I raise my eyebrows: it seems Dawn is miming a martial-arts move to show Jervis how to do it. He slightly nods. Neither of them has noticed me.
At a certain point, the young man says:
“I’m not sure… I should try it personally.”
In my head, an image forms of the two of them in contact in a hand-to-hand fight. I can feel it inside me: this is exactly what the rebel is aiming at.
“That wouldn’t be wise,” she replies.
“Come on!”
“I’d hurt you!”
I can’t hold myself back…
“E-ehm,” I say.
The two of them turn around. Jervis looks annoyed, while Dawn is surprised.
“When did you come in?” the girl asks.
“Thirty seconds ago,” I reply. “It looks like I’ll have to go somewhere else…”
“Wait,” she stops me.
And she gestures for me to come closer. I go over to her, perplexed.
I hadn’t expected her to try to talk to me. Even though we haven’t communicated at all since I met her yesterday, I feel as if our relationship has become… strange. It’s complicated to explain, because it’s something intuitive, rather than based on clear and measurable facts.
“What is it?” I ask her.
“Jim is behaving a bit oddly,” she explains. “Could you think about it?”
Ah, so that’s what it is. I don’t know what I was expecting, but… I’m not happy about it.
“I don’t think he needs me to look after him,” I reply, disappointment making me laconic.
“I wouldn’t want him to get himself into trouble.”
“You mean the kid from before, right?” Jervis cuts in. “Don’t worry: he’ll learn the hard way how to behave. Youngster, you may go.”
A jolt runs down my spine. That last sentence… has penetrated into areas of my mind that usually behave themselves. From there I feel an abnormal irritation spring up, of almost primitive origin.
I get a couple of nervous twitches in my right eye. I look sidelong at Jervis, then ignore him and turn back to Dawn.
“He has a different attitude with me, too,” I say. “But it’s normal: it’s his age.”
A rather obvious remark on my part, if not almost out of place, given that she and I are only a few years older than Jim, and certainly still subject to the same “swings” that characterise adolescence.
But after Jervis’s words, I felt the desire to linger here a moment longer, just so as not to give the impression that I’m yielding to the rebel. I don’t care if, in order to do so, I have to say banalities I would normally refrain from.
Not that she seems to find them such. She nods instead.
“All right, all right,” Jervis says. “Can we have a bit of peace now? We came here precisely not to be bothered.”
I look at him for a moment. There’s nothing else I could say, at this point. I clench my teeth, then turn to head for the door.
Once again… once again, I’ll let things go the way they’re meant to go.
Before I take my first step, though, out of the corner of my eye I see the young man place a hand on the rebel’s shoulder. As he does so…
“This is basically mine and Dawn’s room,” he adds.
I freeze. Inside me, the part of my mind stirred by Jervis’s earlier words swells, like a mass of sensations and urges charged with immense latent energy.
I stand fixed in place for a few seconds, my shoulders turned towards the two rebels. I feel on the edge of an inner precipice… one I have an incredible desire to throw myself into, a gesture from which only a thread of rationality holds me back.
Stop it… stop it, damn you. Stop talking to me like that… stop making me feel so far away from Dawn.
And… stop it, Ethan. Stop putting up with it. Stop refusing to offer resistance, futile though it may be.
“What is it, youngster?” Jervis asks once again.
Another surge in my mind. And with it, I feel my reason abandoning me. Every inhibiting brake that has held me back so far — the ones I trust so much, and that in the past have protected me from doing various stupid things — gives way.
Exactly what, a few days before ending up in Tersain, was about to happen with Justin, when he was amusing himself by banging a book against my head at school.
At last… I feel myself give in. But it isn’t blind fury that fills me. It’s strange… warm and cold at once… passionate and reasoned. What drives it, more than pure impulses… is a desire. The desire not to remain doing nothing.
I turn slowly. My eyes meet the young man’s. My eyelid twitches, before a cold smile spreads across my face.
And words I hardly recognise as my own leave my lips.
“You said you wanted to learn a few moves, didn’t you?” I say.
“Eh?”
Jervis has barely time to make that puzzled sound, before he finds one of my hands at the base of his neck, just where the chest begins. He lets out a startled gasp, after which, with a shout, I shove him backwards with all my strength, slamming him against a wall.
Still pressing him near the throat, where I can almost make him feel as if he’s about to be strangled, but without it actually happening, I ignore a series of kicks and punches he lands on me. Then, with a great effort, I pull the opponent sideways… who, surprisingly, loses his balance, thrown to the ground by the momentum I’ve channelled into that single manoeuvre.
At once, Jervis gets back up, rubbing his neck.
“You went too far, youn—”
“And stop calling me youngster!” I roar.
Before I realise it, my right hand is clenched into a fist. I’m beside myself. A sense of loss, frustration, the need to rebel against the pain inside me… all together, these feelings are fuelling one another, erupting into an unhealthy physical manifestation. And yet, I don’t care… driven by that urge to act, I’m giving my approval to such an explosion.
This guy, because of whom I’m feeling so many negative emotions… I just want him to stop disrespecting me.
So I raise my good arm… and aiming for the rebel’s shoulder, I throw a punch. He blocks it. Then he stops another.
“You’re barely a couple of years older than me!” I shout. “Don’t act like such an adult!”
At last, Jervis retaliates. I dodge a first punch aimed at my face, while another hits me on the cheekbone. I barely feel the pain, as with a shout I hurl myself at the opponent’s torso, raining punches on him.
“Hey!” I hear Dawn cry out, alarmed. “Stop it!”
“Cut it out, kid!” the rebel snarls. “I won’t go easy on you just because you’ve got an arm—”
A punch lands squarely on his jaw: to be precise, I hit him with my broken arm. An absurd pain shoots from there straight up into my brain. However…
“This is for Jim, you idiot!” I shout all the same, ignoring the pain.
And while Jervis staggers, dazed, I grab one of his legs, yanking it upwards. He loses his balance and stumbles backwards. That’s when a front kick of mine hits him full on, smashing him against a wall.
Ending up sitting on the floor, the young man looks up, panting furiously, as if ready to get serious. There his expression freezes: in front of the rebel, I’m making a little flame flicker on my palm.
Not one of the kind I’d managed to create after the delirium, small as a candle flame… this one looks more like the blaze of a torch. Almost as if my fury is feeding it, pushing beyond the limits I haven’t been able to cross so far.
“Just so we’re clear,” I growl. “This is MY and DAWN’S room! Not yours — OURS!”
And I clench my hand violently, extinguishing the flame. I’ve achieved the result I needed: Jervis knows I have the mayea… and that with me, he could get really hurt.
“Oh, come on!” the rebel says, wary, his irritation well contained by the rationality that is surely warning him not to take risks in a real fight. “You’re a pathetic kid, and she wouldn’t want someone like you over me.”
A kick suddenly strikes the rebel in the torso. His eyes almost pop out of their sockets. The young man stares in astonishment at the author of the attack: not me, but Dawn.
“Ethan is not pathetic,” the girl bursts out, having arrived out of nowhere. “And it just so happens you got the wrong idea: the only thing I cared about was you teaching me how to use firearms better. If you were thinking of anything else, then you were way off.”
I stare at the rebel, dumbfounded. Jervis is stunned too. In both of us, the anger has suddenly dropped into the background.
“What are you saying, dear?” the rebel says.
“Don’t call me dear!”
Dawn grabs him by the ear and drags him towards the door. There she lets him go, not before yanking him hard enough to send him sitting on the floor.
“Oh, how stupid… why didn’t I realise what you were trying to do?” she snaps.
“But… seriously? Wasn’t it obvious…?” Jervis tries to reply.
“Shut up…” she cuts him off, one hand going to her eyes, rubbing her closed eyelids. “Go away… just go away and—”
At that moment, Jim suddenly appears on the threshold. He’s wearing a broad smile, completely devoid of surprise… as if he’d been following the whole scene from hiding. Swiftly, the boy pounces on Jervis from behind… and before the latter can react in any way, he unleashes a series of punches on him. Nothing too strong, it seems to me… so much so that, at first, it isn’t clear why he’s doing it. Then…
“I’ll take the credit for beating him up,” he declares. “All by myself, obviously. I’m going to turn myself in… they’ll surely want to punish me for this.”
That said, Jim gives me a wink and drags Jervis out of the room, who by now, between pain and confusion, is struggling to react. Dawn and I find ourselves staring at the doorway beyond which the two have disappeared. Then we look at each other…
… and both let a smile slip.
◊◊◊
“I was showing him those moves as a sort of exchange,” Dawn explains.
She and I are sitting near the door of the training room, our backs against the wall. The door is closed, so that no one will come and disturb us. This room has tended to become rather crowded, lately.
“I want to improve in every respect: grappling, bladed combat, mayea, firearms…” the young woman goes on. “I ran into him in the storeroom. He said he was from the armoury, so I thought I’d have him teach me how to use weapons better, since until you recovered I couldn’t train in hand-to-hand combat with you.”
I can still feel my body full of adrenaline, even though the agitation of the fight is gradually subsiding. I’m already starting to wonder what on earth came over me… my behaviour really was indefensible.
Still, though, I don’t care all that much. I… as much as I hate violence, in that moment I feel I did the right thing.
“You could have told me straight away,” I point out. “Instead of telling me that story about mind-influence mayea as a reason not to see me.”
“But that still applies,” Dawn objects. “I certainly wasn’t spending my days with that guy; I could have seen you regardless, even if maybe a bit less.”
“You didn’t really get in touch much, though. Was it really because of that absurd fear about the mayea?”
Maybe “absurd” is too strong a word… but I’m not quite myself, and my language is less diplomatic than usual.
“No… not only that. It’s just that lately you seemed strange to me, and besides I didn’t want to disturb your rest,” Dawn reveals. “What Nipria said… made me think that perhaps she’s partly right. It’s better if you recover in peace, without forcing the training.”
I don’t reply. Frankly, I don’t know what to think.
“Hey,” the rebel says, taking hold of my hand. “Sorry, all right?”
At that gesture… the remnants of my anger melt away.
“There’s nothing to apologise for,” I reply.
I give her a smile. I realise I’m much calmer than before.
“It’s just left me… perplexed, all this,” I admit. “I got used to our time together… and besides, you’re the one I’ve known the longest here. I feel a bit lost not seeing you anymore… or not having your attention.”
I don’t even know myself why I’m confiding something like this to her. Normally I’d be embarrassed, and yet… now I just want to open my heart to her.
“You silly,” Dawn says. “Come on, it seemed to me you adapted: you looked like you were having fun with Nipria yesterday.”
“Eh?” I says, embarrassed. “Actually, nothing was really happening… I think…”
I scratch my head awkwardly. In fact, the doubt that something might have been happening yesterday is quite real…
“Certainly not on my side,” I declare at last.
“No… I can’t imagine it from you,” she laughs.
And what’s that supposed to mean? I almost feel offended.
“Hey…” the girl goes on at once, before I can protest. “When Antony and Samuel aren’t around, you’re the person closest to me here, you know?”
“Me?”
“Yep… if you think about it, we’ve lived the last period together. The Republic’s attack on my fragment, the missions… and then, there’s your promise. I’m counting on it, all right?”
I feel my heart speed up. Pulsating waves of emotion seem to radiate from it in bursts, flooding my chest and stomach. I… damn it, I’ve never experienced anything like this. It makes my head spin!
“Yes,” I say, my voice almost trembling. “I’ll hel—”
I stop short, twisting my face into a grimace of pain. With all these sensations making me feel light-headed, I was trying to find a more stable position… and in doing so, I leaned too much where I shouldn’t have.
“What is it?” Dawn asks.
“My arm…” I groan, clutching my left limb. “Maybe I shouldn’t have used it to throw a punch…”
◊◊◊
As soon as she hears a knock on the door of her cabin, Nipria runs to open it.
“Ethan, you’re late—”
She stops short. Beyond the threshold stands Jim.
“Sorry,” he says with a grin. “Ethan’s ended up back at the iatreion. He thought it was a good idea to strain his broken arm.”
“What?” the artificer exclaims, alarmed.
“Easy, they say it’s nothing, just a lot of pain,” the rebel reassures her. “But today he won’t be able to come with you to look at engines and stuff like that. You’ll have to wait for another time.”
“That’s fine… as long as he recovers,” she says, relieved.
“Oh, he will, he will,” the boy assures her. “We’ll see if I recover, rather, after shovelling coal even in the evening.”
“What? Why?”
“Punishment for a brawl,” Jim explains, shrugging. “Ethan owes me a big favour.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t mind what I just said.”
And the rebel walks away down the corridor. A smile flickers across his face.
“This is for Jim, eh?” he mutters.
You idiot… it was for Dawn you were meant to fight. Oh well… I’m glad that, at long last, you stood up for yourself.
◊◊◊
In the captain’s study, Martin Young and Archeos stare at each other in silence. Both are thoughtful, partly also because of what happened to Ethan a few days earlier, when he reached the peak of his illness and caused an uproar.
“Aimond… what do you suggest?” the captain asks.
“I think Ethan should continue to take part,” the philosopher states.
“Are we sure he won’t be a source of trouble?”
“No,” the old man shakes his head. “But I don’t feel able to ignore the signs… nor the intuitions.”
Martin Young leans back in his chair, resting against the backrest.
“Mmh… energy, eh?” he murmurs.
Aimond Lacelet shrugs.
“In any case,” the captain adds, “the Sanders brothers are back. We can send them to Agathe.”
Archeos doesn’t reply, merely fixing his gaze on the man.
“Do you think I should include him as well?” Martin asks.
The old man raises an eyebrow, as if to indicate the obviousness of the answer.
“All right,” the captain says, raising his hands in surrender. “At this point, we might as well give their team a name.”
“How about Energy?” Archeos chuckles.
“Oh, give me a break!”
