The Toll {Book 2}

18. A Ghost- Ferdinand

I left the Lephards with half of my heart still inside. Nadia's face, so strained but trying to keep the smile in place, haunted me. She claimed to be happy, but her whole body had shook against me as she just stood there. I knew the way shock worked. I'd seen it in many men in the Vigilant army. Their friend would fall right beside them, and later on they would turn to me with a smile and say they were glad it had happened. Now he would no longer have to feel the pain of the battlefield. It was the same pale lips and wide eyes that I'd seen on Nadia. They didn't want others to feel sad, because then it would be real. It would mean that the black maw of grief would open up and claim them...

I shook my head as hard as I could, trying to escape the trail my mind was going down. I was already halfway to the LeClaire's, walking down the sidewalk in the sun. I couldn't let Katya down, and the Lephards were perhaps better at comforting than I was. Even with the countless times I clung to my fellow soldiers, telling them it was all right, averting their eyes from limbs and guts, I still had no idea how to stop the pain of someone else. In fact, I wondered if I might even make it worse for Nadia. An idiot with a family of his own. She probably despised me for it. I clenched my teeth.

No. That was unfair to Nadia. She'd never think such wicked things.

I hesitated on the street corner, wanting to turn back and make sure Nadia was okay. I started to turn, rehearsing a line I'd feed to Katya about why I was late, when something caught my eye and froze me in place.

A ghost stood on the other side of the road, a gray smear against the bright backdrop of the Flaunsian buildings. I stared openly, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

It took me a moment to slowly realize that it was not a ghost, but a refugee. A man with almost no hair, despite his face looking only a bit older than mine, and draped in rags that did little to fight the cold. The more I watched him, the more he crawled out from my memories. He was one of the men I knew in the ranks. Fragments of our time in the Vigilant Men scraped out from the hollows of my mind, flopping around like dying fish as I cringed away from them. I remembered him from Rumonin. His name escaped me, but the face remained. The faces always remained.

I took a step forward, until I noticed the tin cup shaking in the man's hands. This man was still a beggar, still stuck in the hell that I only escaped because my father had been a baron. His political ties and Mother's social ones had created for us a nice little bubble in Flauns, to cushion our fall from grace. Had this man ever even had a pedestal to once stand on? Had this always been his life, made only worse by the conscriptions?

I paused for a moment, wondering if I should pass the man by without a word like the Flaunsian people were. But before the thought even fully developed, though, I knew that I couldn't do that. I needed more than anything to help this man, to rescue someone.

I crossed the road and held out my hand toward the man. "Brother," I said through a lump in my throat. I didn't dare to smile at the man. Smiles were fake things that the comfortable people in Flauns told us to wear.

The man looked at my hand, and his eyes crawled slowly up and down my suit and growing hair. Even though I knew I still looked hallowed out and bruised, I was nothing compared to the comrade in arms before me. The man scuttled backward, his shoulders coming up to his ears.

I paused, closing my fingers and drawing back my hand. "I'm not here to run you off. I'm from Rumonin as well. We fought together." My heart reached for this man, for one more person in the world who knew what it was like to fight in Rumonin.

The man shrugged his shoulders and ducked his head. He didn't speak, just stared at my shoes.

"I remember you," I said, but this seemed to be the worst thing to say. The man's eyes grew wide and his gaze shot up to my face. His eyes flashed with fear, like a spark in a gun's chamber. The tin cup dropped to the ground, and the man spun on his heel, readying to dash off. Before I thought about it, my hand whipped out and caught his sleeve.

"Wait! I only wanted to talk!" I said, but the man jerked his arm. The disintegrating fabric of the jacket ripped in my hand, leaving me with the bottom of the sleeve while the man ran down the street and into a crowd. I tried to follow, but couldn't keep up with my ankle still not entirely healed.

I came to a sloppy stop once the man disappeared from sight. I gripped my leg with one hand and cursed, and before I even knew that I was that angry, I punched the brick wall of the shop to my side. Pain spiked through my knuckles, jolting into my arm, but it was nothing. I gritted his teeth and stuffed my hand into my pocket where the passing ladies wouldn't stare at it.

I turned to head back, and that was when I remembered the man's name. Peter. With his name came his entire history that he'd revealed to us through long nights. He was the son of an innkeeper, not educated but still smart. He originally joined the Vigilant as one of their supporters, until the conditions worsened and worsened, and he realized just how little the Cause really cared for those who fought and died in its name. I remembered him as bossy and arrogant, but he was the one who got us out of many scrapes. He was also the one who had, when we were caught in an alleyway in the city, ordered us to create blockades out of the bodies of our fallen comrades.

My eyes fluttered shut as I remembered the night approaching, the bullets whizzing by from the Rumoni soldiers on the other side of the alleyway, trying to pick us off before we could make it back to the Vigilant. If we could have run to them, surrendered and joined their own ranks, we would have. But they would have gunned us down before we even took a few steps.

Without cover, and without something to stop the Rumoni soldiers from following us, we would have died that night. Peter had looked around at us, at our only supplies, and found that the only thing we had too much of was our dead. He'd ordered us to stack them as high as we could, and create a barrier with their bodies.

When we started to run out of the dead, and Peter had turned his attention to the injured, I couldn't bring myself to help any longer. I tried to save them, argue against him piling them onto the makeshift wall, but he'd only smacked me across the face with his trench-shovel. I barely kept consciousness, barely escaped being added to the blockade of bodies. Another man, someone also conscripted, flung me over his shoulder as we fled from the alleyway, leaving behind the dead and wounded. Sacrificing our humanity in order to save our lives.

I felt dizzy, and stumbled into the wall to hold myself up as I realized why Peter had run. When I recognized him, I'd let Peter know that there was someone in this new city that knew of his shame. The fresh start Peter must have thought he'd be getting would be nothing if I knew his past. Peter wanted to forget it all. Leave the past in the past. Yet, I remembered what he had done.

Just then, a cheerful voice lifted from the background buzz of the city. I looked up just in time to see Katya running down the sidewalk toward me. Her ringlets bounced over her shoulders under a massive white bow, and her matching pearly dress fluttered with the wind. She launched into my arms in a rose-scented hug like she always used to. She laughed, the giggle of the younger sister I had doted on since she had been put in my arms in a lace blanket fifteen years ago. I shoved Peter to the back of my mind, never wanting to think of him again. He wanted me to forget, and perhaps I finally would.

"I'm so excited to finally go to the candy shop. The LeClaire girls told me to buy the licorice ropes because all the girls are stringing hard candies around them and wearing them as necklaces! I can't let all these Flaunsian girls outdo me like this! I'm the daughter of a Baroness, after all!" She picked up my hand, chattering away as she pulled me down the sidewalk. I let her lead me, a boat in a current, toward the candy shop as she explained to me the ins-and-outs of her new social circles.

Everything was normal. It had to be, I told myself. I was not in Rumonin. I did not have to relive those hellish nights. I was in Flauns, with my sister and my family and Nadia. They were what I needed to protect. My family, together and safe and living the life they were supposed to.