Allen had acquired a stalker.
He wasn't sure when it happened because it took a while for the poker bot to flag it. The person in question had at least two accounts, and Allen had no way to know how long it took before activity on both accounts matched enough to trigger the alerts on the bot. Could be weeks, could be months.
The stalker favored an account where he called himself Tease, but the icon on both accounts was the same, one of the default icons, a stylized black butterfly. Might be a woman, but it also might be a man who, for some reason, gave less of a fuck about being associated with butterflies than he did about what butterflies meant to him. Allen considered both possibilities equally likely, but that was because online poker was an overwhelmingly male pastime. Odds of any player being male, regardless of avatar, were high.
A search through the bot's files showed that Allen's first encounter with this player was back when he was in Turkey. It wasn't memorable, but later encounters were. Apparently, Tease handled an embarrassing loss by trying to get their own back, and those attempts hadn't ended well.
A shrewd stalker could report Allen for his botting, and as far as he could tell, Tease was himself a competent cheater. He preferred collusion, if Allen was reading the data right, but that didn't mean he couldn't recognize a bot when he saw one, and botting was against the site's terms of service. If sufficient evidence was gathered, Allen could get banned.
One of the difficulties with being underage was that Allen had only one account per site. It took a certain amount of identity and credit card fraud to open it, and although he made his living playing poker, he wasn't a gambler. He hated to rely on luck even a little, and he had absolutely no interest in pushing it. He didn't want to repeat his bits of fraud until they hit the kind of critical mass it took for him to get into real trouble.
The easiest way to get rid of the stalker was to scale back his playing for a while. Unless by some freak chance they both lived in the same country, it was the sort of thing where lack of interaction would eventually kill the interest.
Unfortunately, this created a problem. Although Allen's time at the Order had done wonders for his bank account, the possibility of his teacher being back could wipe out all of those gains. Marian Cross was an excellent spender who delegated the task of earning to others, specifically to Allen. Between cigarettes, alcohol, and women, Cross's continued presence could clean Allen out.
His best hope was that Cross's presence was strictly a one-shot deal, but he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be that lucky. He still hadn't seen Cross since China, but he was starting to understand his teacher better. Cross was trained by the Rouvelliers, who were big believers in keeping people off balance. Cross, like Malcolm, would time his appearance for the moment when he thought people were least expecting him.
So when Allen walked into the studio and found Cross lounging in a chair with his feet on the table, he was ready. "Hullo," was all he said.
"Hullo, idot pupil," Cross said. "Care to explain what the hell you were doing in that car park?"
"Looking for you," Allen said, aware that he wasn't concealing as much of his anger as he would have liked.
"Ah! That was stupid."
"I know." Allen was still ashamed of himself for it. There were a million good reasons for Allen to avoid Cross as much as possible, all of them apparently overridden by his instinct to seek out whatever adult was responsible for him. It made him hate the fact that he was still a child.
"So are you going to explain how your stupidity landed you in the hospital?"
This Allen was better prepared for. "I was mistaken for a thief," he said.
"You're supposed to be able to talk your way out of that kind of thing," Cross said.
"Hard to do when I don't speak the language," Allen said. "I got shoved, if you must know, into the wall. The hit to my back was what did it."
"You should have gotten out of there."
"I suppose I should," Allen said. His hands were shaking with anger, but this arrogant prick had dumped him into this situation in the first place, and didn't have the good graces offer a word of explanation.
"Try running next time," Cross said. "That's something you can do no matter what language is spoken."
"I think I'll take the hospital over jail." There were a million things he wanted to ask. Where had Cross been? What had he been doing? Why had he sent Allen to the Order in the first place? But there was no point, because even if Cross would be inclined to answer, he wasn't going to answer here, in front of Komui, Reever and the other dancers, who were stretching or straggling in.
"In your case, I wouldn't advise it," Cross said. "You can recover from jail."
"Is this really what you came back for, to fuss at me about my health?" Allen asked.
"Happens again, and I'll do more than fuss. I'll turn you over my knee."
Ordinarily, Allen would be too big for that kind of thing, but his teacher still towered over him. "Are you done?" Allen asked.
"For now. We might need to have a chat about what you're doing for Paris. I told you you couldn't pull that Dick Dale piece off yet."
"I'm getting changed now," Allen said, but his heart was beating harder and faster than he liked.
"That's better," Cross said, sitting upright and smiling. "Get out before you lose your temper, and don't make excuses for it."
Allen went to the locker room, wishing he could hit something, but he knew he'd get laughed at if he did. What had just happened was Cross's idea of teaching him how to manage his temper, and hitting something would be a good indication that he wasn't learning.
"He's really back?" Lavi asked as Allen shrugged out of his coat.
"Looks that way," Allen said.
"Is he always like that?"
"Pretty much." Actually, Cross did have another approach to teaching, and Allen had a bad feeling he was in for a bit of that, too.
"Sorry, mate."
"Thanks."
Cross did not disappoint. They barely got a start on warming up before he marched over to Allen and moved the boy's arm up by about a millimeter. "You're supposed to be pulling from here, not lifting invisible weights. Is that the best you can do after all this time, stupid student? Or have you already forgotten everything I tried to teach you?"
He continued in that vein, correcting the tiniest flaws in position and posture, accompanied by impatient insults when Allen didn't comply fast enough. It would have been unendurable, except that when it came time to demonstrate, Cross could do it. He'd been dancing twenty years longer than Allen, and although he'd had his share of injuries, none of them had been enough to slow him down significantly. He'd been written up more than once as one of the best dancers of his generation, and it was true. Marian Cross was a living legend.
Of course he was also snide, sarcastic and tactless, but nobody cared, not even Allen, who had born the brunt of it for three years. If there was any sliver of hope that a bit of that genius might rub off, everyone in the studio would tolerate all the verbal abuse the man could dish out.
Which was what rehearsal degenerated into in very short order. Komui and Reever seemed inclined to let it happen, but as the War dragged on, rehearsing became increasingly difficult. The changes in casting forced by Holy War casualties were demoralizing the Order to the point where a perfectly good production was becoming an impending disaster. Being crushed under Cross's thumb wasn't a pleasant change of pace, but it was a change.
The only one unaffected was Kanda, but whatever Rouvellier had threatened him with after China left him more closed off than ever. He didn't care what Cross said because he didn't care about anything at all. He did what he was told as quickly as possible so that Cross would move on and bother someone else, marking time until rehearsal was over.
Others were having more difficulty. Allen recognized the tight-lipped anger that nipped at the heels of humiliation on a lot of the boys' faces, and a few girls came close to tears, although Cross was able to flirt them out of it. The only thing that made it bearable was the fact that the man was asking no more of them than he was able to do himself. Marian Cross was an arrogant prick, but he'd earned the right.
By the time they were finished, Allen was wishing the studio had showers. He didn't fancy going out into the cold covered in this much sweat.
"Oy!" Lavi said, and Allen looked up in time to catch a towel that came flying his way.
"Thanks," Allen said as he buried his face in it.
"No problem. Fucking hell, mate, how did you live with that for three years? I mean, I'm about twice as good as I was when I walked in the door today, but all I want out of life right now is a stiff drink."
Allen wasn't even sure himself how he'd survived. "He wasn't around all that much, thank God."
Lavi sat beside him. "What was that like?"
It was a succession of seedy hotels and rooms to rent starting in Belfast and ending in Chennai, about half of which were vacated in such a hurry that the only thing Allen could be sure of taking with him was Timcampy, at least until he learned to keep a bag packed at all times. The other half Allen got evicted from by himself, with varying amounts of sympathy. If he was lucky, he could stay with his local teacher or in a youth shelter. If he wasn't, he slept as little as he could wherever he could, waiting for the mobile Cross left behind to ring and not be an angry creditor.
"Sorry," Lavi said. "Didn't mean to pry."
"That's all right," Allen said. "What was he like when he was here?"
"I didn't see him much," Lavi said, wiping the back of his neck with his own towel. "By the time I got here, he'd gotten really erratic. He'd dance the Wars, of course, but the rest of the time he was obnoxious and drunk. He'd leave for months at a time, without telling anyone where he was going or when he'd be back, then stagger in out of the blue. When he disappeared after the last War, we thought he was gone for good. So where was he before?"
"I don't know," Allen said.
"Where does he live?" Lavi asked.
"Nowhere," Allen said. "I don't think we were in any one place for more than a few months."
"Why?" Lavi asked.
"Cross does one of three things to the people he meets," Allen said. "He stiffs them, cons them or shags them. Either way, someone's bound to go spare."
"So why take you with him?" Lavi asked. "Or are you two related?"
"Not that I know of," Allen said, although he'd wondered about that more than once. There didn't seem to be any other reason for someone like Cross to drag a kid along, but on the other hand if Cross had left him in foster care for twelve years, why not just leave him there indefinitely? It wasn't as if child welfare would have thrown Allen into the street. There was also the fact that Allen and Cross looked nothing alike.
"Then why?"
Allen got to his feet. "I've been asking myself the same question," he said as he pulled his shirt over his head, "and I still haven't got a clue."