Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(19)

He nodded again. He saw—he’d seen at the time, too. He’d known how bad he was f*cking up while he was f*cking up. But he hadn’t been able to stop.

“That’s a lot of trust you’ve lost, Badge. Trust you gotta build back up. You want that kutte back, you gotta build that trust.”

Isaac was offering him a second chance. His heart sang at the thought of getting his kutte back. For a brief, glorious second, he felt good. He felt hope. But then he realized that he had no way of building back the kind of trust he’d squandered. “How?”

“I don’t know, little brother. I don’t know.” With that, Isaac stood. He laid his hand on Badger’s head for a second, and then he left the room. Davey came in right after and took the chair out.

A second chance without any hope of attaining it. Meaningless.



oOo



Len came to see him the next day. He was feeling well enough that he thought he could have gotten dressed, gone out, moved around a little, but he was still locked in, still without anything to do but confront his own mind. He’d thought a lot about what Isaac had said, and what he hadn’t said.

He wasn’t feeling so hopeless. There wasn’t much hope, but he felt a little. Enough to make him restless in his cage.

Len came in and sat on the end of his bed. Badger was up and pacing. “I need to get out of here, Len.”

“No can do, Badge. Not until Tasha says you’re all the way through it.”

“She hasn’t been here for…” He wasn’t sure. “Like…two days or something. How would she know?”

“She’s paying attention. And she’s a doctor. Why don’t you sit?”

“I’ve been sitting for days. I need out. Fuck, I’m goin’ crazy.” He didn’t know how to start fixing anything or if he even could, but he knew he couldn’t from this room.

“Badge. Sit. Now.”

Len had sponsored Badger when he applied to prospect, and he’d been his mentor since long before that. When he was still in middle school, Badger had ridden his Huffy down the road to Len’s and asked for work. Len had given him work—shit work, hard, grueling tasks that made Badger sometimes want to weep from the exhaustion. But he’d paid well, and he’d paid even better in knowledge, teaching Badger everything there was to know about horses. He immensely admired and respected Isaac and Showdown.

But Len was his guide. That it was Len who’d torn his kutte off his body had hurt more than anything else.

Now, he did what he was told and sat, on the side of the bed, pulling his leg up and turning so that he could face Len. No more looking away. That had to be the first step. There were steps, right? Twelve of them, or something. He didn’t know what they were, but facing himself and everybody else had to be the first one.

So when Len looked him hard in the eye, even his eye patch seeming to see into him, he looked right back.

“I want to talk about Hav.”

At that, Badger almost looked away anyway. He couldn’t do that, couldn’t talk about Havoc. But after a single blink, he made himself hold.

“What’s your last memory of him?” Len’s gruff voice was quiet, and it broke in the middle. He cleared his throat.

What Badger remembered about that day, that place…was pain. Fear. Helplessness. Hopelessness. He remembered the room they’d taken him into again and again. He remembered them taking his skin—and what they’d done to it. He remembered horror and pain vividly, but little else.

He didn’t remember Havoc almost at all from that time. He didn’t remember Len or Show much, either, but it was far worse not to remember Havoc. He’d died there, and Badger had no memory of it. That felt like a betrayal of his brother, and there was no way he could undo it.

He shook his head. And then he dropped his eyes, ashamed.

“S’okay, little brother. I want to tell you my last memory of him—the one before he died. Because it’s about you.”

Badger looked up.

“You were in real bad shape. We all were, but, Badge, you were dyin’. Right there in front of us. They’d caved in your chest, and they’d…f*ck, they skinned you alive, and you were dyin’. Hav wasn’t in much better shape. They’d taken all his fingers and just left his hands to bleed. He was worried about you. He couldn’t get a pulse on you, because of his hands, so he called me over when I woke up. I found a pulse, but you were on the way out. I told him to let you go. I’m ashamed of it now, but I was out of hope, and you were sufferin’ so bad. Jesus, it hurt me to see what they’d done.”

Badger felt ill—enough that he looked around for the bucket he’d been using—but he didn’t stop Len from telling the story.

“Hav wouldn’t let you go. He got you to talk a little and he asked you to find one good thought. Your best thought. You said you didn’t have any, and he called bullshit. He told us his best thought. He got you to say yours. You don’t remember?”

The urge to puke had passed, in favor of the urge to weep. Badger swallowed to stop the sobs massing in his throat, but he didn’t try to dam the tears. Those he let fall. He shook his head.

“It’s okay, little brother. I’m glad you don’t remember. Even with what I felt that day, I can’t imagine what it was like for you. But Hav kept you going. He helped you find something to fight for. You told us your best thought. You know what it was?”