BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 13: The Little Suns

The morning went the way his mornings went when he was on the home world. Out at five, along the water. Eight kilometers, out and back, the lane empty, the far bank empty, the house behind him quiet.

Shower. Breakfast. Then the room on the second floor with the hatch in the ceiling and the harness in the corner, where the sim would close Redwing around him and let him take the machine out past the edge of what it could do in daylight. The second seat in there was empty.

The courier came up the lane on foot while he was still getting his breath back at the gate.

Nobody walked anything to that gate. Everything arrived down the chute from the depot, or by drone, or in the hands of an aide with a folder and an expression. This had come on foot, and it was made of paper, and the moment it was in his hand he knew which house it had come from.

The envelope had been drawn on. Orange crayon, a sun with a face in it and four fat rays, the letters running uphill toward a corner because the line they were supposed to follow did not exist. Somebody had written the address in those same uphill letters and got every letter right and the S wrong way round.

At the bottom of the sheet, in the same hand: **the Little Suns**.

This year, the Little Suns turned a hundred.

He had lived there from the age of four until the dormitory took him, which was eight years, which was longer than anywhere else had managed. A free place every year, top of the year every year, prize money every year — he had worked out what he needed for boots and soap and handed the rest to Mary, who took it without ceremony and put it straight into the account that paid for the roof.

Mary had loved one man, and he had loved her, and they had set a date. The day before the date, there was an accident. She had stayed at the Little Suns ever since.

In the yard there was a jujube tree. He had planted it with her the year he was nine. It had taken.

He had not been back this year. That had been the plan for this leave, before everything else got in the way.

So he stood at his desk in the study with the terminal gone dark in front of him and the two calls of the morning behind him, neither of them finished, and read the invitation twice, and he was smiling.

"Ah," Kestrel said, from behind him. "So the face does something else."

He came off the chair and put his hip on the edge of the desk, close enough that their shoulders met, and looked down at the paper.

"What is that meant to be? A sun?" He tipped his head. "It's ugly."

Vance took the sheet out from under his hand, put it face down on the desk, and hit him.

It was not a decision. There was no version of that morning in which he had planned any of it. Kestrel's head snapped sideways and came back with his whole face awake — which was the worst thing about him — and after that it stopped being a decision at all.

It went out of the study the way those things go, one of them moving and the other one following, through the terrace doors, down the lawn, to the water. Kestrel fought without any limit anywhere in it. Vance had grown up in a ward with forty children in it and knew exactly what to do with a fight like that. He got him face-down on the grass with an arm behind him and his knee where it would do the most good, and the two birds that had been sitting in the willow at the west end of the lawn went up at once and crossed the lake together.

Kestrel, under him, cheek in the grass, raised one hand and put up his middle finger.

"I let you have that," he said.

Vance got up. Kestrel got up too, grass in his teeth, and turned his back — and Vance put the flat of his boot into him, which was not advice, and Kestrel went off the bank into the lake like a bale off a cart.

He stood at the edge of the water with his knuckles skinned and his breath loud in his own ears, and did not say the thing that was true, which was that it had been good. There was no other kind of talking he could do without stopping first to work out what to give away.

Across the lake, behind the iron fence, a boy had stopped on the path with a dog on a lead and was watching the water.

He had watched all of it. The fight, the kick, the splash. He stood there the way children stand when the adults have forgotten they are there at all.

Vance looked over. The boy looked back.

Then the boy spoke, in a language that was not Common.

"My mother hits my father like that. When she's angry."

It was one of the eleven or twelve tongues he had picked up in the fleet. He had not used it in years. It was still in him, the way a service number is still in you.

He answered in the same language. "He isn't my husband."

The boy thought about that. "Then what is he?"

Vance looked at the lake. Kestrel was doing something in the water that involved a great deal of splashing and no forward motion.

"A scut," he said.

In the boy's language it meant a man who cannot hold anything — not a net, not a line, not a promise. It only sounded, almost, like a word in Common, and the word in Common was not a nice one. Kestrel had heard that Common word in every port he had ever taken anything out of.

Vance turned and walked up the lawn to the house.

Behind him there was more splashing, then boots on the bank, then a voice.

"Vance." Kestrel came out of the water with two dead leaves on his shoulder, his hair flat to his skull, pond weed hanging off one sleeve, water running off his elbows. It made no difference. Wet through, breathing hard, dripping on the grass, he was still the best-looking thing on the estate. Vance noticed that. He was annoyed at having noticed it, and left it where it belonged, and did not turn around.

"What did you call me."

"He asked what you were."

"I heard one word."

"Then you heard it."

Kestrel stood in the wet grass with his arms out, water running off his elbows, working at it. Whatever he arrived at did not improve his mood. "You cursed me in front of a child."

"If I curse you," Vance said, "I'll do it in Common."

He went inside.

In the study he ground ink and wrote the reply with a brush, because that was how letters went back to that house, and had gone back that way since he was a boy in a dormitory with a scholarship and a fixed idea about manners. He had learned the brush in school, along with everything else school had to teach a ward of the state with no money, and over the years he had built his own hand out of it — lean, hard without being heavy, and not one wasted stroke in it. One piece of it had gone at auction in the capital for fifty million credits.

Mary framed every letter he had ever sent her. Not most of them. Every one. They hung on the front wall of the Little Suns under glass, and every child who had ever come out of that house had a place on that wall, and he had the most wall.

He wrote it, threw the first sheet away, wrote it again, folded it, sealed it, and addressed it in the same hand.

Then he carried it out to the post box at the end of the lane, five hundred meters from the gate. There was a chute in the house that would have done it. He wanted the thing out of his hands and into the system, where it would arrive.

The slot lit up when the envelope went in.

"Connecting you to a postal courier," the box said, in the voice the box had.

"Courier zero-two has accepted your assignment."

A small map lit up on the front of it — a bright dot working its way across the city, a number counting down beside it.

A car came down the lane and stopped hard beside him, and Ward was out of the back before the door had finished opening, which for Ward was very close to running.

"Sir—"

He got through it in under a minute. Vance listened to all of it with one hand on the roof of the car, and when Ward stopped, he got in.

They went down the lane, past the post box, and turned at the corner.

Vance looked back once through the rear glass. Somebody was standing at the rail of the third-floor balcony above the terrace, both hands on it, watching the lane.

He did not lift a hand.

The car took the coast road, and the house went out of the glass.