Elias spun on him. “Shut up.”
“No snappy comeback?” Alek stood under his own strength. His right foot burned with cold as the ice underfoot melted and soaked into his sock, but he ignored the needle-stabbing sensation. Breathing shallow, trying not to aggravate his broken rib, he asked, “No grand debate?”
“I’m not interested in anything you have to say, Terran.”
Alek nodded. “Well, after all, ‘a closed mind never errs, nor learns,’” he quoted.
“Another one of your dead Russians?” Elias scoffed.
“Not this time,” Alek said, thanking Michael silently for the words. “Tracial Steiner. One of yours.”
With Gabreilla’s help he had gotten through to one of them. The dark-haired cadet holding onto Gabriella let her go. “Come on, Elias,” he said, glancing about nervously. “That’s enough.”
Elias speared the other cadet with a severe look. “I’ll say when it’s enough, Patrick.” Then he slowly drew his saber, letting the sword rasp free of its hilt in one long pull. “I decide.”
Gabriella drew in a sharp breath, fear finally showing in her eyes. The two cadets holding Alek let him go. They hadn’t signed on for murder, apparently. But then, neither had Elias Luvon. No one else saw it in Elias’s eyes. The desperation. The fear. Alek knew that Elias wasn’t about to use the saber. He was abusive and insecure, but he had not lost control of his senses. He was posturing, pure and simple. Elias Luvon had a need to be respected. To be in charge. Alek found that sad, and not a little pitiful.
He was also very tired of being Elias’s plaything, used as a means to the cadet’s end. Shrugging away from the two cadets standing right behind him, he limped up to Elias. “You aren’t going to use that, Elias.” His voice was steadfast and certain.
Elias had a dead look in his eyes. He had backed himself into a corner, and knew it. “You don’t know what I’d do.”
Alek nodded. “You’re going to be a soldier, Elias. A MechWarrior. You won’t risk that here and now just to save face. Not with witnesses,” he nodded to Gabriella.
“Who’d believe her?” Elias smiled cruelly. “Distraught and angry, found by four Nagelring cadets with her dress ‘slipping’ off and a Terran pawing her. Maybe her ‘no’s’ were real…maybe they weren’t. How were we to know, Alek? How were we to know?”
He meant to do it. Nothing with the sword—Elias seemed to have all but forgotten that as he crafted his latest piece of scandal and slander—but he could recover some poise by thrashing Alek further through university gossip. The feet thrust into his way, the thrown books and rude shoulders on the stairwells, they would never cease. Any “accidents” that befell him would be seen as deserving, to be covered up right away before any hint of the scandal made it into official records. If it ruined Gabriella Bailey’s reputation alongside his, that didn’t seem to bother Elias at all.
But it bothered Alek. More than anything else.
Bruises faded over time. Bones mended. But to hurt an innocent person for no other reason than the fact that she liked Alek seemed unconscionable.
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Oh, yeah.” Elias flipped the end of his saber up, tapped Alek lightly on the shoulder with it as if knighting him. “And you know,” he whispered, “the more adamantly she denies it, the more people will believe it has to be true.”
“No!”
Alek flailed out with his left arm, knocking the saber away from his shoulder with such violence that it turned Elias halfway around from him. No one, especially Elias, had expected mild-mannered Alek to strike back. Not ever. Alek could have taken that moment to escape, so clean was the surprise. Grab Gabriella and run. Back across the courtyard patio, anywhere where others saw them, and could bear witness.
But instead Alek took a full step across the line he had toed for so many years. The line which had grown thicker, more severe, in the eighteen months spent on Tharkad.
He grabbed Elias Luvon, taking thick handfuls of fabric in each fist, and heaved. Elias staggered toward the steps which led into the university’s winter gardens. Alek stumbled, lost his footing. Pain lit up his left side as he slammed his knees against the cold patio flagstone. Through tear-filled eyes he watched as Elias wavered dangerously at the top edge, sword slashing the air in front of him as if trying to fend off gravity’s clutches.
Then Elias fell.
Alek’s breathing stammered, dredging in painful breaths and then exhaling small clouds of frost. He sensed someone drop down beside him, adding what warmth she could with an arm around his shoulders. “Oh, Alek.” The words echoed in his mind, but Alek drew no support from them. They were lost among a sea of chaotic thoughts and one dark, visceral image.
That of Elias Luvon. Sprawled over the lower patio.
A broken piece of his saber impaled through the right side of his chest.
• • •
The apartment, taken by Alek’s parents so that they could be on hand for the inquiry, smelled of coffee and his mother’s homemade black bread. The radiator rattled in the mornings and there was never enough hot water to satisfy anyone, but for now it was home.
It gave him a place to rest over the weekend, nursing his broken rib and a deeply-bruised kidney. Retreating into his books, he memorized three new poems by Pushkin and long passages by Dumas and Shakespeare as well. None of them could scrub the image from of his memory. No matter how hard he tried.
He limped from his room only twice that weekend. The second time he met Gabriella Bailey at the apartment’s door. She had tracked him down via Michael Steiner, Alek’s first visitor after the incident. Gabriella stood in the hall and bit
