Chapter 13
Ugly Moles
I don’t realize that my feet are bare until Hawthorne asks, “Do you want your slippers?” I shake my head no because I don’t trust my voice not to be thick with emotion, and I don’t know exactly what he’ll see if I open my locker. I try to walk to the door that leads to the tiers of capsules. Hawthorne stops me with a gentle tug on my arm. “Sorry about Barkley. He’s a head case. Stay away from him if you can. He has a crazy fascination for the rules, and I know you don’t.”
Hawthorne’s strong hand on my arm loosens. He’s about to let go of it when I turn and rest my forehead against his chest. I inhale Hawthorne’s scent that I now associate with safety. My shaking shoulders hunch toward him. A sob that I can’t force down breaks through and chokes me. He moves his rifle so that it rests against his back on the gun strap. I hide my face against his chest once more. His hands come up to rest on my shoulders as he holds me to him. “Shh,” he hushes softly, brushing my hair back from my hot face, tucking it back behind my ear. “Whatever it is that’s making you cry, look away from it. It doesn’t have you. I do.”
I can’t get close enough to him. He lifts me up in his arms, and then sits down on a bench, settling me in his lap. He leans his back against the wall. I don’t know how long it takes me to stop crying, but I get the hiccups toward the end. Hawthorne doesn’t tease me about them. He reaches into the pocket of his gun strap and extracts a cloth used to remove condensation from the barrel. “It’s clean,” he says when he uses it to wipe my face.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur.
“About what?” He stuffs the cloth back into the compartment. “I’ve never cleaned my rifle with Roselle’s tears before. I’ll let you know how well it works.” He waits to see if I smile. I don’t. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I reply with a watery look and a set of sniffles.
“You look exhausted. I know you were picked up for brandishing.”
“Who told you?”
“Agent Crow, when he gave me this.” Hawthorne shows me his new moniker and scar. “He also told me he wasn’t done with either of us.”
“Is that all he said?” I ask.
“Yes. Why?” he replies. I cringe. Hawthorne doesn’t know about Agnes Moon. Agent Crow didn’t tell him. How do I tell him that his girlfriend was murdered because he wanted to help me? He’ll never forgive himself . . . or me.
“He killed her, Hawthorne. Agnes is dead. Agent Crow beat her to death. He showed me the photos.” Exhale—that’s how I tell him.
Hawthorne shakes his head. I’ll never forget the look of horror on his face for as long as I live.
“Agent Crow accused Agnes of being thirdborn. Was she?”
His eyes smolder. His nostrils flare. “No! She was secondborn, like us! She was just a Moon. She’s never even been trained to defend herself!”
“He was going to kill her either way, for helping me. He’s insane, Hawthorne. I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I feel powerless to take away his pain.
“She didn’t want to help. I convinced her to do it.” His lips thin in despair. “I’m going to kill him.”
“One day. I’ll help you.” Rubbing my eyes in exhaustion, I rise from his lap and sway on my feet. Hawthorne stands and catches my shoulders.
“I’m taking you to your capsule.” I don’t argue. He places a comforting hand on the small of my back, and we walk.
“How do you know which one is mine?”
“I asked around once I found out we were in the same air-barracks.”
I pause. “That’s more than coincidence, Hawthorne. There are literally a million capsules on this Base and thousands of air-barracks.”
“I know,” he says grimly.
“Who put me here with you?” I stare at him accusingly, searching his eyes.
He cups my cheek. “I swear to you that I don’t know, Roselle.”
“I don’t either.”
We continue walking until we reach my capsule.
“Get some sleep,” Hawthorne insists. “I’ll check on you later.”
I climb the ladder up four levels, open my capsule, and crawl inside. The door shuts. Resting my head against my pillow, I pull my blanket over me, but for hours, I lie awake in total darkness.
My thoughts turn to last night. Flannigan planted herself in my detention cell. The privateer manipulated me into helping her steal monikers, but for whom? She died to get them. What am I supposed to do with them? Turn them over? Say that I accidentally shot eight Census agents and helped blow up and flood the tunnel-dwelling hunters and their scary interrogation rooms?
A part of me wants to rationalize the eight deaths as mercy killings. They would have died anyway—drowned by the wall of water—except for the one in the elevator. He probably would have made it. But how many thirdborns had he murdered? He had at least twenty kill tallies by his eyes. Maybe I brought justice.
All I know is that I’m in possession of contraband that will get me tortured and killed. Now that I have time to think, I can see every mistake with glaring clarity. I was released a few hours before my sentence was officially over. Strike one. If anyone asks Holcomb Sword, he’ll be able to say he hadn’t released me. Strike two. They won’t find a moniker trail of my leaving the detention center at five a.m., or arriving at the air-barracks at five twenty, except for the login at my locker. And there won’t be a record of my entering the air-barracks at all. Strikes three and four.
I feel more and more confident that at any second, Agent Crow is going to bang on the door of my capsule and arrest me. But one hour slips by, and then another, and another, and nothing happens. I switch on the virtual-access screen on the ceiling. No one is reporting on the bombing of the Census Base. The news is all about the semifinal rounds of the Secondborn Trials. Half of the competitors scale the side of a mountain. From a bluff, the other half picks them off, one by one, with fusion arrows. Something inside of me feels like it’s dying.
I’m startled awake. The visual screen above my head is still on. Commentators discuss the deaths of several of the champions from the Fate of Seas, burned up in a fiery crash when an incendiary device ignited their ultra-light aircraft in the aviator challenge. A fist bangs on my door, and Hawthorne’s voice calls, “Roselle?” I scoot down to the panel and open the door outward. He gazes at me from the ladder.
“Hi.” He fakes a smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I just had a coronary. I thought you were Agent Crow.” I rub sleep from my eyes.
“He’s back at the Stone Forest Base,” Hawthorne says, a look of hatred in his eyes. “We’re in the air, en route to the Twilight Forest.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“You missed breakfast and lunch. It’s fourteen hundred.” He hands me a silver foil ration pack. “It’s turkey pasta—one of the better ones. You know you can come out now? We’re no longer on lockdown. Whatever was worrying them while we were docked at the Base has passed now that we’ve left. We were cleared for active duty.”
“You’re serious?”
He’s worried, but I’m relieved. It’ll be harder for Agent Crow to get to him. After Agnes, I don’t know how to protect him, beyond not telling him anything about the thousands of monikers hidden in my locker. He can’t be involved in that.
“Would you like to go for a run with me?” Hawthorne asks.
I nod, set aside the ration pack, and climb out of my capsule, meeting him on the catwalk. We head to the locker room, where I pick up a workout T-shirt and sweats from stacks of them. No one here is shy, I’m learning. Naked bodies, male and female, walk around for all the air-barracks to ogle. I take my clothes to a bathroom unit and change there.
When I come out, Hawthorne is leaning against my locker with his arms crossed. “Do you intend to do that every time you change your clothes?” he asks with an amused grin.
“Yeah. I do,” I reply. I kneel on one knee and secure the straps of my running boot.
“Why would you want to hide your body? Do you have an ugly mole or something?”
“Uh, no. No mole.”
“I can lend you some merits to get that thing removed, you know.”
“Hawthorne,” I say, my face reddening by the second. “You’ve been getting naked with these people since you were ten. I’ve never changed my clothes in front of anyone since I could change them by myself.”
“Your access feeds showed you training, your diet, your lessons, almost every aspect of your life, but they never showed us your room or anything like that.”
“That whole place—everything you saw—those were all my rooms. I had an entire wing of the Sword Palace to myself.” We exit the locker room and walk along a row of capsules to a heartwood. We step on facing each other. It takes us down to the lower floors.
He leans toward me. “What was that like?”
“It was lonely, Hawthorne. There were days when I thought that if someone didn’t speak to me, I’d go mad. And then there were times when I thought I was a ghost, and only drone cameras could see me. Now it’s as if everyone sees me, and they can’t look away.”
We step off the heartwood onto a training deck. A track spans its circumference. Soldiers stop talking as we pass, their eyes on me.
“I see what you mean,” Hawthorne says. “It won’t last forever. The regiment will get used to you, and then they’ll stop paying attention.”
Hawthorne and I keep pace for the first fourteen miles. It feels right to run after days of not training. I haven’t had a decent workout since I left the Sword Palace—since I lost Dune. We pass other runners, but no one passes us. In the final mile, Hawthorne pulls away from me. I try matching his stride, but it’s impossible, and he beats me by a hundred yards. He has the decency to breathe hard afterward. I have to pinch my side.
“You don’t lose often . . . do you?” he asks.
“I believe . . . you went easy . . . on me.” I give up trying to play it cool and hobble around outside the track, staring up at the black ceiling and panting like I might die. “That last mile . . . was painful.”
Sweat dripping from his face, Hawthorne offers me a towel. “I have something I want to show you.” He guides me to the other side of the deck. “We’re close to the Vahallin Sea. We’ll fly low, near the water. Do you feel us descending?”
He motions for me to wait, goes to a small compartment door, and unlatches it. He slides the door open, securing it from closing with a hook. Wind whips around us. He holds out his hand to me. I inch toward him, my hair pulling free in wisps from its stays. The wind is so loud that I’d have to scream to be heard, so I don’t even try. I grasp Hawthorne’s arm and cling to it. I long to explore the world drifting by beneath us, knowing I’ve squandered my existence by never having trudged through these green fields dotted with sheep.
We fly over a cliff, the land falls away abruptly, and the Vahallin Sea moves as if it’s breathing. Its scent is a primal thing, bringing tears to my eyes, as if some ancient part of me remembers it—knows what it feels like to swim in its depths, its vastness.
Hawthorne taps my shoulder. I look up at him, tears on my cheeks. He brushes them away with his thumb, then takes my hand and helps me up, sliding the door closed.
“That was—” I have no words to describe it. “Thank you.”
“It’s nice to share it with someone.” I nod, my throat tight. “C’mon,” Hawthorne says, “I could use a shower.” My eyes widen. “I don’t mean together.”
“Oh.”
We make our way back up to Section Black. At my locker, Hawthorne asks, “Have you put on your combat armor yet?” I shake my head no. “Okay, when you’re finished with your shower, put these on.” He indicates the tight black shirt and leggings that go beneath the armor. “I’ll show you how to armor up.”
Hawthorne walks away. I gather the special shampoo and detangler that Emmy had requisitioned for me, a razor and shaving cream from the shelf of supplies available to everyone, and a towel from the stack. Then, following Hawthorne, I find that his locker is two rows over from mine.
I peek around the corner. Hawthorne strips off his sweaty T-shirt. His broad shoulders and back muscles bear witness to his intensive training. His skin is perfection. His training trousers hang low on his narrow hips—so low I get a glimpse of the two dimples just above his rounded backside. I back away, my cheeks burning. He’s right, I am weird, and right now, I wish he had an ugly mole.
An empty shower closet isn’t hard to find at this time of day. I step inside one, close the door, and lock it. I strip off my clothes and turn the water on by scanning my moniker. I only get five minutes.
But five minutes isn’t long enough. I finish shaving one leg, sans water. After towel drying my hair, I wrap the damp cloth around my body, exit the shower closet, toss my dirty clothes in the clothes chute, and run my fingers through the tangles in my wet hair. Rows of sinks are located near the lockers. Putting toothpaste on my toothbrush, I begin brushing my teeth in front of one. Two buttons are on a panel near the side of the mirror. Above them, a label reads “dryer.” I push the top one. Warm air blows down on me, drying my hair. Soft waves form as I run my fingers through it. On a shelf behind me are grooming supplies—razors and shaving cream. I take a new razor and some shaving cream to finish shaving my leg properly.
I set the items on the edge of the sink. With my toothbrush still in my mouth, I bend over at my waist, flipping my hair over so that the underside can dry. Running my hands through it, I feel the curls loosening. Reaching for the shaving cream, I rub some on my ankle before pulling the razor across it. I rinse the blade in the sink without looking up, and then drag it across my skin again. Large feet stop right next to me. I flip my long hair out of my face and look up. Hawthorne is there, with just a towel wrapped low on his hips. He is knee-weakeningly handsome.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Bruwshing my teef,” I reply, my mouth full of foam. Beyond him, a group of male soldiers watches in fascination. I turn and spit. “What?” I ask Hawthorne’s reflection in the mirror.
“I meant what were you doing with that razor?”
“Shaving my legs. I don’t have wax to remove the hair, so—”
“I thought only Diamond-Fated women shaved their legs—models, and you know, feminine women, not soldiers.”
“No one here shaves their legs?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t. Hammon doesn’t.” Putting toothpaste on his toothbrush, he turns around and scowls at the males still watching me behind us. “Show’s over. Go on now.” The men laugh, telling him to lighten up. They push each other around before dispersing.
“I didn’t know,” I mutter, embarrassed. “We do things differently at home. Every woman shaves or waxes her legs and her armpits—all the aristocracy does it. Do you find it disgusting?”
“No.”
“They think it’s disgusting though, right?” I wish someone would tell me these things before I make an ass of myself.
“Roselle, you just made their top-five lists,” he says, pointing in the direction of the other soldiers. “Honestly, you were probably on that list anyway, but now it’s a safe bet you’re number one.”
My nose wrinkles. “What’s a top-five list?”
“You don’t want to know. Rest assured, they find you the opposite of disgusting.”
I gesture with my thumb over my shoulder. “All right. I’ll just go—”
“Change in the bathroom—yeah, that’s actually a good idea.”
Hawthorne is in his uniform when we meet later at my locker. Tossing my long hair into a ponytail, I tuck it into the neckline of my undershirt. My clingy under-armor attire doesn’t leave much to the imagination, and Hawthorne’s eyes rove over me. My cheeks flush with color. He looks away, reaching past me to retrieve the armor from inside my locker. His arm brushes up against my breast. I bite my lip and move back, giving him more room.
“Excuse me,” he says.
“It’s fine,” I assure him. “Thank you for doing this.” My fingers tangle together nervously. “I’ve never used this kind of combat gear before.”
“It’s no problem.” He inhales deeply, then leans close and sniffs my hair. “You don’t smell like a soldier,” he jokes. His nose brushes my neck.
“Oh.” My blush turns to one of embarrassment. “They gave me this special detangler because they wouldn’t let me cut my hair.”
“Why wouldn’t they let you cut your hair?”
“Oh, you know—I need permission from Admiral Dresden, Clifton Salloway, or Agent Crow in order to change how I look.” Admitting my total lack of freedom regarding my own body is humiliating.
Hawthorne’s jaw ticks.
“So, how does this work?” I ask, gesturing to the combat suit, changing the subject.
He shows me, and it’s ingenious. A catheter lines the interior of the armor for long missions. He describes how to position the collector so that I don’t wet myself and how to change it when it becomes necessary. I step into the suit, sans catheter. Armor plates run over my calves, thighs, torso, and arms. Hawthorne tightens my elbow buckles, tugging on my armor like he’s trying to protect me. I want to lean into him, gently brush my lips against his. He has no idea.
Hawthorne pulls the armor breastplate from my locker. “You can put this on a couple of different ways,” he explains. “I usually unclip the right buckle of the waistband, shrug into it, putting my head through this hole, and secure the waistband clip. Some soldiers lift the breastplate over the head, and then tighten both the waistband clips. Whatever works for you.”
I do it the way he does it. The wide armor-plated straps hang on my shoulders, holding the armor in place. I secure the right clip of the waistband. He tugs on the belt to cinch the waist, hands me a headset, and passes me a helmet. It fits me like it was made for me. The visor clicks out in sections to cover my face.
Hawthorne hands me elbow-length gloves and a fusion-powered rifle. He steps back from me and admires his handiwork. “Goodness, Roselle. You look like a soldier!”
“I am a soldier.”
He pulls a tin of wax from his pocket. “Rub this on all the shiny parts of your armor. Some of the clips need to be dulled down so that they don’t reflect light and give away your position. Don’t go using it on your legs. I only have this little bit.”
I nudge him with my shoulder. “Very funny.”
“Ration rotation happens in ten. I’ll wait here for you while you change.” He leans against the lockers and crosses his arms.
Dining in the air-barracks is as informal as you can get, just bins of premade food in foil packages. We line up for the bins. There isn’t much to choose from. I pick up a red foil package and begin to read the label, but Hawthorne snatches it out of my hand and tosses it back in the bin. “Don’t eat that. Remember: ‘Red for a reason.’ Here.” He thrusts a green foil package into my hand.
Hawthorne takes two of everything except the red package.
Tables and chairs occupy most of the room. We spot Gilad, Hammon, and Edgerton at one. I follow Hawthorne to the table and sit down next to Edgerton. Hawthorne sits beside me. I strip off the long plastic spoon from the foil pouch, tear away the top of the foil, and stir the contents—creamy chicken salad.
Hawthorne hands me a package of rolls. “It’s better with these.”
I take one. “Thank you.”
“Why’s she here, Hawthorne?” Gilad growls.
“She’s hungry,” he replies.
“All you’ll get from her is trouble,” Gilad grumbles. He’s not wrong.
“So I should run panic-stricken from her?” Hawthorne asks. “Like most of these soldiers around us? Isolate her because she’s different?”
“It’s called caution,” Gilad says, looking straight at me. “She may not last long here. No sense in getting attached. No hard feelings, Roselle. I’m just a realist.”
“Sure, Gilad,” I reply. “Let’s just get all our awkward moments out of the way now.”
“So, Roselle.” Edgerton addresses me from his seat next to Hammon. “Tell me why you shave your stems—and what else do you shave?” Hawthorne begins to choke. Hammon elbows Edgerton.
“What?” he queries Hammon. “You’re the one what wanted to know. I was just going direct to the source. Roselle and me has that kind of relationship. Don’t we, Roselle?”
I pat Hawthorne on the back as he tries to catch his breath. Red-faced, he wipes his eyes. “Where I come from,” I answer Edgerton, “females shave their legs, armpits, and . . .”
“You don’t has to do that. We’ll like you just fine with hair,” Edgerton replies, as if he’s sorry that I’ve been raised by savages. Hammon elbows him again. “What?” he asks her, dismayed. “We will. She’s our friend, even if she does strange things.”
“Thank you, Edgerton,” I reply. “That means a lot to me.”
Hammon gives me a friendly smile. “Sorry. Edge still has mountain sensibilities. Things that appear impractical are lost on him. He forgets what it was like to be newly processed.”
“I know that a lot of things from my world don’t make sense here,” I reply. “How long has it been since you were processed?”
“I was eleven,” Hammon says. She looks over at Edgerton, her adoration obvious. “We were all processed on the same Transition Day. That’s how we all met. You make most of your core friends on your first day.”
“We was just sayin’,” Edgerton chimes in, “how hard it must’ve been for you not to Transition with anyone else.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gilad interrupts, not looking up from his food. “I said you’d be puking up sunshine to be the only one.”
“Gilad and I were best friends from the start,” Hammon says. “Then Gilad brought Hawthorne in, and I brought Edge in.”
“So you’ve all been together for years?”
“We’ve been lucky,” Hawthorne replies. “None of us has been transferred. We were assigned to Tritium 101, and it’s been home ever since.”
“We all made the rank of Strato together. Well, Hawthorne made it first. He’s up for Meso now,” Hammon says proudly. “I bet he gets it by the time we’re done with active duty. We’ll have an officer in our midst soon.”
“I might not get it,” Hawthorne says.
Edgerton rolls his eyes. Gilad says, “You’ll get it. You earned it.”
There’s genuine love here, even between Gilad and Hawthorne, maybe especially between them. A cold sort of anger bubbles up in me. It’s hard to name what it is at first, but then I realize that it’s jealousy—of their relationships with one another, the camaraderie, trust, respect, and love. I’ve never had that.
I glance away from them. A familiar face catches my attention over at a different table. Jakes sits with a few other engineers. I haven’t thought much about him since I was thrown in detention. He nods and points his chin toward the door. He gets up from his table and leaves. Crumbling the foil meal package in my hand, I stand. “Please excuse me, I have something I have to do. I hope you have a lovely evening.”
I hurry for the exit, following him. Jakes is at the end of the corridor by a heartwood. I move in his direction. He takes the heartwood, and I follow him down. We pass a few decks. He steps off into a hangar that houses combat troop movers and Winger aircraft. Most everyone is still at dinner. He pauses by some metal crates, and I join him.
“I looked for you before we deployed,” he says by way of a greeting. He pushes his thick glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“I was in detention. I was picked up for brandishing.”
“I heard. No one has ever stood up for me before.”
“It was my fault you got harassed in the first place. I’m sorry there was trouble, but I’ll always take the consequences.”
“Maybe I’m tired of being cautious,” he mutters. “Maybe it’s time for a little danger.”
“Do you have something for me?” I ask.
“I do. I was looking through schematics for some older weapon designs in the archives.” He touches the scanner on the metal crate, opening it. “What you wanted isn’t so far-fetched. Most of the old designs were scrapped when fusion came along, but I was able to use existing diagrams and parts to create this.” Inside the crate is a fusionblade housing, but it’s unlike any I’ve seen before. The silver hilt is longer than a normal fusionblade’s. Not only that, a regular sword of this caliber has only one strike port where the energy flows from the weapon. It’s the source from which a fusionblade glows with golden power. This weapon has two strike ports: one at the top of the hilt, and the other at the base of the hilt.
I lift it from its case. When I squeeze the hilt at its center, two light-infused blades ignite from it. At one end, a golden fusionblade; at the opposite end, a silver hydroblade. It’s truly a dual-bladed sword.
Jakes comes nearer to me. “If you choke up by moving your grip toward the fusionblade’s strike port, Roselle, the hydroblade will extinguish. The opposite will occur if you place your hand closer to the hydroblade. Or you can have both if you keep your grip centered on the hilt.”
Most of the time, I’ll only use one side of the sword or the other because to have them both lit at once is dangerous, unless I use it like a staff. Jakes shows me how to switch off each side so that it won’t pop on accidentally.
“This is remarkable. You’ve done it, Jakes!”
“It wasn’t that hard. The hydrogen cells are abundant,” he explains. I wave the dual-blade around, trying out complex maneuvers. “We use hydrogen cells for powering some of our burners in the lab—it’s heavy hydrogen—condensed. I can show you how.”
“I’d like to learn that.” I want to learn everything he knows about everything. I’m tired of being ignorant. I want to be able to break into consoles, like Flannigan could. I want to write the story of my life to suit me. I want to see the world without restrictions. I want to use my mind to obtain freedom, like she had.
“We get these hydrogen cells in bulk,” Jakes continues. “They last about a thousand hours before you have to change them out and recharge them.” He holds it up. It resembles a silver bullet with a clip on the back of it. “You can put them in one of your armor compartments, or maybe even in your hair. They have clips on the backs.” He slips a hydrogen cell into my hair like a decorative pin. “Just open the housing on the hilt here to reload.”
“Am I interrupting something?” Hawthorne asks from behind us.
Jakes looks startled. “It’s okay. Hawthorne is a friend,” I tell him.
“What’s this?” Hawthorne asks, indicating my new weapon.
“Something we need. Hawthorne, how many merits do you have?”
“A lot. Why?”
“Because I need some to get an ugly mole removed, and so do you.”
“I don’t have an ugly mole.”
I blush, remembering catching a glimpse of him in the locker room with just a towel on. “You have a mole, Hawthorne, and it will kill you if you don’t have it removed. This is the tool that’s going to remove it. Everyone will need to get a mole removed, and Jakes here is the one who’s going to do it.”
I extend the dual-bladed sword to Hawthorne. He takes it, examining it closely. “This is . . . handy,” he says, in awe.
I turn to my Star friend. “Jakes, anyone who comes to you wanting a mole removed, you give him the means to remove it. If he needs to do it on credit, you extend him credit. Do you understand?”
“How many moles are you expecting to remove?”
“An entire regiment’s.”
Hawthorne and I haggle with Jakes over the price of the new sword. He has already made two of them, and I intend to take them both. “When can you have more ready?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I’m going to need more help—parts—time.”
“Do what you can. Also, look into converting existing fusion-powered rifles to hydrogen. We’ll need hydrogen magazines. If you can think of a way to make it work, I might be able to get a message to Clifton Salloway.”
Hawthorne grasps my arm. “Excuse us for a moment,” he growls to Jakes. He drags me a few paces away around the side of a shipping crate. He positions me with my back to the metal box, his face close to mine, his eyes as dark as storm clouds. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you—you just have to trust me. We have to spread the word about this new weapon, but it has to be a subtle infiltration. Soldiers have to want them because they’re new and in demand, and for no other reason. I don’t know how we’re going to do that, but we have to try.”
Hawthorne’s expression softens. “You just need to be seen using one, Roselle. That’s all it will take. You’re Roselle St. Sismode. They may pretend to despise you, but they’ve watched you for years and copied your fighting moves, your mannerisms, your style—everything about you.”
“You’re an influencer, too, Hawthorne. Soldiers follow you because you’re trustworthy.” I grip his biceps. “Use your sword with me tonight. Practice with me, somewhere that we’ll be seen.”
“You’re acting as if this is a matter of life and death.”
“I’m not acting.”
His eyebrows slash together. “I don’t want you to contact Clifton Salloway—for any reason. Is that understood?”
I drop my hands. “Why not? I’m not going to get personally involved with him. I’m just going to, you know, ask him to mass-produce dual-bladed swords. And maybe a new hydrogen version of a fusionmag. And a fusion rifle with a hydrogen-powered option. And maybe see if he has connections to major airship manufacturers.”
Hawthorne stares at me like I’m insane. “Roselle, Clifton Salloway is not someone you want to owe a favor.”
“Hawthorne, I understand firstborns like him. He’s violently bored. He craves purpose. I can give him that purpose.”
“His purpose will be to get you in bed.”
“I’ll worry about that later. Right now, we have to make this weapon seem like the only one worth having.”
Frustration plays upon Hawthorne’s face, but he nods in agreement. “We’re merely tabling this conversation about Salloway for now.”
“Thank you,” I murmur. He backs away, just a step. I squeeze by him and walk back to Jakes, who is drumming his fingers on the dual-blade’s case.
He straightens. “I have some ideas about who can help me. It’ll be less expensive to convert existing fusionblades.”
I agree with a nod. “We focus on conversion, then. Soldiers will have to bring their fusionblades to you.”
“I’ll get started right away,” Jakes replies.
“Good. I’ll find you later and check on your progress.” Hawthorne and I turn and move toward a heartwood.
“You’re a regular arms dealer, Roselle,” Hawthorne says. I want to tell him everything. I want him to know that I’m doing this to protect secondborn Swords because my mother won’t.
“No, Hawthorne. I’m not an arms dealer,” I say instead. “I’m a privateer.”