doing. First of all, he stretched out all his fingers and held them tight together in a line. “See, it makes a kind of invisible knife that goes out in front of you, like this. You can’t see it by looking at it, but you know it’s there because it makes the air go wavy, kind of. Like the twists and ripples you get over a puddle when the sun’s cracking down on it.
“But it don’t have to be a knife, really. You can sort of decide the shape of it by how you move your hand. You can narrow it right down so it’s like…” He curled up his pointing finger and folded his thumb around it, leaving just a tiny hole in the middle. “Like that. You know? Like that drill thing you use to put neat little holes in a plank of wood.”
“An auger.”
“Yeah, like an auger. Or you can flatten it out into a shovel. Or you can make it really wide, and then if it hits you it’s more like being punched real hard than being stabbed with a knife. That was what I was doing with that stone – hitting it with a wide beam.”
“How about when you held it still?”
Haijon shrugged. “I don’t even know the words for that,” he said. “It’s like the widest field of all. Only you drive it in soft, so it don’t hit the thing you’re pointed at, it just kind of slides around it. I only just figured how to do it.”
He looked up at me, and maybe he seen in my face some of what was in my heart. “You gonna sit down?” he asks me. He scooted to one side, leaving room for me to get up on the bench next to him, only I didn’t do that. I didn’t move at all.
“Why’d you choose the cutter, Haijon?” I asked him.
He looked surprised. “What?”
“Why’d you choose the cutter? Why not the firethrower, like your ma? Keep it going down through the family, like? Wasn’t that a thing you felt like doing?”
He was looking at me strange, and I didn’t blame him. My voice must of gone real hard when I come up to the point at last, and Dandrake knows what my face looked like. The whole time Haijon was telling me about the things he could make the cutter do, I was thinking of Ursala’s words and kind of hating him. Kind of running forward into that hate, and holding back at the same time, and not knowing which was worse.
“What’s the matter with you, Koli?” Haijon asked me.
“There isn’t nothing that’s the matter with me. Just you answer, now. Don’t try to get out of it.”
Haijon blinked, like something got in his eye. “Get out of what?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
“The cutter, Haijon! I’m talking about the dead-god-damned cutter!”
He come down off the bench. “What’s the matter with you?” he asks again. “Did I say something to cross you, cos if I did I don’t remember it.”
“A shit on what you remember,” I shouted at him. “Why the cutter? Why was it the cutter you choosed?”
He shaked his head, like he was giving up on all this. “I’m going back inside the fence,” he said, “and leaving you to your sulks.”
I punched him in the face. I done it without even thinking. First thing I knowed about it was Haijon putting his hand up to his nose and bringing it away bloody.
“Oh,” he says. “Like that?” And he hauled off and hit me back. It wasn’t like he let go of his temper or nothing. It was more like something had wobbled out of balance and he had got to tilt it back again. Just the one punch, about as hard as the one I give him. It landed on my cheek and made my whole head ring – but Haijon outweighed me by a good twenty pounds and could of knocked me off my feet without trying.
The next thing I was up at him like a madman, swinging with both fists. He held me off with his left hand on my chest, leaning his head away from the punches so they just landed on his arms and shoulders and done very little to discomfort him.
“Koli, stop it!” he said. “Stop doing this!”
I stopped, and he let go of me. Then I jumped at him again and tried to wrestle him down. I had even less luck with that than