He shrugged and lifted his hand to take another drag. Dry skin across his knuckles split, a fine thread of pain so delicate it merely itched. In the silence, a train whistle soared through the purpling sky. Evening robins called from the fencerows and the fields.

“You know I got a black eye over you,” said Stephen. “People call you all kinds of names. Mariah Peavey and her gang tried to duck me when we first came over from Asu.”

“You didn’t let them, did you?”

Stephen sent a piercing sideways glare in his direction. “How do you think I got the black eye?”

“Good. Let them duck you once, you stay wet the rest of your life. Mother’s tits.” Overcome by the truth of it, he pitched the butt of his straight into the field. Sparks danced in its trajectory. “None of it should matter. Not like it does.”

“What, ducking and all?”

“Ducking, Cantrell, university, any of it. You’re thirteen. A bunch of other kids throwing you in a fountain shouldn’t mean more than wet shorts.”

“It does, though,” Stephen said. His tone had taken a turn from teenage pique to disturbing gravity.

Cyril sighed. “And don’t I know.” He could feel his nephew staring, wanting to ask but hardly daring.

His secrets weren’t for the judge or the jury. They weren’t for his lawyer or his sister or the press. He’d had enough hauled out of him in his life to know the value of keeping what he could close to. But he’d decided to teach his nephew how to better live through what had nearly killed him. Perhaps Stephen deserved those pieces, even if it cost Cyril his pride, and dredged up old injuries.

“University,” said Cyril. “I made it that far, anyway. I was a miserable student at Cantrell, and all the teachers hated me, but I got along all right with my class and I was never ducked. I only slipped in the midden once I got to Ellerslee.”

“What happened?”

“I had a good professor. The only one I ever had. Most classes I couldn’t keep my head in the lecture; none of it seemed important. But he … well. It happened slowly. A few of us found ourselves in a study group. We met at his house in the evenings. It wasn’t really studying, though. Just talk. But when you got in the room with him it was like someone had flipped the switch on a current and even the air was humming. He had that much presence. Which was why, I’ll wager, the Tatien government had him recruiting fresh-faced troublemakers. He had a knack for finding the students who chafed in school—the ones too clever for their own good, all ready to chuck what they’d been told they should want and take up something new.