Chapter 1.18 - In which Lieutenant Robards sympathizes, again

(Author Note: Yes, I know chapter 1.17 has been skipped. It's because I added another chapter earlier in the book during revision, and now the numbering is all off. I'll be updating the post for Chapter 1.13 to include 1.13 and 1.14 once the book is totally ready. The extra chapter doesn't contain anything critical to understanding the story, and hasn't caused any changes here.)

Calder

Month 11, Day 3, Tuesday 7:55 a.m.

Calder’s eyes flicked over details that suggested how the fight might have played out and then catalogued the expressions of the four civilians for extra clues. Shelleck’s hostility also did not escape his notice. “Mr. Irving likely fought back in self-defense, Shelleck. Look at the boy. He’s half dead himself.”

“It’s the same kid who got in the way of retrieving the stolen book,” Shelleck muttered sourly. “Do you really think this is a coincidence, Robards?”

Calder could understand Shelleck’s skepticism. “In any case, all four of them need treatment. We can question them once they’re stable.”

Shelleck called for a transport wagon from the local station.

Meanwhile, Calder restrained the three men—who he suspected to be members, or at least affiliates, of the Morrow gang—with the cheap, non-magical handcuffs. He then applied basic first aid to everyone with the supplies in his belt pouch.

Calder forced young Mr. Irving to sit down, then wiped the blood away from the gashes on the boy’s face. He did the same for the obviously defensive wounds on the boy’s arms and his mangled shin. There, Mr. Irving had been somehow been pierced with spikes of wooden shrapnel that splintered into smaller pieces when Calder tried to remove them. He applied a sprinkle of blood-clotting potion to it all.

To cap it all off, the boy was missing one shoe, and of course the bottom of his foot was horribly torn up and caked with a mysterious mix of filth. Calder washed it as best he could with the water from his canteen, revealing red, leaking areas of irritation that looked like a burn. This was on top of several cuts and an entire patch of skin that was simply gone. Calder wrapped the foot carefully in bandages, though the appendage was so cold that the boy probably couldn’t even feel it. “Do you have any other wounds? Broken bones? Any dizziness or trouble breathing?”

Mr. Irving shook his head silently, his face so bloodless it had turned slightly green.

Calder eyed the lump forming just above the boy’s temple with dubiousness, then looked around at the crime scene. “The healers will do a more thorough job, once we get back to the station. Where are the weapons the Morrows used on you? We’ll take them into evidence.”

The boy’s shoulders hunched, and he looked at the ground. “They didn’t use any weapons on me. The cuts are actually—there was this rooster. Ripper,” he said miserably. “On the way here.”

Calder stared. “A rooster did this to you?”

The boy’s shoulders hunched further. “Well, not all of it. I had a hard time chasing down C Dog. That’s what they called the thief,” he added quickly, looking at the man who was happily in handcuffs on the other side of the courtyard. “And then when I got here, Boris and the other guy, the one with the Morrow bandanna”—he pointed—“they wanted to keep me from leaving, because they were afraid I might report their hideout. I tried to get away. And things just…escalated. It’s totally blind luck that I’m okay, actually. If they hadn’t been so clumsy and badly coordinated…” The boy fell silent and shuddered visibly, tucking his knees closer to his chest to ward off the cold.

The one called C Dog let out a faint sound of affront, as if he disagreed with the boy’s statement. He didn’t speak, but when Calder met his gaze, the man shook his head pointedly, eyes wide as if trying to convey some silent message.

“You can all give your statements up at the station, under the wards,” Calder said. This time, there would be no avoiding the compulsion of the wards against untruth simply by Mr. Irving’s status as a minor.

The boy nodded miserably.

Calder and Shelleck secured the location and processed the evidence, including a satchel stuffed full of stolen goods, and then packed all of those involved into the back of a wagon. They rode alongside young Mr. Irving, who flinched at every silent scowl and shift in posture from the other three, who sat across from them.

Judging only by the boy’s demeanor, it made little sense that he had the gumption to chase down a thief, let alone successfully beat three grown men in a fight.

When they arrived at the station, Copper Alma remembered the boy and swooped in to take him under her wing and off to the healer’s station. “Oh, you’re frozen through!” she exclaimed. “Another warm blanket ought to do the trick.”

While she took care of Mr. Irving, Calder and Shelleck booked the other three and took their statements. The leader refused to talk beyond identifying himself. Boris had been unconscious for most of it. But the one they called C Dog—real name Clifford Smith—painted a surprisingly incongruous picture of that morning’s events.

Calder picked up the paper with the report he’d written and read it out for Mr. Smith’s benefit. “You were breaking into Schubert’s Photo Emporium with the intent to steal valuable artifacts and fence them for coin when Mr. Irving approached you and encouraged you to continue your efforts so that he could come in and ‘look’ at the artifacts, which you believed was a euphemism for joining you in the theft.”

Mr. Smith winced.

“However,” Calder continued, “when you actually began to steal the artifacts—we’ll attach the complete list separately—Mr. Irving protested and attempted to stop you, and then to alert the neighborhood to your theft. At this point, you sought to escape, but Mr. Irving chased you through the city with frightening tenacity, disregarding injury to himself and all attempts to discourage pursuit.

“When he finally caught up with you, having reached your current base of operations, your associates threatened his wellbeing. At this, he proceeded to systematically and viciously assault all three of you, using makeshift weapons sourced from the environment.”

Mr. Smith nodded. “And he was mocking about it, too. Like, he acted like he was scared and stupid, but it was only to make us lower our guard. He was in control from the beginning. And he was having fun with it. I realized, when he picked up that plank to beat me with, even though I already wasn’t fighting back—”

Smith cut off and shook his head, leaning across the table to better impress his earnestness on Calder. “I was on the ground. Who keeps hitting when you’re already down? Someone who isn’t fighting just to win. Someone who wants to make a point. Or someone who just loves the violence. I realized then that, as soon as he saw me trying to pick that lock, he’d already decided what he was going to do. Everything from there on was just a game to him. Why else draw it out like that? If you hadn’t come…maybe he would have kept going until he killed me.”

At Mr. Smith’s insistence, Calder added a few extra lines to the report, which Smith then signed with an “X” and his thumbprint because the man could neither read nor write.

Calder took Mr. Irving’s version of events after the healers had seen to him. Rather than acting out of any malice or bloodlust, the boy had made a bizarre mistake out of naivety, and then acted foolishly out of desperation.

Despite the implausibility of his story, it did—in actions if not in motivations—match up with Mr. Smith’s report. Both testimonies were given under wards against untruth, which were weak due to the laws against blood magic but should nonetheless be enough to compel a mundane teenager to honesty.

But it didn’t explain how a slight fifteen-year-old boy managed to take out three grown men. The sheer tenacity was one thing, but the skill referenced by Mr. Smith, and apparent in the men’s injuries, was an obvious, discordant note.

Shelleck was less than impressed. Hands folded on the edge of the table, he stared down Mr. Irving. “Are you sure that’s exactly how it happened? Maybe your involvement here was less ‘accidental’ than you’ve suggested. With the previous incident, too.”

The boy sagged wearily. “It was just…bad luck.”

“Once is coincidence. Twice?” Shelleck shook his head.

Calder didn’t believe Mr. Irving was being deceitful. Perhaps his sense of justice led him to make poor decisions, given an immediate and concerning opportunity. “What kind of training have you had?”

“My dad handles the training. Well, I mean, I keep up with the exercises on my own now that I’m older. But he’s the one who helps me figure out what I need to work on. It comes in really useful when I need to run away, usually. Never thought about how all the workouts might make chasing down a thief plausible. In the end, he just got so tired that he stopped trying, you know?”

“What martial style?” Calder asked.

Mr. Irving tilted his head to the side like a little owl. “What?”

“What fighting style does your father train you in?” Calder clarified.

Mr. Irving shook his head back and forth slowly. “None? I mean, he did show me how to throw a punch without breaking my thumb. But his advice has always been to run away. We do reflex training and fall training, and a lot of running. And he makes sure I’m strong enough to pull myself up by my arms so I can escape into a tree or over a wall.”

“Are you stating that you defeated those men, literally, by accident?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying since the beginning? I mean, I was doing my best. I was willing to hurt them to keep them from hurting me. But like I said, the only thing that even kind of worked like intended was hitting Bandanna with that plank—I just didn’t notice the nails sticking out. I mean, I’m not sorry. He said he was going to kill me. But, that, and then at the end I wanted to hit C Dog in the leg a couple times so he couldn’t ambush me from behind again. Everything else was just…” He shrugged.

Despite the boy’s impression of flailing and desperation, it was likely that adrenaline allowed him to subconsciously take advantage of hidden opportunities he wasn’t consciously aware of. The men underestimated him, and that created a slight gap that allowed him to defeat them. The outcome of a fight was never determined ahead of time, no matter how lopsided the scales may seem.

“You may have a talent for this sort of thing,” Calder mused.

Mr. Irving stared at him blankly.

“Why didn’t you consider waiting at the shop? Even if one of the witnesses mistook you as a thief, we would have taken your statement, just like this, and learned the truth.”

Mr. Irving’s gaze dulled, a world-weary cynicism descending onto him like a heavy fog. “Would I have just been a witness? Or would I have been in cuffs as a suspected accomplice?”

Shelleck scowled, sitting forward and opening his mouth in anger, but Calder kicked him in the ankle to shut him up.

Mr. Irving had obviously been disillusioned by authority, and maybe even the coppers themselves, at some point. There was no need to be belligerent and unprofessional and make that worse.

“We have ways of discerning the truth, Mr. Irving. Wards against untruth and prognos on staff. And if nothing else, I assure you that you could have relied on me to ensure you did not become a scapegoat. It is our job to discover the true bearer of blame and charge them to be punished accordingly. I take that job seriously.”

The boy eyed him skeptically for a long few seconds, then tilted his head to the side again. “Really? Even if…” He glanced quickly to Shelleck. “Even if you don’t like the person who might have committed a crime?”

“Even then,” Calder said.

Shelleck crossed his arms. “Even then,” he echoed.

Mr. Irving looked between them, and then relaxed visibly. Or it might have been better to say that he regained some liveliness as the cynicism fell away. He gave Calder a small smile and pushed up the pair of “backup glasses” that he apparently kept in the small backpack that he carried everywhere.

“That being said,” Calder continued, “taking the law into your own hands is never the right answer.”

The young Mr. Irving nodded agreeably. “I know. I agree. I just… I wasn’t thinking. I panicked.”

The boy was covered in wounds, not all of which had been inflicted by a rooster. “Do you really understand? Things could have gone much worse for you today, and I find it concerning that your first instinct was not to avoid danger. You are fifteen, Mr. Irving. At no point should you feel it is your responsibility to take the scales of right and wrong into your own hands.”

Calder continued, with the boy nodding seriously along with everything he said. It was a welcome difference to the belligerence often displayed by the young people who passed through the station. Calder found this gratifying, but somehow also more worrying.

Alma interrupted his lecture, peeking her head through the door to tell them that Captain Hay required their presence.

As Shelleck and Calder left, Alma took Calder’s seat across from Mr. Irving, sliding him a cup of coffee with enough milk to turn light, no doubt also saturated with sugar.

Captain Hay looked up from his desk when they entered. “I’ve read the statements.” He fell silent, letting them stew under his gaze.

Shelleck shifted from side to side, but Calder simply clasped his hands behind his back.

“I am disappointed in the lenient way you two handled the prior incident involving this kid. It has obviously led to today’s brazenness. Spare the rod, spoil the child, but that one”—he stabbed his finger in the general direction of the interrogation rooms—“is old enough that he should be taking responsibility for his actions. If you let the commoners run wild, they will run wild, and then it will be anarchy. You can’t play favorites just because they cry prettily. If you let reckless glory hounds act freely, what happens when a boy like this gets himself killed and the public wants to blame it on us?”

Captain Hay jammed his forefinger into the desk repeatedly. “He deserves to be censured for interference in an attempted arrest, disturbing the peace, and abetting grand theft.”

“He was not an accomplice to the theft,” Calder argued. “And I’m not sure we could make a charge for interfering with arrest stick. At most, it would be disturbing the peace with the small amount of damage he caused while chasing down the thief.”

Hay narrowed his eyes. “Not an accomplice? Why didn’t he do anything until it was the perfect moment for him to be a big hero, then? According to this report, he literally stood there and watched the man break in.”

Shelleck cleared his throat. “The boy claims ignorance. He says he thought the man was a new employee of the establishment.”

“And I believe him,” Calder added.

Hay eyed him unhappily but didn’t reply.

Calder didn’t throw around the far-distant drop of prognos blood in his ancestry, and he wasn’t a diviner—or a thaumaturge of any path—but among those who had worked with him for any length of time, the results of his careful calculations spoke for themselves.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the proper course is, that’s all off the table now. The Office of the Ambassador to the Public got wind of this, and the Assistant Ambassador is on his way down to give the boy a Titans-damned medal. Calder, you deal with him,” Hay ordered, waving his hand in a shooing motion. “Shake his hand and smile nice and get him out of here as quickly as possible. And,” he added, pressing his forefinger into the desk again, “make sure this Irving kid knows that just because he’s being rewarded for his unacceptable behavior doesn’t mean we’ve taken our eye off him.”

Calder did as he was ordered, but to his surprise, Mr. Irving was the staunchest denier of any recognition or rewards, scrambling for any reason to avoid them, even to the point that those reasons contradicted each other. Calder took pity on him and offered a way out, and the Assistant Ambassador left in a bustle, obviously peeved.

Calder reported this to Captain Hay as he returned, some of his amusement slipping through.

Captain Hay was taken aback and struggled to adjust to this new understanding of events. Eventually, he harrumphed, said, “Well, good!” and waved Calder off.

When Calder asked, Mr. Irving explained that his desperate denial of any reward or recognition was due to fear of his mother finding out about the day’s events. Calder caught the half-twitch of his eyes to the side and knew that it wasn’t a complete truth.

“Would she not realize something had happened simply from your current state?” Calder asked, waving his hand vaguely up and down Mr. Irving’s body.

The boy laughed. “Oh, I’ll just tell her I had a run-in with some Morrows and leave out the details. She probably won’t even be that surprised.”

Calder remembered Copper Alma’s vague worries about the boy’s injuries and frowned. How often did the boy receive such grievous wounds, and what kind of mother was more frightening than a group of violent gang members?