Chapter 15: The Nose Knows

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who learns his limits before he tests them, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had a bruise shaped like a shoe, a plan shaped like a bottle, and absolutely no interest in being sensible.

"No," Hadjer said.

"I haven’t said anything yet."

"You’ve got your planning face on. No."

It was Wednesday afternoon, and they were sitting on the roof stairs of the dormitory, the only place Arthur had found where nobody asked questions about bandages. Carter sat one step below, arms folded, looking like a man who’d already written the eulogy.

"I’m going to fight back," Arthur said.

Silence. Then Carter laughed, once, and stopped when he saw nobody else was laughing.

"Arthur. He’s huge. He’s strong. He’s Silver Tier. You have no chance."

"I can’t see that."

"What?"

"I can’t see it." Arthur shrugged, and wished immediately that he hadn’t, because his ribs filed a complaint. "I’m still standing. From where I’m sitting, that’s the whole résumé."

"You’re sitting because you can’t stand," Hadjer said.

"Fine. Sitting." He grinned. "But I get why you see it that way. You’ve both spent weeks bent over, taking it. From down there, anything looks big. Even something small and pathetic that bullies kids into submission."

Carter’s mouth opened. Closed.

"He’ll kill you if you skip Friday," Hadjer said quietly. "You know that."

"Nothing kills a soul faster than standing in the wrong place with the wrong people." Arthur looked at the sky. "And I don’t bend."

"You need to know your limit," Carter tried.

Arthur laughed, a tired, delighted sound. "Yes! I’m about to find out. And if I find it, and it can’t break one oversized gym teacher who won’t accept us, then it was a bad limit."

Hadjer pressed her fingers to her forehead. "How would you even fight him? He’s a tank. You can’t hurt him."

"Skin isn’t the only sense a human has that can feel pain."

He reached into his jacket and took out a box of matches.

Carter sighed the sigh of a boy who had seen a lot of fires.

"Fire won’t work either. He’s a berserker. Flames just make him angrier."

"I know," said Arthur. "Use your imagination."

He pulled out an empty glass bottle, the kind with a screw cap, scrubbed clean in the dormitory sink. Then he sat on the top step, took a small knife, and began cutting the heads off the matches, one by one, into the neck of the bottle.

Nobody spoke.

He added something from a second container. Hadjer couldn’t see what. It made her eyes water from three feet away, a sharp, flat, ammonia-bright sting that lived at the back of her nose.

"What is that?" Carter gasped.

"Shh."

He capped the bottle. Shook it, slow, patient, like a bartender with a grudge. The smell curled out around the edges of the cap anyway, and for one terrible second it smelled like a school hallway after something had died in the walls.

Hadjer’s stomach flipped. Carter coughed into his sleeve.

"Arthur," she wheezed, "you’re going to hurt someone."

"Only one," he said. "On purpose."

He made more. A second bottle, a third, a fourth, a fifth. A hollowed tennis ball. A gym sock, sealed in a plastic bag. A battery casing. He didn’t explain any of it. He labeled them with a single smudged letter each and slid them, one by one, into the lining of his jacket.

"Tell me what it’s for," Hadjer said.

"Ask me after Friday."

"If there is an after Friday."

"Then ask Carter to ask me."

A secret kept is a trap half-set;

the best surprise is the one they forget.

Carter, being Carter, had done his homework.

That night he spread three crumpled pages on Arthur’s bed and read them out in the flat voice of a doctor delivering bad news.

"Blod Sac. Berserker. Silver Tier. Eleven years on the front lines before he started teaching." He swallowed. "His Talent is called Bloodrush. Every hit he takes makes him stronger. Every hit he lands makes him stronger. He doesn’t flinch at cuts or blows, because pain doesn’t register the way it does for normal people."

"A tank," said Hadjer.

"A snowball," said Carter. "Start a fight, and by the time it ends, he’s three times what he started as. People call him the front-line man, the first one in, the first to draw blood. He’s the kind of ally that makes a long, ugly battle winnable. And the kind of enemy..."

He stopped.

"...you’d have to be an idiot to poke," Arthur finished.

"Yes."

Arthur lay back and looked at the ceiling. A very large, very scarred man filled his imagination. Shaved head. A neck like a tree stump. Hands scarred white along every knuckle, as if he’d punched through a hundred lives and kept the receipts.

Fearless, he thought, means a thing so brave it forgot what else it needs.

Everything had a weak point. Bloodrush took away the fear of being hurt.

It said nothing about being offended.

Friday morning, Arthur woke up early, ate a very slow breakfast, and did not go to Combat 101.

He walked past the east corridor at 8:58, two minutes before class began, with his hands in his pockets. He waved, in fact, at the brass plaque.

At 9:00, the Academy bell tolled once, long and dull.

At 9:06, somebody threw open the double doors at the far end of the hall.

Blod Sac came out like weather.

He was taller than the doorframe by a hand. His shirt strained across his shoulders, and the sleeves were rolled to show forearms covered in old crescent scars. A thick leather band was knotted around his throat. His nostrils flared once, slowly, the way a bull’s do before it charges.

He turned his head and found Arthur at the end of the hall.

"Specter."

"Good morning, sir. Beautiful day."

For a moment, he simply stared. Then something in Sac’s neck cracked, loud as a knuckle.

"You," he said, "are late."

"Actually, I’m absent. It’s a different thing." Arthur backed up a step. "I’d be happy to explain it in your classroom."

Sac moved.

Arthur ran.

He ran down the stairs, through the cafeteria, out through the back kitchen door, and the whole way he could hear the man behind him, no shouting, only boots and breathing and the heavy, patient sound of a locomotive deciding to get closer.

Hadjer and Carter had been told to wait on the gallery, a narrow glass balcony above the combat ring, soundproofed and sealed. Arthur had picked it for exactly that reason.

By the time Arthur burst back through the arena doors, the sand was empty, the weapon racks were still, and he was alone in the center of the ring.

Almost.

He turned in a slow circle and called.

[PROXY ME — ACTIVE.]

The copy appeared beside him, stretching its shoulders in the dusty air, wearing his face and his stupid half-smile. He patted it on the cheek.

"Stand there. Look annoying."

Then he ran for the balcony stairs.

The doors behind him boomed open. Sac stood in the entrance, filling it, and he did exactly what he’d done on the first day.

He turned and slammed the double doors shut. Reached for the old iron key on his belt. Locked them from the inside.

Click.

On the gallery, Arthur dropped down beside Hadjer with a gasp.

"He locked it himself," she whispered.

"He always does." Arthur wiped his forehead. "He wants nobody to leave. It’s the best thing about him."

Sac stood in the middle of the ring, looking at the copy.

"Clever," he rumbled. "Again."

He hit it.

Once. Twice. Three times, the clone’s head snapping back, the hits landing heavier each time as the Bloodrush kicked in, his breathing deepening, his shoulders swelling. Sweat ran down his temples. His chest rose and fell like a bellows.

On the fifth blow, Arthur leaned toward the glass and whispered to nobody:

"Come on. Breathe."

That was the plan. Not the flame. Not the strike. Breathing.

Bloodrush made him stronger with every hit. It also made his heart pound, and his lungs work, and his nose, trained by eleven years at the front, drag in huge gulps of air to feed the burn. A man who cannot be afraid of pain still has to breathe.

And Arthur had spent Thursday night sneaking into the arena after curfew. He’d tucked one bottle inside the lining of a training dummy’s chest. Another in a hollowed practice sword. A tennis ball in the sand, buried near the center, sprinkled over with a thin cloud of sawdust. A sock, sealed in plastic, hung in the exact corner of the ceiling vent, with a tiny pinprick in the bag.

Every impact shook them. Every swing cracked the seal a little wider.

The sixth hit landed.

Sac stopped.

His head tilted a fraction. His nostrils flared, once, twice.

"What is that?" he said.

The seventh hit never came.

Instead the big man’s face did something Arthur had never seen a face do: it went gray, then green, then a deep, offended, thundercloud red. His eyes watered. His hand rose to his nose like it had a mind of its own. He doubled over and made a sound that was half cough and half howl.

"Specter!" he choked. "What did you—"

He staggered. He took three wild steps toward the nearest wall. The smell had hit every corner of the sealed arena at once. Hadjer pressed her sleeve over her face on the other side of the glass and let out a muffled, horrified, delighted noise.

The copy of Arthur, still standing, still smiling, waved.

Sac fell to one knee. Then to both. His mighty shoulders heaved. Somewhere in that locked, airless room, the greatest berserker of the front line threw up into the sand.

"Is he dead?" Carter whispered.

"No," Arthur said, smiling for the first time all week. "Just thoroughly embarrassed."

The strongest man still has to breathe;

it’s the easiest thing for a fool to seize.

Then the coughing stopped.

Arthur’s smile faded.

Down in the ring, Blod Sac was still on his knees. His back rose and fell. The gray had faded from his face, replaced by something hard and flat, and as Arthur watched, the man slowly, deliberately, stopped breathing.

His chest went still.

His head turned. Slowly. Up to the gallery.

Through the glass, through the tears, through the stink, Sac’s bloodshot eyes found Arthur’s.

He can hold his breath, Arthur realized. Of course he can. Eleven years on the front line.

Sac stood.

He walked to the center of the ring, picked up the ruined dummy, and held it in one hand like a bag of laundry. With the other, he tore the leather band from his throat.

Then he walked toward the gallery stairs.

Carter was already pulling at Arthur’s arm. "Arthur. Arthur, that glass is only reinforced for students."

Arthur reached into his jacket. Three bottles left.

He didn’t have a plan for what came next.

TO BE CONTINUED...