Chương 10: Requisition

They came at midday, which was somehow worse than if they'd come at night. Night visits belonged to nightmares, to the shape of things you could tell yourself weren't real once the sun came up. But this was midday, full gray light, the kind of ordinary hour when Aurelian was supposed to be arguing about porridge and Keth was supposed to be failing at a sword stance and Elian was supposed to be sitting very still by the window doing whatever it was Elian did when he thought no one was watching him do it.

Midday didn't leave room for pretending. Midday just happened to you, in full view, with nowhere to hide the fact that it was happening. Three of them came through the gate. Not Census-gray like the letter-runner from before. Black tabard, silver trim at the collar, the kind of stitching that took a tailor and not a quartermaster. Officer rank. Keth didn't know the insignia yet, wouldn't learn to read it for months... but he understood without needing the vocabulary that these were not men who filed paperwork.

These were men sent to collect on paperwork already filed. The one in front had a face like a closed door. He didn't knock. He didn't need to. Voss was already standing in the yard, having heard the gate long before Keth had, his bad hand tucked into his sleeve and his good hand loose at his side in a way that Keth had learned, by now, meant the opposite of relaxed.

"Reckoner Voss." Not a question. The officer's voice carried the particular flatness of a man reading from a form he'd memorized so thoroughly he no longer needed to look at it, though the ledger under his arm suggested he'd bring it out anyway, for the record.

"We're here for the subject Elian. Induction was scheduled forty-eight hours prior. The window has closed."

"He's injured," Voss said.

"Medical report's on file. Broken fibula, training incident, filed by—""We're aware of the report." The officer's eyes didn't move from Voss's face, didn't so much as flick toward the house, and something about that stillness was worse than if he'd been angry. Anger would have meant he cared enough to perform it.

"We're also aware the physician who filed it has a documented history of falsifying injury reports to delay conscription in this sector. Three prior incidents. This report has been flagged for review. The subject will be evaluated at Barracks Seven, under proper medical supervision, and inducted according to his confirmed status regardless of the outcome." Behind Voss, the door had opened. Elian stood in the frame, splint still on his leg, weight braced against the jamb. He didn't look surprised.

Keth would think about that later, how his brother's face held nothing that resembled shock, only the particular stillness of someone watching a thing arrive exactly on schedule, the way you watch weather you've already read in the shape of the clouds an hour before it lands.

"He can't travel," Voss said.

"Not on that leg."

"We have a cart." The officer said it the way you'd note the weather.

"The subject will be carried if walking proves difficult. This is not a negotiation, Reckoner. This is an order." Keth came out of the house behind Elian before he'd decided to move at all. His body had simply gotten there first, the way it always did lately, faster than the part of him that was supposed to be thinking clearly.

"He's not going anywhere," Keth said. The officer looked at him for the first time, not with malice, not even with real interest, just the brief, clinical attention of a man confirming a detail matched what was written down. Fifteen. Unmarked. Not relevant to the ledger under his arm.

"You are not the subject," he said, and turned back to Voss, as if Keth had already stopped existing the moment the sentence finished.

"Reckoner Voss. Your record with the Census has been exemplary for twenty years. I'd advise against jeopardizing it over a bureaucratic delay that changes nothing except the paperwork's date. The subject is confirmed Support-type, pre-seventeen manifestation, anomalous classification. He belongs to the Census as of the day those symptoms were logged. Not the day you decided to report them." Voss's jaw worked once. Keth had learned to read that motion by now.

A man biting down on the size of what he wanted to say, choosing, instead, the smaller true thing that wouldn't cost him everything. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Let me walk him out," Voss said.

"At least let that much be mine." The officer considered this the way he seemed to consider everything briefly, without warmth, weighing cost against benefit and finding the cost acceptable.

"You have five minutes." Voss turned. For a moment his face wasn't the mask at all... not command, not exhaustion, just an old man looking at a boy he had failed to protect long enough, doing the arithmetic on what was left to give him in the time that remained.

"Elian," he said.

"I know." Elian's voice was steady. Too steady, the way stone is steady, the way something that has already decided how it's going to be carried stays still under the hands that lift it.

"I've known for a while, Voss. Since before the letter. You don't have to look like that."

"I'm allowed to look like this."

"You're allowed. I just don't want it to be the last thing I remember of you." A small, tired smile.

"Give me something else." Voss's hand... the ruined one, the one he kept hidden, the one that had held fire steady enough to seal a boy's chest shut in an alley months ago, came out of his sleeve and rested, gently, against Elian's cheek. It shook the entire time. Neither of them mentioned it.

"You get up," Voss said.

"Whatever they do to you in there. Whatever it costs. You get up afterward. That's the only order I've got left to give you, and it's the same one I gave your brother, and I mean it exactly as much for you as I did for him."

"I'll get up," Elian said. Aurelian had come out by then, still in his sleep clothes, hair every direction, face doing something complicated that wasn't a joke for once, the absence of a joke somehow louder than any joke he'd ever made. He didn't say anything. He just stood there, arms crossed hard against his own chest like he was holding himself together by main force, watching. Keth didn't remember crossing the yard.

He remembered, after, standing in front of his brother with both hands fisted in the front of Elian's shirt, not pulling, just holding, the way you hold onto something already halfway gone because your hands haven't caught up to that fact yet.

"Keth." Elian's voice, close, quiet, only for him.

"Look at me." Keth looked at him. The calm was still there — always there, that terrible, patient calm — but underneath it, for just a moment, something else surfaced. Something that looked, for the first time in longer than Keth could remember, like fear. Ordinary fear. The kind that belonged to a seventeen-year-old boy and not to whatever else lived quiet beneath his skin.

"I'm scared," Elian said, so softly it barely carried the distance between their faces.

"I need you to know that. Whatever I look like walking out that gate — I'm scared. That part's real. Don't let the calm fool you into thinking it isn't."

"Then don't go."

"I have to."

"You don't. We could—""Keth." Elian's hands came up, closed over his brother's fists where they gripped the shirt, not prying them loose, just holding them there a moment longer, like he needed the pressure as much as Keth did.

"There's no version of this where I don't go. There's only a version where I go and you spent our last minute fighting me about it, or a version where I go and you spent it just being my brother instead. Pick the second one. Please." Keth's hands loosened. Not because the fear had gone anywhere. Because his brother had asked, and some habits. The habit of giving Elian what he needed, formed over fifteen years of shared bread and shared silence, ran deeper than fear ever could.

"I'll come get you," Keth said.

"However long it takes. Whatever it costs. I'll come."

"I know." Elian's smile came back, small, real, breaking at the edges.

"That's the only thing keeping me steady right now. Don't lose it before you have to use it." The officer's voice cut across the yard, flat, unbothered by any of what it was interrupting.

"Time." Elian let go of Keth's hands. He turned to Aurelian, and something passed between them that Keth couldn't fully read, some private ledger of jokes made and food shared and nights spent not-quite-sleeping in the same room, all of it compressed into a look that lasted less than a second and somehow held years.

"Take care of him," Elian said.

"He's terrible at taking care of himself."

"Obviously," Aurelian said, and his voice cracked clean in half on the single word, and he didn't try to hide it. Elian limped toward the gate. He did not look back, not out of coldness, Keth understood even then, but because looking back would have cost him the composure he needed to walk through it at all, and some kindnesses only look like cruelty from the wrong angle. The cart waited outside.

He climbed in without help, refusing the hand one of the officers offered, settling his splinted leg with the same careful precision he brought to everything. The gate swung shut. Keth stood in the yard a long time after the sound of wheels had faded into the ordinary noise of the street, carts, gulls, someone's laundry line creaking in wind that didn't care what had just happened beneath it. Voss hadn't moved either.

His hand was still raised, slightly, at the height where Elian's face had been, like the gesture hadn't gotten the message yet that there was nothing left in front of it to touch.

"That's it?" Keth's voice came out smaller than he wanted.

"That's just — allowed? They just walk in and take him?"

"That's the law," Voss said. His voice had gone somewhere very far away.

"I told you it wouldn't be enough. Whatever we did. I told you."

"I know what you told me."

"Then you also know I'm not sorry for trying anyway." Keth looked at the gate, at the empty street beyond it, at a world that had simply continued existing in its usual indifferent rhythm on the other side of the worst thing that had happened to him since the alley.

"Neither am I," he said. Behind them, Aurelian had gone very quiet, sitting down hard on the training post like his legs had stopped agreeing to hold him up. He didn't say anything else that day. Neither did Keth. Voss went inside and didn't come back out until the light had changed entirely, and when he did, his eyes were red in a way none of them mentioned, because some things, once seen, didn't need to be spoken of to be understood. The wall stood beyond the yard, black and patient as it had always been.

The seam had not broken. Not the wall's. Something else had, quieter, harder to name, somewhere in the three people left standing in that yard once the cart wheels had faded entirely out of hearing. End of Chapter Ten