The Shibboleth (4 page)

“I can.” I say it loud enough to stop him. He'd been raising his hand to make his point, the soft pink of his palms contrasting with the deep brown of his skin. His hand remains
there, tenuous, like some bird caught in flight, and his eyes widen as he looks at me not because I'm doing anything—I'm still firmly incarcerado—but because I'm going to and some part of him knows it.

I go in, not full strength, but enough to give his whole chassis a good rattle. He's got his defenses up, but I am to Booth as Quincrux is to me, a dragon dwarfing his little castle. I breathe fire and screech and crap in the moat before tearing at the wall, just to let him know I'm serious.

For an instant, I see the image of a fish swallowing a smaller fish swallowing a smaller fish, and I laugh.

He's got some defenses, Booth does.

–he's more than gristle, Ilsa. But no matter. Round one is over, Mr. Cannon. And round two will tell all–

Maybe Booth senses my moment of doubt—he's like me, right? Just not as strong—and he steps toward me where I stand in front of the door to the cell's bathroom. He's fast, despite the fact he's gone all slovenly. So it's there that we have the battle.

I blow out the windows of his mind, and he rocks back on his feet as if he's been hit by an invisible shock wave. I've knocked him totally senseless, so it's easy now to slip behind his eyes and start working the levers and walk his body past mine, into the bathroom, and to the mirror.

His face is wearing
my
sneer when it says, “I can do this to you. You can do this to others. But Quincrux is still out there. And worse. The Riders. They're coming here.”

Booth has sprung a leak. Blood pours from his nose in great gouts, discoloring his once-thin mustache.

He recovers quickly, and he pushes my mind out, hard.

Before I know what's going on, before I've recovered from that moment of dislocation that comes with being put back in the box everyone comes shipped in, Booth has me by the neck in one big hand. The other's moving too fast to see until it comes to a dramatic stop in my stomach and I fall to my knees. All I can do is gape in wonder at the stars zigzagging at the edges of my vision and work my mouth open and shut to try to say something. But of course, I can't because sound needs air to vibrate through to be heard and Booth took all the air in the world with him after he punched me in the gut, turned on his heel, and left my cell.

And I didn't even get to tell him about the Rider.

It's night, after lights-out, and Kenny in 16 is screaming again in his cell, crying and screaming, and the rest of the wards begin hollering too, moaning. No one sleeps in Casimir anymore. No one closes his eyes. There's just the watchful, sleeplessness night after night.

They're pumping our food full of saltpeter now, but the boys still masturbate furiously in the dark, and occasionally you'll hear a cellmate yell, “Souza's rubbing one out,
again!
” and then a rough, desperate laughter followed by more howling. Screaming. Gibbering.

There is no sleep. No rest. Not for the wicked.

I miss Jack. There's no getting around it. I miss Vig and Coco and freedom, but I miss Jack.

Especially times like now, morning, when the cell doors swing open and the cry and clatter of a thousand delinquents rises to fill these gray cinder-block walls and the whole world stinks of Pine-Sol and mold and cheap laundry soap, the heavy breath of a penitentiary.

Sometimes I feel like my head is too full, my heart too empty. I have no one to watch for. And this terrible gift has given me knowledge of things that no kid from the trailer park perched on the big piney woods should ever know. It's a burden I used to share.

In general pop, we assemble for mail call. There's a new bull today, one I've never seen before. He shuffles through a stack of letters, calling out names.
Brendan, Buxton, Cacciatori
, and then, surprisingly,
Cannon
.

A letter.

I snatch the proffered envelope and dash to the table nearest the wall. Its return address is in Washington, DC.