Page 14 of Rust of Control

The light held.

Chapter 7

Jude woke because someone was holding his wrist, and his whole body tried to apologize before his eyes were open.

"Don't move yet." Low, even, bored. Jude knew the voice before he placed the face, and placing the face did not make it better. "You've cracked at least two ribs. If you sit up the way you're about to, you'll find the third."

Jude opened his eyes.

Morning, thin and grey, the river light he remembered from the spring. The lamp was off. A man sat on the edge of the bed with two fingers on the inside of Jude's wrist, counting, watching a watch and not Jude. Dark clothes, sleeves pushed up, forearms a surgeon's and a fighter's at once. A leather roll open on the nightstand with steel in it. Older than Nate. He held himself like a man nothing had ever managed to startle.

"Your pulse is fine," the man said, and let go. "Pupils were even an hour ago when I checked them and you swore at me. You probably don't remember that."

"No," Jude said. The word came out scraped.

"Good. The swearing was the most interesting thing about you so far." He capped something, set it in the roll. "You know who I am. You've watched me from a stage often enough." Scarlet did not look up from the roll. "What you don't know is that I do the medicine this crew can't take to a hospital, and that right now you're a favor I'm doing a man I owe. That makes you the least dangerous thing in this room. So stop bracing. It's wasting what you'll need for the ribs."

Jude did stop. His shoulders came down off his ears before he had decided anything, the way they always came down for a certain kind of voice. He caught himself obeying and could not catch it in time.

He took stock the way he did of a green room. The room was the one he knew. Same bed, same chair, the window on the grey moving water. His left eye sat heavy and wrong in his face. His ribs were a belt cinched two notches too tight. Someone had gotten him out of the alley clothes and into a soft shirt that was not his and smelled of the house detergent, and the not-his shirt closed his throat tighter than the eye had, tighter than the ribs.

He had been here before. He had left. He was back, and worse off than when he'd left, and the math of that was a sentence he was not going to say out loud, least of all to this man. Jude had spent two years watching Scarlet from the safe side of a stage light. The knife was the thing he always found first, the small bright fact of it turning between the man's fingers at the back of the clubhouse while a band played, and Jude had built every show around never giving it a reason to stop turning. He had never once been close enough to be touched by him. Now the man had had his hands inside Jude's shirt while he slept, counting ribs.

"The eye looks worse than it is," Scarlet said, packing the roll. "Orbital bone's intact. The ribs are the honest injury. Six weeks, and they'll ache in the cold after that for a year. Don't sneeze if you can help it." He stood. He moved like a man who was never in a hurry because hurry was for people who could be surprised. "The man who did this to you knew how. He stopped where someone told him to stop. That's not comfort. You should know anyway."

The sentence went in under the ribs, past them, to the place the ribs were guarding.

He stopped where someone told him to stop.

Jude had spent two years learning the weather of one man's hands, and he had thought the not-knowing-why was the worst of it, the part where it came down on him out of a clear sky. It had not occurred to him, until he was lying here in a borrowed shirt, that the men in the alley had not been weather. They had been instructed. Someone had said this far, and they had gone that far and not one inch past it, and that meant there was a ledger somewhere with Jude's body entered on it as a line.

"I-" The consonant caught. He felt it catch, the old jam, and Scarlet watched it happen with the same flat interest he'd given the pulse. "I don't know what that means."

"No," Scarlet agreed. "You don't." He shouldered the roll. "Eat when they bring it up. You won't want to. Eat anyway." He looked at Jude one more time, the same look he gave the instruments before he rolled them up, and then he was gone, and the door did not quite close behind him.

A nose pushed it the rest of the way open.

The dog came in like he owned the lease.

A beagle, tan and white and grey at the muzzle, ears that had given up years ago on standing. He put his front paws on the side of the bed, decided the climb was worth it, and got himself up in three tries and one indignant grunt, and arranged himself against Jude's good side with the confidence of an animal who had never once been told no in this house.

"That's Benny." Nate, in the doorway. He had a mug in one hand and a plate balanced on a paperback in the other, and he did not come in. He stood at the frame the way he stood at every frame, a foot of air kept on purpose. "He's not supposed to be up there. He doesn't know that. Nobody's ever told him in a way he believed."

Benny sighed the sigh of the deeply justified and put his chin on Jude's hip.

The least dangerous thing in the room, Scarlet had called him. Jude looked at the beagle annexing his lap and figured that at least he had competition for the title.

Jude looked at the dog because it was easier than looking at Nate. The weight of him was warm through the blanket, uncomplicated, asking for nothing but the spot he'd already taken. Jude got one hand into the soft fur behind the ruined ears and the dog leaned into it, and the wire that had been cinched across his chest since the alley gave by one notch, the way the belt of his ribs would not.

"You don't have to stand out there," Jude said.

"I know." Nate didn't move. "Figured I'd let you decide who's in the room. You've had a short supply of that."

He came in only when Jude moved the blanket an inch, which was not an invitation anyone else would have caught, butNate did. He crossed the room and set the plate on the nightstand where the steel roll had been. Eggs. Toast already buttered. The same as the last time he'd been here, when the food had arrived like weather and nearly broken him for it. He had thought, leaving, that he'd imagined how much it undid him. He had not imagined it. Here it was again, two pieces of toast somebody had buttered, and his eyes stung.

"Scarlet scare you?" Nate said.

"No." Jude considered it. "Yes. Not the way he meant to. He doesn't mean to. That's the scary part."