The door flew open and Vlakas stood in the doorway, his arms full of empty storage containers. When he saw me standingin the darkness he jumped, obviously not expecting to find someone in the storeroom.
“Uh, sorry,” he began. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I sighed. “You’re fine. I just needed to blow off a little steam.”
V looked at me sympathetically. “Kat’s avoiding you, isn’t he?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked.
He shrugged. “He’s good at hiding. In more ways than one.”
“What do you mean?”
While Kat had avoided me, V had shared a little bit of their history with me over the last few weeks, so I knew they had lost a brother when Kat was younger.
“Kat had to change when he joined the Legion,” he said as he settled on a storage crate, and I pulled up a bench across from him.
“Change? Change how?”
“As a kid, Kat was never the one to start a fight. He’d end one, if he had to,” V said, a wry grin on his face. “But the Legion—it turned him into something else. Something…darker.”
“Isn’t that what the Legion is supposed to do?” I asked. “Turn Mageia into weapons?”
He shrugged.
“The Legion is supposed to teach us how to fight with our magic,” he responded. “Kat already knew how to fight. He and his brother had to fight for everything they had for years. He’d always avoided killing, especially any of the other Mageia, though, until I was sent to the Legion.”
“What happened?”
“When you’re sent to the Legion, you aren’t supposed to be allowed near any family members. That’s one of the reasons they change our names; they want to break all your ties outsidethe Legion walls. I guess they want to keep you from relying on old loyalties,” he said. “When I was sent to the Alexandrian Legion, we didn’t think anyone knew that Kat and I were half-brothers. We did everything we could to keep our connection a secret. Someone…someone we used to know was also sent to the Legion, and he threatened to tell everyone and get us separated.”
“Kat… he had already lost two other brothers you see, and he was determined not to lose me, too,” V swallowed thickly. “Ypoulous threatened to tell the Tagmatarches if I didn’t do certain… favors for him.”
V’s face reddened, and I had some idea as to what kind of favors might have been involved. The thought of anyone doing something like that to these two made my blood boil.
“What did he do?” I asked, though I was pretty sure of the answer.
“Kat and I were practicing in the courtyard when Ypoulous had an…accident. Tripped and fell over a four-foot-tall railing, four stories up. Broke his neck,” V said, his voice low. “Kat is really good at tripwires. Especially small, invisible ones with an extra gust of power behind them.”
“And since the Elusians can’t see magic…” I said, my voice trailing off.
V nodded.
“No reason for them to know it was anything except a freak accident,” he continued. “Still, I think they suspected, because there had been a couple of blowups between the two. Unexpectedly, several other Legionnaires vouched for us that we were nowhere near Ypoulous’ room at the time. We found out later he had a history of this kind of extortion.”
V sighed, continuing in a near whisper. “We also found out that same month that the Legion doesn’t even consider half-anything to be family. Ypoulous’ threats were empty ones. So Kat killed him fornothing.”
“Shit, V, I’m sorry,” I said. “But itwasn’tfor nothing. He was protecting his family. That’s not nothing.”
V smiled sadly.
“I know, but I also know it’s a burden Kat carries around with him every day, and it’s not even the heaviest one.”
Something V said caught my attention.
“You talk about Kat and his brother and what they went through, but you make it sound like you didn’t go through the same thing,” I said.
“Because I didn’t,” he responded. “They had it a million times worse.”
