I might not be my brother, with his patter and ability to talk to anyone about anything, but I have my own uses.
It turns out I don’t need to say anything more. A commotion from the other end of the room draws all our attention. Another beast-borne giant is limping through the door, escorted oneither side by a pair of equally massive males. His lip has been split, and the cloying tang of blood that accompanies them as they drag him along until he collapses onto a nearby bench.
“Bad spill at fight night?” I mutter.
“Not tonight,” my chatty seatmate tells me. “Training only. And he wouldn’t have wound up like that. They know not to fuck each other up during practice.”
“Random attack, then?” I say, although I’m fairly sure I know the answer already. No one would be stupid enough to attack someone his size unless they were willing to get their arm ripped off.
Or unless they had the upper hand.
“Sam works for the Morgans, over at the mill.”
With deliberate slowness, I cock my head to one side. “They have a habit of beating their workers?”
“Nah. They’ve got shitty working conditions at the best of times. They don’t care who gets chewed up by the machinery.” The guy beside me holds up his hand, revealing two missing fingers on his right hand and a chunk of his flesh is oddly sunken and shiny. “Half of these guys have grey lung from the factory too.”
“He needs to get out of town before they kill him.”
“Gus,” the quiet, growly one at my table snaps. “What did we say about having loose lips?”
“Something profound, no doubt.”
I fight the laugh building in my chest as the grouchy one lets out a warning growl.
I tune out their bickering, more interested in the other conversations going on around me. It seems like I don’t have to do too much around here to sow any seeds of discord. There are enough disgruntled mutterings to tell me that these people aren’t just sitting back and letting things happen to them.
When you dig a hole in the sand, you can’t just fill it with water and expect it to stick. You have to dampen the sand first and work slowly from there.
Still, it seems like there isn’t much I need to do here.
“Think our friends have transport willing to take him in the state he’s in?”
“They’re picking him up in an hour.”
My ears prick up with interest. I’ve wondered in the past if we should be helping dissatisfied and disillusioned people up north. But it sounds like we wouldn’t be the only ones.
Everyone wants freedom. Choices. A way of living that they’re not forced into. And we could be the ones to help them get closer to that.
Maybe we should have been doing something more altruistic with our time over the past few years. But there’s something about our current chaotic setup that feeds my fucked up version of a soul.
I finish my food, and when I’m done, I slip out unnoticed. My hood’s still firmly in place as I head back into the dark and the drizzle.
Chapter 9
Torin
I’m in a terrible mood, surrounded by a barnyard of numbskulls who have been cooped up in one place for too long. First, they were stuck on the ship and now they’re stuck on a tiny island with a little more room to mess around but no way of leaving. Despite the regular supply runs, they can’t exactly nip into the nearest town to get pissed or start a fight or find someone new to get laid. Which means there’s a whole lot of unspent energy in the air, which is risky with this bunch of reprobates. And so I’ve been trying to keep them occupied, hoping to use that energy for something more useful than destruction.
It’s not going well so far. In fact, it’s a lot like herding kittens. Every time I think I have one where I want them, someone decides it’s a good idea to fling themselves out of the window or start wrestling until they break another floorboard. It doesn’t help that Jack returned from his latest trip to one of the cities with the news that even more names have appeared on the arrest list.
We might all want to be wanted, but not like this. Not with the looming threat of arrest and detention hanging over our heads.
And so, they need some hefty distraction.
I’ve spent the past couple of days working day and night, trying to fix up the generator in the musty basement that links to the lighting system. At least that way, we won’t be stumbling around in the dark as soon as the sun goes down. Most of the wiring is intact, and there are just a few places that I’ve needed to patch up any breaks. Then all we needed was a top up of magic in the tank and we should have lighting, which Aster provided earlier today.
I was damn satisfied with myself when it got dark and the lights all came on. The house might look thrown together and a hazard waiting to happen... mostly because it is. But at least we were eating dinner in the light for once. Everyone was in a better mood already, partly because of the lights and partly because Bones announced we were throwing Cookie a birthday party.
