Page 70 of The Care of Broken Things
He screamed—as he was meant to. As he’d always been meant to, he realized, because the shattering pain brought with it a clarity that connected all the dots together. Big Tom’s antagonism. Cheese’s falling off the bandwagon. Jabbers’ betrayal. All of it like the strings of a spider’s web, a herding into the trap, everything coming together in the center where The Android was waiting for him.
“Oh,” said The Android, and for the first time his voice had some feeling in it, a yearning kind of pleasure. As the man pushed down on the knife, the act brought color up into those cheeks, a blushing virgin in the thralls of his first torture—except Samuel knew it wasn’t the first. The Android was far too practiced. Too comfortable. Samuel screamed again, unable to help it. He was no novice to pain, but this—this unending explosion, never leveling off, only shooting higher and sharper the longer The Android pushed in with the knife.
He felt The Android’s tongue in his mouth then, along with the gag. He tried to bite down on it, but couldn’t, and the knife—the knife! He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. The knife and that tongue were the only things in the world he was aware of. And then the door exploded on its hinges, shattering its way into the room in two great chunks and a countless number of splinters, some of which even flew far enough to pelt them with little stinging kisses.
The Android kept his hand on the knife, but he turned his head and was caught up by one of Bee’s great dinner-plate hands. It seized him right around the neck and hauled him up like some straggly chicken. It shouldn’t have looked like that. The Android was a man fully grown and kept well in shape by the pathological discipline that ruled every last bit of the man’s life. But Bee was bigger. Bigger than everything. And he seemed to grow even more, his rage like some kind of transformingserum, so that right then, before all their eyes, he had become a monster god of all-mighty retribution snarling to life.
The Android was slammed against the wall, but made no sound at all, not even a choking kind of sputter. The hold on his neck was that tight—so much tighter than a human hand should have been able to grip. Samuel hadn’t known a hand could do that. If he had, then every minute of his prison life would have been a paralyzed terror. But it wasn’t terror he was feeling, because he’d just spotted Eli, half-collapsed in what remained of the doorway, and then he wasn’t thinking anything at all.
He spit out the gag. “Eli…” It was meant to be a shout, but what came out was barely audible. Still, Eli heard it, or maybe he didn’t need to. His grip on the doorway had been all that was holding him up, but he was cutting through the space now and it was less than a moment before he was crashing to his knees near Samuel’s head.
“Is this the worst one? The worst injury?” Eli’s voice was so fast and so urgent it seemed to double up on itself.
Samuel sucked in another half-breath and felt his shoulder scream in protest. “Go. You have to—not safe.”
But Eli didn’t listen. He punched a hole into his shirt and tore it in half, right down his chest. It made his shoulder scream again, and though a gasp escaped him, Eli’s focus never wavered. Pain was cutting into every fold of that face, but it was concentration too. The man wadded up the shirt and pressed it to the wound.
His vision went black as he gasped again. “Knife,” he managed. But there wasn’t a knife anymore. When his vision came back, he could see where it lay and realized it must have been pulled from his shoulder when Bee—
“Android!” He tried to sit up, knowing what his shoulder would do to him if he did, but doing it anyway. “Eli, go.Leave.”
But Eli only continued to press down on his shoulder,keeping him from getting up. His other hand was palpating other bits of him, checking for further injury. Above them was The Android.
The man hardly looked like himself. Samuel had known him for years, but even he might have had trouble picking him out of a lineup just then. The man’s face was purpling, swelling up with blood and force, and he was dying. He had to be. A human face couldn’t turn that color and still live. Not for long, anyway. And then The Android wouldn’t be The Android anymore. He would just be a corpse, though that didn’t seem possible. The Android was too careful to die. Always so careful and so clever and always,always, the hunter. But now he wasn’t. Now he wasn’t anything except some purpling insect in Bee’s hand—Bee,The same man who never talked to anyone, who just went about his quiet business without ever looking anything in the face—that Bee was killing him.
He was sure Eli would stop it. It never occurred to him that maybe Eli would barely notice or wouldn’t care. The Eli who took the time to inspect the fevers and rashes of the worst murderers and thieves, so even if it was The Android, he was sure the man would intervene—hadto intervene—because if he didn’t, The Android really would die, and they would have murdered a CO.
They were murdering a CO.
“Wait!” The panic was back now, and pain or no, his mind was clearing. “Bee, stop! You need to stop!”
But it didn’t work. The hand kept squeezing, and The Android kept purpling. Bee didn’t even turn his head. “Why?”
It was no time for it, but even amid the panic, some part of him acknowledged that the man had finally spoken a word to him. Or maybe it wasn’t to him. Maybe he was speaking to The Android, demanding to know why he was the way he was and doing the things he did. Which, to be fair, was a question with a lot of merit, and whose answer Samuel himselfwas more than a little interested in. But not just then.
“We can’t. Bee, we can’t—for fuck’s sake, he’s a CO. We’ll never see the outside again.”
He didn’t realize he was rising, the metal of the cuffs scraping against the floor as he tried to push off on his hands.
“Hey!” Eli’s protest was sharp and meant to curb him of all foolishness, but he couldn’t listen to him.
“It’ll fall on all of us—on Eli, too.” He’d only been trying to persuade, but as he tasted the words, he realized he was right. It wouldn’t matter if it was Bee’s fingerprints on The Android’s neck. They were all present, and the blame would fall on all of them. For colluding in this. For not putting a stop to it. And it wouldn’t matter that Bee had too much strength and rage to interfere with, or that they hadn’t tried to start, never mind collude, with anything. The blame would fall on all of them regardless, and Eli’s sentence would—
The horror of it drained the blood from his face. Or maybe that was just his wound. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter, he was already on his feet, and then he was tugging on that arm, even though it was no use. He was too dizzy. Too weak. And so he begged. “Bee.” His mind was full of Nat. Of Hailey. Full of their horror as he was forced to tell them—to admit that once again, because of him, Eli was—“Please.”
He needed to find the right words. Convincing words. But his mind was useless, too full of horror and terror to work. He had nothing. But Bee’s face, that great mask of fury, finally turned to him.
“Sure?”
He had wished death on every last CO in the building. He’d wished it on Mathews, who was honestly more lazy than he was cruel, and Alvarez, who had two kids and needed the job to get health insurance for them, so of course he’d wished it on The Android. He’d wished it on him most of all. And not even asvengeance, but as a prayer. A sincere entreaty to any force in the universe who might be listening. But now he was wishing the opposite, and wishing it far harder than he ever had his death. “Yes.” And he could still feel the pain in his shoulder, and the bruising in his mouth where the gag had scraped him raw. But it didn’t matter.
The great hand opened, and what was left of The Android hit the ground, destined to live another day.
Chapter Seventeen
Knight Errantry
It was Nathaniel who took care of the mess. Samuel wanted to help—to do anything at all—but he wasn’t allowed to. Eli made it quite clear he wasn’t to leave his bed even with his shoulder so nicely bandaged and the fever only mild.
