Cato poked his tongue through his lips as he concentrated on smearing a level of cement between bricks. The wall was up to his waist. Together, the men of the construction division had managed to finish one building and an eighth of the second. He reached for his handkerchief hanging in his back pocket and mopped his face. The white came back speckled with dark from the coal dust leaking through his pores. Every fucking ounce of air was full of coal.
Cato licked away a bead of sweat on his upper lip as he stuffed the fabric back into his pocket. There was something sweetly satisfying about building things with his own two hands. The others never would have pinned him for being a handy man–he was far too brutal to be good with trowels and mortar and floaters. A sword or a gun belonged in his hands, where he could control people. It all came back to being a peacekeeper. But at night the nightmares came, bringing visions of those horrible mutts with Clove’s and Marvel’s eyes. And he could never run fast enough and suffered his same death again and again. The nightmares never ended, even when he was crawling into bed beside her and she lifted her hands to his hair to touch, to mark him as hers with a sleepy mouth. He would have died a thousand times if it meant that she never felt an ounce of pain.
It was now that he sat down on one of the rocks outside the building to reach for his canteen, taking a long pull. He’d been working since the sun rolled its lazy eye through the dirt and smoke and it was now settling into a cool dusk and his stomach wrenched with hunger. He should have returned hours ago from work but the more breaks they took, one less home would be finished. He stretched his legs out in front of him, closing his eyes to enjoy the quiet.
