“See? You has to puts the
waters in just like thats.”
“Hrnh.”
“And then? You has the perfect con-sis-en-see.”
“Rgh.”
Vincent found them first.
After five minutes of searching out every corner of the building, wondering how
it was that a seven-foot-tall slab of muscle could possibly hide himself, Cell mentioned that the
best place to look for a man like him—he gestured to the leathers and feathers
of his own outfit—was outside.
They found him, in the
yard outside, behind the black-iron fencing that Commander Breckenridge erected—“To make the place
look more official.” A little girl, Vincent recalled that she went by
Ollie, was teaching the giant how to make mud cakes. For a long while, Vincent
watched in silence. Sythius had a rapturous look on his face as he listened to Ollie’s
step-by-step instructions, and when Ollie applauded and congratulated him on
finally making one that stayed together the right way, Sythius grinned like a
child and nodded so vigorously that his hair flew around his head like a
blue-black octopus.
Vincent was still
watching as Sithe came up behind him. The matron actually laughed as Ollie
pulled Sythius along toward some of the other children to play a game of
hunt-the-aurochs. This soon devolved into six or seven small children using the
big man as an obstacle course, swinging from his mammoth arms and latching onto his
huge legs as he stomped around. Ollie sat perched on his shoulders, directing
her new horsie this way and that, effectively ruining the yard in a storm of
dirt, mud, and laughing.
“That ... is pathetic,”
Sithe muttered, but there was a smile in her voice that Vincent didn’t have to
turn his head to see.
* * *
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