South Shogun. The Following Week.
Butter had been told Utzy died in the field.
Deployment accident. The kind of thing that happened. The military sent a notice in the specific flat language of official notices and Butter read it three times and each time the words arranged themselves in the same order and produced the same meaning and she put the notice down and went to the well and drew water for four hours without stopping because she needed to do something with her hands or the other thing would start and she wasn't ready for the other thing yet.
She carried water to twenty-three households.
She came home.
She sat on the floor of her apartment with the contact bug on the table in front of her and Utzy's laugh somewhere in her sound memory, she had sounds filed the way other people had photographs, the acoustic record of people she loved, their specific frequencies, and she sat with it until the sitting became too much and she lay down and let the other thing start.
She cried for a long time.
Jeriko came to the south district on a Tuesday.
No convoy this time. No long cars and flower distributions. Just him, walking into the south market street with the ease of someone who had decided where he was going and had no expectation of being unwelcome.
Butter saw him coming.
She waited.
He stopped in front of her with the expression of someone who had rehearsed this and was confident in the rehearsal.
"Marry me," he said.
Butter looked at him.
At the face she had found beautiful. At the hair he flicked. At the boy who had fixed the sewage system and sent flowers and called her chocolate sundae and kissed her hand and behind all of that had sent her best friend to her death in a room she would never find.
"No," she said.
Something shifted in Jeriko's face.
Not quickly, the rehearsed expression held for a moment, the confidence of it, the certainty that this was a formality rather than an answer. Then the holding became work. Then the work became visible.
"No?" he said.
"No."
"Butter." His voice was still controlled. "I have given your district resources. I have fixed your infrastructure. I have..."
"I know what you've done," she said.
Jeriko "Then you understand how much I love you. I'd never let anything come between us." His voice still gentle.
"I know what happened to Utzy," she said.
The controlled voice stopped.
"I don't know exactly," she said. "But I know she went to you and she didn't come back and the military sent me a notice in flat language about a deployment accident and Utzy had survived three deployments without a scratch and she was careful and she was good and she didn't die in a field." She looked at him. "I know."
Jeriko looked at her for a long moment.
Then something in him reorganized.
The boy who had flicked his hair and kissed her hand and looked at her like she was something he'd been searching for didn't leave exactly, he just stopped being the thing at the front of Jeriko's expression. What was at the front now was something older and more honest and much worse.
"Ghetto waste," he said.
Butter went still.
"That's what you are," he said. His voice had found a different register, flat, certain, the voice of someone saying something they believe to be simply true. "I came down here and I treated you like something worth having and you threw it back at me because some girl put ideas in your head." He stepped closer. "You belong to me. That is the nature of what Scytherians and Hammerians are. Our ancestors understood that. You don't get to decide otherwise because you grew up in the sGhetto's without the education to understand what you are, a slave to me!."
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"Get away from me," Butter said.
"You don't give me instructions," Jeriko said.
He turned.
The civilians in the south market street were watching. The same people she'd drawn water for. The same people who said the Empress blesses us with their steady patient voices. He looked at them with the specific assessment of someone calculating what the easiest demonstration would be.
He raised the hammer.
The civilians scattered.
The hammer came down.
Butter moved faster.
She pulled the sound from the impact before it fully formed, pulled it directly from the hammer's resonance, from the Hammerian abi vibrating at the frequency of the strike, stripped it out of the air and into her reserves before it could translate into destruction. The hammer hit the market street and the ground cracked but the force was a fraction of what it should have been, the sound, which was the power, which was what Hammerian strikes ran on, gone.
Jeriko looked at his hammer.
At the crack in the ground.
At Butter.
She changed.
Butter awakened her scytherian power. Her brown curly haired shifted to golden.
She transformed into the XY Caracal arrived and the south market street became a different kind of space, smaller in the way that spaces become smaller when something that is built for hunting is present and oriented.
Jeriko looked at her.
His confidence found its edges for the first time.
He raised the hammer again.
She was faster than the raise.
Silent Pounce covered the distance and Whisper Fang disrupted the arm's musculature at the joint before the swing completed and the hammer swung wrong and Jeriko stumbled and Direction Break placed her sound signature three meters to his left and his recovery strike went three meters left and found nothing.
He spun looking for her.
She was behind him.
She let him see her.
He looked at the Caracal form and at the golden eyes and at the south market street around them and at the civilians watching from the edges of their doorways and he did the calculation that his father had done in the study and arrived at the same conclusion from the other direction.
He stepped back.
Then again.
He pissed his pants realize he was no match for the Sound Scytherian.
"This isn't over," he said. His voice was doing the work of controlled that his face wasn't quite managing. "The Scytherians belong to the Hammerians. That is history. That is what we are." He looked at her with something that was trying to be certainty and was closer to need. "I will come back for you my love. When you've grown. When you understand what you are."
He turned.
He ran back the way he'd come.
The Hammerian Mansion. That Evening.
Pyraz looked up when Jeriko entered.
His son's eyes were red. His hair was wrong. The hammer was still present at his side with the specific restlessness of something that hadn't finished what it wanted to do.
Pyraz set his papers down.
"Sit down," he said.
Jeriko sat but quickly stood up.
"She refused me, that Ghetto trash told me no" he said. "And then she.." He stopped. "Her power. Father, her power is.."
"I know what Scytherian power is," Pyraz said.
"She stripped the sound from my hammer mid-strike." Jeriko looked at his hands. "She moved like I wasn't there. Like I was hitting at air."
Pyraz was quiet for a moment.
"You should have listened," he said. "When I told you. They are like children, son. They need to be led. They need to be taught what they are and what they belong to. You cannot ask. Asking gives them a choice and they will always choose wrong." He leaned forward. "I told you this."
"You're right," Jeriko said. "I should have listened to father"
"No harm done," Pyraz said. "I'll send guards for her immediately. She'll be brought in and..."
"No," Jeriko said.
Pyraz looked at him.
Jeriko looked up from his hands. His expression had settled into something that wasn't grief anymore and wasn't anger exactly, something that had found its shape in the specific place those two things meet and calcify.
A nearby soldier handed Jeriko a blue blazer.
"I want her to grow," he said quietly. "I want her to become everything she is. I want her power fully realized and her confidence complete." He looked at his father. "And then I want to break her."
Pyraz looked at his son for a long moment.
Then he picked up his papers.
"Now," he said, "you sound like a Hammerian." Pyraz chuckled "Now, I have two sons who will grow up to be true Alphas, Roxer and Jeriko."