Page 87 of Salt Kiss
She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean.” It takes her a minute to speak again, and when she does, her voice is low. “I was thinking about killing in general. When is it good. When is it bad. What it means if there’s not a clear answer either way.”
“What brought this on?” I ask.
“Oh, you know,” she says with a sound that could be a laugh if it weren’t so strangled. “Art history.”
I study her out of the corner of my eye, not sure what to make of this Isolde, this mood she’s in. Her fingers are gripped tight around the railing, and her face is tilted up to the sky. To the waxing moon with its full belly.
“I killed my best friend in Carpathia eight months ago,” I say, and then wish I could scrape the words back into my throat. I don’t want her to know this about me; I don’t want her to guess my nightmares. I want her to think that I’m good and noble and—yes—heroic. I want her to look at me with trust in her eyes. I want her to be the one person that I can start fresh with, without my past rotting around my neck like an albatross.
She doesn’t react to my statement, but it’s a near thing, I think, because it takes her a moment to respond.
“Why?” Her voice is low still, but uninflected. She could be asking me why I chose the shirt I wore today.
I blow out a breath. “He tried to kill the people we were protecting on a diplomatic escort. Two of them were kids.”
Her chin lifts the tiniest bit, but she doesn’t do what most other people do when they find out. She doesn’t swear. She doesn’t sayJesus Christorwhat the fuck?
She just says, “That’s evil.” Like a statement of fact.
And it’s so reassuring to hear, becauseyes, it was fucking evil. Even if Sims wasn’t. Even if he looked desperate and strange and afraid of himself. He might not have been evil, but he was about to do an evil thing.
“And you never found out why?” Isolde asks. “Why he was going to kill them?”
I put my own hands on the railing. It’s wet and solid under my palms. “The official report said he’d been bribed into it by rebels. Paid off. There’d been a transfer into his bank account the day before from somewhere untraceable.”
“Does that sound like him?”
“No.” The answer is immediate. Of all of us, Sims was the most zealous about Being a Soldier.It was his whole identity. As was taking care of his mom and sisters, but being a soldier was how he did it, and he was so fucking proud of that. So fucking proud of being in the army, being patriotic, never harboring doubts about our mission. If the army had told him to fight a group of Girl Scouts, he would have done it without question and then left their corpses smoking in a pile of smashed Thin Mints and loose merit badges.
There’s no way he would have done anything for the rebels, no matter how much money they offered. He was too loyal.
“He must have had a reason,” muses Isolde.
I tell her the same thing I’ve told myself every day for eight months. “It doesn’t matter. His reason wouldn’t change anything.”
“But don’t you want to know?”
“Of course I want to know,” I reply, my hands lifting from the railing briefly to emphasize the wordwant.“But howcanI know? And even if I do know, his death is far from the only blood on my hands. There were more that I killed over there. Many more.”
“Enemies,” Isolde says.
“Yes, but—” I look up at the moon. “People. People with favorite colors and songs they hated and aunts they couldn’t stand. And sometimes I’d be glad to kill them, you know? Like you’re shooting from some village street and they’re trying to pin you down, trying to kill you first, lobbing shit at you, and I’d feel this...like,fuck you, motherfucker, you can’t kill mefeeling, and I’d be so hopped up on adrenaline, and I’d finally kill them. And there’d be this surge of...triumph. I’d be sick with how good it felt.”
Her voice is quiet when she speaks. “Like being drunk.”
She doesn’t know how right she is. “Exactly like that. But then...later—much later—my blood would cool, and I’d start wondering why they were there at all. Who they were. Why this was the fight they picked. And I’d still be sick with it, but in a different way. Like there was mold growing inside me and only I could see it.”
The ocean is a bit rougher now—lines of wave-foam and chunks of light. Like someone tore up the moon and scattered the pieces over the water.
“And then, other times,” I say, my voice barely louder than the water, “I’d feel sick from the very beginning. Like I could taste the mold in my mouth from the minute I lifted my gun to start shooting back. And the only way to get rid of that feeling was not to think about it. Was to pretend it was normal. And I think that must be what people mean when they talk about heroes. Heroes are the ones who can pretend the shame away, at least long enough to fool everyone else.”
This can’t be what Mark meant when he said to court Isolde, to give her everything she needs. Dumping war trauma on her seems like the exact opposite of courting.
And yet, she’s listening intently. She seems to understand. “Maybe that’s what’s heroic about it,” she says and looks at me. “You did it knowing that you’d have to give something up. That it would feel like a corrosion, like bits of you were being clipped off every time you drew breath and remembered.”
I look back at her. I don’t have to see my own face to know that my smile is sad. “Mr. Trevena would say that there are no heroes.”
“Mark is wrong,” she says, suddenly fervent. “He has to be.”
