Page 113 of Never a Hero

Aaron fell into step beside her. He grimaced as a rat skittered across their path. There’d been top hats in the Liu dressing rooms, but Aaron had selected a grey felt and silk hat. Looks like you’re in a gangster movie, Joan had said when Aaron had put it on. Aaron had arched an eyebrow, amused. It’s a homburg, he’d said. They were invented in this period. They had a renaissance in the 1970s. Aaron’s golden hair shone beneath it now. He looked ridiculously out of place here, and it wasn’t just his fine clothes. His ethereal beauty was a contrast to the tired and lined faces of the working people around them.

Joan opened her mouth, and then realised that she didn’t know how to talk to him anymore. She could have said anything to his old self, but this Aaron had barely met her.

‘You’re new to travelling,’ he said quietly to her, and Joan was surprised that he’d initiated something. He usually held back and waited.

Joan felt a strange twist of nostalgia then. This had been one of their first conversations. You’re new to this, he’d said last time. You’ve barely travelled.

‘You can tell just by looking at me?’ Joan said. ‘Is it part of the Oliver power?’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘Or not only that. It’s the way you look at everything here like it’s new. Like you’re not jaded by it all.’

Joan couldn’t imagine ever being jaded by time travel. ‘I always wondered,’ she said tentatively, ‘how much you’d travelled.’

Sometimes Aaron had seemed to have manners from another age. His grey eyes flickered at always wondered, and Joan felt another twist—this time, sadder. Always implied a longer relationship than he remembered. He answered, though: ‘I moved around a lot growing up. We spent a couple of years in the nineteenth century. A year in the eighteenth century, a year in the seventeenth …’ He anticipated her next question. ‘I suppose I think of the twenty-first century as home. I’ve spent the most time there. I …’ He hesitated.

‘What is it?’ Joan said as the pause stretched.

‘Just …’ He gave her the penetrating look he’d given her when she’d told him what the true Oliver power was. ‘I don’t usually like to talk about myself.’

That had been true last time too. He’d been like the other Nick in that way. Joan hadn’t understood why Nick had been so closed off until she’d seen the recordings of him being tortured, his family murdered.

Aaron, though … Some part of her had instinctively understood that Aaron’s reticence had been self-protective.

They’d fallen some way behind the others. As if sensing her observation, Nick glanced over his shoulder at her. Aaron tilted his head, seeming to register again the tension between Joan and Nick—the only one of them who had. And there was more in his expression again too—an awareness of Nick as a figure of nightmarish legend.

In her peripheral vision, Joan saw Nick turn away again.

Joan bit her lip. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said to Aaron.

Aaron put his hands in his pockets. ‘Of course.’

‘At the masquerade party, your father said something to me.’

Aaron visibly braced himself, perhaps remembering that Edmund had given him a knife and told him to kill Joan on the spot.

Joan didn’t want to think about that part of it. She rushed on: ‘He said to me …’ She quoted Edmund: ‘You don’t even know what you are. You all die without knowing. What did he mean?’

Aaron seemed puzzled by the question. ‘He wanted to intimidate you. Scare you.’

‘Yes, but …’ There were a million ways he could have frightened her. He’d used such specific words. You don’t even know what you are. Joan glanced ahead again; the others were still out of earshot. ‘After your Oliver power was confirmed, they took you to see that man in the cage. They told you to kill anyone with a power like his. With my power.’

‘They didn’t tell me why,’ Aaron said, answering the question she’d really wanted to ask. ‘But the Court does all kinds of things without explanation.’ He searched her face, and his expression gentled. ‘You mustn’t listen to my father. He has an ability to sense the cracks in people. To know how to hurt them.’

Maybe Aaron was right. Maybe Edmund hadn’t meant anything by it.

But the question of why echoed as they followed the others onto the next street—a small stretch of flats with an eating house at the intersection. Grey clouds had rolled in, darkening it all. Joan felt the prickling sense of eyes on them again. She looked around. Faces stared through the window of the eating house, from windows above.

A bucket of slop splashed down into the gutter, brown muck smearing the pavement by Joan’s feet. She stumbled back and saw a woman peering down, her lined face hostile.

The others were still a little way ahead. Joan sped up to catch up with them, and so did Aaron. She frowned, thinking. Was the hostility being directed toward Aaron in his too-posh clothes? No, she realised slowly. The hairs rose on the back of her neck … All the eyes had been on her.

She replayed the stares of the grey-clothed workers from the pub. Some of them had been looking at Jamie, but most of them had been looking at her then too. Was it because she was a girl? Early Chinese immigration had mostly been male, she knew. Or could people tell that she was mixed race? She wondered suddenly if mixed marriages were even legal in this time. She had a vague memory that they’d been banned in some countries in this period. Not in the UK, though, right?

They turned the corner. A man in a blue sailor’s uniform overtook them, mumbling something that Joan didn’t catch. In a flash, Aaron had grabbed the man’s shoulder, perilously close to his neck. An inch more, and he could have killed him if he’d wished.

‘Aaron?’ Joan said. They’d caught up to the others, and now they all stopped. Joan had never known Aaron to threaten violence before. Not that the man understood that his life was at risk. She glanced at Nick, afraid that he might hurt Aaron in response—he knew what a monster’s hand to the neck meant now. But to her surprise, Nick had a dangerous expression too. He stared down the sailor.

‘You should not speak so to a lady,’ Aaron told the man softly. ‘You should not speak so to anyone.’ Joan felt her mouth drop open. She’d heard the man mutter something but had no idea what he’d said. Aaron’s grip tightened, and even though Aaron was slighter than him, the man paled as if some primal instinct had told him that he was in the hands of a predator, something inhuman. ‘Your next word had better be the right one,’ Aaron said, his cool tone uncannily like his father’s. The man mumbled something again. It must have been an apology, because Aaron released him with a shove and watched him hurry away.

---