Original fiction AND fanfiction in beautiful combination. Happy Friday 13th, you buggers.
It rained like the sky was forty days behind schedule: it wasn't the right sort of weather for running away. But no one had told Eli Witherspoon that, and he was a dreamy boy, pale and soft as a mushroom grown in the shade; how would he have known? He did not so much as remember to retrieve his umbrella as he left school that afternoon, when the bell rang and jarred him out of his light childish sleep. (The last class was Reading, and to Eli, near illiterate and full up with his own stories, Reading meant soft chairs in the bare school library and a book to hide his closed eyes from the teacher with.) It didn't worry him even when he discovered it, walking slowly down the steps to the slippery water-stained curb with his face wet and his hands chilly.
Well. He wouldn't have known that he was going to run away then, of course. Still. His one concession to the world around him, which he did his best to ignore and which returned the favor, was to blow on his mottled white-pink palms, hot sticky little-boy breaths, one after the other, and rock on his heels to heat himself up once he'd reached the edge of the sidewalk. He was waiting for his mother's boyfriend's Jeep that day, but the car that eventually skidded to a halt a few inches from his careless toes, splashing his jeans with mud and honking at him was his mother's sister's. Eli thought of her as his mother's sister because she said the word 'aunt' made her feel like a fucking spinster. Maureen was a great one for not feeling like a fucking spinster, and also for teaching Eli new and interesting words he was strictly forbidden to use around anyone else, especially his mother, who had yet to realize that he was nine years old and understood what she was saying when she cursed traffic and his father in vivid language.
She rolled down the windows and said, "Hurry up. My god, you're soaked, I thought I told you not to jump in puddles."
"Sorry," Eli murmured, jerking the door open and climbing inside before slamming it shut after him. Part of his seat was already damp from what rain had slicked through after him, and he sat awkwardly, hunched into the side of the chair nearest his aunt, seat-belt stretched taut by the distance between his shoulder and the sodden cloth where it normally rested.
"Don't apologize to me. You're the one whose going to be sneezing come morning."
He half-smiled tentatively; he found it difficult sometimes to tell whether she was mocking him or whether she simply didn't care about his latest cold. Her face was expressionless, and her eyes were on the road. Dappled light filtering through the windshield sharpened the contours of her profile into a flat puzzle, without depth or shading. There were no hints. So he kept quiet and shivered, lacking an answer, unsure of the question.
She misunderstood his trembling and reached out to turn the heater on with a few deft flicks of her wrist, one gleaming dial after the other. "Do you want me to stop at Starbucks before we go home for your piano lesson?"
"I'm not thirsty," he said.
"Fair enough."
She smoothed his dripping hair back from his forehead: she was wearing leather gloves, and the fabric felt glossy, somehow gruesome, like he imagined, wrongly, that flayed squirrels would feel. (Her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Fields, had explained to him how to flay squirrels, and he couldn't stop himself thinking about them.) He didn't mind, really. Maureen always wore those gloves in fall, and he was used to the way they rubbed oddly against his clammy palm or slipped against the skin around his eyes when she padded up behind him and covered his eyes, laughing at the way he started every time, even when he was expecting it.
"How was school today?" she said, after a pause.
"Okay."
"Nothing interesting happened?"
He shrugged one shoulder. "I got an A on my math test."
"I should hope so," she said, lightly. Eli was good at math. It was the one constant of his academic career, as his mother called it. Every other class but Reading was somehow untrustworthy; he might be the best of his grade one year and mediocre the next, or vice versa, in the other classes, but math he could rely on to be a pleasure, and Reading he could rely on to be a restful tedium. "What was it testing?"
"Surface area and volume and circles and things," he said. "Geometry. It's easy."
"Hah! You wait till you get to the Euclidean version, kid."
"What's Euclidean?"
"Invented by Euclid."
He rolled his eyes. "Whose Euclid, then?"
"A dead Greek man who came up with geometry. Not what you're learning about pi squared - that's just numbers. He proved all those rules that they give you, about lines and circles and so on. You'll learn about him in a couple of years."
"Oh," said Eli, disappointed. He would rather have learned then, but Maureen did not go on and he was embarrassed to ask. Instead he changed the subject. "How come you picked me up today instead of Mr. Fields?"
There was a brief silence. He was about to repeat his question when she said at last,
"He got called away unexpectedly this morning. A new client. You know how it is."
Mr. Field was a divorce attorney, like his mother was studying to be. Eli knew how it was. "Did he say when he was coming home?"
"Nine at the earliest," she said, and added, "Fortunately for you, I didn't have any plans tonight."
"Thank you," he said, unsure of how he should react. Maureen rarely baby-sat. She said their new house made her uncomfortable, and besides, she was only his mother's older sister, someone who picked him up from school and defrosted his dinner on occasion but who was not really a part of his life, having too much life of her own.
"Don't thank me," she said. He wondered whether she was echoing her first reprimand intentionally. Either way, he appreciated the symmetry. It made it easier to remember. Don't thank her. Don't apologize to her.
"Why not?"
"You're my nephew. That's just the way it works. I take care of you, don't I?"
That wasn't just the way it worked, Eli thought, in the privacy of his own head. He wasn't her nephew, he was her sister's son. A stranger's child. He held his peace, sank deeper into his seat, tried to distract himself from the faint unease. His pulse was fluttering curiously in one eyelid. He told himself to concentrate on the squat white suburban houses that streaked past, nearly invisible through the water sheeting down. His gaze persisted in sliding back to Maureen, though; the outside world was runny, blurred, like oil paints being smeared together by a huge, invisible thumb, and she in contrast was precisely drawn, down to the individual threads of her long pale hair, ash blonde except for a suggestion of mousy brown around the roots. Probably she dyed it. His mother's hair was dark, and so were his grandparents in the photographs.
"What are you staring at?" she said.
"Nothing." He went back to looking at the trees and buildings lining the avenue, their regularity lost in the downpour. A mess of uncertainty. Everything very grey or very green.
"Does your piano teacher know how to get in the house if she comes early?"
"She won't come early."
"Why not?"
"She's never early," he said, calm and certain at least of this. "She said so."
"Hmm. When did you start having piano lessons at home, anyway?"
"This is the first time. Because I told her my address and she said we lived really close, so it would be more convenient and..."
Maureen dismissed the rest of the sentence with a gesture. "Yes, yes. Well, that makes sense, I suppose. We're almost there, anyway."
"Okay."
She made two left turns, then pulled into a driveway quite like the other driveways, the few individual touches blotted out by rain, and turned the car off. "Get out and run for it," she drawled, seeing his hesitation. "What happened to your umbrella, anyway?"
"I left it at school."
"I should have known. C'mon." She extracted her own from beneath the seat, got out, and unfurled it clumsily before coming around to his side. The lingering warmth made him sluggish as he unbuckled his seat-belt and reached for the door, but when she tapped the top of the car insistently with the hooked handle he did as he was bid and hurried after her as she crossed the concrete in a few long-legged strides.
GIMME YOUR EDITS.
Also, a sneak preview of ZER AU OF DOOM (because I'm too lazy to attend to the Bold etc.'s poor plot tonight)
Sometimes things just happen. One after the other. It's an unfortunate truth that really bothers physicists, but this is not, on the whole, unusual, and it's still true.
You can talk about History, but the four-dimensional timey-wimey globe of liquid that is History can be dammed and its path diverted. Histories breed, and histories multiply; histories curl around glassy frames of should have beens and dreams every which way. History serves free will, and dances to Uncertainty's tune; you can talk about History, but you can't trust it, because History, with a capital H, is about choices, and no one knows what a choice will be until it is made. Not even the chooser. Not even the chosen.
Consider, then, that in the end, most of the choices are the Lady's; and where She shows her hand, it comes down not to kings and dates and battles but to what you can trust, where History will leaving you gasping: things just happening one after the other, because it's a funny old world.
Sometimes things just happen. Somewheres, everything just happens.
Somewhere, the batty old relative who visited the Ramkin household on a Hogswatch Eve was Genuan rather than Quirmian and had cultivated in her venerable years a passion not for dragons but for card-sharping. Somewhere, Sybil, the pet of the family, a precocious ten-year-old with a good head for maths, found keeping track of her great-aunt's hands astonishingly easy.
Somewhere, she said so. The batty old relative, who had high-class connections in Genua, observed the gel with bright eyes almost buried in a web of fleshy folds and sunburned skin for a moment, and later that night quietly suggested to the gel's father that she be fostered among Society in the swamp city; it would give her a bit of, you know, culture, and polish, and such valuable things to be had. Somewhere, her father was happy to agree, because he trusted his aunt more than he trusted Miss Butt, the headmistress of the school he had been planning on, always assuming his aunt hadn't had a few gins first.
"What did you say to him?" Sybil marveled.
"Told him you were coming to learn to be a proper exotic lady," her great-aunt said cheerfully.
"Am I?" Sybil asked, mildly disappointed, although too well-bred to show it.
"Good heavens, no. What a load of rot. No, I need a bookie," her great-aunt said. "For the Baroness's races, bless her heart. You're a bit young, but you'll learn, and talent like yours shouldn't be wasted on Quirm, eh?"
Somewhere, Sybil blushed.
And so, as the Lady's dice had dictated, Sybil Ramkin bloomed like a hothouse flower in a city built on a swamp - insofar as Ramkins can ever seriously be compared to hothouse flower - rather than shaping into a damp, white, sodden vegetation not unakin to a mushroom of the sort so popular among the nobles of the Ankh, although, to be fair, in no somewhere throughout the multiverse did Sybil Ramkin ever quite fit into the backdrop of fungal countesses, thanks to her tall taste in wigs(1) and conversation(2).
In this somewhere, she learned to cook prawns and insects and mysterious roots and sprouts shading from green to octarine. She learned to cheat men with neat leather brief-cases and very thin watches. She learned to calculate odds really, really quickly.
She was her great-aunt's own little gamble, and she paid off: two years later, it was generally agreed that the Ramkin Gel was worth her not inconsiderable weight in gold. At least, until the day that she evaded some irritated investors by climbing a wall and landing lightly over the other side on a well-camouflaged twelve-year-old's stomach.
The dark-haired boy yelped as he was trodden on. Sybil hurriedly stepped off him, but the damage was done.
"What did you do that for?" he inquired, unfolding upwards in one movement and grabbing her arm before she could make an acceptably grubby getaway. He focused in on her round face. "And who are you?"
"Sybil," she began, and then remembered herself.
"Sybil what?" the boy said impatiently.
"Sybil... Fields," she blurted. Well, it could have been worse, she supposed. It could have been 'wall', the way her thought processes were going.
"Hmm," he said.
They stared at each other. It wasn't what you might call love at first sight. And everyone knows what that means.
"Who're you?" she said. Not scintillating wit, but she was flustered, and although the unhealthily pale, equine face was vaguely familiar, she couldn't place it. "Why were you hiding in the flower beds?"
"I certainly was not hiding in the flower beds," said the boy, who had yet to learn how to control a conversation. "My name is Havelock Vetinari. This is my aunt's property."
"You were skulking," she persisted, while inside a little Sybil Ramkin sorted through her catalogues of important names and came up with just one entry for 'Havelock Vetinari' (and no wonder, what a name). The inner Sybil Ramkin skimmed the entry, said something, and then immediately added 'pardon my Klatchian'. As well she might have. Two years in Genua had planted quite a tongue in her head.
"I was practicing the art of invisibility. Unfortunate timing, I agree, but -"
"Is that what you call it, lying around in a flower print suit? Art? Because I call it suspicious."
"If you call lying around in a flower print suit suspicious, I'd hate to hear what you call trespassing on private grounds and stepping on people," Havelock said sharply, although there was a faint rosy cast to his thin cheeks that suggested the term 'flower print suit' had found its mark. It was a very bad suit, though an excellent choice, she would concede, for blending in with the surroundings.
"I wasn't trying to step on you," she pointed out. "It was a perfect accident."
"Nevertheless."
It was hard to argue with Nevertheless, something Havelock had learned early. What rejoinder is there for Nevertheless? Still, Sybil had a go at it.
"If you'd been practicing the art of visibility, like normal people, it wouldn't have happened. You've only yourself to blame."
"If I had been wearing ordinary clothes you wouldn't have come barging over our wall?" he translated, raising an eyebrow.
"I wouldn't have stepped on you," she corrected. "And I would have outrun you."
He laughed. "You think?"
"I'm a good runner."
"Yes, I expect you are, Miss Significant Pause Fields," he said, his tone a little bit ridiculous but also a little bit terrifying. Sybil wished she'd thought to bring a lead pipe, or something.
"Whose your aunt, then?" she said, switching tacks.
"Madam Meserole," he informed her. "You can meet her for yourself, I'm sure she'll be very curious as to why you happened upon my enclosure."
"Bobbi?" she said, taken aback.
"You know her?" he said, equally so.
"She's an old family friend," she said, relief bubbling up inside.
He blinked. "Which family?"
"Dulcis. I'm Sybil Ramkin, but my great-aunt -"
"Ah," he said, comprehension dawning with speed, and carefully let go of her arm. She flexed it. It was a touch numb, but otherwise all right, not that she planned on telling him that. "The Gulch project went bad, did it?"
"How did you know?"
"I did tell Aunt it wasn't one of her better ideas," he said, with just a trace of smugness.
"Oh? Why?"
"That lawyer - Piero of Quirm - leaked, didn't he?"
"Yes, he did."
"Right. The levers were all wrong."
"The levers?"
He smiled. "It's a game. Find the levers, see?"
"I don't see," Sybil said, as patient as a rock. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
He told her.
(1) Which might not seem like a proper Ankhian lady's first concern, but only to someone who hasn't seen what a small Golden Smut can do to a proper Ankhian lady's luxurious chestnut locks and unguarded scalp.
(2) The term 'blast radius' tends to stick in the mind no matter how pallid the speaker.
Well. He wouldn't have known that he was going to run away then, of course. Still. His one concession to the world around him, which he did his best to ignore and which returned the favor, was to blow on his mottled white-pink palms, hot sticky little-boy breaths, one after the other, and rock on his heels to heat himself up once he'd reached the edge of the sidewalk. He was waiting for his mother's boyfriend's Jeep that day, but the car that eventually skidded to a halt a few inches from his careless toes, splashing his jeans with mud and honking at him was his mother's sister's. Eli thought of her as his mother's sister because she said the word 'aunt' made her feel like a fucking spinster. Maureen was a great one for not feeling like a fucking spinster, and also for teaching Eli new and interesting words he was strictly forbidden to use around anyone else, especially his mother, who had yet to realize that he was nine years old and understood what she was saying when she cursed traffic and his father in vivid language.
She rolled down the windows and said, "Hurry up. My god, you're soaked, I thought I told you not to jump in puddles."
"Sorry," Eli murmured, jerking the door open and climbing inside before slamming it shut after him. Part of his seat was already damp from what rain had slicked through after him, and he sat awkwardly, hunched into the side of the chair nearest his aunt, seat-belt stretched taut by the distance between his shoulder and the sodden cloth where it normally rested.
"Don't apologize to me. You're the one whose going to be sneezing come morning."
He half-smiled tentatively; he found it difficult sometimes to tell whether she was mocking him or whether she simply didn't care about his latest cold. Her face was expressionless, and her eyes were on the road. Dappled light filtering through the windshield sharpened the contours of her profile into a flat puzzle, without depth or shading. There were no hints. So he kept quiet and shivered, lacking an answer, unsure of the question.
She misunderstood his trembling and reached out to turn the heater on with a few deft flicks of her wrist, one gleaming dial after the other. "Do you want me to stop at Starbucks before we go home for your piano lesson?"
"I'm not thirsty," he said.
"Fair enough."
She smoothed his dripping hair back from his forehead: she was wearing leather gloves, and the fabric felt glossy, somehow gruesome, like he imagined, wrongly, that flayed squirrels would feel. (Her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Fields, had explained to him how to flay squirrels, and he couldn't stop himself thinking about them.) He didn't mind, really. Maureen always wore those gloves in fall, and he was used to the way they rubbed oddly against his clammy palm or slipped against the skin around his eyes when she padded up behind him and covered his eyes, laughing at the way he started every time, even when he was expecting it.
"How was school today?" she said, after a pause.
"Okay."
"Nothing interesting happened?"
He shrugged one shoulder. "I got an A on my math test."
"I should hope so," she said, lightly. Eli was good at math. It was the one constant of his academic career, as his mother called it. Every other class but Reading was somehow untrustworthy; he might be the best of his grade one year and mediocre the next, or vice versa, in the other classes, but math he could rely on to be a pleasure, and Reading he could rely on to be a restful tedium. "What was it testing?"
"Surface area and volume and circles and things," he said. "Geometry. It's easy."
"Hah! You wait till you get to the Euclidean version, kid."
"What's Euclidean?"
"Invented by Euclid."
He rolled his eyes. "Whose Euclid, then?"
"A dead Greek man who came up with geometry. Not what you're learning about pi squared - that's just numbers. He proved all those rules that they give you, about lines and circles and so on. You'll learn about him in a couple of years."
"Oh," said Eli, disappointed. He would rather have learned then, but Maureen did not go on and he was embarrassed to ask. Instead he changed the subject. "How come you picked me up today instead of Mr. Fields?"
There was a brief silence. He was about to repeat his question when she said at last,
"He got called away unexpectedly this morning. A new client. You know how it is."
Mr. Field was a divorce attorney, like his mother was studying to be. Eli knew how it was. "Did he say when he was coming home?"
"Nine at the earliest," she said, and added, "Fortunately for you, I didn't have any plans tonight."
"Thank you," he said, unsure of how he should react. Maureen rarely baby-sat. She said their new house made her uncomfortable, and besides, she was only his mother's older sister, someone who picked him up from school and defrosted his dinner on occasion but who was not really a part of his life, having too much life of her own.
"Don't thank me," she said. He wondered whether she was echoing her first reprimand intentionally. Either way, he appreciated the symmetry. It made it easier to remember. Don't thank her. Don't apologize to her.
"Why not?"
"You're my nephew. That's just the way it works. I take care of you, don't I?"
That wasn't just the way it worked, Eli thought, in the privacy of his own head. He wasn't her nephew, he was her sister's son. A stranger's child. He held his peace, sank deeper into his seat, tried to distract himself from the faint unease. His pulse was fluttering curiously in one eyelid. He told himself to concentrate on the squat white suburban houses that streaked past, nearly invisible through the water sheeting down. His gaze persisted in sliding back to Maureen, though; the outside world was runny, blurred, like oil paints being smeared together by a huge, invisible thumb, and she in contrast was precisely drawn, down to the individual threads of her long pale hair, ash blonde except for a suggestion of mousy brown around the roots. Probably she dyed it. His mother's hair was dark, and so were his grandparents in the photographs.
"What are you staring at?" she said.
"Nothing." He went back to looking at the trees and buildings lining the avenue, their regularity lost in the downpour. A mess of uncertainty. Everything very grey or very green.
"Does your piano teacher know how to get in the house if she comes early?"
"She won't come early."
"Why not?"
"She's never early," he said, calm and certain at least of this. "She said so."
"Hmm. When did you start having piano lessons at home, anyway?"
"This is the first time. Because I told her my address and she said we lived really close, so it would be more convenient and..."
Maureen dismissed the rest of the sentence with a gesture. "Yes, yes. Well, that makes sense, I suppose. We're almost there, anyway."
"Okay."
She made two left turns, then pulled into a driveway quite like the other driveways, the few individual touches blotted out by rain, and turned the car off. "Get out and run for it," she drawled, seeing his hesitation. "What happened to your umbrella, anyway?"
"I left it at school."
"I should have known. C'mon." She extracted her own from beneath the seat, got out, and unfurled it clumsily before coming around to his side. The lingering warmth made him sluggish as he unbuckled his seat-belt and reached for the door, but when she tapped the top of the car insistently with the hooked handle he did as he was bid and hurried after her as she crossed the concrete in a few long-legged strides.
GIMME YOUR EDITS.
Also, a sneak preview of ZER AU OF DOOM (because I'm too lazy to attend to the Bold etc.'s poor plot tonight)
Sometimes things just happen. One after the other. It's an unfortunate truth that really bothers physicists, but this is not, on the whole, unusual, and it's still true.
You can talk about History, but the four-dimensional timey-wimey globe of liquid that is History can be dammed and its path diverted. Histories breed, and histories multiply; histories curl around glassy frames of should have beens and dreams every which way. History serves free will, and dances to Uncertainty's tune; you can talk about History, but you can't trust it, because History, with a capital H, is about choices, and no one knows what a choice will be until it is made. Not even the chooser. Not even the chosen.
Consider, then, that in the end, most of the choices are the Lady's; and where She shows her hand, it comes down not to kings and dates and battles but to what you can trust, where History will leaving you gasping: things just happening one after the other, because it's a funny old world.
Sometimes things just happen. Somewheres, everything just happens.
Somewhere, the batty old relative who visited the Ramkin household on a Hogswatch Eve was Genuan rather than Quirmian and had cultivated in her venerable years a passion not for dragons but for card-sharping. Somewhere, Sybil, the pet of the family, a precocious ten-year-old with a good head for maths, found keeping track of her great-aunt's hands astonishingly easy.
Somewhere, she said so. The batty old relative, who had high-class connections in Genua, observed the gel with bright eyes almost buried in a web of fleshy folds and sunburned skin for a moment, and later that night quietly suggested to the gel's father that she be fostered among Society in the swamp city; it would give her a bit of, you know, culture, and polish, and such valuable things to be had. Somewhere, her father was happy to agree, because he trusted his aunt more than he trusted Miss Butt, the headmistress of the school he had been planning on, always assuming his aunt hadn't had a few gins first.
"What did you say to him?" Sybil marveled.
"Told him you were coming to learn to be a proper exotic lady," her great-aunt said cheerfully.
"Am I?" Sybil asked, mildly disappointed, although too well-bred to show it.
"Good heavens, no. What a load of rot. No, I need a bookie," her great-aunt said. "For the Baroness's races, bless her heart. You're a bit young, but you'll learn, and talent like yours shouldn't be wasted on Quirm, eh?"
Somewhere, Sybil blushed.
And so, as the Lady's dice had dictated, Sybil Ramkin bloomed like a hothouse flower in a city built on a swamp - insofar as Ramkins can ever seriously be compared to hothouse flower - rather than shaping into a damp, white, sodden vegetation not unakin to a mushroom of the sort so popular among the nobles of the Ankh, although, to be fair, in no somewhere throughout the multiverse did Sybil Ramkin ever quite fit into the backdrop of fungal countesses, thanks to her tall taste in wigs(1) and conversation(2).
In this somewhere, she learned to cook prawns and insects and mysterious roots and sprouts shading from green to octarine. She learned to cheat men with neat leather brief-cases and very thin watches. She learned to calculate odds really, really quickly.
She was her great-aunt's own little gamble, and she paid off: two years later, it was generally agreed that the Ramkin Gel was worth her not inconsiderable weight in gold. At least, until the day that she evaded some irritated investors by climbing a wall and landing lightly over the other side on a well-camouflaged twelve-year-old's stomach.
The dark-haired boy yelped as he was trodden on. Sybil hurriedly stepped off him, but the damage was done.
"What did you do that for?" he inquired, unfolding upwards in one movement and grabbing her arm before she could make an acceptably grubby getaway. He focused in on her round face. "And who are you?"
"Sybil," she began, and then remembered herself.
"Sybil what?" the boy said impatiently.
"Sybil... Fields," she blurted. Well, it could have been worse, she supposed. It could have been 'wall', the way her thought processes were going.
"Hmm," he said.
They stared at each other. It wasn't what you might call love at first sight. And everyone knows what that means.
"Who're you?" she said. Not scintillating wit, but she was flustered, and although the unhealthily pale, equine face was vaguely familiar, she couldn't place it. "Why were you hiding in the flower beds?"
"I certainly was not hiding in the flower beds," said the boy, who had yet to learn how to control a conversation. "My name is Havelock Vetinari. This is my aunt's property."
"You were skulking," she persisted, while inside a little Sybil Ramkin sorted through her catalogues of important names and came up with just one entry for 'Havelock Vetinari' (and no wonder, what a name). The inner Sybil Ramkin skimmed the entry, said something, and then immediately added 'pardon my Klatchian'. As well she might have. Two years in Genua had planted quite a tongue in her head.
"I was practicing the art of invisibility. Unfortunate timing, I agree, but -"
"Is that what you call it, lying around in a flower print suit? Art? Because I call it suspicious."
"If you call lying around in a flower print suit suspicious, I'd hate to hear what you call trespassing on private grounds and stepping on people," Havelock said sharply, although there was a faint rosy cast to his thin cheeks that suggested the term 'flower print suit' had found its mark. It was a very bad suit, though an excellent choice, she would concede, for blending in with the surroundings.
"I wasn't trying to step on you," she pointed out. "It was a perfect accident."
"Nevertheless."
It was hard to argue with Nevertheless, something Havelock had learned early. What rejoinder is there for Nevertheless? Still, Sybil had a go at it.
"If you'd been practicing the art of visibility, like normal people, it wouldn't have happened. You've only yourself to blame."
"If I had been wearing ordinary clothes you wouldn't have come barging over our wall?" he translated, raising an eyebrow.
"I wouldn't have stepped on you," she corrected. "And I would have outrun you."
He laughed. "You think?"
"I'm a good runner."
"Yes, I expect you are, Miss Significant Pause Fields," he said, his tone a little bit ridiculous but also a little bit terrifying. Sybil wished she'd thought to bring a lead pipe, or something.
"Whose your aunt, then?" she said, switching tacks.
"Madam Meserole," he informed her. "You can meet her for yourself, I'm sure she'll be very curious as to why you happened upon my enclosure."
"Bobbi?" she said, taken aback.
"You know her?" he said, equally so.
"She's an old family friend," she said, relief bubbling up inside.
He blinked. "Which family?"
"Dulcis. I'm Sybil Ramkin, but my great-aunt -"
"Ah," he said, comprehension dawning with speed, and carefully let go of her arm. She flexed it. It was a touch numb, but otherwise all right, not that she planned on telling him that. "The Gulch project went bad, did it?"
"How did you know?"
"I did tell Aunt it wasn't one of her better ideas," he said, with just a trace of smugness.
"Oh? Why?"
"That lawyer - Piero of Quirm - leaked, didn't he?"
"Yes, he did."
"Right. The levers were all wrong."
"The levers?"
He smiled. "It's a game. Find the levers, see?"
"I don't see," Sybil said, as patient as a rock. "Why don't you tell me about it?"
He told her.
(1) Which might not seem like a proper Ankhian lady's first concern, but only to someone who hasn't seen what a small Golden Smut can do to a proper Ankhian lady's luxurious chestnut locks and unguarded scalp.
(2) The term 'blast radius' tends to stick in the mind no matter how pallid the speaker.