Creedmoor slapped a last wide streak of fresh blue across the wall.
“Good enough,” he said. “I think I’m due a break.”
He’d joined a game of cards. Not purely for recreational purposes—his fellow players were important men in the House. Sichel was Head Cook. Renato had for fifteen years wandered all over the northwest, collecting patients for the House, and now ran security at the south fence. Hamsa was a doctor, one of the few to have a real education, being a graduate of Vansittart U, back in Jasper, which Creedmoor understood to be quite fancy.
On his way down, he stopped by a dormitory on the second floor.
—A whim occurs to me.
A young man lay on his back on the bed by the window. He had only one leg. While the right side of his face was exceedingly handsome, the left had been melted, kind of like ice cream. His remaining eye stared up at a pipe in the roof with vicious intensity, as if trying to burst it.
Creedmoor leaned against the window.
“Kid. Hey, Kid.”
“Fuck you.”
If the young man had a name other than the Kid, it wasn’t known to anyone at the House. That was what he’d written in the ledger, and he answered to nothing else. In fact, he hardly answered to anything at all. He’d come in on the last ambulance party to arrive, three days after Creedmoor. He was intensely bitter about something, presumably something related to his injuries. He rarely left his bed. When he did, he limped down the hallways, shouting and snarling and threatening nurses, and was generally thought to be a hairsbreadth from doing something that would cause the Spirit to flatten him once and for all, and he would not be missed.
“Hey, Kid. You play cards?”
“Which idiot are you? Cackle, right?”
“Cockle. John’ll do. You play cards?”
“What’s the point?”
“What’s the point of anything?”
The Kid turned his head to glare at Creedmoor.
Creedmoor shrugged. “Some of these idiots have money for the taking. But if you’re busy . . .”
—Why, Creedmoor?
—I like him. He reminds me of me at his age.
—He is maimed. Useless. We would not take him.
—Not useless. Not useless at all. Just not sure how to use him yet, that’s all.
They played down in one of the basements under the East Wing, in a vacant operating room. The afternoon was cool down in the tunnels—the walls were moist and prone to lichen, which had to be scrubbed off. Sichel brought whiskey from the kitchens. They sat on hard wooden stools, around an operating table.
“Bad news out of Kloan,” Sichel said.
“A tragedy,” Creedmoor agreed. “I blame the Line. Naked aggression. But no changing the subject, Sichel, my friend; let’s see what you’ve got.”
Sichel scowled—which made his scarred and empty left eye socket crumple in something like a wink. He tossed his cards on the table. His hand was mostly Engines, bad numbers.
“Curse the day you came here, Cockle.”
“Now, now. This is a welcoming House. The Spirit forgives all. Even luck with cards.”
Creedmoor reminded himself to start losing again. They talked more freely when they thought they were winning.
“It certainly does,” Renato agreed, dealing. “It forgives everything.” Solemn as ever. Renato slurred his words because parts of his jaw were gone; he wore a red domino over his face. His hand was mostly Guns, Creedmoor thought, and pretty good.
“It does at that,” Sichel said.
“Bullshit,” said the Kid, who sat on the far end of the table, by himself.
“Now, now.” Renato shook his head. “Now, now. You just need to give it time. Lie back. Let the Spirit work on you and—”
“I got nothing to forgive,” said the Kid. “It’s those fuckers who did this to me who need forgiving, and I don’t plan on forgiving them. I don’t plan on sitting around here like a coward and rotting. I’m going to—
“That way you’ll get yourself killed,” said Sichel.
“So what?”
Renato said, “Listen. You were a soldier, right? So there’s something to forgive right there. Doesn’t matter what side. Let me tell you a story. So twenty years ago . . .”
Creedmoor stopped listening. Twenty years ago, Renato had fought in the army of one of the richer and more inbred southern Barons, a Baron who’d allied himself with the Gun and whose lands and, more important, oilfields now belonged to the Line. Renato was a great storehouse of war stories. All of them had a moral at the end about forgiveness, and healing, and above all of the importance of turning