Caine's Law Read Free

works.”
    Director Keller spread his sweaty hands. “Win or die.”

 

 
    This is the axe from Kor
.
    This is the arrow from the Teranese floodplain
.
    This is the spike from my cross, and this the burn from Crowmane’s god
.
    This is the alley knife from home, and this the brick, and this my father’s fist
.
    — “CAINE” (PFNL. HARI MICHAELSON)
Retreat from the Boedecken
     
    A week or two after my seventh birthday, my father beat my mother to death.
    I remembered it. All of it. Finally.
    I remembered the way it was. The only way it’ll ever be.
    Listen to me.
    Yes, you. Pay attention. This is important. This is the whole story right here. Everything else is just context.
    Listen:
    The Mission District’s Labor free clinic … Dad and me and the old guy with the scars …
    Dad and me, we sat together on a plastic bench, shoved up against the mildew-stained wall a couple meters in from the age-smoked armorglass of the street doors. A girl hunched next to me, twelve or thirteen probably, because to me she looked practically grown up. She was talking, kind of under her breath, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what she was saying and the rest of the time she didn’t make much sense. She was rocking back and forth with one knee hugged to her chest while her other legjittered and bounced and kicked out sometimes and she didn’t seem to notice.
    On the other side of her was some ancient ragface, probably Dad’s age even, lying on his side on the bench, snoring with his head on a bundle of rags, blowing pinkish bubbles of bloody vomit out his nose.
    On the other side of me was Dad.
    Elbows on knees, hands dangling limp between his thighs, he stared straight ahead, barely even blinking, and I knew he was looking at something inside his head instead of in the room. He got like that after an episode. Like he was dead, except for moving and breathing and stuff. He hadn’t made a noise since we sat down. Over an hour.
    Me neither.
    The clinic waiting room was bigger than our whole apartment. Cleaner, too. It was late morning, so there were only fifty or sixty Laborers waiting to see the practitioner. Slowest part of the day. Most of them just had the flushed faces and thick gluey coughs that meant they’d caught the wheeze, which had started early this year. It wasn’t even fall yet. The wheeze could be cured by taking a pill every day for a week or two, but somehow there were never enough pills. Nickles Porter, a kid about my age who lived on our floor in the Temp block, had told me his dad had come home from the clinic worse off than when he’d went in, and that the old man had spent most of the night choking to death.
    I remember thinking, when Nickles told me about it, how it’d be pretty neat if
my
dad would come down with the wheeze, because once he was gone, Mom could maybe get us recasted to Professional, and she could teach and we’d go back and live in our
real
house, the one on Language Arts Drive at the faculty compound in South Berkeley.
    I sort of figured that Nickles and his mom must have done something like that, because a couple weeks later he wasn’t around anymore. I thought this because I was still new. A few months along, I’d have a more direct understanding of how and why Labor kids disappeared from the Mission District.
    Sitting there on the bench, I didn’t worry about Mom dying; I wasn’t
that
new. In the Temp blocks, you don’t worry about what’s coming so much as about living through whatever it turns out to be. If she died, it’d be one thing. If she lived, it’d be something else. Nothing I could do about anything either way. Except sit and wait. And try not to think about the rest of my life.
    So that’s what I did until the old guy showed up.
    He came in through the street door like he had someplace to be, walkingwith one of those hollow plastic crutches tucked into his armpit, even though he didn’t look like he needed it. Except maybe for being old. He