He lay his arms around her back, right looser than the left, to keep the nerve stimulators from smushing into her. He didn’t know what she wanted, so he put his nose against hers. Pushed, gently, so their muzzles slid against each other. The way she had done it.
She shut her eyes, eyelids trembling for just an instant, before she lifted her chin, rolling the underside of her jaw across the bridge of his snout, settled in like that, with a more delicate, somehow more meaningful push of her nose against his. “Do you know what pretty means?”
She wanted an answer. He couldn’t stay silent forever. He fought his impulse to keep his mouth shut, and whispered, “Not when you say it.”
Janine’s eyes opened uncertainly, and she blinked at him for a long time. “What do you mean?”
“I thought it meant nice.” He looked away, slumping back against her couch. “I don’t think you mean it like that.”
“Well, I do mean it like that… but.” She bit her lip for a moment. “Beautiful. What’s beautiful?” She stared at him like she’d been shot. “Am I beautiful?”
He looked at her.
“Edane?”
He looked at her eyes. Her ears. Her muzzle.
“Edane?” She shook him, a tiny bit.
“I like looking at you,” he said, softly. “That’s what it means, right?”
“Yeah. Kind of.” She did the Cathy and Beth thing all by herself. Lay her head on his chest, forehead pushed up under his jaw, staring into space. Her tension went away, a little, when he put his hand over her ear. Held her to him.
She didn’t move, not one little bit. “What other things do you like looking at?”
He frowned. He didn’t want to tell her. But he did. He wanted to tell her, because he’d never told anyone. Who else could he tell? None of them would ask. “The sky.”
“The sky?”
“It was real blue.”
“Oh.” She shifted her head, a slight bit. Ear flicking against his thumb. “When was it blue?”
“In the Tous market. T-bone, we called it. I was on my back for awhile. There was smoke trailing up, and that was black, but it cleared out and then the sky was real blue.” He stroked her hair softly. Brushed it back and forth over her ear.
“When you got hurt?”
“Yeah.”
“And that was beautiful.” Her voice was so soft. Soft and strange.
“I don’t know what beautiful is, Janine.” He looked back up at the screen, blank and dead. “I don’t think they made me for that.”
“The sky can be beautiful,” she whispered.
“Okay.”
Her voice dropped again. So quiet he had to cup his ear to hear her. “Do you want me, Edane?”
“Is that a sex question?”
“Doesn’t have to be.”
“I like sitting with you.” He thumbed her ear, gently. “It’s calm and gentle.”
She lifted her head a little, rolling her eyes to look up at him, blinking slowly. “They didn’t make you to be calm and gentle, y’know.” Janine sounded so hopeful. “You can be all kinds of things they didn’t make you to be.”
“Maybe,” he whispered.
“Kiss the top of my head?”
He looked down at her. “Like how?”
“Like in the movies. Just curl down and—”
Edane had seen movies. He ground his nose in her hair, kissed her. Carefully pressed his mouth to her scalp, and she relaxed.
They sat like that for awhile. Quiet, calm, and Edane didn’t think about too much. Just felt kind of sleepy, but not like he needed a nap. Safe.
“Do you want to make love?” she asked him.
“We can if you want.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she all but squeaked, voice tight, lifting up to look at him, blinking wetly.
“What did you mean?”
“Like if you… if you want… if you want… God.” She shut her eyes on tears.
Edane pushed his muzzle against hers again. Kissed her. “Do you want to? We can if you want.”
“It’s not about me, I want to know what you want, Edane. I want to—”
He pressed the bridge of his snout against her mouth until she stopped talking. Until she held onto his fur with her teeth, while she blinked wet tears down her snout at him.
“I want you to feel happy,” he told her.
“Make love to me,” she whimpered.
“Okay.”
Edane didn’t really understand why it was so important. He did it with her anyway, to try and make her happy.
It didn’t.
*
“Hit me.”
“Okay.”
Fire stabbed Edane in the gut. A wrenching tear in the fabric of his life, suddenly hot, suddenly real, a keyhole he could look through to spot a world where everything was right, everything was sane. A tiny fire-laced hole in reality that clenched up in burning rocky muscle. His blood thundered in his veins, and for an instant, he wondered if this was what sex was like for Janine.
Only for an instant. He didn’t have time for more.
Ellis’s fist was jammed into his gut, knuckles twisted against Edane’s shirt, and Edane caught the follow-up across the back of his forearm, throwing Ellis back through sheer physical weight of movement.
It had been a long time since Edane had broken a bone. He wanted to break a bone. Wanted to have a hurt he could understand again. None of this foggy ‘how do I please the people I care about’ bullshit, but something real and concrete, something he could hold onto, something he could feel a fucking grudge over, but he couldn’t go back to Tajikistan and track down the bastards hopping over the border from their training camps in Uzbekistan and beat their heads in, couldn’t rub their noses in the pools of blood and bodies left in the Tous Marketplace, in the corpses of dead kids and the ruins of his arm. He couldn’t do anything with that need except yell.
Yell, because sparring wasn’t real fighting, and the rules didn’t apply, he didn’t have to be quiet, he could fucking yell.
“Eagh!”
Ellis’s teeth flashed in his face. Anger, rage. Not at Edane. At the strength in his arms, shoving Ellis’s fists aside, grappling for supremacy, digging in at the elbows, fighting, strength against strength.
The fight wasn’t just against Ellis. It was against doing anything. Against doing dumb-ass things to hurt people, Louie, Janine. Against doing something dumb, making a mistake.
Edane twisted the tip of his thumb into Ellis’s armpit, even as Ellis dug his fingers into Edane’s shoulders, slowly twisting him to the side. But Edane wouldn’t let that happen. He jerked back his fist, yelled again, and Ellis’s shout was hot across his nose, breath wet with the stink of meat, wet with pain as Edane thumped his fist into Ellis’s ribs.
It came down to a grapple, Ellis shoving in close, body against body. Wrestling for leverage. It wasn’t unkindness that got Ellis pulling against Edane’s right arm, dragging him into a lock. Wasn’t even practical expediency. It was just that his right arm was the only place Edane gave way. Shoving at Ellis’s throat, pushing his face away, Edane could do that best with his left hand.
His right arm wasn’t as strong.
He could pummel at Ellis’s gut and shout and wrench against the pain of having his arm twisted, feel a tangled mix of joy that he could hurt so cleanly, so purely with his right arm after so long with it numb, then feel inadequate, utterly inadequate and lost and a failure because he couldn’t slip out of Ellis’s grip until at last there wasn’t much point in moving. It wasn’t going to change anything.
Ellis leaned in against his shoulder, his back, panting across Edane’s ear, like Janine at night, but entirely unlike Janine, and Edane wondered what it’d be like with Janine.
Hurting her. Getting hurt by her.
He felt sick in the back of his throat. Was glad when Ellis eased off, loped back across the room to slump onto the garage bench. Edane wiped his tongue against the roof of his mouth, against the
back of his hand, but it didn’t take the sick taste away.
It was okay to hit Ellis. Okay to get hit. Bruising was okay. Bruising was healthy. But bruising was for Edane and his brothers, not for anyone else. He learned that quickly enough, when he’d gotten the surgery to let him have puberty. Puberty was different for him and his brothers. It didn’t make them like the other kids, it made them aggressive. Aggression wasn’t for anyone else. That wasn’t allowed.
He wiped his tongue against his fur again, and swallowed down a shivery breath.
Sometimes, he felt like if he hit Ellis hard enough, Ellis would understand. Ellis would understand everything Edane couldn’t say. It was an insane, irrational idea, but probably no less irrational than Janine’s idea that if they made love nicely enough, Edane would understand.
He took hold of the garage’s wall and panted for breath, cooling off his tongue until his head felt less like a powder-keg. Outside, under the smooth high walls of Ellis’s folks’ housing block, on the asphalt between one building and the next, in the scuffed-away outline of Ellis’s folks’ parking spot in front of the garage door, Marianna paced, phone to her ear.
“Yes ma’am. I know. No, I don’t want you to push Louie into talking to me if he doesn’t want to.” She dipped her gaze, taking a sharp depth. “No ma’am. No. Yes. Just like that. Let him know he’s always welcome with us if he wants to play, or socialize. Anything.” A pause. “Yes ma’am. It really is tragic. Eberstetten was with Enzweiler on the march, and… yes, ma’am. I’m sorry ma’am.”
Edane watched her back. Thought about Cathy and Beth. About someone else having that kind of conversation with them. He shoved his nose against the crook of his arm as he leaned against the wall, and shut his eyes, listening.
“We all like Louie. It’s… well, I think he was doing really well given his age, and the training time he could put in.” Another pause. “No, no he’s not really at anything like a pro level, ma’am, but we like him.
“We… we don’t really think of it as him holding us back, ma’am. I think the consensus is more that we helped him go forward.”
“Ever played football?” Ellis, behind him.
“Hnuh?”
Ellis wiped his nose off against his forearm, panted down a breath. “Fútbol Norteamericano,” he drawled, laughed. “That hypermasculine shit. They have a crapload of genemodded players. There’s this one guy, a genemod tiger linebacker? I don’t know what the hell he started off as, human or fur or what, but when they finished with him, shit. This guy can take the roof off a truck with his bare hands.”
The idea of taking the roof off a truck bare-handed had weird appeal. “Could probably do it if I had a knife or something. Just an edge-tear in the sheet metal to get me started,” Edane mused.
“That’s not the point. The point is, they like overbuilt players. Safer to play if everybody’s been toughened up past natural specifications. It’s gotta all be in line with their medical safety board and registered and shit, but they don’t treat genetic improvement as doping, right?” Ellis spread his hands.
Funny, how he wanted to be part of the team. Just to have a goal. An objective. Something comprehensible to chase down, like hardlines. No wonder the shit Eissen said had nagged at him, like it’d nagged at Ellis.
Like it must have nagged at Marianna.
He looked over his shoulder, out at her, done with her call to Louie’s folks, standing at the far end of the worn away rectangle of paint in the asphalt. “Think we’re gonna wind up playing football Norteamericano style?”
“We’d need to find some more players.” Ellis bent over and poked at the door of the washing machine. The panel said ‘wait’, but it hadn’t done anything for awhile. The froth of soap and camo fabric was just sitting there. They had to wait. “Teams are bigger.”
Edane slumped down onto the garage floor, staring despondently at the washer’s glass window. They’d already loaded two more plastic tubs for the washer, but for some reason it was just sitting there instead of spin-drying, folding, and dumping the first batch of uniforms into another of the plastic tubs.
“Fucking thing,” Ellis complained, flopping down beside Edane.
“Yeah.”
Marianna’s shadow fell across the concrete from outside. “Louie isn’t coming back. We’re keeping Eissen.”
After awhile the washer spun up again. Stopped, foam dripping down the glass.
“I want Louie back,” Edane rumbled.
Ellis was silent a little longer. Watching the rolling of water and fabric hopefully. Ears lifting in alarm when it spun, once. Stilled again. “Louie was fun to have around.”
Marianna covered her face with her hands, struggling to keep the sigh in her. Not let it out. But she gave up, nodding. “I miss him too.”
“Think if Salzach talked—”
“No,” Marianna snapped. Shook her head more slowly. “No. No, the kid doesn’t need Salzach around.”
Edane looked up, wary. “How come?”
“He needs to mourn. He can’t do that with carbon copies of his brother everywhere, with a violent death being re-enacted every time one of you knuckleheads gets shot down.” Marianna flicked her middle-finger across the inside of Ellis’s ear. “Hear me? head on a fucking swivel, Ellis. You are not getting tagged because you forgot to look over your shoulder again.”
Ellis winced away. “Ma’am yes ma’am.”
“That’s sir yes sir,” she hissed.
“Sir yes sir,” he said. Didn’t shout it, like at drill, just said it.
Saying it satisfied her. “Good. And you, Edane. You’re ditching that pissy rifle. What were you, an eight?”
“I was White-Six.” Back fifteen years ago. When he’d been a kid without a name, just part of the pack. When he’d known which squad and which platoon he’d been part of. When he wasn’t a person, just a fireteam position. When ma’am and the female gender hadn’t yet existed in his limited world.
“What is that? LAMW?”
“LAMW,” he corrected. Not Ell-Ayy-Emm-Double-You, it was all one sound, Lamm-whuh.
Standard pack-pairing put evens with odds. Odd-numbered individuals were out front with heavy-barreled rifles good for anything. Even-numbered individuals hauled the specialist weapons. Light Support Weapons, which were rifle-caliber machine guns. Grenade launchers. Light Anti-Materiel Weapons — LAMWs — infantry-portable rifles in light cannon calibers for engaging light vehicles, infantry in assistive armor, UAVs, the works.
“Get a LAMW.”
“But I—”
“I don’t fucking care if it’s got fin-guided-projectiles with a fucking gyro to aim it for you. If you need a crutch to shoot straight, get one. Hallman will fabricate whatever we want, and I’ll make it work in the equipment budget. You’re carrying a LAMW.”
“Sir yes sir,” he replied, doubtfully.
The washer turned over. Slung back and forth… and started to whirl, a blazing wheel of green and brown.
Marianna glared at it. “I’ve got seven of you knuckleheads now, so we’ll do this the way we were designed to.” She edged her ears back. Made the lines of her skull sharp. “If the league want to call us cheats, we’ll give them something to really fucking cry about.”
IV: Innocence.
::/ Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
::/ May, 2104.
::/ Edane Estian.
Edane beat the stock of his rifle against the doorframe, the ancient wood flaking away under each deadblow impact. “Hey! Hey!”
In the dim corridor branching off the main street, the dark-haired Tajik locals stopped arguing with each other and bunched up tighter in the shadows to stare at him.
“We aren’t accusing anyone,” Edane said, waiting for the translator on his vest to catch up before going on. “We’re looking for witnesses. Not making arrests.” He lifted up his hands, showing his palms. Thorne would have approved, if he hadn’t left the country, Edane hoped. “Did any of you see anything yesterday, before t
he man was killed outside?” He stepped back, gesturing at the street.
Silence. Dark eyes glaring out at him, all silent. Judging. Alien. He’d never been looked like that, not in his whole life until he’d come to Tajikistan — the Muslims around here, they didn’t like dogs, and they didn’t like Edane.
“Abhorred before God,” one of them muttered — fast and quick, voice low. The bud in his ear said it slowly, in three words, where the angry woman, her head covered by a shawl, had made it sound like a single curse.
Thorne would have been able to talk to these people. Thorne would have found an angle to take, a corner to lift. Edane didn’t even know where to start, but he tried, anyway.
“Please. The man who was shot yesterday, he was like you, your brother, we’re only trying to find the people who murdered him. He was a good Tajik man, he would have shouted if one of me tried to shake his hand. I don’t want to shake his hand, I don’t want to shake your hand, I just need to find out who shot him.”
Confused grumbling from the man with the thick moustache shouldering in front of the lady. Not laughing — Thorne had been good at making people laugh, Edane couldn’t yet — but they weren’t trying to make him go away.
“Hsst.” Sokolai, just to his side, hands lazily on his rifle, nodded his head out to the street itself. “That kid’s moving again.”
Edane glanced over his shoulder.
The little boy had been edging across the road, earlier. Walking back and forth, waiting for a gap in the traffic — dusty old cars, some manually driven, pushing goods and passengers through Dushanbe’s streets. Edane had spotted him, wondered where the parents were. Now the kid had made it to the middle traffic island, was tottering along under his woolen coat as he crossed the rest of the way.
Elavarasa and Esparza were there, canvassing the opposite side of the street, knocking on doors, trying to find witnesses to the shooting. Elavarasa turned, blinking as the child pushed past some adults, reaching out to him, arms up.
Like he wanted a hug.
It happened sometimes at home. There were tourists who wanted photos of their children with furries — as if they were costumed performers in San Iadras’s streets — so Elavarasa began to kneel.
Dog Country Page 6
