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Somehow, someone decided Terrel had broken a rule, and they made him pay." Sarah's face was pale and her lips trembled, but she could think of nothing to say.
    "Well." he continued, "there are a few things we can infer." He waited but she was still silent. "Okay, they didn't torture him for information."
    "How do you know?"
    30 AFTERMATH
    "Because he was killed here, while you were sleeping. Yet you and the children never woke. Why? Magic—possibly. A sleeping draught—less likely. No one, anywhere, heard a sound the whole time Terrel was dying. I think magic, a spell to contain any sound he or his torturers made." He
    shook his head. "A lot of effort. Why not just kidnap him, take him somewhere else, interrogate him there? But, no, they did it here, therefore it had to be for one of two reasons: to set an example, or to exact revenge. Probably revenge."
    "I don't understand."
    "If he was killed as an example, well, there were other ways they could have done it, less hazardous ways, and more obvious ones. Besides, as I said, lots of people were doing what Terrel did. He wasn't a big enough fish to go to such lengths for. No, it has to be vengeance." Cade ground his teeth together, the skin of his face pulled tight, making his scars stand
    out in high relief. "They broke every bone in his body, Sarah. Think about it. That's not a normal torture, and as far as I can discover no one
    else has been killed this way. He was killed that way because ... because someone knew."
    "About what happened, his hands," she said.
    Cade looked surprised. So Terrel had told her. "Yes." He said no more. The two sat, lost in their memories. She recalled a warm night, a storm coming in, her new husband sitting on the bed telling her the tale of his
    deformity in a monotone. He, his mother, and Cade had come to Downwind; forced there because, with the death of their father there was no money, and there was no family to help them. Terrel's mother found what work she could, buying Terrel a slate, working hard to find the chalk. It had made it all livable for him, given him a hope for another way of life.
    Then one day, four years after they had moved, a gang jumped him, breaking the slate, the chalk, and the fingers that loved to draw; maiming
    him for life, so he could never be the artist he dreamed about . . . But Cade had other memories. "Sarah." She looked up at him, now with a tear in her eye. "Terrel told you what happened. Do you know the rest?"
    "The rest?"
    So, Cade thought, he never knew. Well, that's something, I guess. Cade had never told anyone before, kept it to himself. Now he could not hold it
    in, though he could see no purpose in his honesty.
    His voice was harsh. "He came home that night, his lip cut where he'd bitten it through, trying to hold back his cries. His hands—if he had come home sooner, maybe we could have set them. I don't know. They were ruined." He looked away from her. "He was in such pain.

CADE 31
    "Mother—" He sighed. "Mother tried to heal those hands. Every night she held him, crying on the bent fingers, as if her tears could really
    take the pain away." He could still see them. Lying on the cot, the ragged
    cloth that divided their one-room shack tattered and frayed, not hiding the scene from his young eyes. She had rocked Terrel to sleep every night.
    He slept with her because of the nightmares, about the sound of the snap of bones that just wouldn't go away.
    "I had nothing, we had nothing to give him," Then Cade turned to her, his eyes so fierce she looked away. "But then, I knew, I had one gift
    . . . Sarah, I had vengeance." His voice shook as he relived that time. He told her how he had found the rope in an alley full of mud and refuse,
    how he had pulled the brick from one of the few real buildings in Downwind. How he tied the brick to the rope and then waited.
    "For three nights I waited,"—he stood up, his muscles taut with the memory—"until they went to sleep. Then I took my rope and brick, and