She was smirking.
Though of course it was dark so she didn’t know he could see her smirking, he still wanted to die.
She said, “I’m… I’m better now.” Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips, an odd, hot point in the cool, dark hall. “I… have some trouble relaxing my eyes sometimes.”
Oh, that was right. She could see sub-red. Her color was down farther on the spectrum that way. She would have gotten it on her own. She took her arm back, awkwardly.
Kip squared his shoulders, put his head down, and followed Ironfist down the halls. It was only a couple of turns before Ironfist took them into a room. He manipulated some mechanism Kip probably wouldn’t have understood even if he’d been able to see it in visible light, and the ceiling began glowing, a warm radiant soft white.
It was a training room, but not like any Kip had ever seen.
Ironfist began rummaging in a corner while Kip and Teia looked around. There were beams for practicing balance, bars for doing pull-ups, punching dummies coated with luxin that would light up in various zones to train quickness, punching bags of sawdust and leather, wooden blocking trees, a pile of cushioned body armor for sparring, terry cloths, targets, and padded weapons of every sort.
“This is the Prism’s training room. He allows us to share it,” Ironfist said. He had long strips of cloth in each hand. “Give me your hands, Kip. Straight as you can, and firm.”
Kip gave him his hands, and Ironfist began wrapping a strip of cloth around his wrist.
“It’s time for you two to learn something,” Ironfist said.
“What’s that, sir?” Adrasteia asked.
“There are three scrubs I absolutely can’t let fail.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Kip, because his father asked me not to.”
Teia looked over at him, obviously not happy with the injustice of that. Kip blushed, then scowled.
Ironfist continued: “Cruxer, because he’s got the potential to be the best Blackguard in a generation.”
“How would he fail out? He’s the best of us by far,” Teia said.
“Only through bad luck. But it could happen. Could, but I won’t let it. And the third is you, Teia.”
“Me?” she asked. She sounded genuinely shocked.
“Your color,” Commander Ironfist said. “You can see through cloth, which means you can see concealed weapons. In a normal year, I could take you even if you had no legs. Your peers would be angry, but in the fullness of time they’d realize you’re worth any five of them, even if you couldn’t fight at all. I can’t do that, not this year. If I pass you on and you’re terrible, it’ll be another blow to the Blackguards’ confidence. It’s important that we know we’re elite. If I’m seen adding obvious mediocrities to our ranks, it hurts everyone. Thus, a bastard and an outer-spectrum girl have to look as good as everyone else. Teia, you’ve been hiding how good you are, but without drafting, you’ll have to get lucky to make it at your current skill level, and Kip’s a year behind the top students. So you both get extra practice, and less sleep.”
He finished wrapping Kip’s hands, scowling and being careful with the left, then helped Kip pull gloves on.
Under Ironfist’s watchful eye, Kip started punching one of the sawdust bags. They’d trained punching forms in their lines during practice, but full contact was different.
“Not so hard, not yet,” Ironfist said.
Kip got back to hitting the bag, quick but not hard. It hurt his left hand. But mostly keeping his left in a fist wasn’t hard. It was straightening it that sent tears down his face. Ironfist set Teia to doing push-ups, with claps in between. Teia was tiny, so she didn’t have that much body to throw into the air, but even then she quickly tired. Ironfist had her continue doing it from her knees.
After they got going, Ironfist wrapped his own hands and stepped up to the bag next to Kip’s and started working out himself.
Kip’s hands hurt, but after ten minutes or so, they simply felt warm. He wondered if they were bleeding under the wrappings. Ironfist simply let him know that he could start hitting harder. He thought about Liv. He thought about his mother. He thought about the Prism.
And somehow, though his thoughts took him nowhere and he discovered nothing new, he felt better after beating the hell out of an inanimate object. But Ironfist kept going, and going. Kip followed. After an hour, Kip was the walking dead. Ironfist threw him a towel and said, “Kip, go to the lift. We’ll be along in a minute.”
Kip left. The temptation to eavesdrop was strong, but the idea of facing Ironfist’s wrath was daunting. Plus, it just seemed disrespectful. He walked toward the lift, wiping sweat away with the towel.
He was hungry. It seemed like he was always hungry here. The glims, or second-year, and above students had lounges that were reputed to serve food for longer hours—or for the gleams and beams, the third- and fourth-year students, all day and night. But first-year students weren’t allowed. You had to earn everything here, from library access to food.
Kip coughed, and in his sub-red vision the spray shot out in a cloud of little white and red dots.
He raised his hand, and he was in Garriston, covered in green luxin, the smell of gunpowder and blood and luxin and sweat and fear heavy in his nostrils. He held up his hand and shot out bullets at the soldiers massed around him. A man’s cheek was blown off, head jerking around and then twisting back toward Kip, flinging teeth and blood droplets, the man staggering into him.
Kip put his hand on the man’s forehead, as if blessing him. And shot a bullet into his brain, gore blasting back into his open palm.
He was pure will, and those who opposed him were nothing but chaff on a breeze blown about a titan’s knees.
And then he was back, blinking, shivering.
It was like all this was so thin, so fragile. A lie. Kip was worrying about passing some test? About what fifteen-year-old children thought about him? Death was huge, towering, indomitable, victorious everywhere. One tiny lead ball away. A sliver of luxin, and all this was exposed as frippery and folly.
He barely had time to dab away the tears from his eyes—he wasn’t crying, why were there tears?—before Ironfist and Teia came down the hall.
Ironfist glanced at Kip but said nothing. They got on the lift. Kip wanted to ask him something, but he couldn’t even put it into words. How did Ironfist do it? How did he kill people, and come back, still himself? How did he straddle the worlds? Ironfist was a rock, unperturbed, solid, an island in a sea of madness.
Commander Ironfist ran his hand over his shaven, bare head. His voice came out low, gravelly. “While my mother bled out her life from that assassin’s blade, I held her, Kip. I prayed. Prayed as I never had before, or since. Orholam didn’t hear me. I believed I wasn’t worthy of his gaze, that he sees only the good and great.” His face twisted for a half second in some emotion, quickly suppressed. Grief? Desolation? But his voice was level. “Kip, the world doesn’t explain itself. You go on.”
“How?” Kip’s voice sounded small and hollow in his own ears.
“You just do.”
Kip looked at the commander. That was it? The answer was no answer? He felt his heart drop.
Teia looked from one to the other, mystified, but said nothing, asked nothing. Kip wished he could thank her for that.