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‘A real answer?’ He pulls back, breaking the spell.
‘A controversial one,’ I admit finally. ‘I thought you were a regular working drudge.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘That’s only mildly insulting.’
‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be.’
‘I know. I guess I’m better at fitting in than I thought,’ he says, wrapping gauze around my cleaned hands. ‘What’s this?’
He trails a finger along the techprint on my wrist, and I’m not sure what to tell him. ‘A relic from a past life,’ I say with a sigh. ‘My father printed me before . . .’
Jost tips his head ever so slightly to show he knows and I don’t have to say the words, even though they echo and roar in my head: before he died.
‘Why an hourglass?’ he asks, studying the mark.
‘I don’t know,’ I murmur, extremely conscious of his touch. ‘It’s supposed to remind me who I am.’
‘Is it working?’ he breathes, staring into my eyes.
‘I suppose.’ I watch him and weigh my thoughts. ‘Why are you here, Jost? Serving the Coventry, I mean.’
‘I don’t even know how to begin to answer that,’ he says, starting on my other hand.
‘At the beginning?’ I suggest quietly. He looks up and his usually bright eyes are hollow.
‘I had a family once.’ He pauses and turns his attention back to my hands. ‘Now I don’t.’
The space between us is shrinking, but I’m only now seeing the wide gulf that existed before. ‘How did it happen?’ I ask.
‘I was married when I was sixteen to a girl from my town. Our metro doesn’t segregate much in the pretesting years, and we made certain she’d be dismissed from eligibility.’
I blush at his confession but try to laugh off my discomfort. Something twists in my chest at this revelation. I don’t like that he was married. Not one bit. Even if he isn’t any more. ‘Sixteen? I thought eighteen was bad.’ As soon as I say it, I regret it.
‘Yes, sixteen.’ And to my relief, he laughs. ‘I’d known her since we were children. We lived in a small village, Saxun, which straddles the Western and Southern Sectors. I come from a long line of fishermen. It’s such a small town that assignments are dictated by family trade, and since my brother got a border pass out of town, I was the only one who could take over my father’s boat.’
‘So you weren’t given a role?’ The monthly assignment day was a major event in Romen town. Mostly it was for filling any needs in the metro, and occasionally someone might be sent to a neighbouring metrocentre, but once in a while the Guild would fill a position within the Coventry or various sector departments, which meant a border pass. It almost always went to a boy, but the whole town lived for the possibility of it. No one missed assignment day.
‘You know, if you have a lot of money or none at all, it works differently,’ he tells me wryly. ‘The system doesn’t apply to you in quite the same way.’
‘Romen was the third largest town in the Western Sector,’ I say. ‘It was the kind of town where everything was average – houses, assignments, people.’
‘The middle is what the Guild thrives on.’
‘So, you were married before you came here?’ I try to sound casual, but I’m feeling a bit out of my
league, and I don’t want him to hear the jealousy in my voice.
He nods and begins to dress my hands. ‘Her name was Rozenn. She lived with her father and her brother. I was working to buy a new boat and . . .’ He pauses as though skipping past something too painful to share, but he continues, his voice barely audible over the water. ‘I should have known something was wrong, but it never occurred to me.’
I lay a bandaged hand on his shoulder and his rigid muscles soften.
‘Her brother, Parrick. He was a loner, unhappy with his assignment, uninterested in girls. Rapidly approaching eighteen. I tolerated him because he became my family when I married Rozenn, but the two were opposites. She was a day in spring. Everything about her was vital. Parrick stuck out the same way, but only because he was cold. He could suck the joy out of a conversation. People didn’t like being around him. I didn’t like being around him,’ he admits. ‘I couldn’t understand why he was so distant and isolated.
‘He was supposed to be apprenticing with his father, but he began taking long breaks. One day he disappeared and didn’t return until nightfall. Rozenn was worried her father was losing patience with him, so she asked me to step in. She thought I could talk to Parrick. Maybe befriend him. He didn’t want to talk to me, and I didn’t try very hard. Instead I started following him.’
‘Where was he going?’ I ask in a low voice, my jealousy giving way to dread.
‘He was meeting others – from our town and other metros near us. They talked about change and revolution. I thought about turning them in, but the stories stopped me.’
