What’s in a name

“NO, Marshal. I don’t want to do it with training ones. I want to use yours.”

Marshal. That is what Sepp was calling me now. They all were. There was no more “Miss Beck”, which I’d never really responded well to. There was no more “Beck”, the strong, monosyllabic name adopted in the first weeks of my stint at military school. Pardon me, orphanage. Marek, my bookstore manager, was the only exception. He called me by my first name, Jane. Surprisingly, I liked it. The title; not so much.

It was a sign of respect, a designation given to me by the Tribe. A self-governing were-kind pack that made their home in Suurspruit, in the North West Province of South Africa. It wasn’t given easily. I had the scars, emotional and physical, to prove it. And yet… I wasn’t sure. About any of it. Whether I deserved it, whether it was real, how long it would last.

Eight weeks ago, I was a dutiful government employee; a sanctioned consultant with the Department of Non-native Affairs. Then my life snowballed. Suspension, inheritance, making new friends, and here I was. Jane Beck. Marshal Jane Beck.  

“Look, Sepp, you’ve got the practice versions for a reason.”

“It’s a stupid reason. I want to use yours.”

Sepp was quite commanding for a ten-year-old child. Came with the territory given that he was were-kind. Luckily, I wasn’t swayed by the domineering tone of his voice or the green puppy-dog eyes he flashed me when he realised the answer was still no.

The items in question were a pair of sai, pronged weapons originally designed for striking and blocking the attacks of enemies, most likely wielding swords.

“Mine are forged from silver and when you nick yourself, and you will, a lot, it will hurt like a bitc…”

The hardest thing about being a role model, yes, suddenly I was someone the kid looked up to, was toning down the language. Actually, the hardest thing was not screwing up. I wasn’t winning on either front. I didn’t want the kid getting hurt. Silver was poisonous for were-kind. Ingested, it was fatal. But being cut (or stabbed) by a silver blade wasn’t. It just hurt. A lot. And slowed down the super healing abilities the were-kind enjoyed. Sepp didn’t care. About the pain or about my lack of social skills because he kept hanging around, which was easy to do because his sister worked at my bookstore. Eight weeks ago, I didn’t own a bookstore. Or an apartment building. Or anything really, except my motorcycle. And now…

We were sparring in the basement beneath said bookstore. The kid looked at me and rolled his eyes. Five feet of attitude. He held up his training sai, less lovingly constructed from polypropylene, which was hardened, yet flexible plastic. The sai were essentially pronged batons. The prongs, called yoku, curved out from the handles and were helpful in snagging and restraining opponents. Traditionally the baton was rounded and blunt, but mine were sharpened within an inch of their lives.

“They’re not really even offensive weapons, Sepp. They evolved from farming forks back in the old days in Japan, when farmers weren’t allowed weapons. I told you that yesterday.”

It was either that or they’d been used by Japan’s police for pinning and restraining people. The history of the sai was a bit murky, especially with a great chunk of history missing thanks to a great big meteor that smacked into the planet a few generations ago. The same meteor that ensured mankind, were-kind and Otherkind were suddenly aware of each other. My instructor back at the orphanage had been sold on the farming version of the story, so I stuck with that.

All it got me was another eye roll from Sepp. Had I been that confident at ten? Nope. I’d probably been much, much worse. I’d been learning to fight, too. Only it was with my fists and wits against older, hardened kids who’d been at the orphanage a lot longer than me. We started our official training at age twelve with Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. But by that time, we were already seasoned veterans in making each other bleed, defending our space, protecting our meagre possessions, or just fighting because we could.

Our weapons training followed when we were fourteen, and that is where it got interesting. There we had a choice — sword, knives, Arnis or stick fighting, guns and sai. For the most part we all gave the guns a go. They were relatively easy to use, point, shoot, reload — not exactly highbrow weaponry. For those inclined to move beyond shooting, they usually chose the sword or knives. I guess I was just ornery because I chose sai almost immediately. They were by far the hardest but I stuck with them for the next four years, until they felt like an extension of my body. Now, a decade and half later, I felt naked without them.

“Look at my hands,” I said in near exasperation. I holstered the sai in a specially designed leather belt and held out my hands. They looked like regular hands, eight fingers, two thumbs. Nothing special. They were a little dry, moisturising wasn’t a priority for me, but otherwise, stock standard. Except for the dozens of fine scars that covered them, from the tips of my fingers to my wrists, with a few on my forearms. The thin white stripes weren’t glaringly obvious unless you looked closely.

“See? We didn’t get plastic ones to practice with. We used the real ones from day one and it was a steep learning curve.”

I practiced for hours every day for years. The memory of the cuts was real, and I wasn’t allergic to silver. So sue me if I wanted to spare Sepp from that. He’d been through enough. He, however, seemed undeterred.

“Yes, I get it. You had a shitty childhood. Jeez. But I’m were-kind and we’re tough. I can take it.”

When had he turned into a mouthy teenager? Gone was the respectful, quiet lad who’d asked me to find his sister. In his place, was this…this dwarf-sized dose of testosterone-fuelled attitude.

In response I raised my eyebrow, the one scarred by pixie teeth, and handed him the silver sai. He flung the training sai aside — I could just see the apoplexy of my instructor at the disrespect — and grabbed mine. I took up the plastic versions, and before I could tell him about the balance being different and how the weight of the weapons was important when moving your fingers, he jabbed at me with impressive speed. But his cockiness and complete lack of skill let him down as I gently swatted his attack away and smacked his exposed fingers with the flat edge of my plastic sai.

He looked surprised, but nodded like he was acknowledging he had something to learn. Then he did it again, faster this time and using more force. Suddenly I felt like Mr Miagi, albeit five-foot-ten with a killer dark purple pixie cut hairdo, in that ancient cult classic film teaching the young boy karate.

I stepped out of his way and hit the sai in his right hand hard enough to make him drop it. The yoku nicked his finger and he let out a howl. Instead of saying I told you so, I gave him a pointed look. He bent and picked up the sai but not before I saw his face. The cut was barely bleeding, but the contact with silver was causing pain. A fair bit of it, judging by the grimace he tried to hide.

“You wanna take a break?”

He sniffed, showing the younger, more vulnerable Sepp. But he hardened in an instant.

“No. Show me how you did that.”

It was true. The boy had resolve. Perhaps due to him being were-kind. Perhaps due to the shit storm he’d experienced in his short life. Dead parents, kidnapped sister, and so it went.

Were-kind hadn’t always been mainstream. A few generations ago, a meteor roughly the size of Lesotho slammed into the planet, causing apocalyptic weather events and years of political turbulence. When the smoke cleared, so had the veil that kept our world and the magic world separate but existing in a weird kind of parallel equilibrium. Suddenly two different worlds were no longer side by side, but rather on top of one another. Living together with the new awareness that monsters – or Otherkind as they were named – did exist was sometimes harder than living with said monsters. That was the thing about mankind; we like to label things. Surely Otherkind had to be monsters? If you asked those that got trafficked into holding camps while governments and laws were re-established, monster was a relative term, a description that could easily apply to anyone, depending on what side of the veil you started on.

Five decades ago, kids like Sepp had been dreaming of watches that could make phone calls, hoverboards and robots that could learn and make decisions. Now, we’d just celebrated the first anniversary of the first post-veil car to come off the production line. We still had telephones, some mobile technology, but they were notoriously unreliable, because infrastructure was patchy. The one thing going for us, I mean both mankind and Otherkind, was that the meteor event was still in living memory. There were still engineers, doctors, scientists and scholars who remembered how things were supposed to work, how to fix bridges, how to build desalination plants, how to maintain data centres, and how to convince a population that air travel in tubes with fixed wings was going to make a comeback.

But for the most part, we had more pressing concerns like food, shelter, water. This is the only world I’ve known. Just like Sepp. Except Sepp has been fighting for his place in it for his whole life.

I nodded. “Okay. Take these three fingers and wrap them around the grip, between the yoku. Then put your index finger along the baton. You have to be careful because it’s sharp there too.”

He manoeuvred his fingers into position and waited.

“Good. Now, hold the sai along your forearm to block.”

I picked up the plastic sai and showed him the move in slow motion. He did well, mimicking me, even though his hands were still a little small.

“To change your grip and change from defending yourself to an attacking move, open your three fingers and balance the yoku on your thumb, flip it over and grip it with your thumb on the knuckle.”

There was more skill involved in this move, so I demonstrated it a few times in slow motion before speeding up. I’d barely started when he followed suit, dropping the sai a few times and nicking himself more than once before he got into the rhythm and got it almost right. The florescent lights flickered and buzzed, and I knew any minute we’d be training in the dark. Between the ancient wiring of the building and the inconsistency in electricity supply, a little bit of darkness was a given.

“It’s enough for today, Sepp. Take the plastic ones home with you and practice what I’ve shown you. If you’re serious about this, you need at least an hour or two with them every day.”

He nodded, undeterred. He handed the silver sai back to me, trying to hide the myriad tiny cuts on his hands. After the first one, he hadn’t made a sound. Tough kid.

“Good job today.”

He shrugged. “I’ll get better.”

He tried the offensive move again, and again. There was no doubt he would get better. I knew how determined he could be – the look on his face when he told me he’d find his sister was just the beginning. The lights flickered again.

“Go on, go upstairs and ask Marek to put the kettle on. And wash those hands if you’re going to handle cookies or the comics,” I called as he scampered past me and through the short hallway.

I don’t remember much about my mother, either of my parents really, except vague feelings of warmth, security and a dimpled right cheek when she smiled. But something told me I was starting to sound a lot like her. And I didn’t mind that at all.

The basement of the bookstore wasn’t the best place to train, but it was the only area I had. It was divided into two spaces, a training room and a small parking garage. The training room was accessible through the entrance hall of the bookstore and apartment building above it, while the garage, taken up only by Marek’s car, led straight up to the alley and the street beyond. So far, the training room, previously a glorified storage area, consisted of a few second-hand mats and odd bits of junk and furniture left behind from the previous owner. Despite the lack of windows and shifty electrics, it would make an ideal gym. Just needed to add a boxing bag and free weights.

That was one of the things, probably the only thing apart from free healthcare, that I missed about working for the Department of Non-native Affairs. All the hostels I’d lived in during my tenure featured a gym of some kind. Invariably they all smelled the same and were in similar states of disrepair, but they provided a decent place to train, fight, prepare. I hadn’t done any of that in the time I’d been living in Suurspruit and now that I was almost seventy-five percent recovered from a beating, I needed to get back into some kind of training regimen.

A few days ago I went on a run, but after a kilometre everything hurt and I vomited in the bushes before hanging my head in shame and walking home.

“I like what you’ve done with the place.”

My nerves came alive, the hair on the back of my neck standing to attention and I gripped the sai like someone’s life depended on them. One day, it would be mine. I turned, as nonchalantly as possible.

“I took some decorating tips from the Den,” I responded.

Rees, the leader of the Tribe, turned up his perfect lips and smirked. He took a step forward, all six foot four of him, and the basement shrank in size. His short dark brown hair and electric blue eyes emphasised the powerful line of his jaw and his high cheekbones making him a handsome man. But underneath it all, he was a predator, pure and simple. It was something I could never forget.

“Sepp looked…determined. You give him those knives?”

His voice was like warm like molten chocolate that poured into my ears and did unexpected things to my insides. But I stood my ground. With Rees, it was a necessity. One false move and it was game over.

“Firstly, yes he’s determined because he’s one of yours. Secondly, they are not knives. And thirdly, yes, I bought him training ones.”

The arrogance rolled off him as he mockingly mimicked me.

“Firstly, thank you for the compliment. And secondly, why? Why did you buy them for him?”

Why indeed. They were custom-made and weren’t cheap. But the kid followed me around and asked me all kinds of questions, mostly about fighting, and never stopped trying to handle my sai.

“Because I thought it would be safer than letting him play with mine.”

Rees took another step closer.

“And yet, he was doing just that.”

How long had he been lurking in the shadows? Why had he been watching us? Not for the first time I felt like I was treading a very fine line with Rees.

“He needed to see why they are necessary. These beauties can save your life, but they’re wickedly sharp and if mishandled, extremely dangerous if whoever holding them doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

Were we still talking about the sai? Rees gaze moved from my face to my hands. While talking, I’d unconsciously whipped out the sai, my primal brain recognising an apex predator when it saw one. Despite my better judgement, I re-holstered them.

I was rewarded by another smirk and definite mirth in his blue eyes.

“Yes, I remember.”

Okay, we definitely weren’t still talking about the sai.

Our first meeting, I’d been summoned to the Den, the Tribe stronghold. It hadn’t gone well. Rees showed me exactly what the Tribe was made of by demonstrating his dominance and squeezing my throat until I almost passed out. I retaliated by slicing his arm with one of the sai. The cut was shallow, but drawing first blood hadn’t made me very popular. We hadn’t come much further.

I picked up a towel and Sepp’s aluminium water bottle and walked to the door and towards the man beast invading my space. If he’d been any other man, he would have stepped aside, allowed me past. But he wasn’t. So he didn’t. He blocked the doorway while I waited patiently just a foot away from him trying not to show that his proximity bothered me. He probably knew anyway.

“You don’t using make house calls. What’s the occasion?”

He moved the tiniest bit closer.

“I was in town doing some…business and I thought I’d drop in.”

Bullshit. But I wasn’t brave (stupid) enough to call him on it.

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t elaborate. Instead, he issued a command.

“You need to come back to the Den with me. We have a meeting with the police this afternoon.”

That immediately piqued my interest.

“Another body?”

The smirk didn’t shift.

“I’ll bet that didn’t sound so ghoulish in your head. But no. It’s about your weapons. You have to surrender them.”

What the holy hell? Again, my hands went to my belt.

“Relax. It’s about your guns.”

Of course, it was.

Not many nations were as accepting of Otherkind as South Africa. We prided ourselves on being progressive so we welcomed them with semi-open arms and talked a lot about equality. We set up the Department of Non-native Affairs — an all-encompassing arm of government functioning alongside the judiciary, legislative and executive branches that included the Equality and Rights Commission, a Legal and Policing Forum, and a Social Welfare Department. The model was adopted in some shape or form throughout the world, except Australia where Otherkind outweighed mankind to such a large degree that the continent became a strange little lawless island that was largely left alone.

While living in South Africa meant we were all free and equal… there were caveats.

One of them was that Otherkind were strictly forbidden to buy, own, use or touch any projectile-expending weapon. In a nutshell, that meant no guns, none at all. No shotguns, rifles, airguns or even toy guns. The reason? The legal justification? Otherkind, especially those like were-kind, are seen to have an unfair advantage in terms of strength, fitness and magic ability, which can all combine to equal deadly force. Given that the majority of Otherkind possessed, at most, one of the three and then never in large amounts, the law was enforced just to make sure that if Otherkind started an uprising, humans with guns would have more of a fighting chance against a horde armed with teeth, claws and some hocus pocus.

It made sense. If I really was a member of the Tribe now, technically I was Otherkind which meant no guns. The law was the law but that didn’t mean I had to be happy about it. I didn’t have super strength, fangs, claws or magic to give me an unfair advantage. It was a bullshit move, spurred by my previous employers out of what could reasonably only be seen as spite. More fool them. I was more than my pistols.

“Sure. Let me get cleaned up and I’ll meet you there. What time?”

Rees looked unconvinced.

“I’ll wait for you.”

There was something in his tone that ignited a spark of rebellion. Did he not trust me to turn up? Did he think I’d leave town screaming at the injustice of it all?

“Really, it’s okay. I’ll meet you at the Den. I won’t abscond and I won’t do anything to embarrass you or the Tribe.”

Something shifted in his eyes. He was the boss. The one in charge. The one people listened to. I wasn’t complying and it irked him. I tried to move past him to the door but he remained like a statue. As I drew level with him, he put his mouth very close to my ear and said:

“You make sure you do, Miss Beck. I won’t stand for any shit.”

Of course he wouldn’t. I barely contained my eye roll as I shouldered past him. At least now I knew where Sepp got his attitude from.

Consequences

Back in the bookstore, Marek was far too polite to ask what Rees was doing in my basement. Sepp, however, had no such inhibitions. The shop took up most of the ground floor of the building. Like many other buildings in Suurspruit, it maintained its 1900s mining town heritage. On the outside it was painted yellow, with a discreet maroon sign positioned above a small alcove that housed a solid wood door. Inside, the shop was all dark wood shelves and floors, set out over a split level. The mini-mezzanine level hid the small office that led out to the innards of the rest of the building while the lower portion was more welcoming with scattered armchairs, faded rugs and a large table to the left of the door that doubled as Marek’s workstation. Here, a kettle was boiling away and Marek set out three delicate, mismatched bone China cups and saucers, a teapot and serving plate in whimsical lime green filled with biscuits.

In addition to being my bookstore manager, expert on my deceased great aunt who left me the place, and Tribe encyclopaedia, Marek was also the man who ignited, nurtured and enabled my cookie addiction. Tiny little mouthfuls of sinful, sugary goodness, sometimes with chocolate, sometimes with caramel, sometimes with nuts, often times with all three, the delicacies filled my mouth with happiness and were the primary reason I needed a gym downstairs. And he played dirty. The cookies were rarely, if ever, store bought. And I was pretty sure he used real sugar, which was incredibly hard to find and when it was found, extortionately expensive. I wasn’t quite sure if I loved or hated him given my current state of unfitness.

But now, today, I was leaning towards to the former. I popped a sticky cashew nut round into my mouth and bit back a sigh of pure delight.

“I’ve got some admin stuff to sort out at the Den later.”

Sepp stuffed three cookies in his mouth and then slunk away to the new graphic novel section as Marek threw him a withering glance. Since Sepp started hanging around, we’d started to stock more comics and graphic novels, the latter were like currency for the youth of the town. Hard to find, easy to sell and always in demand.

“And he came all the way over here to tell you that? He couldn’t use the phone or send a messenger?”

As much as the silver-haired Marek was rubbing off on me, there reverse was also true because he echoed my thoughts when Rees told me the reason for his visit.

“He wanted to reinforce the point that it’s important and I need to show up.”

Marek nodded and poured hot water into the teapot so that the leaves could steep. His movements were deliberate, measured, the whole ritual a massive contradiction to his appearance. In his late fifties, Marek exuded fitness and health with his close-cropped silver hair and deep tan. The tan, much like the strength in his arms, was the kind that came from a lifetime of working outdoors doing manual labour. Even though it had been a while, managing the bookstore hadn’t robbed him of that aura.

He set the teapot aside. I would have been happy with a teabag plopped straight into the cup. Or coffee. But patience really was a virtue because I didn’t rush the ritual or moan about how small the cup was and how I worried with every sip that my clumsy hands would crush it like a meringue. Marek didn’t say anything else. He moved the plates and cups around the table. It was a basic interrogation tactic. Bring on the silence and watch as the person in the hotseat spills their guts. I was in the hotseat today ready to do just that. Marek must have been a fearsome Tribe leader back in the day.

“I have to meet the police there and hand over my pistols. Apart from the fact that I no longer have a licence to carry them, as a new member of Otherkind, they are enforcing the letter of the law.”

He decanted the tea into three cups, held one out to Sepp who took it and two more biscuits with a nod of thanks before returning to his shelf. The other he gave to me. I took it gently by the saucer and ignored the offer of milk and Stevia sugar because those sweet little biscuit treats would suffice. He stirred milk into his tea, just a drop, and then looked me in the eye.

“That they will because they don’t mess around when it comes to guns. We know that better than most. The absolute letter of the law…do you what it is? The exact wording? The themes covered and the meaning attached? You should do a bit of reading before you go, be fully prepared.”

I did know the law because I helped enforce it. But Marek was almost anxious making me question myself and the reason he was squirrelly.

It was called the Empty Hand Law and was unforgiving and absolute. There were no allowances for motive, intent, age, circumstance. No room for legal manoeuvring, no extenuating circumstances. The outcome was always the same. Death. The law applied to all Otherkind, including were-kind and the Tribe; the only time the government could supersede the law and determination of Rees and his people.

“Why, Marek, why is it so important?”

For an organisation that was constantly at the front of a potential public relations shit storm, the Tribe, and Rees specifically, was playing a political game with the government, with the town and with public opinion. Add other packs, smaller, weaker and less wealthy groups of were-kind into the mix and you had a volatile environment where trust was a commodity. I guess I knew that becoming affiliated with the Tribe would be challenging, but I naively assumed the issues would be internal and related to the Suurspruit were-kind.

Now as Marek sipped his tea and dispensed advice, I realised that it wasn’t going to be as simple as handing over my guns and walking away.

“I heard something yesterday which didn’t make much sense at the time, but now… given what you’ve told me…”

His cup hit the saucer with a jolt. He was worried. The tightness around his weathered mouth and eyes. But why? I would give up my guns, which would send a clear message to both the members of the Tribe and town inhabitants that I was acknowledging my new role in the organisation.

“What did you hear?”

He waited a beat, looking me in the eye with what I felt was fatherly concern. There was an aura around him that was… comforting. It outweighed the authoritarian vibe he sometimes gave off, especially when it came to me, Sepp and his sister Nikita.

“There’s an Overseer in town. He’s been here since Tuesday and has been spending his free time at the police station.”

The cookies felt like lead in my stomach and cold fingers of unease ran all over my body. This was why Rees came to fetch me. He was worried if I knew about the Overseers that I might take off.

“It will be fine, Marek. It’s a formality.”

I faked a smile and took a tiny sip of tea hoping it would break up the cemented dread in my gut. He didn’t look like he believed me, so I promised to be careful.

“I’ll do the reading, I promise.”

I didn’t have to. I knew what it said. It hadn’t changed in fifty years. But it wasn’t the law I was worried about. It was the Overseer. Wherever they went, unpleasantness was sure to follow. They existed to keep NNA consultants in check. By any means necessary. Every consultant had one official appointment with an Overseer and that was at the end of their probationary period. Pass, fail or extend. After that, it had to be a fuck-up of epic proportion to see another one. And if you did, it was probably the last thing you did see.

Question was, what did this one want?

There were still a few people back in Johannesburg who were willing to talk to me. Most of them worked for the NNA or the adjacent departments so I knew asking them about the Overseer would yield nothing but a hung-up call and a guarantee they would ignore my next call. There was something else at play; technically I was no longer an agent with the NNA so there was no reason for an Overseer to be dispatched. Unless the department regretted its decision to terminate my employment and wanted to terminate, well me. But they’d lost that opportunity. I had the letter to prove it.

The meeting was a test of some kind. The only thing was, who was doing the testing? Who had a bigger investment in my performance, Rees, the police department of Suurspruit or the Overseers and the department they represented. The only way to find out what was going on was to go the Den and play my role.

I packaged up the guns, paying particular attention to how they were laid out, a sinking feeling heightening my anxiety and nagging at me to get the hell out of town as fast as I could.

The same page

If I didn’t already know about the Overseer being in town, I would have realised something was not quite right when I got to the Den. My first clue that there was a lot more at stake than anticipated was not the two armed and uniformed police officers waiting outside the boardroom, or the two Tribe security staff that kept them company. Nor was it the strange absence of Tribe members in the building itself. At any given point during the day the compound was buzzing with life — kids coming back from school, Scouts taking advantage of the free food, admin and support staff walking purposely around. Not today.

The giant gates swung open, admitting me to the massive grounds, just as welcoming as they were the first time. The Den took up hectares and hectares of bushveld on the edge of town, combining a self-sustaining mentality with a number of eco-friendly stone buildings that blended perfectly with their surroundings. The compound included a small power plant, water treatment facility, and dairy in addition to the large main structure and its auxiliary homes, sheds and garages. Today the gates swung shut behind me so someone was around, but the parking lot was empty of bodies, as was the entrance hall of the building and the quad that the building was built around.

I made my way up the stairs of the stone façade two-storey building, the box in my hands and an itchy feeling in my spine. Markus, one of the Tribe security guys, exchanged a meaningful glance with his compatriot, a woman called Penny who regarded me with disapproval evident in her thin-lipped frown, before opening the boardroom door and ushering me inside. The two cops watched me and the box, but didn’t make eye contact. As I moved past Penny, she gave me a silent snarl, twisting up her lip and showing me her teeth. That behaviour was to be expected; especially after I’d challenged the head of security, Jordan, and then kicked her arse in view of Rees and his second in charge, Ford.

There was a lot more backstory to that fight, but the gist of it was that Jordan didn’t like me — for reasons unknown, mostly — and the feeling is shared. And the reason I didn’t hold her in much esteem was because I didn’t believe she was any good at her job. It wasn’t personal. Okay, it was mostly not personal. Fireworks. Challenge. Ass-kicking. You see where I was going. The result was that there was now a large power vacuum in security with a number of candidates vying for Jordan’s job. She was still a Tribe member, albeit a quiet one licking her wounds and no doubt plotting her comeback, but she had left her post. And yes, that was my fault, something I was going to have to answer for. I’m just not sure how. Rees will no doubt tell me.

But for now, I focused on the box that was burning my hands and the sense of doom that I just couldn’t shake. I fixed Penny with a stare that said: anytime, anywhere, but not now. If she thought handing my guns over would make me weaker and easier to take down, she was going to be less than pleasantly surprised because I didn’t use my guns when I beat Jordan. Just my bare hands.

The room was deathly quiet when I entered. It wasn’t that the conversation stopped. There was no conversation. Everyone sat in silence waiting for me. William Rutherford, Ford’s brother and the Tribe’s lawyer, sat at the boardroom table next to Rees.

That was my first clue that something huge was happening.

I met Rutherford on my first day in town; hot and sweaty after spending hours crossing the country on my motorcycle, I stopped at his office to sort out the paperwork for my great aunt’s estate. He was a soft-spoken, calm man, his great height almost at odds with his gentle demeanour and today, like Marek, he looked worried. Especially when he saw the box in my hands.

My second clue was the presence of a familiar Overseer sitting on the opposite side of the table. Hayden Mayfair. The world skidded to a halt. There were no curse words descriptive enough to demonstrate the depth of my unease. It made sense now. Letter of the law. It was too late for me to back out of the room, so I moved forward.

He was as I remembered him; medium height, medium build, medium brown hair, all perfectly unremarkable. Except his eyes, which were black, downturned so that his entire face frowned even when it was expressionless. And his arms, skeletally thin with paper-thin white skin stretched over the bones and tendons, the knuckles on his long-fingered hands stood out so much they were permanently white as the skin was forever taut.

This was the third time I’d seen him. I was still alive after the first two meetings and I wondered how much longer my luck would hold. The second time we met, he failed my probation, adding another six months to prove myself. I was twenty-one years old and he scared the tar out of me. It wasn’t because of the power he held; it was because I saw nothing in his eyes. Devoid of any kind of emotion. There was no humour, no mercy, no joy reflected there, just a keen, almost lizard-like intelligence that did little to put me at ease.

Even now, after everything I’d seen in my tenure, Hayden Mayfair was still the most unsettling individual I’d ever encountered.

The boardroom was dominated by a large wooden table, set at a strategic angle to ensure no matter where anyone sat, no-one would sit with their back to the door. Three sets of eyes watched me enter the room. And my hands started to sweat. As much as I wanted to believe that I was a superhero who laughed in the face of danger, feared nothing and gave no thought to her personal safety, I was firmly rooted in reality. Which meant I felt fear, hard palpable terror. Yes, I worked through it, carried on even when I wanted to soil myself and run screaming. Guns, knives, teeth, I could deal with. But the law; the cold, unyielding letter of the law and its black and white interpretation frightened me more than almost anything I had ever faced. Especially when it was delivered by the equally inflexible and emotionless Overseer. Perhaps William’s presence was supposed to reassure me that the Tribe was on my side and that they would protect me like I was one of their own. But it didn’t. It just made me aware that I was in way over my head and seemed to be the only one who realised it.

Slowly, deliberately, I set the box on the table and took the chair between Rutherford and Rees. The Tribe leader caught my eye, looked at my absence of holster and turned his lip up in a semi smile, like he was impressed. Arsehole. Did he really think I would turn up to a meeting with an Overseer wearing my pistols? Again, I had to wonder if this was just another test in a long series of challenges designed to see if I was worthy.

The Overseer signalled to someone in the depths of the room, a younger version of himself. Both men were clad in matching dark grey tailored trousers, crisp white shirts, black leather waistcoats and thick red leather buckled armbands on both wrists. The younger man opened the box, removed each of the pistols, checked the chamber was empty, then checked the magazines were all empty. He also noted that the firing pins had been removed and were missing.

“Where are the bullets?” Asked Hayden Mayfair, his lizard-like gaze never leaving me.

“It’s not illegal to own or carry bullets,” said Rutherford before I’d had the chance to process the question. His voice was clear, hard and firm, not something that I’d heard from him before.

The Overseer turned his black eyes away from me and onto the lawyer but said nothing. Then they shifted back to me and I felt the sharp tickle of millions of fire ants slow-marching all over my skin.

“I would like to say it is a surprise to see you here, Beck. But given your history, it is almost what I expected from you. It has just taken longer than I thought.”

His voice was low, modulated like he was reading from a script. I inclined my head slightly to acknowledge him, all the while biting my tongue. I wasn’t a kid anymore that he could bully into admitted to something I didn’t do. Or rather did do, just not in the way he thought. Still, I had to tread lightly. Rees looked at me, no doubt surprised I wasn’t mouthing off like I did with everyone else, him included.

“What did I tell you after your failed probation? What did I say?”

Despite my inner pep talk and realisation I was an adult that couldn’t be bullied, that voice, the carefully chosen words, the tone, transported me back to my teen years where despite my toughened shell I was still just a stupid, vulnerable kid trying to make sense of the world. The teen rebelliousness surged through me and I wanted to say that I didn’t remember. I wanted to defy him like a child and say his words meant nothing to me, so they were easy to forget. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because his words, his hatred and the residual feelings were all burned into my being. They’d shaken me when he delivered them — with no malice, just factual inflection — each word a perfectly crafted grain of sand that slowly eroded the stone heart my education had created.

But those words shaped me too. The jury was still out on if that was for the better.

“You said even if I passed my probation the second time around there would come a time when I fucked up so badly that nothing could save me,” I replied, my voice sharper than usual.

Rees shifted in his seat, almost imperceptibly, but I noticed because he was sitting extremely close to me. For a moment, I believed that was he was getting ready for battle in case I leapt across the table and tried to break the Overseer’s neck. He didn’t need to worry. That wasn’t happening today.

“And…?”

I could almost taste the delight in the air around him. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was enjoying this. I far preferred the emotionless version from before.

“And you said when that happened you would there to show me what real discipline looked like, and take great care in demonstrating to me what the consequences were of sullying the great mission bestowed upon me by the Department of Non-native Affairs.”

The sharpness in my voice dulled and it sounded, even to my own ears, like I’d admitted defeat except I didn’t even remember starting a fight.

“And here we are.” Hayden Mayfair was a hair’s breadth away from smiling. He was definitely enjoying this. Again, Rutherford stepped in.

“With all due respect,” he paused, emphasising the point that neither he nor Rees felt there was any respect due and the Overseers were being accommodated as a courtesy. “We’ve complied with your request. Miss Beck handed over the pistols in accordance with the law and we’d like that documented. We would also like a receipt.”

Hayden Mayfair waved his long fingers and the younger Overseer brandished a sheaf of papers that he slide along the table to Rutherford.

“There is also the small matter of where the guns have been stored since your admittance to the Tribe.”

“In a locked safe in Miss Beck’s apartment,” said Rutherford without missing a beat. This was news to me, but I didn’t contradict him.

“Not good enough,” Mayfair sneered. “At any point anyone could have accessed these weapons, mankind, were-kind, anyone.”

He looked back at me and he was smiling now.

“It is my determination that Jane Beck in her capacity as member of the Tribe has contravened the Empty Hand Law and will be remanded into my custody until such time that the death sentence is passed.”

© 2023 Eris Matthews