The Death of the Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

I saw that those black eyes,
    the whites transparent as lace,
    flickered to where my medal ought to be.
    The thin mouth never spoke a word.
    He rarely focused on my face, but I often looked at his, intent, as if on a new species of animal.
    Something about that thin, aristocratic face, with its elongated bones, seemed so right.
    It resonated in my being, as if I was plucked like a harp.
    He smiled a fractured little smile.
    I puzzled at its broken perfection and wondered what it meant,
    that hatred ,
    when that freezing hand came to rest upon my arm like it did upon the head of the child.
    Confused, I waited in the silence that followed, his lips moved as if about to speak,
    I loved it despite myself when he spoke, it was like torn velvet left to rot in the street.
    But he only gave me a slip of paper that I recognized with Eden’s white oak seal.
    I folded it and bowed my head.
    “When next do you have need of me?”
    “Tomorrow.”
    Home, and there was fire in the big black belly of the stove, and my mother stood tending it.
    I had not been home all week, but I came through the door of our humble house
    bearing food and bottled water like gifts.
    I needn’t have, we had enough.
    I thought that this was strange and wanted to ask about the sudden wealth of my mother,
    humming at the stove.
    But I did not.
    My Breaker uniform and coat lay draped over a chair
    in the bedroom that my brother and I shared.
    In plain clothes, I shivered in front of the warmth, looking at my little brother as
    he laboriously went over problem sets in his CEE workbook.
    I wish I could have given him a tutor.
    Our schoolroom was there, in the warm kitchen with its too-often scrubbed brown table.
    We only sent him to regular classes at the next Hive when it came close to mock exams.
    He failed the last.
    I searched his face as if trying to find anything of me in him, and not succeeding,
    I sat next to him and studied with him in front of the fire.
    My brother was not the best at the mocks, but he had a genius for words.
    I used to find snippets of stories hidden in his drawers when he was younger,
    fantastic stories full of heroes and villains and brave little kids.
    The stories stopped since heavy CEE prep began, but I’ve kept every one of them.
    He looked at me half-way through the set and then reached over to touch the side of my face.
    He showed me his hand, a tiny drop of blood had smeared into powder.
     
    “Are you hurt?”
     
    “Someone else’s.”
     
    He turned back to his workbook, satisfied.
    Now that he was twelve and had come into contact with Breakers on the job,
    I got the sense that he knew who and what I was.
    He was good about it.
    He didn’t ask questions.
    Sometimes I would come home and my uniform would be torn,
    bloodied,
    burned,
    gashed in a thousand different places, but he never asked about my job.
     
    There was a hitch in the last problem, and I guided his progress with patient hands.
     
    That night was the last night for my brother, because testing started the next day.
    He could not stay here unless he had by a miracle tested and chosen into being a Breaker.
    I did not want that for him.
     
    One night, one test.
     
    Late that night, as he climbed into our shared narrow bed, in our shared narrow room.
    I wondered what it was that I could do for him, to give him something,
    something that he could remember me by.
    He was half asleep, turned away from me, when he spoke.
     
    “Breaker 256. That’s a funny name.”
     
    “Yes. It is a funny name. No funnier than yours, though. Child 3457.”
     
    “But I’ll get a real one once I pass testing. You never will.”
     
    Once you pass testing.
     
    “Yes, that’s right.”
     
    “What should I call you, then? You can’t just be another person.”
     
    I smiled in the darkness.
    If only that were simple enough.
    He waited for my answer, but I did not have one to give him.
    Eventually, he spoke again, as if tired of my waffling.
     
    “Well, what is it you