Page 50 of Steel & Thunder
“Sit.” He points at the couch when I enter the living room and I take my seat.
He paces back and forth in front of me, occasionally running his fingers through his hair. He’s obviously still angry, but a lot of the rage from last night seems to have settled. He’s fully dressed, we both are, but he’s at least not wearing the same thing he was last night. I don’t dare open my mouth to complain. Finally, he comes to a stop and turns to me.
“I want to know why you did it, David.” He locks his eyes on mine. “What possible reasoning do you have to justify your actions?”
“Because you sent my friends to a work camp.” My voice is steadier than I would have expected, but I am nothing if not confident in my convictions. “I know what those are and what really happens there.”
“What are you talk—”
“Don’t play dumb!” He doesn’t look happy that I cut him off, but he lets me continue. “Those places are where you send prisoners to work themselves to death. Where you use them until there’s nothing left. We both know two months there is as good as a death sentence.”
“Spirits, I swear this boy is going to drive me insane.” Ironstorm sighs at my outburst, pinching the bridge of his nose. “David, I can assure you that your friends are safe and will continue to be safe as they serve out the terms of their incarceration.”
“Bullshit. Tell that to my dead great-uncle.” He cocks an eyebrow at that, so I continue. “He and my grandfather were captured after a battle and sent to a ‘labor camp.’ For months they were forced to do things like mining or logging or hunting dangerous fucking monsters. Barely fed, made to work until they wasted away to nothing.” I speak bitterly to the floor. I was told this story so many times growing up. “My grandfather barely made it out alive.”
“The term ‘labor camp’ only refers to the fact that your friends will be laboring while incarcerated.” He sounds frustrated. “It is different from a normal prison because they will actually be leaving the site most days to do things like farming, or construction, or sewing. The administrators at the camp will determine what their skills will be best used for. They will even earn a wage for their work, which will go to paying whatever fines or damages are owed, and they will receive anything leftover upon their release. Your friends were lucky to be sent there at all; it is normally out of the question for anyone convicted of a violent crime.”
Ironstorm stands in front of me, arms crossing his chest, waiting for a response I don’t have. I sit there silently, staring at my hands. If what he’s saying is true, that doesn’t sound so bad... But how do I know it’s true? Aside from the fact that he hasn’t actually lied to me yet.
“I tried to explain all of this to you yesterday when we were walking home. I can only assume that the ideas in your head are a result of whatever fucked up system you humans use.” I think that might be the first time I’ve heard him curse. “I can tell you with confidence that here things do not work that way. What would be the point in punishing someone if they are not given the chance to survive afterward? As a general rule, we try not to starve or maim our prisoners, let alone allow them to die.”
“Well, I didn’t know that okay!?” How could I have?
“You never know, David. You never even try to learn! You just act.” He’s not having any of my excuses. “You never think your actions all the way through. What exactly was your plan here? Say you did manage to break your friends out of their cells and get out of the jail without anyone noticing. Then what? The five of you would make the two-and-a-half-mile trek to the edge of the city unnoticed? Somehow sneak past the guards posted at the gates and the ranger patrols in the forest outside?”
“Let us say that somehow, the five of you manage to pull all of that off. Then what?” He continues to dismantle my plan. “You have no money, no food, and no weapons. The nearest human settlement is a three-day hike. Every last person you know is either in a jail cell or half a world away. So again, I find myself asking: what was your plan, David? What has been your plan for any of your escape attempts?”
“I would have figured it out!” I snap, standing so I can yell in his face. “Why does it even matter now? It didn’t work and my friends are gone. Nothing happened. Your buddy was happy to let me go.”
“He did not do that for you, David,” he grits out, punctuating his sentence by pushing me back onto the couch, venom dripping off his tongue. “He did that for me. How do you think it would look if it got out that four days after taking you in, you managed to subdue me, rob me, and break into our jail? How do you think my superiors would react to that news?”
His career would be as good as over, probably.
“That is not to say you do not have anything to thank him for. You sincerely do not seem to grasp the seriousness of what you did tonight.” His voice is starting to sound a little like my dad’s now. Yikes. “You drugged me, a captain, a high-ranking government official. You then stole my keys, keys to a building in which we house alleged criminals. You then proceeded to break into that building intent on releasing four convicted criminals. Individually those are all already grievous crimes, but together? Even I would not be able to protect you.” His voice shakes a little as he finishes. “David, they could execute you for something like this.”
I let his words sink in. It’s not like I didn’t know that what I was doing was serious. I’m still not sure I would have done anything differently. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else you expect from me. As far as I know, you’re keeping me here for the rest of my life. Being a slave was never very high on the list of things I wanted to do.”
“I have seen how humans treat their slaves.” The fuck he has! Outlawing slavery was one of the first things Lutheria did when it was founded. “You have slept in a warm bed every night and eaten better than you have in weeks. I even bought you a new wardrobe.”
“Oh good, so I’m a slave with extra benefits.” I roll my eyes. “Except things like feeding myself, or wearing clothes when I want to, or sleeping in my own bed.”
“Just because in human cities you—”
“Ohmygod, I don’t know if this has somehow escaped your notice, but I am a human. One who has spent the last twenty years living in human cities surrounded by other humans and generally being immersed in human culture. You know, because I’m a fucking human!” I stand from the couch again to shout in his face. “I’m sorry that I don’t always get how things work around here, but the way you explain something and then just expect me to accept it and ignore everything I’ve ever known isn’t as helpful as you seem to think it is!”
I continue because why not? I’m on a roll. “I get it. You live in this perfect city with its perfect people and your perfect job, and then me and my friends come in and start blasting fire everywhere and fuck it all up. I am well aware of just how much I don’t have my shit together. If I did, I wouldn’t have left everyone and everything I know behind two months ago just to end up stuck here turned into your fucktoy!”
“You would not be here as my fucktoy if you had not chosen to challenge me in the first place!” I can tell my comments have him bristled. His fists are clenched. “You are not here because you were ‘blasting fire everywhere.’ You are here because you broke onto our land intent on ransacking a temple and then attacked my group when we tried to stop you! This was not a simple skirmish. One of my men had almost all of the skin on his arm burned off. Another broke his leg in two places! And after you were arrested for all of that, rather than accept your punishment, you decided to take things further and challenged me personally to a fight to the death!”
“We both know I wasn’t going to kill you.” I roll my eyes again. “You even said it yourself: I could have if I wanted to. You were face first on the ground, and all it would have taken was a quick jab to the neck. But I didn’t, because—and this may come as a shock to you—I’m not a shitty person. Killing someone, even for my own freedom, is about as high on the list of shit I wanna do as being a slave. So when I had the chance to finish you off, even when I thought it meant me and my friends going free, I couldn’t do it. So could you maybe stop being pissed off at me for it?”
“Just because you hesitated does not mean you would not have done it.” He crosses his arms and puffs out his chest. “No one forced you to challenge me. You still walked into that arena fully intent on killing me.”
“Yeah, and when you accepted my challenge, I thought you were doing the same thing. I thought that maybe knowing that the other person was also trying to kill me would make things easier.” If only out of self-preservation, I figured. “Surprise! It didn’t. I’d like to see you wake up in a jail cell thousands of miles from home to find two of your best friends are missing. You might find it a little difficult to not freak out and make some rash decisions.”
“Rash decisions? You nearly killed me!” he shouts in my face.
“And you made me your fucking slave!” I scream the words and he winces. “From the second I met you, you have beaten, molested, and humiliated me. You can dress it up however you want, tell yourself that I deserve it, even make me scream and beg for it, but none of that changes the fact that at the end of the day, I never asked for any of it. You forced it on me.”
