Free Havemercy by Danielle Jaida & Bennett Jones Page B

braids in the Ke-Han style, streaks of royal blue at his temple.
    I disliked him, and I was frightened of him yet oddly intrigued by him as well.
    “Come to teach us all to talk and act like the noblesse and keep our fucking private-like?” he went on, leaning forward and making a lewd Molly gesture between his legs. “’Cause we’ve been waitin’ on you. And I’ve heard it’s considered rude, in some places, to leave esteemed guests waitin’.”
    “Rook,” said the eldest—a heavyset man with an even heavier brow and a square jaw like a nutcracker’s—in a voice that suffered no insubordination. “Sit the fuck back and shut the fuck up. Your pardon,” the man went on, giving me a once-over.
    “You must be Chief Sergeant Adamo,” I said.
    “Yeah,” said Adamo. “That’s right.”
    “Well,” said Rook, who’d managed the art of sitting back but not, apparently, of shutting the fuck up, “when’s the sensitivity start?” The airman next to him giggled—at least I thought it might be a giggle—and I swallowed as hard as I could to prevent my own tongue from choking me.
    This wasn’t simply going to be difficult. This was going to be suicide.
    Of the fourteen men lined up and sitting before me like princes, there was only one kind face to be seen, which the rest soon shamed out of its kindness. I didn’t blame Balfour for falling in step with the others. I’d seen such behavior during my worst days at the ’Versity—but those young men had always fallen by the wayside quickly enough, as the ’Versity was an institution of learning, not a catchall house for fraternities and (to put it like a boy raised on the Mollyedge strip) fuck-ups.
    Here, it seemed that such stupendously cruel hierarchical systems were encouraged rather than torn down before they could form.
    “I thought we might first introduce ourselves,” I said, buying myself time. I had notes—files, papers, years of behavioral research—behind me, and yet I didn’t want to scrabble at odds and ends, nor seem as young as I felt. Not in front of these men. I thought of Marius’s reminder—that they could smell fear—and swallowed down my intimidation as best I could.
    “You thought we might?” asked Rook. “How fucking old are you?”
    “Rook,” said Adamo. Balfour made a high, disapproving noise.
    “It’s just he looks fucking twelve, is what I’m sayin’,” Rook said.
    “Rook,” Adamo repeated.
    “And I don’t want to be taught fucking anything by a fucking twelve-year-old,” Rook finished, then shut his mouth easy as you please, as if he were a choirboy at week’s end and his parents were looking up at him from the pews.
    I dug my fingernails into my right palm. Steady, Thom, I told myself. Steady. I thought of distant, soothing things: of the strength of my dead brother, of Ilsa on Hapenny Lane who always was kind to me, of Marius’s gentle laughter. In the face of what I’d lost and what I’d accomplished, a handful of self-important men were nothing I couldn’t handle. “We’re going to start by introducing ourselves,” I said. “Now. Who wants to begin?”
    Silence was my only reply, and the sound of the wind against the glass walls. I saw Balfour look nervously about at his fellow airmen, as if he wanted to volunteer but knew he couldn’t. And then at last, as if it were being drawn out of him by the screws, Adamo cleared his throat.
    “Thank you,” I said, and meant it with all my heart.
    “Tell us how it’s done,” Adamo said, a little grudgingly, as if he knew as well as I did that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing; that I was green as the grass, and that I was going to mess all of this up.
    I licked my lower lip. “We’re going to say our names, which dragon we fly—well, that’s not for me to say, obviously, but for the rest of you—and something the others have never known about you.”
    “Something private?” said the giggler.
    “How private?” Balfour asked