You know that bit below the ribcage on a woman, above the navel and under the lowest rib, where the skin of her gut stretches so tight you can see a caged heart beating?
No, I don’t either.
My old lieutenant told me to look for it the day I visited my first brothel. Mind you, I was thirteen and he was always after the impossible.
Franc’s skin is taut, right enough.
Her navel is a tight knot, but her heart is safely back behind her ribs. And she doesn’t have body hair because she scrapes between her thighs, under her arms, and across her skull each morning with a knife – or so Rachel told Haze.
Never seen her do it.
‘Stand still,’ I say.
Pulling a blade from my boot, I check its edge. Sharp enough for our needs.
Twilight is the only time Hekati is bearable. For now, the wind is at Franc’s naked back. Soon, the last of the sun will vanish behind a slope; the wind will switch directions and with it will come the cold.
A moon is already rising.
Of course, the moon doesn’t actually exist. It’s another illusion.
Like the sun setting and the night sky, which is just a pattern of stars reflected through glass. I don’t care how many times Haze tells us. It still looks like the sun, the moon and the stars to me.
‘Sir,’ says Franc. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘About the moon.’
‘Beautiful,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’ See, she agrees with me.
Franc and I are up here to have a little discussion. She thinks she is losing her edge in battle. I think she’s as fast and deadly as she ever was. Except once you lose faith in yourself it doesn’t matter what anyone else tells you.
You find it again fast, or you lose it for ever.
Sometimes, of course, it’s not there to start with. Sometimes you only stumble on it later . . .
The colonel is down in a valley with the rest of the Aux.
I have told them he’s eighteen and not here from choice. They are to cut him the slack due any new recruit. Enough to stop him killing himself; not enough to get them killed instead. In the meantime, they are to salute him, feed him and obey his orders wherever possible. As for the Jaxx thing, they’d be stupid not to work that out for themselves.
‘Sir,’ says Franc. ‘When you’re ready.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Steady yourself.’
Reaching out, I grip one bare hip and drag my knife from one side of her abdomen to the other. Franc gasps, swallows the pain and stands straighter. I am impressed. Not least that she keeps her hands to her sides to leave herself open for the next slash.
Instinct is a bitch to fight.
My second cut is slightly higher than the first, and my third higher still. There’s a fourth and a fifth. Until blood trickles down Franc’s inner thigh like piss.
‘Don’t move,’ I tell her.
Kneeling to scoop up grit, I rub it into the cuts. Dirt will raise the edges of the wounds, make sure they never fade. She has her scars back, and with them will come her edge. Or so she believes.
Stepping back, she salutes. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘My pleasure.’
A few months back someone offered to remove the whip marks from my shoulders. I refused, because some lessons need remembering. Scars make us what we are, people like Franc and me. She nods when I say this, pleased that I understand.
Now’s the moment to ask my question.
‘Franc,’ I say. Must be something in my voice because she goes still.
‘Sir?’
‘You were trained. Weren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’ She nods. ‘We all were. We were Uplift militia, before . . .’ Before they were captured, told to change sides and became cannon fodder for the glorious Octovian army instead.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Before that.’
She looks at me. ‘From birth,’ she says finally. ‘That’s the way it works.’
‘To be Haze’s bodyguard?’
‘His lover, his bodyguard, his servant, his possession, until death . . .’ Her mouth twists. Her eyes are bleak. ‘He rejected me.’
‘Franc.’
In short bitter sentences she describes Haze running away from home. She follows, because her training drives her to. Only when she catches up, Haze tells her she is free. Her life is her own.
So she’s here. Because here is where Haze is.
‘You’re here,’ I say, ‘because you’re in the Aux.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she says. ‘That too.’
As she turns, I see the dagger sheath between her shoulders and realize why she never takes it off. Unbuckling it probably makes her vomit. Knives keep Franc happy and make her secure. It’s called imprinting, and hers is an extreme version of what we do to new recruits.
Sounds like she has had it for ever.
Reaching for her singlet, Franc hesitates. Probably nothing, I tell myself. But I catch her sideways glance. Her blood’s on my hands and my shirt is in the dirt, because it’s filthy enough as it is. And she’s already naked . . .
Meet a woman you like, make conversation.
Can’t remember who told me that. Either my old lieutenant or a whore. Make conversation. It convinces women you’re not only interested in one thing, even if you are.
‘You know something?’
‘No, sir,’ says Franc. She waits, singlet in her hand.
‘Can’t remember my first fuck,’ I tell her. ‘Can’t remember my first kiss or my first drink. But I sure as hell remember my first knife.’
Franc smiles, and for a second looks like someone else. ‘Really, you can’t remember your first . . . ?’
‘Happened the same night as my first drink.’
She laughs.
‘You make that blade?’ I ask.
Sliding the dagger from its sheath between her shoulders, Franc finds its balance without even looking. ‘Stole it,’ she says.
It’s my turn to smile.
‘Sir,’ says Franc. ‘Permission to speak freely?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You think our time’s come?’
Standing up, I walk her to the edge of a drop. It falls for a hundred paces onto jagged rock. If I said jump, she would jump. No doubt about it. ‘When I was a child,’ I say, ‘an officer put a pistol to my head. It misfired, so he kept me as his orderly.’
‘That was your time?’
‘Everything since is extra.’
‘Those scars,’ says Franc. ‘They were my time.’ She hesitates, and then shrugs, mostly to herself. ‘Killed my uncle, my three brothers and a cousin. They thought I’d just let them do what they wanted.’
‘They tried to rape you?’
‘Tried to stab Haze.’
My surprise must be obvious.
‘If he dies I go free,’ she explains. ‘They thought they were helping. Not a single one of them believed I’d protect Haze against my family if that was what it took.’
She weighs next to nothing. Our kiss only ends when I bite her lip hard enough to draw blood. She bites back, and then she’s tugging at the buckle on my belt and fumbling the fastening on my trousers.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. So I put the rest in.
This time when she bites, she means it. A second later, she’s spitting and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘Could have warned me.’
Bad blood. What, she couldn’t work that out for herself?
Wrapping my prosthetic fingers into the webbing across her back, I grab her buttocks with my other hand and yank her against me, feeling her legs twist behind mine to bring her closer. We are standing naked on the edge of a drop, with a rising wind buffeting us. A dirt path to one side and certain death to the other. I’m not going to move unless she asks me, and she is not going to ask me.
Licking my fingers, I reach under her.
Franc yelps.
When I persist, she sinks her teeth into my chest.
This time round she wipes her mouth against the unbroken skin of my shoulder. Then she decides to live with what my hand is doing and locks her legs tighter. A second later, they’re locked tighter still and she’s raking bloody lines down my back.
I’ve met better-behaved wildcats . . .
‘Don’t laugh,’ says Franc eventually. That’s when she can say anything at all. ‘Take next watch,’ I say, lifting her off me.
She nods gratefully. Replacing Shil on guard is going to be easier than returning to the fire and the knowing glances of the others. They’ll have heard us. It would be impossible for them not to . . .
‘And you, sir?’
‘I’m staying up here for a while.’