A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
He wants to laugh again at the startled expression she wears - not out of cruelty but boyishness, for how like a dappled fawn she looks. Abel’s lips fight to quirk but he schools his expression smooth, turns his gaze away, lets her watch him, wondering what she sees. A boy, gaunt and coarse as the desert they sweat in? Does she see the grim guilt that lays across his back the way his stripes do?
It feels strange to care what anyone other than Raum thinks of him. It catches like a kernel stuck between his teeth and rather than worry at it he begins to walk. When she falls in step beside him he spares her little more than a swift glance, but something in him tightens like a fist to hear her give her name. It is too much; he wishes she would swallow it up again, take it back.
“This is the third day,” he answers automatically, somehow grateful for a question so normal, one that did not call up the memory and stink of blood. Yet his heart pangs nonetheless, for three days in this sun-baked and staring place has felt like an age away from the paths and forests of his birth. How strange to smell the salt of sweat and not the sea, how wary each pair of eyes that catches on him, how wary he is when he watches them back.
Abel thinks them vipers, but how many look at him and see the jackal he is? Here to eat the bones of their dead.
I’m Sabine, she had said, and the name takes shape in his mind like a swallow with its slim wings curved up to the sky. For a moment he does not answer, only watches that bird tumble over and over until it is not her name but the words before it, I am I am I am. He is not sure he could say those syllables with any certainty; he is not sure if he is a who or a what or anythig but a boy swallowed up by his own shadow.
At last he speaks, the rhythm of his voice matching that of his walking, each slow step easing him fetlock-deep into hot sand. “My name is Abel.” But it does not sound like a name at all, not coming from his cracked and dry lips - it sounds like a crime, or like a sentence.
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