
“What happened? How did you get…?” Chris was obviously unwilling to use the term Exile again. “How did you become estranged?”
Evan tried to think of an explanation that would avoid getting into it, but he was so tired. The adrenaline was long gone, faded to a bone deep exhaustion. He didn’t want to talk about the full truth, but he couldn’t figure out how to answer otherwise.
Evan said, “My older sister was a Light Bearer.” Chris’s whipped his face toward Evan so fast he probably got whiplash, and he stumbled. For a long moment there was silence but the sounds of the night. Strangely, in the distance, Evan heard someone whistling. That didn’t seem like a safe thing to be doing at night.
“Virginia was five years older than me,” Evan continued, staring off into the darkness, slowly piecing together the sentences in his brain so that he could say them out loud. The whistling distracted him, a familiar refrain repeating in the distance, something Evan couldn’t put his finger on while speaking. “She was the first Light Bearer, at least that we know about, from either my mother’s or my father’s lines.”
“It didn’t go well, I take it,” Chris said, his voice gentle. Evan was listening to the whistling. That was it. It was the guitar line from “Locked in a Trunk of a Motorcar.”
“She waited for well over an extra year,” Evan said. “But there was… pressure, I suppose. Social pressure at school, intended or not. People always asking her when she was going to go on her first hunt. And, I guess, unintentional, subconscious pressure at home. My parents were always telling her to just focus on her training, she didn’t have to hunt at all before she was fullage, but…”
Evan shook his head. He continued, halting and starting, his cadence off, knowing it was off, but not knowing how to make it not off. “You won’t be able to relate, but for some families, there’s never quite enough money to pay for everything that needs paying for. Father was a militia lieutenant at the time. Mom’s a cleaner, and definitely not the High Threat Response team kind. The breaks-them-down-and-cleans-up-after kind.
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“They tried not to talk about it around us too much, but Ginny was smart. She understood how welcome bounties would be, even if she was spending them entirely on herself. It would be money my parents wouldn’t have to spend on her.
“And that’s how it went for the first year,” Evan continued, his voice quiet, dull. It seemed distant, like it was someone else talking. He hadn’t talked about this with anyone for a long time, not since they’d stopped making him go to counseling. (Maybe someday he’d find a therapist he liked, but they hadn’t tried for a while.) “The bounties were very welcome. They paid for her training, for better gear, for her going-out money. She bought clothes and treats for me and Cali, she—”
“Cali?” Chris asked, his tone soft and even.
“My younger sister, California,” Evan answered. “She’s in eighth grade.
“Fortune turned against Ginny a couple months after she turned seventeen, right before I started middle school.” He fell silent, and for a long bit there was only the sounds of the trolley around them.
Chris made some sort of sub-vocalisation, like he was preparing to speak, but Evan said, “There were a couple of drunk rich kids who broke curfew, thinking they’d be fine to walk home without an escort, with no weapons but little salt-round loaded sidearms. I know they were firstagers, but I don’t know who they are. Ginny ran across them, started to escort them back to a checkpoint, but then they ran across a Menace-class Beast. The rich kids were able to get inside a building. Virginia covered their escape, but couldn’t escape herself, and wasn’t good enough to kill it. The nearest watch-members arrived in time to drive off the Beast and recover part of her body.
“At least the top half of her casket got to be open at her wake. At least there was a casket.” He fell silent again.
“I’m so sorry,” Chris said.
Evan wished he didn’t have to talk about this. He ignored the sympathy. “Ginny basically raised us. All four of us. Five, counting Cali. Megan and Angie and me, our parents were always really busy, Megan’s most of all. Ryan doesn’t have parents, just a ward at the Bounty Office.” Chris made a confused noise. Evan kept his eyes closed. “And Ginny was fucking awesome. We loved her. So much.
“Megan once told me she loved Ginny more than her parents, that Ginny was cooler and better and loved her more than them. Ginny’s death broke her.”
“Powers…” Chris said, horror in his voice.
“It happened while Megan was out of town, in the late summer,” Evan said. “The third anniversary was a couple of weeks ago. Megan couldn’t talk to us, when she got back. She couldn’t even see us without breaking down in crying. It was so bad she had to leave the wake, where you expect that sort of thing,” Evan said. “She begged for time to get herself together. We assented, of course, though it hurt that she wasn’t there for me.”
Evan paused, gathering his thoughts. As he did, Chris asked, “And this led to… um, your Exile?”
“We had a ‘friend,’” Evan said, opening his eyes. “That we were kind of stuck with, because her dad is Megan’s dad’s boss.”
“Katie ‘Kay’ Konigsmann,” Chris said, as if he’d discovered the identity of a murderer. “Who thinks she knows better than Megan who Megan’s best friend is, and thinks it’s herself.”
“Sounds like Katie, yeah. Nisha Twighs’s grandmother is Katie’s dad’s direct boss, and as a result, since they both attended Asphodel, Nisha introduced Katie to Lauren Bakili.”
“They seemed like they were in the same party,” Chris nodded, “Though Lauren objected to the term.”
“Yes, they were effectively in the same party. A thing of the past, I hope,” Evan said coldly. “So, Katie—Kay—in turn introduced Megan and Beth to Lauren, Nisha, and Katier. And then Lauren witnessed Megan break down in the hall on seeing us the third day of school.
“My understanding is that at this point Katie, and Lauren’s pissheaded boyfriend Brandon Chase-Xaviar, convinced Lauren that we should be made invisible, to protect Megan and Beth. They did their best to make Megan avoid us, I assume, and no one would ever talk about us near Megan or Beth, who wasn’t much better off than Megan. That’s just how Beth is, of course.”
“Uh. And this worked!?” Chris said.
“For three years,” Evan said. “Lauren, scion of the mighty house of Bakili, had the clout to pull it off. She put out the word that anyone who spoke to us or about us, at all, would incur her displeasure. And ten times so if Megan or Beth heard anyone talking about us, I’d guess. Everyone in our class, basically, followed her wishes. Adults aren’t wrong when they say middle schoolers are monsters.”
Chris just took that in for a bit. “And it ended today?”
Evan shrugged, barely paying attention to Chris, caught up in how to explain these things, thinking about that morning rather than his current exhaustion. “I don’t even really know what happened to begin with, exactly. Ryan went on ahead to meet with Angie sooner, and I was being slow, so I waited for them at the trolley stop south of the school. Ryan texted me when I was on my way that he thought Angie was talking to Megan, so I had a chance to prepare. Kind of.
“When they showed up, Megan was with them, and it had clearly been a big ol’ thing. Megan’s and Angie’s makeup was mostly wiped off, they’d obviously been crying, so I tried not to make a big deal out of it, but… then at school, we caused a big scene. It surprised Lauren and Beth and Kay so much they dropped their coffee and splashed it all over themselves, and then we had a big melodramatic encounter with Katier and Nisha there in front of everyone and their mothers.
“Then you were there, and with whatever happened between you and Megan, that I didn’t really feel but was a big deal to everyone else, I mean I sneezed, whatever that fucking means, but then you were eating lunch with us and she’s like entirely focused on you when it was supposed to be like lunch with the four of us, to see if we could even still be friends! And—” Evan realized he was babbling and out of breath, and snapped his mouth closed.
Chris continued nodding. “Sure. She showed up this morning. Absolutely smoking, but also one of your oldest friends. Apologetic and vulnerable. Cutting through your every defense.” Chris nodded steadily as he spoke, looking forward into the darkness. The Link was approaching now, the low squealing sound of the rails and the rush of air heralding its arrival.
Evan nodded. “Yeah, absolutely. She shows up without warning, she’s been crying, Angie’s been—wait, what?” He stopped, baffled, staring at Chris, as the train slid into the station. He felt the wind of the arriving train blow his hair all over the place. His mind, too, felt blown by what Chris had just said. “Absolutely smoking? Like, as in hot?” An early autumn leaf blew into the station with the arriving train and right into Evan’s face, forcing him to flinch and shake his head to dislodge it.