Page 16 of Night in a Waste Land

He was pitifully easy to read.

All of them were: her new team.

Gallo she’d met in cadet training. With his bouncy curls, and his big, puppy dog eyes, she’d dismissed him straight away. Too soft, too weak; he’d be the first to dissolve into tears in the field; crouched behind a bit of rubble, rocking back and forth and sobbing, crying out for his mother. He looked like someone who’d actually had a mother, rather than a string of terrible foster parents, and then a crotchety old woman, and a killer.

But his determination had proved unbeatable. Beneath the bouncy curls and puppy dog eyes, she’d glimpsed steel in him. He did get frightened; always the first to jump, to swear, to spook. But he didn’t run away, and he was the first to offer a hand, too. When the others had shied away from her, still nursing bruised egos from the day she’d signed up, openly sneering at her because she didn’t play their little social games, he’d walked right up to her in the gym, and said, “If you’re the best, then I want to learn from you.” His gaze, when she’d finally met it, had been earnest, rather than mocking. She’d begun thinking of him as a barnacle that couldn’t be scraped off. Now, she supposed, he was more like a friend – as close to a friend as she was capable of having these days.

Different people handled unfortunate circumstances in different ways, and Gavin she’d pegged as the sort to offer a heartfelt pat on the shoulder, but a joke designed to help you laugh off some of the pain. He hadn’t tried to do so with her – she got the impression he didn’t really think much of her, though she detected no outright hostility from him – but he gave off the aura of a man who’d seen a lot, perhaps suffered a lot, but who soldiered on anyway, because it was the only, and the best thing he could do. She respected that. There was a lot to be said for resilience in times such as these.

Tris Mayweather was an outlying statistic: he’d been a Knight longer than most. In a branch with a high mortality rate, he’d proven tough, and savvy enough to stay alive. Long enough that he had iron streaks in his dark hair and close-cropped beard; long enough that his gaze moved dispassionately over everyone and everything. The instructors at the academy had used old still photos of him and anecdotes to excite the cadets about their futures as Knights, but he’d been younger in those photos, and not dead behind the eyes.

She’d recognized it in him straight off: the lack of all caring. His gaze had moved over her and Gallo on that first day, and she’d known he was already seeing them with toe tags; had already dismissed them as casualties. She respected that. She felt dead inside, anyway.

Lance struck her – at least at first – as a painful military cliche. Handsome and strong-jawed, earnest and righteous. The sort who believed in what he was doing; believed he was accomplishing something for the greater good. The first to offer condolences and congratulations, and he tried to make them sound sincere. Someone who stood on ceremony. Someone who thought that holding her back from the portal the night she lost Beck had actuallysavedher. That he’d performed a good deed. Men like him sickened her: the kind who required those good deeds of themselves in order that they might live with less guilt.

But. Sometimes. His gaze would slide over, and she’d see the spark of something else lurking behind his Good Soldier Boy façade. Something wilder and thornier, resentful of being contained. She wondered if it could be teased out into the open; if it would even be worth it.

Regardless, they were a team now –herteam. And she had nowhere else to go, no place to call her own, and so she was stuck with them for the time being.

~*~

“You’re dropping your shoulder before you strike. It gives away your plan of attack.”

Gallo swiped his forehead with the back of one wrapped hand, nodded, firmed up his expression, and slid back into his ready stance. He was quick, and he took instruction well, but he still hadn’t figured out how to keep from telegraphing his movements when they sparred.

Rose lifted her hands, and circled him; dropped her own shoulder, and offered a weak spot. He didn’t move right away this time, but she saw the flaring ofah-hain his eyes. Was ready for his next strike when it came and dodged beneath it. Came up with the side of her hand poised as his throat, the threat of a quick chop that, delivered, would have left him choking and gasping, and totally vulnerable to further attack.

He groaned and stepped back, dropping all pretense of a fighting stance. “Shit,” he muttered, scraping his hair back of his face with one hand. He winced. “I’m hopeless.”

“No,” she assured, going to retrieve her water bottle over on the bench. “That time was better – you’re getting better.”

“Then why are you still kicking my ass?”

Before she could answer, a voice over by the door said, “Because she knows all your tells. You can’t win a fight against someone who can read you that well.”

Gallo’s startled expression told her who it was before she turned her head, but a look confirmed it. Tris stood leaning against the threshold, arms folded, gaze impassive as it tracked over both of them. Before Beck, what seemed a lifetime ago, she would have read a threat in that look. You couldn’t trust anyone with that much restraint and control over his face. But Tris’s impassivity was a sheer cliff face compared to Beck’s quicksilver disguise. Nothing about him frightened her.

“She’s better than you, yeah,” he continued. “That’s why it’s good to learn from her.” He pushed off the doorframe and stepped into the room. Shrugged out of his jacket and hung it up, revealing a black t-shirt, and scarred, muscled arms beneath. “Have a go at me.”

Rose sat down on the bench to catch her breath, and watch.

Gallo sucked in a huge, unsubtle breath, face twitching as he fought to smooth it. “Yeah. Okay.” Hero worship, fascination, reverence – call it whatever, but it rolled off of him like steam. This wasn’t going to go well.

But Gallo proved her wrong, as he so often did. The two opponents circled one another, assessing, and after a few more breaths –no time for that in the field, Frankie,she thought – Gallo settled: his jaw set, his hands up, his body tensed and coiled and ready. Tris was bigger, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Look at the cadets she’d laid out in her time here.

Tris offered a few feints to start, but he didn’t strike her as the type to toy with his food. She was right: he launched a crippling sequence of blows that would have left any untrained civilian, or a common street tough, halfway unconscious.

Gallo had been learning and practicing, though. He dodged, blocked, and bent back, catching himself on one hand to avoid Tris’s last swipe – then bending back up in a flash, inside his attacker’s guard, ready with a strike of his own, a chop of his hand like Rose had just used on him.

Tris deflected it easily – but was forced to take a step back to keep his balance.

Gallo grinned, his gaze cutting over toward Rose.Did you see that?

“Dumbass,” Tris muttered, and in a matter of moments had him pinned face-down on the mat, his arm twisted behind his back.

Gallo’s face went red, and Rose knew it wasn’t from exertion.

“The second you stop paying attention is the second you’re dead,” Tris said, letting him up. Gallo scrambled to his feet, head ducked, cheeks flaming. “If you wanna celebrate every time you get in a halfway decent hit, you can go serve with the infantry.”

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