Steelhands - Jaida Jones [81]
My heart jumped, and I jerked my head around. “Where?” I asked.
Toverre nudged me in the right direction, and I realized at once he hadn’t been talking about Gaeth but Professor Adamo. My thoughts were way too scrambled, as evidenced by my inability to concentrate, and I wished I’d had some better plan—one might even say “strategy”—laid out before I came to speak with him.
At least the professor was a fan of improvisation, I told myself. That might earn me some points if I didn’t choke on my own foot first.
“Now go talk to him before he’s surrounded,” Toverre instructed, still poking me in the back. Bastion, but it was annoying, and I swatted his hands away as I made my own way into the hall.
Professor Adamo—hard to think of a war-hardened man like him with a “Professor” tacked on in front of his family name, and I didn’t think he could much fathom the title, either—didn’t seem like he was swarmed by students to me. He was having some kind of argument with his assistant—a prissy little prancer if ever I saw one—and no one was even trying to get close to them.
I should’ve taken that as my cue, but Toverre was hissing what must have been his idea of encouragement behind me, and there was no turning back. Instead, I catapulted myself forward, before I could lose my guts, and landed right in the middle of what Adamo would’ve described as a “preexisting skirmish.”
“Ahem,” I said.
Both of them whirled on me; if they’d been wearing weapons, I suspected, right about then was when they’d’ve been drawn. Thankfully, they weren’t—although if it’d been that kind of fight, my money would’ve been on Adamo, no question. His skinny little note-taker was the worst kind of know-it-all; I doubted he could apply even a fraction of what he knew to real life.
“Well?” Adamo demanded. “What is it?”
“I …” I began.
As ever, I was reminded of how very solid Adamo was. He wasn’t even that tall—barely a few inches over me—but he was the squarest and most-sturdily built person I’d ever known, reminding me more of a brick storehouse than a man. His chest was particularly wide, which I imagined helped while he was shouting out orders to everyone; and, now and then, when he forgot himself in the middle of a lecture, he’d use that voice without any warning. Now, that woke all the sleepyheads up, and made some of ’em piss their trousers, too.
I loved it, which was why his was my favorite lecture class. You never knew when he was going to start shouting like the war was back on, and it gave me a feeling of genuine excitement.
Toverre just said it made him hyperventilate. Now, there were two men so completely different it was impossible to imagine they were both the same species, I thought, and rubbed at the back of my neck to keep from smiling.
“I believe you’ve intimidated her,” Adamo’s assistant said. I’d actually forgotten about him—which was what I usually did with people I didn’t care for, so that they wouldn’t annoy me. I wasn’t like Toverre; I didn’t like to let these things fester. Instead, I just cut them out. “Do you see what you’ve done? She can barely speak. Come with me, that’s a good girl, and I’ll get you some tea, or perhaps a cup of coffee, and we can speak like civilized people, without—”
“I don’t think so,” I replied, jerking away the moment he tried to touch me. “I came to talk to the Chief Sergeant—to the professor—to tell him where I was yesterday’s lecture, and today’s.”
“That’s right,” Adamo said, looking pleased for some reason. I had my suspicions that he had no use for his weasel of an assistant, either, but then again, what man in his right mind would? “I didn’t think I saw you. We were discussing battle tactics of the Ke-Han hordes.”
“Damn it,” I said, knowing that Toverre—wherever he’d hidden himself to eavesdrop—had probably lost consciousness over my language by now. “I was looking forward to that.”
“Well, then,” Adamo replied. “You probably should’ve come.”
“I was sick,” I explained, hoping he wouldn’t think I was one of those slack-jawed shirkers. And I had been looking forward to how the