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“You’re hanging out with a mass murderer!”
“Eh? But he’s such a nice man.”
“You should tell me another story,” says May, having wriggled her head free of the sleeping bag. The bluish material bunches around her face to give her the appearance of a kitten wrapped in a blanket. Not that he would compare her to a kitten. A lioness, perhaps, more than willing to stain her muzzle red to defend her cubs or procure her dinner.
Just over the past few months alone she’s grown three centimetres and he’s somewhat surprised to find that he‘s noticed.
Outside the vicious blizzard wails against the outpost, the outer walls shuddering as the hail beats the metal sheets, as the wind snaps over the roof. Snowed-in. He’s experienced worse in his life: Despite the frigid temperatures without, the plethora of blankets and emergency kerosene have converted the interior to a miniature eden, if evanescent.
The others lie curled in the soft scarlet lighting, some in sleeping bags, some in swaddled blankets, most still wearing their coats. The low-burning fire has dimmed to a makeshift brazier of glowing coals splashed with a douse of oil by some enterprising hostage-via-blizzard who has elected to try to snuff them out through sheer idiocy. No one’s confessed, and the shelter hasn’t gone up in flames.
Most, by his count, should be asleep. The alchemist. The soldiers. The coal miner. Deep in sleep, inner warmth buoyed by outer cold. Worrying of what to eat at morning’s light, or concerned with when the storm will end, or perhaps completely sound in their slumber.
She isn’t. She—May Chang—scrunches herself up in the sleeping bag and inches forward. A caterpillar of sorts, if caterpillars could key into the chi of the earth and level buildings from a distance. “Mr Scar?”
He wonders, sometimes, if she knows that not to be his true name, but an epithet she’s taken on for him in lieu of nomenclature. “May.”
The acknowledgement manifests in her smile. She scrunches more closely towards him, away from the flickering fire, until she lies on her belly perhaps half a dozen centimetres from his face. Curling the blanket nearer his frame, he rolls onto his side to face her.
“I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she whispers in a voice without a single hint of apology. “I can try to go back to sleep!”
He doesn’t smile, but his perpetual frown loosens. Evens in the absence of tension, not unlike a violin bow with the horsehair unwound following the performance of the master. “Is it about my brother’s notes?”
“No. Well—I am interested in them!” Enthusiasm twinkling her eyes, May beamed; he could feel her almost vibrating from the thought. “Your brother was brilliant! Alchemy and alkahestry from all walks of life—I’ve heard of Ronshitese alkahestry before, but I’d never, ever thought that a country like Ronshito could produce something so essential to immortality if even Xing had struggled!—and the bits about Creta, and Drachma, and that other third country—” When she speaks and pauses to correct herself, or when she considers a matter just difficult enough to intrigue her, her brow wrinkles and her tongue pokes from her mouth in her concentration. “—and the whole about the odd and even arrays, and figuring out which arrays can be reversed and which ones can’t, and you’re right when you talk about how exciting the whole thing is—” She blinks, suddenly. Glances left, then right. Towards the latter, seated against the doorway akin to a guardian against the wind, the abomination in the hollow armour has turned his head respectfully away from the sleeping forms. Still his gaze glows in the darkness. The scarred man frowns. “. . . I’m keeping my voice down, right?”
“Yes, you are.” He pauses. “Is Xiao Mei asleep?”
May giggles, clamps her hand over her mouth; he can see the edges of her smile in the gaps between her fingers. “You’re worried about her.”
“She is a travelling companion, as you are, or as the alchemist is,” he answers tersely, “and I was worried about the noise she could make.”
“Her squeaks aren’t that loud.”
“No, but they’re ideal at keeping people awake.”
With the hand she’s wriggled free from the slumbering bag, her right hand, she reaches out to slap him lightly on the cheek. The contact barely stings, but he remembers the very real strength possible in her blow. “Very funny. Y’know, I don’t take well to insults.” She angles her eyebrows and huffs in mock anger. “And if you dare insult my friends, then someone’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’!”
At her colloquialism, rather painfully and obviously lifted from some hoodlum street rat, he tastes the words for a moment before he takes them as his own: “I meant that affectionately.”
Her faux fury extinguishes in an instant. “See, you pretend to be tough, but you’re softer’n pretty much anyone else I’ve ever met. Mr Scar?”
“. . . yes?” His frown returns, more at himself than at the world: For some curious reason this thirteen-year-old girl has wormed her way past his defenses; he doesn’t fault her her amusement at his supposed softness. Because perhaps he has. For her, of all people. The question lingers: because she understands the persecution of her entire people, because she holds the gravity of a divine expectation less on her shoulders and more on the nape of her fragile neck, because she, too, is a stranger in a strange land of straw-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes, striving against a system dedicated to stripping the power of those like her.
Or like him.
She watches him. Though her eyes are narrow, the lids lacking the defining fold, her curiosity brightens to them until they seem amongst the largest he’s ever seen. The pupils alone could swallow the universe and still want more. Her timbre has evened to a low half-somberity, the edges affecting a hint of lushness, of romanticism, of dreaminess. No, not quite: longing. “Tell me about your brother.”
“About my brother?” His gaze dips to her right hand resting on the cold floor. “May.”
“Mmhm!” As if noticing her blued fingers for the first time, May tucks her hand back into the warmth of her sleeping bag.”Thank you, Mr Scar. You’re always looking out for me like that. For everyone else, too.”
He isn’t. “If you say so.”
“You are. You just pretend not to be ‘cause you’ve all convinced yourself that you have to be strong as iron for you to get anywhere. Change anything.” May takes a breath. “I don’t know much about you, but I know you care.”
“May.”
“You care so much it hurts,” she says stubbornly, “and I just wish that you’d get that you don’t have to pretend not to.” He answers by clenching his jaw; she sighs. “Tell me about your brother,” she repeats for the third or fourth time, and the scarred man inclines his head, brings his knees up to his stomach under the blanket. “I wanna—I wanna know why he was so important to you. If he changed your life, then . . .” May rests her chin on the fabric bump of her sleeping bag. “He must have been a great man.”
The greatest. He starts: “My right arm.”
“The tattoos.” The scarred man nods. “Did he ink them?”
Somehow he loosens the agonising tightness of his jaws adequately to reply. “Yes.” WIth the talk of changing alkahestry and alchemy circles to one another, corresponding arrays capable of reversing reactions of matter or of energy, he has begun to consider the possibility of inscribing his other arm with the key to alkahestry; May herself has a similar array drawn into her back, apparently an indication of the mastery of the art. A master, at thirteen. Disciplined and sharp and genuinely interested about her world. His brother, again. The scarred man selects each word carefully and cleanses it through the wash of his mind: By the time it leaves his lips, he has beaten his voice to steel. “My brother tattooed his arms, from the shoulders to the wrists.”
“With both alchemy and alkahestry?” she prompted.
“A third form, the one that he created. The synthesis. A left arm of creation and reconstruction, and a
right arm of deconstruction, of death.”
May nods. “One to break matter into its basic building blocks, and the other to rebuild matter over again to the alkahetrist’s choosing!” She smiles sheepishly. “Or an alchemist’s. Al-sama has taught me a few things of alchemy.”
“Yes.” He wants to tell her: never practise alchemy; never practise the devil’s research. Yet she craves not the blessings of any god but the right to feed her people. The world is lined with more shades of grey than he would like, but he cannot alter the fabric of the world, any more than she can.
“So what’s this got to do with your arm? Ah! He tried tattooing you, too, but—”
“No.” His words still. The fire crackles onwards, oblivious to his suffering or her silence; he can sense, despite his lack of comprehending the chi she can see in blossoming colours around her, her desperate need to keep pressing, keep asking. A need reigned in, held tight, for his sake. He lifts himself slightly, grips the hem of the blanket between his left thumb to finger to draw the blanket down. Pushes back his sleeve. Reveals the thin scar on his bicep, in a thin circle of hardened beige. “This is his arm.”
May blinks. “But—oh. Oh. He . . .”
Lowering his eyelids, the scarred man turns his head away. Faintly he hears the fire cough out sparks; faintly he hears the intruders snore lightly in their sleep; faintly he hears the world spinning madly on. “I was dying. A demon, one of those wretched alchemists, with a devil’s stone. The ground opened beneath my feet, and I don’t remember—” His throat seizes, and out of nowhere May has caught his cheeks in her palms, one hand warm, the other still cold.
Her irises shine wetly. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I want to.” He listens to himself say the phrase and some part of him coils up, vaguely surprised on a level he can’t understand. “I thought that I could leave my home behind.” His fingers tremble. “I thought that I could . . . leave him behind. When I started to kill, for Ishvala, and for revenge, I think that I . . .” Without speaking May nudges him with her gentle fingers, encourages him, and he swallows. “My brother’s story deserves to be told. And if there is anyone whom I want to carry his story on, it’s you, May. Thank you.”
Her fingertips press into his cheeks for an instant longer before she lets go. “Thank you, Mr Scar. For trusting me with something so sacred.”
No, he wants to tell her: Thank you for trusting me to be a brother.