Liberte et Egalite, Republic of San Magnolia
June 5th, Stellar Year 2143
On the fifth of June, Vladilena Milize broke two records. At eleven years old, she became the youngest applicant to pass the entrance exam for the Future Officers Initiative. She was also the first to pass with completely full marks, scoring a perfect 100 on a test of two hundred written-answer questions and five essays.
When the journalists put out their accounts, they reported her as twelve. Partially because her birthday would pass by the time of publication - but primarily because eleven would have been slightly too unbelievable.
The sky was as clear and blue as the ocean when she went in for the exam. Not a cloud in sight. It made her excited to come back home; she knew she was going to ace it, and she was going to tell everyone all about it when she got back. Alice would be so proud of her. She and Rei would praise her to kingdom come, and Kaie would probably tell some stupid joke because she'd be too embarrassed to say she was proud too, and everyone would laugh.
Except by the time she left the academy with her perfect score-sheet, it was raining.
She tried to turn on the Para-RAID anyway, hitting the talk-switch dozens of times, turning it off and on again for what felt like hours. Each time it would light up for a few mercilessly hopeful seconds before it failed to find a connection, lights fading into darkness.
She hoped tomorrow would be clearer, but it wasn't. And the day after was overcast with clouds blotting out the sky like a smear of ashes. She continued to hope. Hoped that it would clear by the afternoon, and then by the evening, and finally she hoped to see the stars, and hoped in vain because there were none that night. The day after that, she boarded the bus for the training camp, and was was forced to leave her Para-RAID behind along with the rest of her belongings.
She wouldn't talk to any of her friends again until the end of the program.
And by then, things could never be the same.
—
June 8th
Lena stood in a line of eight, shorter by a head and shoulders than the older applicants to her left and right. Nonetheless she clenched her hands into fists behind her back, planted her feet on the dirt of training yard and steeled her stance. She was younger and smaller, but she would not be weaker.
"Look at this. What the fuck do we have here?" barked the Drill Sergeant, eyes like twin titanium picks ripping into the student immediately to Lena's left. Lena looked pointedly ahead, making sure she could see nothing but the yellow dirt of the yard and the wall of the Gran Mur in the distance. Another applicant had been all but ripped to pieces for not keeping their eyes forward. Verbally and emotionally.
"What District are you from, Private Gunther?" the Drill demanded.
"T-the seventh, sir!"
"Do they got gardens in the seventh District, Private Gunther?"
"Uh, uh-"
"'Uh, uh, uh-" the Drill cut in, stepping in so close his heavy boots were half an inch from crushing Gunther's toes. "You realize how fucking stupid you sound when you make that dipshit noise, Private? You will answer with yes Drill Sergeant, or no Drill Sergeant only. Do you understand that?"
"Y-yes, Drill Sergeant."
"Louder! Faster and smoother too, for Chrissake!"
"Yes Drill Sergeant!"
"Better! Still makes me wanna rip my fucking ears out on account on your dipshit voice, but better. Now answer the question: Do. They. Got. Gardens?"
"No Drill Sergeant!"
"You lyin' to me, Private?"
"No Drill Sergeant!"
"You fucking must be!" he roared. "'Cause how the fuck else would District seven raise a vegetable like you!"
"I- I don't know, Drill Sergeant!" Gunther sounded on the verge of tears.
"Of fuckin' course you don't. Idiot like you wouldn't even know how to plant your pecker in a woman's box! Much less grow a goddamn carrot!"
At this unfamiliar terminology, Lena was struck with an image of Gunther gently coaxing a woodpecker into a pink, frilly box filled with dirt, and encouraging it to grow into a… woodpecker tree?
She couldn't help the giggle that escaped her.
Like a whirling war-machine, all two-hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and rage, a face like battered iron and sharp, cruel eyes, the Drill Sergeant turned his attention to Lena. He stomped into stance before her, all but quaking the ground with his boots. Lena only stood to the shoulders of her fellow students, but the Drill dwarfed even them, putting her face-to-face with the hard line of his stomach. If she dared to peer up to see his face - which she didn't - she would see a lantern-edged jaw shot through with a jagged scar, running from cheek to cheek, stitched so brutally that the flesh contorted at hideous angles. A scar that looked painful just to live with, to say nothing of how the grievous the wound itself must have been. She would have seen a stark contrast to the unscarred faces of the military's new generation, who'd all been trained within the shelter of the Gran Mur, and spared the horrors of the Legion war.
She would have seen that this man was a veteran.
"Something funny, Private Milize?"
Lena straightened at once, hands locked behind her back, gripped so tightly together the knuckles turned white.
"No Drill Sergeant!"
"Really? You fuckin-A sure of that? 'Cause I could have sworn I heard someone giggle. And it sounded a helluva lot like it came from some prepped up, prissy princess brat five years too young for a car, let alone a gun. Are you saying I didn't, Private? Are you saying I'm a liar?"
Lena felt the sweat build on her palms, and was suddenly very glad they were shielded from view behind her.
"No Drill Sergeant!"
"Then what in fuck's name did I hear?"
A billion thoughts rocketed through her brain in less than a second.
-lie lie lie. Blame it on the girl next to you. Pretend it didn't happen. Say it was the wind. Lie lie lie-
"Yes, I laughed, Drill Sergeant," Lena said, masking her swelling terror behind a facade of unflinching stubbornness. "I'm very sorry, it won't happen again!"
Lena could feel the piercing weight of his titanium-white eyes glaring down at her like two spikes being driven into her face. She chanced a single slow glance to meet them, summoned resolve from fear, looking up as he looked down, seeing the hard, pale line of his frowning mouth and the crooked break in his nose from an ancient injury. The Drill Sergeant sneered. Turned and spat onto the ground.
"Make sure it doesn't, Milize," the Drill ordered, holding eye contact for one terrifying moment longer before he moved to the next recruit in line.
It took every ounce of willpower Lena had not to sigh in relief.
—
"Are you kidding? Mikhail Ferrislav? You got Iron Mike as your Drill Sergeant?"
Annette's voice sounded tinny through the cheap wall-phone's speaker, but the worry in her words was clear enough.
"Is that bad?"
"You remember that friend I told you about? The one whose older brother did the program? He said that Iron Mike fails twice as many recruits as every other Drill Sergeant combined. That he screams at them for making the smallest mistakes until they cry, Lena. And you're the biggest crybaby I know! I hear he even fought in the Legion War himself. He might as well be a demon!"
"But isn't that a good thing? First-hand experience is the best teacher."
She would know. The only reason she was standing here now was because she'd had the chance to talk with Alice and Rei over many long nights through the Para-RAID about their time spent at war, the ways they'd survived or seen other soldiers die. As much as she'd studied and prepared, if not for their expertise she wasn't sure she would have even passed the exam, let alone scored perfectly on it.
"Not if it's Iron Mike who's doing the teaching. All the other Drill Sergeants are much much nicer. They won't rip you apart for making mistakes like he will."
Lena frowned, leaning conspiratorially into the phone. "But isn't it a good thing if he's harsh? How are we gonna learn to fight if the training isn't hard?"
Annette sighed. "You don't get it, Lena. You already did the hard part. And with a perfect score too. The only thing the professors are gonna look at later on is the entrance exam. The rest of the program might as well just be for show, and most of the Drill Sergeants understand that."
"But not Iron Mike."
"Not even a little," Annette confirmed. "Man, that's some bad luck. With a perfect score, I wouldn't be surprised if the Academy agreed to take you in at the start of the next semester, if that's what you wanted to do. But it won't mean anything if Iron Mike expels you."
Perhaps mindful of the fatalistic, defeated tone of her voice that made Lena feel no small amount of dread, Annette tacked onto the end of her sentence a halfhearted, "so, uh, try not to let that happen, okay?"
"I won't, I won't," Lena said, but her voice sounded distant to her. For her morale's sake, it would probably be best to think of other subjects.
"But um, hey," she added. "I heard that your parents are getting you into an arranged marriage?"
"What? You're on a military base. How could you possibly manage to hear that?"
"Never underestimate the rumor grapevine, Henrietta von Pennrose. Your family's a pretty big deal you know, with all the AI advances your father's been working on. Everyone says you might be billionaires this time next year."
Lena pictured Annette waving her hand dismissively on the other end, though of course she couldn't really know that for sure. She got the feeling all the same. Probably some kind of weird hunch developed after too much Para-RAID use.
"Nah, it's nothing that glamorous," Annette said. "And dad's been a little stumped lately, to be honest. I don't know if Pennrose Labs is going to be releasing anything new for awhile."
"The robot companion dogs are already selling like hotcakes though, aren't they?"
"Sure, but Fido and his siblings aren't going to make us billionaires. The real money would be in truly autonomous combat drones, but dad's still a long way off from that."
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah. Between you and me, most of dad's progress was because of a… special gift someone brought him: a piece of advanced technology he's been reverse-engineering for the last few years. And now that he's about cracked it, he's not really sure where to go from there." There was a pause on the other line. Again, Lena saw an image of Annette's eyes widening, her mouth slowly dropping in disbelief at what she'd just said.
"And I mean that by the way!" Annette added in a flustered huff. "That has to stay between you and me, no spreading that around, okay? I'm only telling you because I trust you-"
"I know, Annette," Lena said patiently, giggling into her hand. "So, um, what was the special gift exactly? You know, since you've already spilled one big company secret and all."
Another pause. Another sigh.
"In for a penny in for a pound, I guess…" Annette murmured. "Yeah. It was a robot from the Empire, recovered from some battlefield, I guess. The model was nothing special, and beat to hell too, but the AI core was intact. Dad said it was the most advanced processing unit he'd ever seen outside of the Legion, but much, much easier to replicate."
The Empire, Lena thought, and in a flash she couldn't hear a thing. Annette was talking, she could feel the vibration of the speaker against her ear, but Lena could understand nothing but her own thoughts. It was almost like that night again, when the tinnitus drowned out everything but those taunting, repeating words, it's pretty, so pretty.
She thought of Rei. He had gone through hell to reach the Republic. He'd started with an almost full-strength force of eight Feldress and eighteen men, but by the end of the journey he was reduced to a single Vanagandr on the verge of breakdown, towing six survivors behind in a cargo canister. There were tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Legion drones between the Empire and the Republic. Even getting a company of hardened battlefield veterans through that no-mans-land was a miracle.
So, she wondered, how could someone have managed to escort a piece of fragile technology all that distance?
"Leeenaa?" Annette sing-songed. "Hellloooo, Earth to Lena?"
"Ah, yes!" Lena said, snapping back to attention.
"Jeez. You're so scatterbrained, you know that? You asked about my arranged marriage, and then when I start talking about it you zone out. People would say that makes you a bad friend, you know?"
"Wait, you're actually getting married?! Isn't it way too early for that?!"
Annette laughed.
"See, that's why you should listen when people talk, Lena. No, I'm not getting married; my mom's having me do marriage interviews. We're seeing if there's anyone who might make a good match for me by the time I come of age."
Lena frowned. "Doesn't that feel kind of cold, though? Wouldn't you rather marry for love?"
"Oh, Lena, you're so sweet," Annette said, then laughed again. "Love's overrated. As long as I get a man who's smart, rich, and nice, the love part will come on its own. Besides, it's more important I get someone who can help support the company when the time comes. That's what matters most."
"You think so?"
"Yeah. Pennrose Labs is on the cutting edge of technological development in the Republic. I want to make sure that when my dad steps down, I'll be able to put my best foot forward and go even further than he did. For my family's sake, and… I guess the country's sake too, in a way. But to do that, I need to make sure I marry someone who can support my ambitions.
"Compared to that, love is kinda selfish, don't you think?"
"Maybe…" Lena said, eminently unconvinced.
She got the sense that Annette was smiling on the other end. A slightly annoying kind of smile, the sort of placating smile that was usually followed by an exclamation of, 'oh you sweet summer child.'
"Lena, one day you'll understand that we all have obligations. You are a noble's daughter after all."
Lena thought on that a moment. Then remembered something she probably shouldn't have forgot in the first place.
"Well, speaking of obligations, I should probably get going. I have to get up early tomorrow for PT - uh, physical training, I mean."
Annette chuckled. "I know what PT means. Goodnight, Lena."
"Goodnight, Annette."
—
July 19th
Lena's twelfth birthday came and went without fanfare, not so much as an acknowledgment from classmates, staff, or even herself, much less a party.
Not that she cared.
She was in boot camp, after all. There were more important things to worry about. She barely even thought about her birthday when the day came, mostly because it happened to fall on rifle day, and her mind was otherwise occupied with the heavy weight of the all-steel 7.62mm they put in her tiny hands; the fearsome roar of its report and the recoil that felt like someone was punching her in the shoulder each time she pulled the trigger.
She held that same rifle now.
Hugged it to her chest with both arms as she hunkered down in the moonless dark with the forest all around her, trill cricket-songs screaming in every direction. She clutched the rifle like a lifeline, partially for comfort. It was heavy enough and large enough that she could cuddle it with some effectiveness, and she was terrified enough that she didn't second-guess the thought of cuddling a gun for emotional support.
Mostly, though, she held it like that because otherwise it would be too heavy. Her frame was too small to carry it on the sling. If she tried, the rough cloth strap would dig so sharply into her skin she felt like her shoulders might lose circulation and necrose.
It was official. Lena was wrong and Annette was right. About everything ever, she would add, if doing that would somehow get her out of this. Having Iron Mike for a Drill Sergeant wasn't a good thing at all. It was, in fact, a no good, very bad, awful terrible nightmare.
For SERE training - Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape - all the other platoons basically got a three-day summer camp where they got to go hiking and fishing, eat MREs, and sleep in air-conditioned tents. They didn't even have to lug around their rifles, heavy pieces of junk that they were.
Lena had no such luck.
Her platoon (by then already cut down to half by a worryingly even mix of expulsion and injuries) was called to muster an hour before dawn, lining up beside the stairway to the base's helipad with their rifles in hand. As usual, Iron Mike went up and down their line, looking over each of their uniforms to ensure they were spotless and worn correctly (no severe creases, shirts tucked in all the way, sleeves rolled down), marking any infraction on his clipboard.
"Wow, would you look at that?" the Drill Sergeant announced, no small amount of wonder in his voice. "It's been five minutes and nobody's fucked up yet. I'm impressed."
He really sounded like he was, too.
"Clear arms!" he ordered.
Lena kept her rifle pointed to the ground as she dropped the magazine and pulled back on the charging handle, catching the ejected bullet in her hand. It was longer than her palm, sticking out like a sixth finger. The Drill Sergeant once again went up and down their line, inspecting the rifles to ensure they were empty.
"Private Hall you retard dipshit! There is still a round in your chamber!"
Private Hall was a stocky, placid-faced boy with callused hands. From a conversation last night, Lena learned that he came from the 82nd District - one of the few places left in the Republic that still had farmland and forests. They'd tread other topics soon after.
"Suh- sir, I don't know how that happened! I racked the bolt! The bullet even came out!"
"You ass-sucking, dog-fucking MOR-RON! You racked it before you dropped your magazine! Two strikes!"
The chamber was the part of the gun where the bullet fired from. Bullets were fed from the magazine whenever the bolt cycled, either because the gun had been shot (moving the bolt back automatically) or because the shooter pulled the bolt themselves via the charging handle. Pulling the bolt back would eject the round currently in the chamber, but if a loaded magazine was still in the gun when the bolt moved forward again, it would automatically feed another bullet back into it.
It wasn't very long ago that Lena had even learned any of this. Private Hall's mistake was one she could easily have made herself if she was distracted in any way. But despite her sympathy, she kept her eyes firmly forward. An easy mistake or not, she wasn't the one being addressed; it wasn't her business to watch, even if she couldn't help not to listen.
"B-b-buh- but- sir, I already have one strike, if you give me two-"
"Oh would you look at that? The mor-ron knows how to add one and two! Wonders never fucking cease!"
"Sir, it ain't fair!" Private Hall all but sobbed, his voice one octave from breaking.
"No, Private, it is more than fair. Un-fair would be letting you trip over your dipshit shoes and shoot Private Caritas in the back because you're too incompetent to clear your goddamn gun. It would be un-fair to send a Private to an academy who clearly has no respect for firearms and doesn't realize that they are not toys, but weapons. FUCKING WEAPONS Private Hall, weapons that need to be cleared yesterday when I tell you to damn well clear them!"
The veins in Iron Mike's neck pulsed with the force of his tirade, eyes bulging from his skull, titanium-white irises searing hot, lips pulled back to bare a mouth full of sharp, hard teeth. Every single one on the bottom row, near that grotesque scar across his jaw, had been replaced with metal crowns.
"You've got three strikes now, Hall. Clearly you already know what that means."
Hall was outright crying now. In the utter silence of the early morning, the breath of all the other recruits bated to nothing, it was all too easy to hear the patter of his falling tears as they struck the dirt.
"Pleassir," he begged, words melting together, country accent coming through under stress. "My ma, she-"
Iron Mike took a hard step forward, planting his boot and a considerable weight straight down onto Private Hall's feet, shoving their faces within inches of each other.
"Don't you dare soil her name, Private. Cry to mama and you'll do nothing but bring shame to her and you both. She's not the one trying to join my army. You are," he said, and thrust his finger into Hall's chest.
Private Hall opened his mouth to retort, but no words came through, just a choked, scrambled sound conveying only fear.
Not your business, Lena, she thought, desperate to keep her eyes forward and her heart closed. If he wants to be a soldier, he has to fight his own battles. You know it well, and if he doesn't by now, then he has no place here.
All of which was true. All of which she believed wholeheartedly.
But his mother-
"Sir!" Lena said, snapping her hand to her forehead in salute, facing sharply forward and hoping that the mask of staunch discipline she wore was enough to hide her fear. "Private Hall's mother passed away last night. He has been in bereavement, but is trying his best to adapt."
Iron Mike stepped back from Private Hall and on toward Lena, towering over her, the top of his bald head like the tip of a skyscraper for how high he stood. Even if she stretched both arms as high as she could and jumped, she wouldn't be able to reach him. He glowered down at her. Lena met his gaze and held it even as her heart thundered in her chest so hard she seriously thought her ribs would split apart.
"Death is second nature to a soldier, Private. It's in the job description. When my buddy gets ripped to chunks in front of me, that doesn't give me free reign to fumble my gun and force another soldier to follow after him. Do you really think his dead mama makes much of an excuse, Private Milize?"
"No Drill Sergeant!"
"Really? 'Cause it sounded a lot to me like you were making excuses for Hall's negligence."
"No excuses, Drill Sergeant. Just an explanation. Private Hall has found it difficult to think and act as he should in the wake of the tragedy, as would anyone who's suffered such a loss. But I believe one mistake should not damn him."
Iron Mike's expression was unreadable. Unmoving, too. His was a face slashed from stone.
"Pretty words, Milize. Persuasive. Are you gonna use pretty words to stuff Private Caritas' brains back into her skull when Hall puts a bullet through it? Are you gonna talk the blood back into your gut when that retard rips it open?"
She said what she figured Rei would say in this situation, a man who'd led eighteen headstrong personalities through seven hundred kilometers of certain death, and kept them all together even as they died one-by-one around him.
"Sir. I would trust Private Hall not to do either, now that he's had the chance to learn from his mistake."
Iron Mike's glare could have burned a hole through the sun.
"And you think he's going to learn anything at all after he's let a little girl three years younger step in to fight his battle for him?"
She smiled the way Alice would have smiled when faced with a question like that: all ceaseless self-assurance and effortless confidence.
"I think he'll be ashamed of this moment for the rest of his life, sir. What better teacher could he ask for?"
A rare thing happened then. Iron Mike laughed.
"'Beware the pretty face with a silver tongue,'" the Drill Sergeant quoted. "'For she brings Armageddon.' I can't tell if I should send you up to the academy right now or expel you straight off. You're gonna cause a lot of trouble in the future, Private."
Lena said nothing, holding her gaze and pinning it in place with Alice's stolen confidence.
"Alright, Milize, since you seem so intent on taking responsibility for Private Hall's idiocy, I'll give you a chance to prove it. Why don't take those two strikes for him?"
"What-" Hall spluttered. "Nosir, you cain't! At least lemme take one-"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" he roared. "Another word out of you and I'm sending both of you home. You for being a dumb-fuck maggot, and Milize for having the shitty judgment to stand up for a dumb-fuck maggot."
He turned his head back to Lena, the muscles in his neck wound so tight she could hear them creak.
"So?" he demanded.
I don't have any strikes of my own. I won't be expelled if I take them.
But you'll be one mistake away from it for the rest of the program, and there's still almost two months left to go. You can't afford it, Lena. You want to change this country, don't you? It's all over if you get expelled. No academy, no enlistment, no officer's seat-
"I'll do it, Drill Sergeant," Lena said, trying and failing to ignore the sudden dizziness that rushed over her, the swell of vertigo in her stomach she hoped didn't turn her visibly blue in the face. "I'll take them."
-youidiotyouidiotyouidiotyouidiot-
Without another word, the Drill Sergeant brought up his clipboard and slashed down two harsh lines. He stepped back, and after one more round of rifle inspections, stood before them all.
"Alright shitstains, with that interruption out of the way, let me introduce you to today's agenda. You are all about to embark on your SERE training. That means survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. You will be dropped into the forest from this here helicopter with nothing but your knife and your canteen, your rifle, and five bullets, and for the next three days and nights you will be tasked with…"
—
Lena woke up at the ass-crack of dawn. She was freezing cold, starving, and hadn't even realized she'd fallen asleep in the first place. She was thirsty too. Her tongue felt like an angry lump of sandpaper in her mouth. She unstoppered her canteen and held it upside down over her mouth, and learned - once again, with even more harrowing a realization the second time around - that it was empty. Not even a drop fell free.
She stared at the steel flask with an expression somewhere between dread and hatred. She resented it for running dry so quickly.
"One day down," she murmured. Her voice was a raspy husk. "Only two more to go, and then…"
And then they'd start sending rescuers. But the Drill Sergeant made it more than clear that the helicopters in the sky wouldn't have any magical X-ray vision to see them through the forest canopy, or the intense magnification needed to spot them all from miles away. None of them had vitals monitors or trackers on them. If Lena broke her leg in a posthole somewhere, no one would come to save her. If she got hopelessly lost (she probably already was), no one would find her.
Forget the academy. She and her ambitions were going to die here.
She hugged her rifle to her chest again, even if the frozen metal sent a shock of goosebumps through her hands all the way up her forearms.
What was she supposed to do? What could she do? Her mind was consumed by the cold. She was unable to process anything else, including any effective ways to stop being cold. She kept thinking of the firestarting drills her father once taught her, what felt like ages ago, striking a knife against a magnesium rod, showering sparks over cotton balls rolled in petroleum jelly. They were useless thoughts.
It seemed so easy then. Knowing she was allowed her knife, Lena had been confident yesterday that she could get a flame going even without the magnesium rod or the cotton balls. She'd just strike it against a rock or something to create sparks, and carve up some treebark for tinder.
Confidence thoroughly misplaced, clearly. She was going to die. It was the only place her thoughts would circle back to.
At least until a very dumb idea occurred to her:
Guns get hot when you shoot them.
The thoughts flowed like thick, syrupy treacle through her hypothermic brain. In that moment the idea made perfect sense to her. Even putting a single twenty-round magazine through her rifle heated up the barrel enough that she could feel it through the handguard. She didn't have twenty rounds - or a magazine, for that matter; she would have to breach-load each shot - but she did have five bullets.
If she fired them all, it would heat up the gun a bit, and if she hugged the gun tight enough, it could heat up her in turn.
A perfect strategy.
With shivering, frost-stiff fingers she plucked out a cartridge from her pocket and regarded it in the dim early-morning light, gleaming brass casing and copper-jacketed tip. She pulled back the bolt on her rifle to expose the chamber and dropped the round inside. She released the bolt forward to a satisfying steel slide and click. She flicked off the safety, took aim at a tree. Fired.
Roar. Ringing in her ears. Recoil like a punch to the shoulder. She ignored all of that in favor of the corona of flame flashing off the muzzle. It was an instant, delicious shock of warmth over her frozen forearms, and already she could feel a wonderful heat baking off the empty chamber, carried by silky curls of cordite gas. She found the ejected casing on the ground and clenched it in her hands, pleasantly warm as she held it in her hands for awhile, letting it thaw out her fingers before she loaded the next round.
But just as her finger curled around the trigger, she heard a gunshot ringing out in the far distance. Not her own, obviously, though it took her frosted-over brain a moment to process that. Someone else had fired.
Someone else had heard her.
Lena's heart pounded in her chest. Her mind raced. She held her rifle tightly, savoring the last of its warmth as it diffused through her clothing, and she asked herself what she should do. The distant peal of another shot answered for her, cracking through the air and rippling through the forest. A signal. It had to be. She whipped her head in its direction. The same direction as the rising sun. East. Come to me.
She shouldered her gun and snapped the trigger.
I'm on my way, said the gunshot.
—
Private Hall was a farmer's son. When Lena stumbled into his camp, still frozen to the bone (although less now that the sun was up), she realized this simple fact by how utterly at home he appeared, arms coated to the elbows in dirt and wood shavings while he whittled away at a length of wood with his combat knife.
More importantly, he had a fire.
When he offered her a place by it, all hesitation and stuttering and gaze cast at the ground, Lena was so grateful she could have kissed him. When he revealed that he had water too, pulled from a brackish stream and boiled in his canteen over said fire, she could have sworn the morning light fell just so to frame his slightly flaxen silver hair and put a glimmer in his gentle eyes, giving him the appearance of the angel he so clearly was.
"Thank you!" she cried, after she upended her entire canteen and Hall, without seeming to think about it, began to pour in the contents of his own to refill it.
"Nah, it's nothing," he said, pointedly not looking in Lena's direction. "I'm the one who's gotta say thanks. You stood up for me, after all."
"No, no, not at all. Anyone would have done that."
"Now that just isn't true," Private Hall said, chuckling sorely. "If anyone would've done it, then someone in our line-up would have stepped in too. They didn't. But you did, and, well…"
Lena nodded reluctantly, made slightly uncomfortable by the sheer sincerity she didn't deserve.
"Dad always says I have to stand up for myself, and most of the time I do but, well… when he was yelling at me, all I could think about was Ma- mom, and the words just wouldn't come out, and…" His voice trailed.
"Well, thanks," he said again.
Lena smiled brightly. "It looks like the words are coming out now though, huh?"
Hall drew the brim of his boonie cap down over his eyes, cheeks flushed bright red.
"Oh! Sorry," Lena added quickly. "I guess that sounded a little mean. I didn't mean to tease you."
"Nah, you're good. I just, uh, fluster easy. It doesn't take much. My sis teases me about it sometimes."
"Does she?"
"Mhm."
Conversation lulled. Lena took the opportunity to drink from her canteen again, filled to the brim with freshly boiled water. It was piping hot and delicious, and now that she was warm and hydrated she felt like she was actually a human being again. She pondered on how she'd never realized before just how wonderful it was to have hot water. She wondered if she'd ever regard her shower in quite the same light.
"How did you get this fire going, Private Hall?"
"Cedric," he said.
"Eh?"
"Call me Cedric." A pause. More redness burned across his face. "Uh, if you want, I mean."
Lena giggled into her palm. "Okay, I'll call you Cedric, and you'll call me Lena."
"Lena," he agreed. "So, you, uh, wanted to know how I got the fire going?"
She nodded enthusiastically. "My Papa taught me how to start fires once, but we had tools and stuff. Like a rod you scrape a knife on to make sparks. And cottonballs-"
"-coated in petroleum jelly. Yep, good choice for tinder. Burns hot but slow, so it can light up just about any piece of branch long as its dry, and it catches a spark like that." He snapped his finger in emphasis. He still wasn't looking her in the eye - more over her shoulder - but his voice had picked up the speed and confidence of familiarity.
"And a magnesium strike rod's a handy tool to have. Light to carry, lasts forever, reliable even in the damp. I always carry one with me whenever I'm in the field, same with my knife. Your pa knew his stuff."
Lena's chest swelled with an aching pride. She felt warm and lonely at the time.
"'Course, Iron Mike didn't let us bring a striker. Or cottonballs. Or even a damn lighter, the asshole. But he did let us bring these," he said, and pulled two rifle cartridges out of his pocket.
"Funny thing about stuff that explodes; it's good at setting things on fire. First thing you gotta get is some good tinder. Birch bark works great if it's dry. You build up a good little mountain of it, and get the rest of your fuel ready too. Twigs and branches first, then bigger wood after.
"Next you need a board or a piece of wood. You carve a hole through it, just big enough so the round will fit snug. First you pry off the bullet with your knife - don't want that ricocheting in your face, do ya? Sprinkle the powder over your tinder and wedge the cartridge in the hole, tip-down. Have your tinder below the board, strike the primer with your knife, and you can get it to go off in just the right way to light everything up."
He was grinning, his voice effusive with the enthusiasm of a person diving-deep into something he loved.
"Throw on your twigs, then your branches, then the rest of your fuel, and you got a fire. Neat, right?"
"Super neat!" Lena exclaimed. "Cedric, that's so cool!"
As if he just now remembered she was there, he turned and met her glance for just a moment, then turned swiftly away again, red from ear to ear.
"Uh, a-anyway, I'd show you how, so you can do it yourself in the future, but there's no use in wasting bullets right now. I only got the two."
"I have three."
He nodded. "I was gonna head further down the stream before I heard your shot. This area's too brackish. Some critters might drink from it, but only if they're desperate. Should be wider down south, though, and since it's still early morning that might mean we'll see a rabbit or two."
"Cute!"
He looked at her strangely for a second, like he was seeing her in a sudden new light. He quirked a lopsided smile and the look faded.
"Well, I was thinking 'tasty,' but I guess cute's true too."
Lena had been so preoccupied with her thirst she'd somehow managed to forget that she hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Her stomach chose that moment to growl thunderously. It became her turn to burn red from ear-to-ear. Cedric very politely stifled his laughter.
"If we see one, let me take the shot." A pause. A sudden flailing of hands. "Not that I think you can't hit it, of course! It's just that I'm more experienced at this, and with a rifle this big, if you hit them in wrong place a rabbit would just explode into bits, and we have so few bullets as it is, and-"
"It's okay, Cedric! Don't worry, you didn't offend me or anything."
He swallowed dully. "You're not?"
"No," Lena said, laughing. "I'm a lousy shot, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."
It was half-true. She actually could get a decent shot on target, but rarely more than just the one. The rifle was way too heavy for her to aim for very long; her arms got shaky and sore after less than a minute of holding it to her shoulder. And the one time she even thought to fire it on full-auto, the Drill Sergeant gave her a single strong, stern look, and she thought better of it.
"Well, okay. You can leave it to me, then."
"Yeah, you got this!"
—
They did end up seeing a rabbit, and Cedric did end up shooting it. One neat shot was all it took. A crack of thunder split the air and its tiny little head exploded into pink mist and red splatter. There was a moment where Lena saw it and remembered red liquid shining in the firelight, and she was instantly sick to her core. Her stomach trembled, bile threatening to surge up her throat.
Then she was okay. And she was very suddenly glad for those two weeks' of afternoons she spent lurking outside the butcher's shop a year ago, awful as that process had been. She probably would have had a full-on panic attack otherwise.
Cedric grabbed the body by the hind legs and slung it over his shoulder, unmindful of the blood dripping down his sleeve. It was a good-sized rabbit, if not quite big enough for them both. Lena felt faintly queasy at the thought of eating it, but her empty stomach spoke louder.
When Lena offered Cedric one of her three rounds, since now he only had the one left, but he shook his head.
"You'll be using one of them to start up the fire wherever we make camp, so you might as well keep the extra. I only one need shot."
She thought the way he said that was pretty cool, broad face set stern and eyes looking forward, his rifle held so naturally in his stocky arms it was like just another part of him. But she didn't say that out loud, lest she embarrass him again.
An hour and untold distance later, and the stream had widened out into a sizable brook full of clear, if slightly silty water. They reached a clearing where an old footbridge ran over the water. The ancient planks were covered in mold and the whole thing was overgrown at the banks with reeds and moss, but it looked sturdy all the same. There was a venerable tree standing tall that looked two hundred years old or more it was so massive, casting a great blanket of shade over every inch of open ground.
It looked like a good place to set up camp, and when Lena said as much, Cedric agreed readily. She felt a little proud of that, that the survival expert- ("Expert? Nah, you give me too much credit. Now my dad on the other hand, there's an expert.") -took some actual stock in her opinion.
They used that fire-starting technique he talked about. It was a lot harder than he made it sound. Gathering tinder alone took half an hour ("You're slicing it too thin, Lena, that'll be gone in seconds, won't even heat up the branch let alone get it burning- no, no, now that's too thick.") but eventually she finally managed it, reaching the point of striking her knife down on the primer of the cartridge, explosive pop and whoomph of the gunpowder, shock of force at its detonation giving way to black smoke and flames licking up from the piled tinder. ("Now blow on it. Not too hard though, you just need to feed it oxygen.")
When all was said and done and they were roasting hunks of rabbit on sharpened sticks, Lena felt absurdly elated for her part in everything, even if Cedric could have done it all himself if he wanted to.
They had both just finished gobbling down their portions, far too small to fill their aching bellies but still more delicious than anything Lena had ever eaten before (with the possible exception of a piece of milk chocolate on top of a crunchy cookie-like biscuit), and were considering carving out seconds when they heard a gunshot. A cracking peal in the distance, not close but not far either, thunder giving way to a high sonic whine spreading out in all directions.
"A signal shot," Cedric said, putting down his skewer. "Like the one you fired."
Lena nodded silently. She was too embarrassed to state the truth. Cedric seemed to have some kind of respect for her, but she'd lose every inch of it if she admitted to wasting one of her bullets because her hands were cold.
"We've only got three rounds left between us. If we return their signal, that becomes two," Cedric mused, looking absently over Lena's shoulder.
"And they're probably hungry too," Lena said. "We'd have to split the rabbit with them." The portions were already too small for the two of them.
Cedric nodded, but said nothing further. He made eye contact briefly before dipping down his head, evidently leaving the decision in Lena's hands. She didn't need to deliberate very long.
"I only need one shot too," she said with a wink, and fired her rifle.
After twenty minutes Cedric gestured for Lena to plug her ears. Though modestly confused, she did it anyway, watching as he stuck his fingers into his mouth, waited a moment, then blew the loudest whistle she had ever heard in her life. Even with her ears plugged it seemed to push against her eardrums. She recognized it instantly. She'd heard the same whistle as she was making her way to his camp earlier in the day. Cedric waited two minutes before doing it again, and again until they both heard the sounds of underbrush being stomped through, rustling branches and boots sucking on wet ground.
"Oh thank God!" cried a lean-figured, sharp-faced boy in torn fatigues as he pushed into the clearing. He staggered his way to the footbridge across the brook and stopped there, falling on his knees. His shoulder-length silver hair was matted up in knots (Lena fingered her ponytail in contemplation of this, glad she'd had the foresight to put her hair up before she boarded the helicopter), and his lips were cracked to the point of bleeding from dehydration. "Thank God!"
After the boy had guzzled two canteens of boiled water and devoured his share of rabbit, passing through all five stages of grief in two seconds flat when he was told there was no more left to spare, he shared that his name was Lucius, and confided straight away that he was-
"-Fucking done with this shit! I signed up for this program because my brother wouldn't stop telling me how fun the military was. He said you just go to the command center in the first District and play around, drink or watch movies or go to parties. Well last I checked, this is not a fucking party!"
It went on like that for awhile, neither of them really wanting to listen but not having much choice in it. Lucius either didn't notice his companions' discomfort, or disregarded caring about it entirely, going on like a motor of obscenities until he came to an end, not with any grand verbal flourish or final indictment, but just a gradual thinning of his voice until he'd about run out of things to say.
After three seconds of silence, Lena asked if he felt better.
"You know what? I really, truly do," Lucius said serenely, then flashed a brilliant smile that lit his whole, dirty face with unvarnished joy. It was infectious. Lena couldn't help but smile too.
An hour after that they were hungry again.
"To be honest, I think that little morsel only made it worse," Lucius grumbled, rubbing his stomach emphatically. "There has be more than one rabbit out in the woods, right?"
"Sure, but they won't be anywhere nearby. The sound of a gunshot will have scared off pretty much everything in a two-kilometer radius. "
"Just two? We could walk that easily."
Cedric gave a kind of patronizing half-smile that Lena had learned he could only make when it came to this subject. "How much distance do you think you cleared since you fired that signal shot, Lucius?"
"What?"
"How far do think you walked?"
"I don't know, a kilometer?"
"Try a hundred meters. And that took you half an hour. When you're walking in the woods, you're weaving around brush or trees or obstacles the entire time. That means if you don't have a compass you're not checking religiously every minute, you'll get turned around in no time. That's why I was whistling - so you'd have a sound to go toward."
Lucius frowned, putting a hand to his chin. "Okay, point taken. But what are we supposed to do, then? Just sit here and starve?"
Cedric shrugged. "I guess so. We've only got two more days of this left, then rescue will come. We've got water, so we'll survive just fine. Won't be fun, though."
"What do you mean, 'fine?' That's two days without food. And it might as well be three for how little that piece of rabbit was."
"You can survive for a month without eating," Cedric said, and shrugged. "Even in the field, you can keep some strength for a week, maybe ten days without food before it starts to be a problem. We'll make it."
The other boy huffed.
"'Join the army,' he said. 'It'll be fun,' he said. My brother's a fucking liar."
—
Cedric was right; starving wasn't fun at all.
Well, Lena could concede that maybe they weren't starving. That was probably an exaggeration. But it was still hard. On an empty stomach, even sitting still wasn't easy. Like a magnet to metal, her thoughts would wander inexorably back to food even when she told herself not to. Trying to keep busy only helped so much. While she was chopping lengths of birch-bark into usable kindling, she'd be reminded of pasta noodles. When she gathered firewood, certain branches would start to look an awful lot like baguettes.
Lucius was right too; drinking water didn't help one bit.
When it was boiled and piping hot, it almost seemed to tease her stomach into thinking it was being fed. It would make the growling go away for a moment, but when that moment was gone the pangs would double over again, like her belly was mad at her for being tricked. Cold water helped a little more, seeming to take the edge off by physically shrinking her stomach down a size, but it also made her ache like the devil.
It was, in short, miserable.
So when Cedric returned to camp shortly after dawn the next morning (they were all awake by then, having gone to sleep in the early evening because time spent sleeping was time they didn't have to feel hungry), and said he saw signs of deer, Lena was understandably thrilled. After he explained that deer could be eaten, anyway.
"My dad's the 82nd District's game warden," he said. "There's not a ton of deer behind the Gran Mur. And they're not native either, of course - they brought them over from the 86th, years back, and we've been managing the population ever since. Some of the older nobles have a taste for venison. A few even like to hunt it themselves." He held his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart, a bemused smile on his face. "A few."
"I had meat once," Lucius said. He was frowning, but in the single day Lena had known him Lucius had been frowning the entire time, so this was unremarkable. "I hated it. It tasted like blood."
"It's either we track this deer or we go hungry."
"Well, we only have one more day to go," Lena offered.
"Let's eat that son of a bitch," Lucius said.
Cedric led them a ways from the camp, pushing through the brush with the understated ease of experience. Occasionally he bade the two of them to stop and be silent while he pushed ahead, camouflaged fatigues melting instantly into the foliage, before he'd come back minutes later and gesture for them to follow. Some time later, he stopped them to regard a scatter of round brown pellets on the forest floor.
"See that?" he said, pointing to it.
"The shit? Yes I see it. What about it?"
Lena sometimes wished Lucius wouldn't use such coarse language, but didn't say as much. She didn't have the energy or the desire to argue right now.
"Scat," Cedric corrected. He crouched down, grabbed a twig off the ground and began poking apart the mound of round drops. "Deer droppings. And they're fresh, too. Means our meat isn't too far away. C'mon, I see tracks."
Apparently, 'not too far away' in Cedric's dictionary meant two hours of slow, methodical hiking through wilderness that all looked the same in every direction. It wasn't as hard as Lena thought it would be. She was still hungry, and weak because of it, but oddly enough it was easier to deal with today than it had been yesterday. She was weak, still holding her rifle to her chest in both hands to keep from dropping it altogether, but at least she wasn't shaky, and that was an improvement.
Most of those two hours Lena and Lucius spent waiting around while Cedric forged on ahead, not trusting them to keep quiet. In fairness to him, Lena didn't trust them either. Where she and Lucius seemed to crash through the brush, a cavalcade of snapping twigs and crumbling foliage, the farmer's son moved with a near-ghostly silence, weaving around the underbrush as if weren't there in the first place.
"I always thought he was an idiot, to be honest," Lucius said apropos of nothing.
"Cedric?"
"I tried to talk to him, the first week. Ask him his full name, who his family was and what district they hailed from, what they did and their social standing. All the standard questions."
Lucius was a noble, so Lena figured he had a different understanding of what 'standard' meant. She was a noble too she supposed, but Lena had spent exponentially more time around people like Rei and Alice and Kaie than she had her fellow nobility. She wasn't sure if she was ever able to think like Lucius did, being honest, but if the ability had been there, it certainly wasn't anymore.
"He was a stuttering mess. Could barely work his way through two sentences. You weren't there to see him get his first strike, were you? He forgot his belt. He'd folded the waistband of his pants twice over, and even then he had to keep pulling it back up by hand. When the Drill Sergeant marked him down, I swear to you he cried." Lucius rolled his eyes, the memory alone an affront to him.
"And yet look at him now," he said, his tone softening. "I'm not sure I would have survived the night if he hadn't guided me to your camp. I guess that means I owe him, huh? Twice over, I suppose, because I haven't treated him very kindly until now."
Lena wasn't sure quite what she was supposed to say to that, so she didn't say anything. Lucius didn't seem to mind.
"I don't know what I'll have to do to level the scale, but whatever it ends up being, I'll do it. I'm a Du Frencia. I pay my debts."
Minutes later, Cedric returned. There was a slightly manic look in his eye, a toothy grin across his broad face. "Come on. I've got her scent. She's close."
"Does that mean we'll only have to walk for an hour and a half this time?" Lucius grumbled.
Cedric's grin widened. "No," he said, and turned around, gesturing for them to follow.
Five minutes later and his grin began to flatten, and then to close entirely down to a hard, pale line.
"Blood," he murmured. "I smell blood."
Lena shuffled uncomfortably. "Is that bad?"
"Look at his face. Of course it's bad," Lucius said.
Cedric held up his finger for them to be quiet. He crouched low and stalked forward, moving through a tangle of brush and densely-packed pine trees before he stopped, stared. Quirked a finger for them to follow.
'Quietly,' he mouthed to them.
"Look," he whispered, pointing down the forest at nothing of interest that Lena could see. At least at first. "C'mon, can't you see?" Cedric urged, his voice picking up a note of stress that was impossible to miss when his tone had been perfectly placid until now.
Eventually, Lena did. Maybe fifty meters away beside a particularly large oak was their deer, laying on its side, head down.
Stomach gouged open, viscera splashed across the grass.
Being eaten by a bear.
"Oh my God," Lena whispered.
She was sick again. She thought she'd gotten better. She'd worked so hard to get better. But her stomach rippled when she saw the blood, thick and steaming and so damn much of it, and she saw the redness soaked around the bear's jaws, coursing down the black fur of its chest, when she saw it bend down and pull at a length of gristle, pink muscle stretching before it tore free. Bile threatened to push its way up and out.
"Oh God. Oh God," she murmured, vision swimming.
"What is it? I can't see," Lucius said. He pushed forward, put a too-rough hand on Lena's shoulder to crowd behind her, and then it was too much.
She stumbled. She fell on her knees out of the brush, retching loudly. Vomiting on the forest floor.
The bear turned its head to them.
Cedric burst from the foliage with his rifle drawn. He planted his legs strong on the dirt, shoulders squared, bringing up the gun. "Stand!" he shouted, his voice a roar across the woods. "For the love of Christ, stand up!"
His words were an eternity away. Her field of view was a pinhole, black at all but the center. She couldn't feel her hands. Her lungs were empty and she couldn't breathe. She'd forgotten how.
"It's just a black bear! Not a grizzly. It'll leave us be if it thinks we're a threat, so stand up Lena! Please!"
His voice couldn't reach her.
Lucius' hand did. He grabbed her by the shoulder hard enough to hurt and hauled her to her feet, releasing her only after she was steady again. She looked back at him through watery eyes. She tried to speak, but when she opened her mouth only more bile dribbled out.
"There's three of us here. It'll see that and leave, we'll be-
"Oh. Fuck."
Lena wiped her eyes and blinked. The bear had turned around to face them. At first all she saw was its eyes, black and beady, glinting by the light of what sun could reach past the treetops.
Then she looked down, slowly, all too slowly.
There was a bear-trap closed around its right foreleg, stagnant blood soaked around the contraption's metal teeth, a snapped chain trailing behind.
"She's enraged," Cedric said tightly. Almost sadly. "She's gonna-"
The bear unleashes a guttural roar before it charges. It's a massive creature, standing a foot higher than Lena's head, hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of muscle and fat and thick fur.
And it's fast.
Cedric's breathing is rapid and shallow. His rifle shakes violently in his hands. He steps forward with a harsh, jerky motion, legs stumbling into stance. Lena watches it all in a daze. Her own gun is still held against her chest, but somehow the thought hasn't occurred to her that she should raise it. She is in shock again. A part of her realizes it. The same shock that paralyzed her before the Grauwolf. And here she thought she'd gotten stronger than that. She glances back at Lucius and sees that he's much the same, staring spellbound at the beast raging toward them.
Cedric takes aim and fires.
The report is massive. The fireball off the muzzle is as bright as the sun itself, and the shot couldn't be better. In instant disintegration the bear's right eye is smashed to jelly, flesh and fur carved out in a chunk from eye socket to ear, gore flung in a crimson spray behind it.
But the bear keeps on running. It doesn't even stumble. Cedric pulls at his trigger again and receives only a hollow click. He drops his hand into his pockets like it might somehow manifest another round, and the bear's distance closes from fifty meters to thirty in the blink of an eye. Thirty to twenty. Twenty to fifteen.
Lucius hurls Cedric to the ground and sprints past him toward the bear.
"COME AND FUCKING GET ME!" he screams, voice breaking as he raises his rifle. He fires. Thunderous crash. Spray of dirt off the ground two meters from the bear's feet. A clear miss. His hand blurs into his jacket pocket, retrieves two rounds and brings them to his rifle, but he fumbles and deflects both off the receiver. They fall to the ground at his feet.
"FUCK YOU!" Lucius screams, and as the bear closes in, mere feet away now, he runs to meet it with his rifle couched like a spear.
He thrusts the gun forward and smashes its muzzle through the bear's widening jaws. Lena sees it all with crystalline clarity. Her vision is sharp like it's never been before, the world moving slowly, all-too-slowly like a diorama of reality. She sees that the blow is a good one. Shatters teeth in a bloody spray. She sees that it doesn't deter the bear in the slightest. She sees Lucius go down, barreled under the bear's body as it tramples its full weight over him.
And she sees her rifle, motionless in her hands.
Rei's voice.
"My mom once told me that you can't go into combat without giving something up. The rush of it pulls your whole mind in on itself - if a person can normally focus on seven things at once, then a person in combat can focus on two, maybe three. So if you want to be able to operate a gun, a Feldress, or even a knife in the heat of things, you have to throw something else away to make room.
"Me? To be honest, I couldn't put it into words as clear as all that - my mother was a lot smarter than any of us. Even my father, and he was a scientist. But I guess what I give up is well… my thoughts. I can't think when I'm fighting. It doesn't just slow me down, it freezes me up altogether. So I don't think at all. I just act."
And with the echo of his voice, consciousness ceases. Ego ceases. Not just thought and not sensation, but everything that Vladilena Milize is and ever was, personality and perspective, memories and emotions are erased in the blink of an eye.
She is born again as two hands in motion.
Aim and fire. These arms are not strong, and this rifle is not light. These hands do not tremble, but their stillness will not last for more than one shot. Even a purely mechanical system has its limits, and this one is frail against the force of recoil. But in any case, there is only one shot left, so the point is moot.
Aim and fire. One shot is all she needs.
She snaps the trigger and the gun roars. Force slams into her shoulder and she stumbles back. The muzzle flash burns a purple-black hole in her vision. A fleck of unburnt powder whips her cheek. She doesn't see the bear die, lanced through the same wound Cedric had opened, ripping its brain into meaty scramble spraying in stream. She doesn't hear it die either, not through the ringing in her ears, not its final guttural shriek or the yawning silence after. But she knows it all the same. Knows it by instinct.
Lena steadies her feet on the ground. She regards the rifle in her hands, and it seems suddenly all to heavy to hold, so she lowers it to the grass and leaves it there. She turns slowly to look at the bear. Then looks down, slowly still beneath it, where Lucius should be, if he's not dead and mangled.
"—you, fucking—" a voice seethes. A muffled voice full of curses. Lena is relieved. "—pile of lard and—"
A head full of tawny, matted silver hair wriggles its way out from under the bear's corpse. Lucius' face is soaked in blood, as are his chest and arms and legs when he manages to get those free too. At first Lena is worried he's been injured. Then she sees that none of the blood is his own, and it's stained thickest down his right arm and at the knife in his hand, the steel painted completely crimson. Lucius stands to his feet and stretches. Then stabs the bear again for good measure.
"You know what," he says, and turns to Lena and Cedric wearing a grin that's downright feral. "I guess my brother wasn't lying about the military after all." He gestures at the corpse and the blood plastered into his clothes.
"But forget parties. This is where the real fun is at."
And now Lena's worried again.
—
July 26th
Lena found herself thinking about her friends.
What was Rei up to, she wondered. Had he ever managed to find a way to hijack the fiber-optic relays like he wanted to? He never said as much, but a month had passed since they last spoke, and any number of things could have happened. She wondered if he and Alice were still fighting. Lena hoped they weren't. Kaie once confided that even though it was annoying to watch those two dance around each other like school-kids who didn't even knew what love meant, they really did care a lot about each other. And Lena thought they'd look cute together.
"Clear arms!" the Drill Sergeant barked.
They were on the range for rifle qualifications. Lena did poorly, of course. She always did, because even if she could get the first shot dead on the bullseye at fifty yards, shots two-through-twenty were lucky to even hit the target at all. She hoped to get stronger as she grew. It wasn't her plan to get stuck into battle with a rifle, and that was unlikely anyway, the Gran Mur being what it was, but still. She didn't like being a liability just as a matter of principle.
She racked the bolt and caught the bullet as it ejected out the chamber. She dropped her magazine and held her rifle pointing down, joining the rest of the line as they gathered before the Sergeant. Their ranks were even fewer now. Their class had started at thirty-six, and now they were thirteen.
All their losses were from expulsion. Nobody had died, despite Annette's warnings about Iron Mike's negligence. Not even during SERE training - as it happened, it had been a bald-faced lie when they were told there were no tracking devices put on them. Those who had been on the verge of death, from injury or exhaustion or dehydration, were quietly recovered and brought back to base. And expelled from the program after they recuperated.
Someone could have died though, which confused Lena somewhat. That bear could easily have ripped apart all three of them if they hadn't been able to kill it. She wondered about that. Cedric did too. He said there weren't any wild bears behind the Gran Mur. None at all - just a handful kept in captivity in case some noble wanted to go on a hunt. So why had that one been there?
She was unable to find an answer. She wouldn't until about a year later.
"Private Milize, present your rifle," Iron Mike barked. Lena did so willingly enough. The Drill Sergeant took her gun and inspected the safety, which had been engaged, and the magazine well, which was naturally empty.
He racked the bolt and a round flew out.
Lena watched in horror as it spiraled through the air, struck the yellow dirt and rolled across it, gleaming in the sun.
"Well, would you look at that?" the Sergeant said harshly. "Private, why don't you tell me what the flying fuck just came out of your gun?"
She turned slowly from the bullet and up to the face of Iron Mike, standing as high above her as always, a severe frown set so firmly in his face it might well have been carved there.
"A… bullet, sir," she said haltingly, slowly to keep the tremble from coming through. She knew what this mistake meant. It was always two strikes for any negligence related to a firearm. And she had two already.
There was no use in crying, no matter how desperately she wanted to.
"Get the fuck out of my army, Milize."
"Yes sir."
She snapped off a final salute. Took a step forward from the line, then a turn, facing back toward the barracks.
"Might as well just take me out too, then," said another recruit from down the rank. Lena pivoted back sharply. It was Lucius, also one step ahead of the line, his shoulder-length hair now knot-free, clean and shining in the sun. He wore a smirk. "If the Princess can't make it, nobody can," he said.
"Then I get to cut two worthless shits from my ranks," Iron Mike said. "Good."
"W-well then I'm going too," said another. Cedric.
For a moment Lena was shocked speechless. She shook it off.
"Stop it! Both of you!" she turned to the Drill Sergeant. "They don't mean it sir, they're… they're being stupid! You're being stupid," she said, looking sharply at them both. "What are you doing? Don't throw away your future for me! It was my mistake!"
"I'm only here in the first place because you covered for mine," Cedric said, stubborn for the first time. "Ma would be cross with me if I just let that stand."
"And unfortunately you saved my life," Lucius added. "Which means I have a debt to pay."
"And you think getting yourselves expelled is going to do that? You idiots!"
Cedric looked away, scratching at his temple.
"Well, it means you'll be less lonely as you leave, right?" Lucius grinned. "I think that's a start."
There was a moment's silence, a tension in the air like building electricity. Then a chorus rose. Another recruit stepped forward. A girl a little older than Lena but a little younger than the others, with her silver-hair cut and styled in a short ponytail. Private Emily Caritas, Lena remembered.
"I share in what Du Frencia said. If a prodigy like Milize can't make it under your tutelage, then no one can." She shot a glare that could have frozen magma up at the bedrock of Iron Mike's face. "I'd advise you reflect on that, Drill Sergeant."
Another stepped forward.
"You know what? I actually liked training under you, Sergeant. You drive us hard, yeah. You're an asshole, yeah. But I thought you were doing it for a purpose. Weeding out the week and toughening the strong. But you know what? If you're cutting the Princess of all people on a single mistake like that, then I guess I was wrong."
And another.
"Milize is the best of us, sir. I don't like saying it. Nobody wants to admit they're gettin' beat by a girl three years younger, but it's the damn truth. You talk about only lettin' the worthy into your army, then you pull shit like this. You don't actually care about this military, do you? You just like bullying kids who won't fight back. Well I'm done. We're all done."
It went on for awhile, and the Sergeant took it all with an unflinching expression, eyes glaring like coals between those who spoke. But he didn't call for silence. He just listened, and waited until it ended.
And when it did he crossed his arms, took a step back and regarded the thirteen of them with a peculiar expression none of them had seen before. Some quirk of the lips that wasn't quite a smile but nowhere near a frown either. A kind of softness in the titanium white of his eyes, an easing of the lines around his mouth.
It was pride.
"Hmph."
He held up Lena's gun in the massive orb of his fist, making the high-caliber battle-rifle look like a toy in his hand. He held it out toward her until she reached cautiously and took it. He waited until she'd settled into stance and stepped back into the line, muzzle pointed at the ground.
"Took you maggots a little while," he said, crossing his hands behind his back, planting his massive trunk-like legs until they were square with his shoulders. "But I think you might just have managed to grow a little esprit de corps."
He flashed a grin, showing two rows of sharp teeth, the bottom of which was pure, shining steel. It was terrifying.
"Congratulations. That means I can start you on some real training."
—
September 5th
When Lena left the program, she came away with changes. One was a complete education in combat on the ground level, which would in time lend itself to a master's understanding of warfare on both the tactical and strategic theater. Another was a layer of thin but strong muscle across her arms and legs, allowing her to finally aim her rifle for more than one shot a time, and carry it properly on her back as a soldier should.
But most important to her, and most noticeable to everyone who would come to know her, was the new, unshakable confidence she carried. The kind that could only come from gaining twelve lifelong friends that believed in you and relied on you, and in whom you could do the same.
She practically skipped her way home, surprised and overjoyed to find a clear sky overhead. She swept into her room and greeted her mother with effusive joy, smiling all the wider when it was returned, with a tight hug and a barrage of kisses and endless repetitions from the both of them of how glad they were to see each other again. She danced up the steps to her bedroom and didn't stop grinning as she picked up her Para-RAID. She turned it on for the first time in three months and waited for a connection.
And when one was made, her grin died a ragged death.
".:Lena, thank God:." Rei said. The naked relief in his voice gave cause for fear, like a sickly-sweet flower taking root in the pit of her stomach. ".:I need your help:."
Sorry for the length! .
Over 12 thousand words spent on indulging in my hobbies. If you couldn't tell by now, I'm a major-league outdoors/survival/hunting kinda guy, so I had a lot of fun with this chapter, even though I feel markedly guilty for spending so many words on it. I hope it was fun to read at least! Next chapter is set in the present day, and will finally answer some long-standing questions, so do look forward to Saturday. Or don't. whatever floats your boat i guess.
- Verbosity