Page 17 of Night in a Waste Land

He shook his head with a mumbled, “No, sir.”

“Here, let’s go again.”

Lance settled down on the bench beside her; he walked very quietly, but he wasn’t silent, not like Beck. She’d heard him coming.

“I told Tris not to kill him,” he said, softly, too low for the sparring partners to hear.

“He’s tougher than he looks.”

He snorted. “Like you then, huh?”

She glanced toward him, and found his eyes on the action, the corner of his mouth curved up in a grim little smile. As she stared, his gaze cut over. He wet his lips, and she thought he meant to say something else, but in the end he didn’t.

He had no idea what to make of her, she’d realized. She thought a part of him wanted to treat her like any other new, young, inexperienced Knight. To guide her, offer suggestions, share his experiences, and to soothe her with bad jokes and anecdotes. But there was no escaping that night in Castor’s basement. He might not have known what she lost, but he knew who, and she could read the hesitance that flickered in his gaze when he looked at her for too long.

“That was a good hit,” Lance said, nodding toward the match.

She glanced that way and saw that Tris’s jaw was clenched, a muscle leaping in his cheek, though no other movement betrayed where he’d been struck.

Gallo was grinning again.

“What did I say about celebrating?”

“Sorry, sir,” Gallo said, not sounding sorry at all, and danced back into the next parry.

They circled one another a moment, taking stock. There was a stillness about Tris that Rose appreciated; he wasn’t one of those fighters who felt the need to boil in place, a needless expenditure of energy if there ever was one.

He pulled a double feint, and sent a blow toward Gallo’s ribs – that he blocked with a hiss as their forearms collided. Triswasbigger. But Gallo didn’t slow, and offered a strike of his own, one that was deflected, and the dance continued.

“Gallo knows he can’t match him strength-for-strength if they keep tangled. Same as me.” The last she added with reluctance, and she couldfeelLance perking up beside her. It might have been the first time she initiated a conversation with him, she realized.

“Yeah, well, no shame in that,” Lance said, eagerness peeking through his casual air. Hewantedto talk to her, for some reason. Probably asteam bondingor some such rot. “It’s better to know your strong and weak points and learn to use them to your best advantage. We can’t all fight the same way – and that’s a good thing. How is he with a knife?”

“Not as good as he is with a gun,” she said, honestly. “But I don’t get the impression you guys do much knife-fighting.”

That earned another snort. “Not with conduits, no. Only crazy people attemptthat. But you’d be surprised what sorts of situations we get into on some ops. Cities are full of surprises. The bad kind.”

She nodded. That was very true.

“Can I ask something?”

She stiffened. His tone had gone careful, like the night he’d tried – awkwardly, inefficiently, but sincerely – to offer his condolences about Beck. She nodded.

“When I told you that you could join up, that was a sincere offer. Things are upside down right now, and I think this is, as strange as it sounds, the safest place to be sometimes. But I didn’t think you’d actually do it.” He paused. “Why did you?”

She remembered Kay giving her one of those calculating looks through the curls of smoke off her cigarette.He got a taste for it. Beck had killed to get answers; to hurt Castor; to avenge his brother. But Beck also killed because he liked it. She could close her eyes and see him now, head pressed back in his chair, firelight dancing in low-lidded, honey eyes; black-smudged fingers tracing the rim of his whiskey glass.After.

In the time between her world shattering and turning up at the recruitment office, she’d killed three people. One was a sour-breathed man who’d grabbed at her arm and askedwhere you going in such a hurry, honey?She’d putting a starving, begging, dying man out of his misery, at his request, when he didn’t want the bread she offered, and instead asked for the knife.

But there had been that pimp. The one who’d come out of that underground bar; the one who’d slapped a woman. The one who’d sneered in her face and told her to run back home to her mommy. His blood had slid hot and velvety between her fingers. That one had been just for her.

Because I got a taste for it, she didn’t say.

But there was another reason. A stronger one. Beck was in hell, and it was down to her to get him out. On the streets, she’d had no resources of any kind. She’d entertained fleeting, wild thoughts of joining the criminal underground; fighting and clawing and stabbing her way to the top. Becoming the next Castor. The, with money and goons at her disposal, she would have the means to figure out how to reopen the portal to hell. Maybe she’d find a conduit of her own. She already had the dagger…

But, no. Too much risk; too little chance for success.

The military would be the easiest, cheapest way to gain access to the powers of heaven of hell. Her best chance for answers.

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