Page 7

Nikos stared into the cold, blank gaze of his mentor and shook his head.

Haris nodded. “I see it in yours. That’s all right, though. You’ll learn one day. We all do.”

Nikos looked down at the body in the pit, and he wondered what kind of tea he’d liked when he was alive.

He went back to Aster. He told him a lie about a couple who met over a broken archery post, and Aster actually laughed.

He told him stories from the barracks, and Aster told Nikos about his aunt and her beehives down south, the rituals they held in the apiary, the way honey could still be poisonous to the wrong people.

Nikos held a woman as she wept secrets into his ear and thought of beekeepers walking slowly through the grass in southern Arktos.

“I don’t know why they put kids in the barracks like they do,” Aster said a week later. “We’re a military, but what war are we fighting?”

“It’s how it’s always been done,” Nikos said.

Aster slid his fingers over Nikos’ hand under the table. “No one says that’s how it has to be.”

A body fell into a pit. Nikos threw a body into a pit. Haris killed a man and Nikos threw his body into an unmarked grave.

Aster kissed him softly at the back door of the tea shop, and Nikos went home and pressed his face into his pillow so no one could hear him cry.

“I don’t think I want to keep working in the marriage office,” Nikos said a few weeks later, leaning against the wall of the tea shop with Aster’s hands in his.

“Then don’t.” Aster’s voice was soft, gentle. “You can stop.”

“I didn’t have a choice. They picked me when I was thirteen.”

“Why?”

Nikos didn’t answer. His friend, Felix, had broken his leg so badly on an ill-timed jump off a wall that a bone had stuck out through the break.

Nikos was the only one who hadn’t blanched at the injury, and one of the interrogators had seen him there, carefully soothing Felix with his dominance, and they’d spoken to the Strategos.

That was all it took to set a new course for his life.

“Tell them you want to stop,” Aster said. “They have to understand.”

Nikos shook his head.

“We’ll be out of a job soon enough,” Haris said the next day. “Akti’s stepping down for his son in a few months, and Evander Akti’s too soft a touch to allow the interrogators to do our work.”

“He’ll close down the interrogation rooms?” Nikos looked up from the table he was scrubbing. Haris grimaced.

“It’s likely. His brother, now he was a proper Arkoudai. A shame he’s dead. He would have known what was right.”

“And that’s us,” Nikos said, slowly.

“Us, the interrogators up north, the spy network that keeps Arktos from civil war… it’s all going to the dogs soon, you’ll see. You’re young, and you can’t tell yet, but we’ll have more traitors than we know what to do with. Evander Akti and his soft heart will pay the price.”

Nikos looked down. He didn’t know Evander.

They hadn’t been in the same year in the barracks, and he’d only seen glimpses of him at official events.

He hadn’t looked particularly soft then, but maybe it was different for men like Haris.

Lately, Nikos was starting to feel like his head wasn’t right.

None of his thoughts in the right place, too many details cast in sharp relief that he’d never noticed before.

The tea shop was closed when Nikos came back to it that evening, and he threw up what he made to eat at home. He went to bed and dreamt of Aster lying in a field, his body surrounded by bees, their humming growing so loud that Nikos woke with a start.

He found Aster in the interrogation rooms the next afternoon.

“This one needs a cleanup,” Haris said, swinging the door open. “He was smuggling poison in from the south. His parents were the ones we found in the west interrogation rooms this morning.”

Nikos looked into Aster’s bruised, battered face and felt a strange coldness rush through him. He hadn’t recognized Aster’s parents. There hadn’t been enough of them to recognize.

“Probably won’t get much out of this one,” Haris said, and left Nikos alone with Aster, closing the heavy iron door after him.

For almost a full minute, Nikos couldn’t bring himself to approach Aster. When he did, his hands were shaking, and he gathered Aster in his arms with none of his usual grace or care.

“I’m sorry,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“I suspected you didn’t work…” Aster swallowed heavily, “in the marriage office. Wrong symbol on your uniform.”

“I’m sorry.” Nikos held Aster in his lap on the floor of the interrogation room. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “It isn’t really poison, though. It’s honey. Isn’t it? It was just honey you were bringing in. I can tell them…”

“Wasn’t just honey,” Aster said. His dark hair was matted with blood. What had Haris done to him?

His job , a small voice said in Nikos’ mind. He did his job. And you’re doing yours.

“But you weren’t involved.” Nikos touched Aster’s hand, and Aster hissed in pain. His fingers must have been broken. One, or was it more? Three. Three fingers on one hand, one on the other. “I can convince them.”

“I was involved, Nikos. It’s wrong, what they do to us.

” Aster looked up at him, and Nikos felt Aster’s submissive need sweeping through him like a tide.

He had to take care of him, but he didn’t know how.

All his knowledge of care and comfort was gone.

He felt young, terrified, like the apprentices who couldn’t make it, or the friends who couldn’t look at Felix’s leg.

“They tell us what our job is and they break us until we fit. Like you. You aren’t a torturer. ”

“It’s called an interrogator.”

“You’re not that, either.” Aster leaned his head on Nikos’ arm.

“You’re Nikos. You’re nice, and funny, and clever.

You don’t want to hurt people. You’re not made for it.

But they’ll try to make you do it anyway, and that’s what’s wrong with it all.

We’re not an army, Nikos, we’re people. We should be allowed to be people. ”

Nikos just held him, unable to speak.

“My parents,” Aster said. “That man said they’re dead.”

Nikos nodded.

“When I go, I don’t want you to be the one to bury me,” Aster said. “Promise me, Nikos. I don’t want you to see it.”

“You won’t die,” Nikos said. “Evander Akti is going to be Strategos, soon. When he’s in charge—if you can hold out that long…” But no one ever held out that long. “I can do something. I’ll ask for a pardon. I’ll make it right, Aster. You’re going to be all right.”

Aster smiled wryly and looked down. “Oh, Nikos. That’s the worst lie you’ve ever told me.”

Nikos looked around the room. Haris was just outside.

If he tried to take Aster out that way, he’d need to kill Haris.

He wasn’t sure he could. He’d spent most of his early life practicing drills against dummies that were supposed to stand in for human beings, but he didn’t think he could pretend that a body was just a sack on a plank of wood.

Perhaps that was why he knew all the details of Haris’ art but was not allowed to hold his instruments.

“I’ll find someone who can pardon you,” Nikos said. He fetched his supplies—water, bandages, rags to clean sweat-streaked skin—and he laid Aster gently on the floor.

“You know I’m guilty,” Aster said, as Nikos started splinting his bent fingers. “I’ll face the firing squad if they don’t kill me here.”

“Maybe I can get you out of Arktos.” Nikos tried to go back into the quiet, calm place where his dominance issued forth, but it felt shallow and strained. “People must have done it before.”

“Not even one,” Aster said. “That’s what they tell us.” He watched Nikos work with a hazy, vague expression. “So this is what they use you for. I’m sorry.”

Nikos looked down at him in alarm. Aster’s family was dead, he was facing execution as a traitor, and he was apologizing to a man working in the interrogation rooms?

The worst part was, Nikos knew why he said it. His dominance had always been used to urge confessions out of broken people. It was a tool— Nikos was a tool, an expert on pain, too broken himself to see it.

“I’ll get you out,” he said. He touched Aster’s temple, the one place that didn’t seem bloody or bruised.

“Get yourself out.” Aster reached up as though to grab his hand. “Go to Katoikos, or Staria. Cross the mountains. See what they look like. You’d like it there, I bet. I bet they’re nicer. I bet you won’t even miss it here.”

I’ll miss you, Nikos wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, he got Aster as comfortable as possible before slipping out of the door. He told Haris he needed a break for water—interrogators always got as much water as they wanted—and staggered into the bright sunlight to find someone to help.

He didn’t know who to trust. His friends were gone, no longer willing to speak to an interrogator’s apprentice. He barely remembered his parents. His instructors in the barracks had been kind, but they’d also signed his apprenticeship to the interrogators.

Evander Akti. Haris said he had a soft heart.

Maybe it would be soft enough for Aster.

Nikos stumbled through Axon until he found him standing by the dueling tents, as beautiful and stern as his father, surrounded by young men a little older than Nikos.

He turned to meet Nikos’ gaze as he approached, narrowing his eyes.

“Soldier.” He even spoke like his father. Nikos needed to get him alone, but he didn’t know how. He opened his mouth to ask, but then Evander’s expression shifted to disgust when he saw Nikos’ work uniform. “Interrogator.”

“I’m apprenticed,” Nikos said.

One of the men with Evander, who Nikos recognized as Acacius Stavros, looked Nikos up and down. “If you have news, you know the proper channels. An interrogator never speaks to the Strategos directly.”

“I’m not Strategos yet,” Evander said.

“You can’t break precedent,” Stavros said. “The rules exist for a reason.”