Page 124 of The Space Between Stars

“I would like a match.”

Trokus clapped his hands together nervously. “With all due respect, Major General, the rally maintains a full schedule, and the rules forbid swapping contestants between rounds.”

“Then I am requesting you change the rules.” His eyes were locked on Calver. “Entertain me. I want to understand how a nameless man takes down a Mastico.”

He was past the point of faking incompetence now: he’d worn his pride until it snagged him on a hook. Calver could have just thrown the match and been on with his night. He hadn’t seen his ego in fourteen years, and now it chose to show up? Fates curse his luck—and Fates curse that fucking dishwasher. Niklaus was visible in the crowd. Whatever prestigious tutoring he’d received, it had not extended to masking one’s feelings from their enemies. His hands were clapped to his face, jaw jutting in a grimace, brows seeking refuge in his hairline.

As if Calver didn’t already know the situation was an utter disaster.

Calver rolled his shoulders and nodded.

“Ahm.” Trokus tapped his fingers together. “Proceed?”

The whistle blew.

There were no cheers, only hushed whispers behind hands as Calver faced off with the elder Mastico. The Major General advanced, watching Calver’s movement with unwavering focus. Their wooden blades clacked in a flurry of lashes, and then they matched step in a series of sequential maneuvers as familiar to Calver as the wood knots in Fankalo’s door. The memories for each counter were so ingrained into Calver’s muscles, they came with the ease of walking. He was spellbound as they shifted through each stance in the progression like dancers on a stage of night and sand.

Calisto’s warm-up. The same Calver had practiced in tandem with Pim every day between the ages of six and twelve. Move by move. Block by block. The crowd faded. There were only the wooden curves of the dowaga and the ritual habit so deeply conditioned that it took him a near minute to realize the trap he’d fallen into: exposing who he was.

Calver extricated himself from the dance, casting his dowaga to the sand. Chest heaving, he stepped—stumbled, really—back from the Major General until he was at the perimeter of the ring. Awestruck faces stared back at him.

Instinct said, “Run”. Curiosity said, “Finish”. Calver had already proven he couldn’t obey his own thoughts. He did neither. He froze on the fated spot.

Emotion took hold of every feature on Mastico’s face. Even at a distance, Calver could see the tears in his eyes.

Run. Run. Run.

“You’re Thadinar Curtaim’s boy, aren’t you?”

Calver turned. He pushed his way through the crowd. He didn’t know where he was going, but it had to be a better place than the legacy he’d never escaped. He sped up.

A hand caught his shoulder. Arms wrapped around him.

A stone lodged in Calver’s throat. His skin snaked with fire. Every impulse told him to fight—fight for his life.

But these were the arms of comfort, not capture. The Major General whispered under his breath, “You look just like him. The last time I saw you, you hardly came past my knee… How are you alive?”

Mastico’s grief became his own. It was the question he wouldn’t answer, even if he could speak. It was the truth he had dived head-first into the void to run from all his life. He was alive—against all odds and intents—he was alive because he gave up. Again and again and again.

“I looked for you, after it all happened. I assumed the worst and…” Mastico sniffed and stepped away. He looked at the soldiers surrounding them. Stiffened, then nodded. His voice regained its air of authority. “Come with me.” Then he said, in a whisper only Calver could hear, “Perhaps we can both give each other some answers.”

One did not disobey the pull of destiny. Calver followed the general through the Jiradeshi night, away from his freedom, away from his purpose, and into the waiting maw of truth.

THIRTY

NIKLAUS

Year: 748 Post Cataclysm: Present Day

Location: Jiradesh Desert

Niklaus watched, his body strangely unfeeling, as Major General Mastico wrapped his arms around the son of Thadinar Curtaim. He had long since brushed the dirt off his hands burying his grief. Yet it gritted against him with the beat of its newfound pulse.

Curtaim was the name that had first made him feel true loathing. He thought he’d killed that hate, long ago. Funny, how one could lie to his own memories.

“We will appoint a signal translator,” Mastico said, though the words seemed to reach Niklaus’s ears an age after the man’s mouth moved. “I’ll get a courier on it.”

Niklaus made to leave—to go anywhere else—but after spending so many days at Calver’s side, his gaze reflexively fastened to him. The mute signaled, as though everything was just the same as it had been an hour prior.