Villain's Assistant

by Carley Hibbert

  Benjamin had just unloaded the wood next to the stove when the teenage girl from the night before came into the kitchen. He didn’t remember her name. She pinched her lips together. Hard muscle stood out on her arm as she handed him an empty bucket without a word and pointed him outside. Benjamin hurried out the door, hiding his scowl. She was taller than he was as well, he noticed. He returned with a bucket full of water and set it down next to the wood he’d brought in earlier.

  “I don’t expect the Lieutenant will be up for a while. No doubt, he was up all night planning,” the girl said, finally breaking her silence.

  Benjamin noticed she had dark circles under her eyes. “Were you up helping him?”

  She turned her back to him and grew silent once again.

  He sat at the table and pulled out a small book. He crossed out “Shamelessly impress Mighty Shreb” and “Gloat after becoming the youngest VA ever” from his to-do list with a thick pencil. It might have been easier to just tear out all the pages, but he hated to waste the paper. It looked as though he would have to start from scratch to find his way back in Shreb’s potential employment. He pressed his knuckles into his forehead as he stared at the scribbled page and then glanced at the girl over his shoulder. The stove hissed as she filled a pot with water. He then wrote: Make friends with hostiles.

  How naïve he’d been yesterday! He never stood a chance against those thugs. He really was lucky to have made it out alive, he had to admit. Organizational skills were not, as it turned out, the most crucial qualification for a career in villainy (or at least not when starting out). He closed his book and hid it in his jacket pocket, promising himself a planning session later.

  The girl sat down with her own book, her fine features twisted in an unpleasant grimace while she read. Scabs dotted her knuckles. Benjamin realized—too late—that he’d been staring when her gray eyes flared at him.

  “Yes?” she growled. She planted an elbow in the middle of her book to mark her place. The muscles in her forearm tightened. “Haven’t you seen a person read before? Or maybe never a girl?” She puffed at a loose strand of yellow hair that fell over one eye. “Any more questions?”

  “Yes…I don’t…or no?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Well, what is it? Do you have a question or not?”

  “Y-yes, I do, but I never actually asked one before—earlier." He smiled nervously. This was the first girl he’d ever had to deal with besides the occasional maid at school, and so far, he didn’t like it much.

  She rolled her eyes. “What?”

  “My name is B—”

  The scary girl lifted her hand to silence him, cocked her head to the side, and took a deep breath (and possibly counted to ten). “No! We don’t use our real names here. You can call me Rebecca. I’ve already got one for you.” Rebecca slammed her book down. “It’s ‘Hey You.’ Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes. Don’t talk to me until then.” Fire burned behind her eyes.

  He nodded, drew his lips tightly together, and then got up and padded around the room. A heavy knot tightened in his chest as he struggled to ignore the two fears screaming inside him: he was now unemployable, and this girl who called herself Rebecca was probably going to stab him in the back.

  Benjamin couldn’t organize a single thought, so he stopped trying. Instead, he admired the neat stacks of dishes arranged by size on the shelves. When Rebecca cleared her throat, he jumped out of her way. She filled two bowls with gruel and placed them on the table.

  “Hey You, while you let that cool, fill that bucket again so I can clean the kitchen.”

  Benjamin, now officially dubbed Hey You, slunk out to the well.

  After breakfast, he went outside with yet another bucket of cold water and dunked his head, hoping to rinse away the frustrations of the last twenty-four hours. After drying off a little, Benjamin returned inside to announce that he would like to see the Lieutenant.

  “Now,” he demanded.

  Rebecca stopped scrubbing a frying pan, looked quizzically in his direction, and then continued scrubbing. At a loss, Benjamin turned to march up the stairs but stumbled to a stop. The Lieutenant sat at the kitchen table, leafing through some papers. His steel-speckled hair gleamed in the morning light.

  “You don’t have to sleep in there again,” he said. “We can clear out the room at the bottom of the stairs.” He then looked at Benjamin with his good eye, a smile barely perceptible at the corners of his mouth.

  Rebecca stomped up the stairs in protest. The Villain picked up his papers and stacked them neatly beside a plate of food. “Please, sit down. We need to talk.” The Lieutenant smiled tightly.

  “Yes, we do. Don’t ever leave me alone with her again. It’s cruel.” Benjamin fiddled with his damp collar. A room full of plotting young men he could handle, but a prickly girl was something else entirely.

  The Lieutenant looked over his shoulder and up the stairs. “Sorry about that. I never know what to expect with her. But you, I think, bring the worst out in her,” he said and then chuckled nervously. “Should I cut to the chase? You can’t go out there now. Mouthrot will hunt you down if he thinks you’re with me. You’re welcome to work with me—with us. I think the job you were after is now filled. Mouthrot gets what he goes after. So…now he’s got your job. The end.”

  “Oh? You want me to work with you?” Benjamin perked up at the thought of being wanted. Any employment would be a step in the right direction.

  “Nothing flashy, but things are about to pick up around here, and I’ll need an assistant.” He gave Benjamin a look that lifted the hair on the back of his neck. “It would be a lot less messy for you.”

  Benjamin watched the Lieutenant as he cut the sausage on his plate. He discreetly checked the kitchen for any stray breakfast meats but didn’t see any lying around. As a young villain, Benjamin did need a job. He could always sneak away and start over, if he needed to. Nothing was permanent, right?

  “Do I get to talk to your employer?” Benjamin asked, wondering where the Lieutenant was on the chain of command.

  “Oh, no, my boss shall remain faceless and nameless. As far as you’re concerned, I am the boss.”

  A nameless boss? Benjamin rubbed at the two hairs that had sprouted on his chin. It had been three days since he’d shaved. Benjamin bit his lip. He didn’t like not knowing, but he wasn’t sure he had much of a choice. Opportunity had found him; it would seem silly not to let things play out. Benjamin nodded.

  The Lieutenant gave him a sharp nod back and took another bite of sausage. “So, your name?”

  “Oh, it’s B—”

  The Lieutenant held up a hand cutting Benjamin off. “Are you sure you want to use your real name? Lots of villain’s assistants use nicknames, in case things end badly. Your real identity is your life.”

  Benjamin watched the sausage on the Lieutenant’s plate disappear one bite at a time.

  The Lieutenant chewed as he batted around some possible nicknames. Juices glinted on his thick stubble. “Pork…Pen…Toad…Patch. I like Patch,” he said, as he opened his mouth for the last bite of sausage. “Yeah, let’s try that one for a while.”

  “Patch?” Benjamin sat blinking, the sausage forgotten. “That’s not a villainous name.”

  “Exactly.” The Lieutenant smiled and then drank from his cup.

  Patch? I think I prefer Hey You, he thought wryly.

  “Don’t worry about Rebecca.” The old man waved Benjamin’s concerns off. “Once she realizes you’re not a threat to her, she’ll calm down.”

  “I think I’ll stick with Benjamin, thanks.”

  The Lieutenant ripped a piece of bread in half and shrugged as he mopped the juices off his plate.

  FIVE

  After several mornings of filling water buckets and chopping firewood, Benjamin decided it was time to stop tiptoeing around Rebecca. She enjoyed ordering him around too much, and he needed to find his place within the organization. He didn’t want to become her permanent dru
dge. He suspected that even the Lieutenant was a little scared of her, and he was the one in charge. If Benjamin wanted to do more than grunt work, he’d have to win her over. He took a deep breath as he unrolled his sleeves, noting that they were still damp after washing dishes and scrubbing the floor.

  “So…” he started with what he hoped sounded like a semblance of confidence, “how long have you been working for the Lieutenant?”

  “Hmm.” Rebecca seemed to consider her answer a few seconds too long. Perhaps that was classified.

  “Uh, how did you meet?”

  Rebecca coughed and went to stir the simmering pot on the stove, focusing her attention on it instead of Benjamin. A heavy ball sunk into his stomach. Was everything a secret with these two?

  “What do you do around here?”

  Rebecca coughed again and nearly dropped her spoon into the pot. The heavy ball grew in his stomach as she carefully skimmed bubbles off the top of the boiling liquid.

  “Is there anything that you can tell me?”

  He stepped beside her. Rebecca dropped her hands and grimaced at him. A yellow piece of hair had slipped from one of her braids, skimming her eyelashes.

  “Listen, I could make up lies or I could tell you nothing. Which would you prefer?”

  Benjamin hooted, searching for the humor of the situation. “Wow! And people say I have trust issues!” He attempted a smile to lighten the mood but saw that his efforts weren’t helping. “Never mind.”

  He breathed in and closed his eyes, and then he laughed again. This whole situation is ridiculous. Perhaps he could learn something from this. He whipped out his notebook, but as nothing came to mind, he shoved it back into his pocket.

  Rebecca chewed on her bottom lip as she gazed out the window, her arms wrapped tightly around her. Then she squeezed her eyes closed, as if that alone would keep her secrets safely locked away.

  Benjamin threw his hands in the air and turned to head outside. The Lieutenant, who had been leaning against the doorframe, followed him. Benjamin pulled the axe out of the chopping block.

  “I should have had a better story prepared,” the Lieutenant said, tugging at his eye patch.

  “Story? I get that everyone has their secrets, but I can’t even have a conversation because everything here is secret.” He looked up in time to see just a hint of Rebecca’s skirt twirl out of sight. He sighed. “Maybe that’s why she’s so angry.” He slammed the axe back into the cutting block.

  The old man nodded. “You’re probably right, but sometimes there just isn’t any other way. Secrets keep you alive.”

  “They also suffocate you!” Benjamin walked over to the well and jerked on the chain. “They just kill you more slowly.”

  Silence filled the space between them. When Benjamin looked up, the Lieutenant was rubbing the back of his head and kicking at the dirt. The villain opened his mouth wordlessly several times before he was finally able to speak. “I’ll have Rebecca show you the drop box. You can start checking that for us.” The Lieutenant adjusted his eye patch and returned inside.

  Benjamin blinked at the space where the old man had just stood. He’d been expecting a little more than that. Yes, he’d just climbed one more rung on the trust ladder, but who knew how many more he needed to climb before he saw any light. Right now, he was completely baffled by these two. All gangs had secrets but this felt different. It felt dangerous, and not the Villains’ Academy kind of dangerous. He yanked the axe out of the cutting block and slammed it deep into the wood, trying to split it wide open but failing. He tugged and tugged at the axe but was unable to pull it out by himself—and there was no way he was asking the Lieutenant or Rebecca for help.

  SIX

  Rebecca followed the boy at a distance. His size suggested he was just a boy, but his mouth said otherwise. He was probably close to her age. She’d just turned seventeen this spring, and she’d guessed him to be fifteen or sixteen. He’d been careful to keep a buffer between them all day, and she could hardly blame him. She’d been a beast since he arrived. What was the Lieutenant thinking, dragging some random kid from the plain into all this? Life was dangerous enough. She yanked on the straps of her pack, letting the air cool her shoulders for a moment. She tried to remember the grass being any other shade besides yellow or brown and couldn’t. She glanced at the mountain range over her shoulder. Just on the other side, green things sprouted. Forests grew thick enough to nearly block out all sunlight. And the law of the king held the people together. It had been so long since she’d seen any of it, she wasn’t sure if it was still there. Rain didn’t fall on this side of the Sunrise Mountains, except just enough to keep everything from burning—or so it had been the last eight years she’d lived here.

  The boy stopped and swiped his brown locks from his eyes to scan for the dead tree she had described to him earlier. This was the closest drop box where they exchanged news with couriers. Her charge glanced back at her, his light-brown eyes searching her face for hints. Rebecca had no problem keeping her face blank. He was supposed to find this on his own. Lieutenant’s orders.

  She tapped her foot on the goat path. A painful hole was growing in her chest every day. No amount of crying or screaming filled that black pit either; in fact, both only made her feel it more keenly. She wished she could talk openly to someone about everything. The Lieutenant preferred not to discuss the past. “The past is safely buried in the past,” he’d say. But she could feel her secrets pressing hard inside her as she hunted for an escape. Fortunately, she didn’t know very many people or she wouldn’t have any secrets left.

  When Rebecca glanced back, the boy had climbed onto a rock to get another foot and a half of perspective. How different his childhood must have been, she thought, without a life of secrets weighing him down. She wondered if he’d had enough to eat when he was young. It didn’t look like it. The boy grinned at Rebecca and then pointed in the right direction. She waved him on to check it out. A puff of dust erupted as he hit the ground and ran. He really looked excited. Once the dust settled, she picked up her pace to keep him in sight. When was the last time she’d been excited about anything?

  The tree wasn’t really a tree anymore. It was bleached white and so dry that it had deep fractures running down its sides. Bees floated in and out of the cracks. The boy glared at her. She rolled her eyes.

  “This better not be some kind of sick trick you play on the new guy, because I swear I will personally tell Mouthrot where you all live!” the boy shouted.

  “Just be careful,” Rebecca called as she approached.

  The problem with working with this new boy was that she found herself wanting to explain herself to him. Like why I’m such a raging mess, she thought, but that would be dangerous. So she kept her distance, but the weight of her life tugged on her all the more when she was with this person who might want to listen to her splintered story. Or I could just invent a happy tale about myself to tell this peasant boy, she mused, one where I knew all the answers. That might be a nice change. But the mere thought of more lies only weighed her heart down more, so much so that she couldn’t take another step until she dismissed the idea. She squeezed the locket that hung under her blouse and stumbled on.

  The boy circled the tree, examining it as close as he dared until he found the burnt-out pit. His eyes glowed like amber with this small victory. He studied her a moment before putting his hand in to fetch the message that might be hidden inside. She tried to look uninterested.

  A few bees circled him as he skittered back from the tree, waving a leather tube in the air. He handed it over to Rebecca. As she opened the tube, the boy swatted at the bees that were already returning to the tree. She exchanged the incoming message with an outgoing message the Lieutenant had written this morning about Shreb and Mouthrot. Personally, she thought he had waited too long, but he had first wanted to review some of the reports he’d received in the previous month. The Lieutenant liked to be thorough. She dropped the tube back into the tree and slid
the sealed message into her pack.

  She sat down for a moment in the narrow slice of shade the burnt-out tree provided. The boy mopped his wet face with his sleeve, slicking his wet strands away from his pale face. She thought about this morning and the simple questions she wasn’t allowed to answer. She felt words building in her chest, and she opened her mouth to let a few out. Surely, a few couldn’t hurt, she thought.

  “I’ve known the Lieutenant nearly all my life,” she said, rifling through her pack to find her waterskin.

  “Really?” The boy raised his eyebrows.

  “I don’t know much more about him than you do, though.” Rebecca smiled in apology. Nothing she could say could explain how a person could live with someone for nearly fifteen years and not know or understand him. “So, Patch, where did you work before?”

  The boy cringed at the terrible nickname. “Benjamin, please. Well, I guess you could say I’m straight out of school.” He deflated a little. “This is my first job.”

  Rebecca nodded at Benjamin. This wasn’t his first choice of employment. He had walked into something he had no way to prepare for. She knew she hadn’t been ready for this life.

  “The Lieutenant isn’t your father, is he?”

  “Um…no.”

  She shook her head. If I had a father, I would never have stepped foot on this cursed plain.

  “I didn’t think so. The Lieutenant doesn’t seem like the fatherly type.”

  Rebecca thought that was enough conversation. She repacked her bag and announced it was time to head back. As she led them, she tried not to think of the ghosts who lived in her past. They dragged her to a cold, damp place from which it was hard to escape. Any thoughts of the future sent waves of ice and flame through her veins, so she focused on each step she took, the sound of Benjamin breathing behind her, and the feeling of the sun scorching her skin. It was the only tolerable way for her to live.