The Soldier
Saturday dinner. Martha had been in the kitchen since noon, which meant Martha had been supervising Mrs. Brennan since noon and Mrs. Brennan had been pretending to be supervised since noon and both of them were happier for the arrangement.
Gabi Kane came through the door first. She had Martha's cheekbones and a laugh that filled a room whether the room wanted it or not. She hugged Martha and then Thomas and then she looked at the boy and said "Oh my God, he got tall" in a voice that suggested tall was an accomplishment and not a thing bones did.
Colonel Jacob Kane came in behind her. You knew he was military before he opened his mouth. Posture like the wall behind him, jaw like he'd shaved it out of granite. Hands that shook yours once and then his hand was back at his side. His eyes did a quick inventory of the room the same way the boy's did: exits, layout, who was where. Former Army Intelligence. West Point. Retired, technically, but retired military men never really retired. They just stopped wearing the uniform. He shook Thomas's hand.
"Let them run around," Jacob said, when Martha asked about the children. "Builds character."
Absolute certainty. No supporting evidence.
Kate was last through the door.
Red hair. Cut short, above her ears, in a way that was either very deliberate or nobody's business. She was wearing a dress that she clearly hadn't chosen, dark blue with a white collar, and she wore it like a costume she'd been told to put on. Her shoes were clean but her knees were bruised, both of them, the yellowish-green of bruises that were a week old and had come from something she'd done on purpose. Her shoulders were square. Her father's shoulders, except on an eleven-year-old girl.
She was eleven or twelve. Couple years older than him. She carried herself like the gap was five.
She looked at the boy. He looked at her. Neither of them smiled. Two kids in a hallway, taking stock. She looked at his hands and then his shoes and then his face, and then she looked past him at the house without changing her expression.
"Bruce," Martha said. "This is your cousin Kate."
"Hey."
"Hey."
Dinner was roast chicken and potatoes and green beans and a salad that nobody under thirteen touched. The adults talked. Thomas and Jacob discussed something about a military hospital contract that involved numbers the boy pretended not to follow. Martha and Gabi talked about a cousin who had moved to Star City and apparently made a series of decisions that Gabi found "creative," which seemed to mean bad. Alfred served courses with the silent efficiency he brought to everything and the dining room smelled like rosemary and roasted garlic and the lemon furniture polish he used on the table every Thursday.
Kate ate methodically. Fork, knife, napkin. She cut her chicken into uniform squares. She ate each square in order, left to right, top to bottom, like she was clearing a grid. Her posture was her father's posture. Perfect. Someone had trained it into her or she'd trained it into herself. Either way it was the posture of a person who took up exactly the amount of space she intended to and no more.
She didn't talk much during dinner. She answered when Jacob directed a question at her and she said "please" and "thank you" at the right times and the rest of the meal she watched. The adults. The room. The boy. She looked right at things she wanted to assess, straight on, and if anyone noticed her looking she didn't adjust. He hid his watching. She didn't see the point.
A piece of potato fell off Thomas's plate and rolled across the tablecloth and stopped against the salt shaker. Nobody mentioned it for the rest of the meal.
Kate put her elbow on the table between the main course and dessert. Planted, firm, hand open, fingers up. She looked at the boy across the table and didn't ask a question. The elbow was the question.
"Kate," Gabi said. A notation.
"He's bigger than me," Kate said. "I want to see."
He wasn't bigger than her. She had two years and probably ten pounds on him. But he put his elbow on the table and took her hand.
Her grip was strong. Trained-strong. She'd been gripping things with intent, climbing things, hitting things. Her fingers wrapped around his and her thumb locked and her wrist was straight and she pushed immediately. No countdown. She just pushed.
He calculated. His real strength would have put her hand flat in about two seconds. The transmigration enhancement was subtle but it was there, compounding with every year, and he'd been training with Takahashi for four years and his grip was not the grip of a ten-year-old who did karate as an after-school activity. If he used what he had, her hand would hit the table before Jacob finished reaching for his wine glass.
So he calibrated. Let his wrist angle, slowly, degree by degree. Let the resistance feel real but losing. Let his arm shake, because a kid's arm would shake, because the effort was supposed to be genuine. He let it be close. Let it be grinding. She pushed and he resisted and his hand tilted toward the table and the losing was slow enough to be convincing and fast enough that she didn't get suspicious about why he was still in it.
Jacob was watching. His coffee cup was in his other hand and he hadn't drunk from it.
Her hand pushed his to the table. His knuckles touched the wood.
Kate's mouth pulled to one side. She punched his shoulder. Solid. The punch of someone who knew what punching was and respected the contest enough to mark it.
"Good match," she said.
"You're stronger than you look."
"I know."
Across the table, Alfred was clearing plates. He didn't look at the boy. But his hands paused. The competing hand had shaken. The hand under the table, the one nobody was watching, had been perfectly still.
He found Kate on the back stairs after dinner. The adults were in the sitting room with coffee and the sound of conversation came through the closed door, muffled and warm. Alfred had put out a plate of Mrs. Brennan's shortbread that the boy could smell from the hallway, butter and sugar and the faint burn of a batch that had gone thirty seconds too long.
Kate was sitting on the third step from the top with her shoes off and her bruised knees showing and her chin on her fists. She'd taken the collar of the dress and folded it down so it wasn't touching her neck. The stairwell was cold and she didn't seem to care. She had a scrape on her left hand that she hadn't had at dinner, or that he hadn't noticed at dinner, and she was picking at the edge of it absently.
He sat on the step below her.
They sat in the quiet for about a minute. She didn't fill it. He didn't fill it. The house was doing its settling noises and somewhere in the kitchen Alfred was running water and through the sitting room door Gabi laughed at something.
"I'm going to be a soldier," she said. Flat. Like she'd already settled it and was just informing the room.
"West Point?"
"If they'll have me."
"They'll have you."
She looked down at him. Her eyes were green and steady and very direct.
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"What are you going to be?"
He looked at the wall across from them. There was a painting of some Wayne ancestor he'd never been able to identify, a man in a dark coat with a jaw like Thomas's and eyes that looked like they'd never found anything funny. The frame was dusty on the top edge.
"Ready," he said.
She looked at him. "Ready for what?"
"Whatever comes."
She was quiet for a few seconds. Her jaw worked once. Then she let it go.
"Next time I'll beat you faster."
"Probably."
She stood up and went back inside, her shoes in one hand and her bare feet quiet on the hardwood. He sat on the stairs for another minute and listened to the adults laugh about something in the sitting room and the house settled around him. The specific groans of a building that had been standing since before anyone in it was born.
Martha was in the hallway when he came down. She was carrying two coffee cups back to the kitchen and she had the sleeves of her blouse pushed up and her shoes were off and she looked at him and the corner of her mouth moved, just slightly.
"You let her win," Martha said.
He didn't answer.
She looked at him. Then she went into the kitchen and the door swung shut behind her.
He stood in the hallway and listened to the water running as she washed the cups. Through the sitting room door, Jacob was telling Thomas a story about a supply sergeant and a missing jeep and Thomas was laughing. Gabi's laugh came a beat later, louder.