The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

send you where you needed to go? That the author might intervene to save the main character? Did you feel the guiding hand of providence on your shoulder? You didn’t even think you needed to try. You didn’t even think you needed to care. You just knew in your heart that he would come for you.’

Fitz fought to keep his face still, to keep his cheeks, his lips, from quivering, and betraying him.

‘Those stories taught you how to be a hero, didn’t they?’ The Rack was pushing harder again, on the nerves that ran along Fitz’s collarbone and collected in his spine. The Rack needled and twisted them, prodded and rolled them beneath his fingertips, as if to say, ‘Your pain is mine.’

‘Didn’t you ever want to ask yourself, who wants you to be a hero? Who benefits from these delusions you have about yourself?’

‘No,’ Fitz said. ‘It isn’t like that.’ Every word he squeezed out between the bursts of pain that the Rack was inflicting on him. The relentless rolling of his tendons, of his nerves between thumb and forefinger was becoming excruciating. It reminded Fitz of children at school scraping knives against their teeth.

‘Who benefits?’

‘I don’t want anything,’ said Fitz. ‘I just want to go home.’

‘Of course you do,’ hissed the Rack in his ear. ‘That’s why you pushed your mother away when she came to rescue you. Because you wanted so very much to go home. Because you wanted to go back to your quiet, ordinary, uneventful life, back to your lonely cottage with beetles and ferns and stones for friends.’

But that wasn’t real. She wasn’t here.

‘Who benefits from your pathetic, self-loving ambitions?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fitz answered.

‘The Master benefits, or maybe his little girl – the one you sit in windows with, the one who tells you stories and holds your hand at Feeding.’

Fitz tensed. His little girl.

He knew before the Rack spoke that his shoulders had given him away.

‘Oh, but didn’t you realize that the Master was her father? That daddy and his daughter have been working on you, day and night? What else haven’t you realized? What else don’t you understand? Do you know what the word “grooming” means? Don’t you understand that they have been using you? Don’t you understand that you are just an instrument?’

‘An instrument for what?’ In the pain of the Rack’s pressure on his tendons, on the back of his shoulder joints, Fitz was murmuring almost at random. The pain blazed in his awareness like a fire, blotting out everything else. He might have said anything; he wouldn’t know.

‘Don’t you know that the Master is trying to destroy the Heresy? Do you pretend that this isn’t what you discuss in your meetings? Do you dare? The Officers know that the Master frequently mentions our enemies, that he wants to set you up against the Heresy and undermine everything that it stands for.’

Now the Rack took between his thumbs and forefingers the ridge of muscle that ran along Fitz’s shoulders, and pinched it. Slowly, he tightened the pressure. Fitz had long since closed his eyes; in the darkness of his blindness, lights began to bloom, then to explode: pink, then red, then blue, pulsing and detonating with electric clarity.

‘We’ll talk further about this tomorrow, don’t you think? When the Commissar is there with her syringes of stack, to focus your mind and your concentration; when the Registrar is there to make careful records of all your answers; when the Sweeper can join me, to piece it all together. We’ll get to the bottom of the Master’s plot. We’ll scrape out of your greasy little shell every last scrap of meat, until there is nothing left.’

And then, as suddenly as he had taken hold of him, the Rack let him go. The pain in Fitz’s shoulders still screamed and burned; the rest of his cramped muscles, contorted in his effort to shore up and support the violent tearing in his shoulders, he didn’t dare try to move. Instead, paralysed and sweating, Fitz stood in the long grass beside the path and waited for the night to settle again like a blanket on his shivering body.

Slowly, like blood leaking from beneath a nail, night returned and the darkness reasserted itself. Where the drone of his own pain died away, the hum of the wind and the rustle of the grasses revived. Fitz tried a step, didn’t fall, and tried another. He took to the path and followed it, slowly at first until he reached the high stone wall that ran round the whole of the grounds of the Heresy: rough, mortared and uneven, it had the look of immense depth, like a pier or a bulwark, and it extended in both directions long into the night, reaching as he knew a formidable compass. There would be no way out, here: he could neither climb over it, nor dig under it, tonight – not without being seen and stopped. And he was sure, too, that if the Rack had seen him in the garden, other eyes would be tracing his movements, even here, even in the dark. He reached out and touched the cool stones, and the grainy cast of the mortar that had oozed from between them. Walls were so final.

‘Ssssssssssss.’

Fitz’s first thought was that he had stumbled on or disturbed a snake. For the second time since running from the Jack’s gallery, he froze, his right palm still flat on the stone wall before him.

Again the low susurration, almost inaudible, cut through the yielding night. Fitz turned his head to the right, then slowly to the left. Before him the gravel path stretched along the wall as far as he could see, running a few metres beyond him behind a screen of dense shrubs. Nothing moved there. Between him and the courts of the Heresy lay nothing but open lawns; these were silent, too, and still. The long grass and the densely planted orchards through which he had earlier passed now lay