Rhian

Time has a spotty reputation. Heals all wounds, turns people grey. Whatever. For me, all it did was pass. I was still landlocked. Feargus and Michael were still gone. Strauss was probably still a pain in the arse, and Adeline Blanchett was still trying to enlist me as her personal hero. One afternoon a lot like the others, there was a knock at my door. On the other side of it, the Squeaky Lass squeaked.

“Good afternoon, Enforcer S! Are you hungry? You must be, because I’ve never seen you eat.”

She’d finally resorted to bribery. Good on her. The food she brought was a nice touch. None of that straight-from-the-trough shite they usually fed us. Reckoned it came from the fancy kitchen. It was probably hers, and it probably wasn’t poisoned.

I waved her inside and shut the door. “Enough with the Enforcer S horseshite, all right? Our work together is done. Children have learned to load pistols—brilliant. Now if you’re gonna go ahead and presume we’ve got some sort of relationship beyond that…”

The look on her face was priceless.

“…so much as to prance all the way over here uninvited…"

Her heart was racing. I could hear it.

“…then you should probably call me Rhian.”

The poor thing relaxed, trotted over to my desk, and set down the platter.

My dorm was dusty, the furniture was rickety, and I generally couldn’t be bothered using the cupboard. I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. Adeline should have been disgusted, but she didn’t seem to mind. We sat down.

“Do you think you could teach me how to do that?”

I plucked a fruit from the platter. I had no clue what it was apart from it being round and purple. I took a bite and chewed. It was juicy. “Be specific,” I said.

“You’re so tiny, yet you really are quite intimidating. While observing your lessons, I noticed your students respect you, even if they are indifferent to you personally.”

I needed a moment to think, so I pointed to the cheese. “It’s all yours. I can’t eat cheese on account of it gives me gas.” I waited until Adeline had been nibbling for a while before I started yapping again. “Look, you’ve got your own things going for you, lass. Wanna learn to shoot a quarter-note off a man’s head? I might be able to teach you that, but I’m not about to start giving lessons on being me.”

She was disappointed. I could tell.

“My mother always says, ‘Adeline, when it's your turn, you’ll make a terrible Councilwoman. Your subordinates will walk all over you.’ But you, Enforcer Rhian, I think you would make an excellent Councilwoman.”

Reckoned she meant that as a compliment, but it wasn’t. If I were a Councilwoman, I’d set the whole place free and there’d be no such thing anymore. Also, I felt bad for the lass. I didn’t know many mothers, but that didn’t seem like a thing a mother should say.

I reached for a ratty book on the desk. A loose page fell to the floor when I tossed over, but I’d put it back in its place later.

Adeline browsed through the pages. I looked along with her.

“These are excellent. Are you an artist?”

“I draw sometimes if that’s what you mean.”

“Like me, only I prefer to draw plans, and patterns, and—oh? What are these numbers?”

“Dates.”

“And who are all these people?”

“They’re dead.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and she looked sorry, too. “Did you know them?”

“To the extent that I killed them.”

Enforcer wasn’t a nickname, it was my job. It’s what I was bred and brought up to do. None of the people in the book were good people—I made sure of that—but they were still people. Barren and Partisan alike. Call the whole thing morbid, but I never meant it like that. Everyone deserved to be remembered, I deserved to be reminded, and I sure as shite didn’t deserve anyone’s admiration. Michael, Gus, Strauss—they were all just as damaged as I was. It worked for us. But Adeline? She had her own shoes to fill, and they’d be bigger, and better, and probably sparkly and whatnot. That seemed to be her thing.

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She was the shiny in all the shite, and I needed her to stay the hells away.

Right up until the minute I needed something else more.

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The Assembly controlled just about everything around Palisade. Everyone had their role, everything had its place, and not a lot happened on its own. Needed rain? No problem. All you had to do was head over to the requisition office, make a request, and one of our Celestian rain-makers would make it rain.

You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

It just so happened on the day I needed something, the Partisan on duty had the sniffles. I stepped up to the desk, said my name, and hoped he wasn’t contagious. After ages flipping through pages of the ledger, the quartermaster shook his head and said something long-winded about not finding my name in the list.

Whatever he was sick with was probably blocking up his ears.

This was about the only time I was grateful my Partisan identification was permanently stamped on the nape of my neck. STSIN7.

I hoped the man wasn’t blind as well as deaf.

The quartermaster spent another six years or so dragging his finger down every page in the ledger until finally, he tapped twice.

“Ah, here we are—I’ve found you. What can I do for you?”

“I need wolves.”

“Have you completed a form?”

“I have not, but I’m telling you now face-to-face—I need wolves. So, if you can go ahead and jot that down, I’ll give it a scribble with my initials and be on my jolly way.”

The sickly Celestian wasn’t having any of it. He slid the form across the desk and handed me a quill. Bloody hell. All those letters on the page looking nothing like they sounded. It didn’t usually matter if I couldn’t read or write all that well. I had Gus for that.

If I wasn’t already busy being irritated, I might have felt sorry for the folks waiting in line behind me. It took about ten hours to fill out the form. The requisition officer was predictable, gawking at me with the pity face the whole time. ‘Course, it was no worse than when he started talking again. He told me I misspelled wolves. Then, after all that, he told me they had no wolves. He said there’d be no wolves indefinitely. I needed wolves.

“I need wolves,” I said.

“Would deer suffice?”

“About as well as a basket full of crippled bunnies. My students need wolves.”

“I understand. Unfortunately, we have no wolves.”

Tired of the word yet? Good. Me too. Bottom line: there were none, and my students needed live targets for practice.

I was annoyed, but I felt like a bit of an arsehole while I was at it.

Palisade imported its dangerous wildlife from Endica, and the folk up there were a touch busy at the minute. Goddess-be-damned war getting in the way. How dare it. But unless that wrapped up tomorrow, my kids weren't getting real practice as far as I could see. You might not think that's a big deal, but they were heading out into the big, bad world sooner than later, and the big, bad world was big and bad. I'd been handed the misfits, the ones who wouldn't stand a chance against the Palisade defects I knew were running free out there. I'd be sitting at five funerals next year if I didn't do something fast.

That's why I needed wolves.

Now I know I haven’t had much nice to say about Palisade so far, but I’ll say I liked its land. No natural predators, and the weather was stable unless someone had recently filled out a form. There were leagues and leagues of forest, and seeing as I had nothing better to do that day, I took a trip up to the tree house.

It had been a while since I’d been back, and if anyone used the space besides me and Gus, they were polite about it. No one ever left a mess and nothing was ever taken. Except the once when the whole thing went missing. We rebuilt, but it was never the same.

The tree house was a great place for a round of gossip, a quick snooze, or a sinister plot. We had about a thousand plans to defect from Palisade. Most of them might have even worked. Sometimes we’d invite Michael, even if he’d never climb the tree.

“What would the world do without me if I fell and broke my neck?” he’d say.

We never called him on his fear of heights. We never spoke about defecting with Michael, either. It wasn’t that we didn’t want him coming with us. It wasn’t even that we thought he’d snitch. Michael was our best mate and an honourable man. But Michael was happy with his lot in life, and that was fine by us.

After meeting Strauss for the first time in Delphia, I brought him to the tree house once we got back to Palisade and I was released from solitary. For a clumsy bugger, he was a decent climber, like a goddess-be-damned monkey. We had a good view of the entire compound, so we’d watch the Celestian-folk train from the roof. It was the only time he’d been able to see them in action. I figured it might help him get his own abilities under control, and he learned what he could from a distance. I never told the others about that time we spent together. They’d have made a stink about it. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. But the teasing made Strauss uncomfortable and that was my job.

Some days I missed that. Most days I missed him. Pain in the arse.

The tree house not only overlooked the northeastern grounds, but it overlooked the madhouse. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that they built the asylum near the Celestian spire. Sure, loads of Partisans were born without their wits—the odds were the same as any Barren I’d wager. But I reckon every Celestian was born with a double dose of wits. Those big-headed bastards had extra wits and more than enough to lose. Compared to the Barren folk, us Partisans are a powerful lot. Faster, stronger, far-seeing, and so on. But only some of us could boil blood or freeze the air in a person’s lungs. That kind of power is no joke.

Anyhow, I liked watching the asylum best.

I always wondered what it would be like inside.