Julia stayed with her brother for a few more days. Being with him was surprisingly pleasant. They just spent time together, most of the time not even speaking, just enjoying each other's company. Every morning they'd make a point of watching the sunrise together. Just him and her, watching the horizon for a good hour and a half, not talking. What did they have to say to each other? What could they say to each other? Perhaps in a better world they could have compared scars, talked strategy, boasted of great victories. In a perfect world they might have been able to laugh at how similar they'd turned out. Both tough and strong and dominant.
It was not a perfect world, though. It was the world of the Legion. In the Legion's world women weren't allowed to be strong and dominant. Even if her brother didn't treat her like property like he'd been taught she was still expected to be docile and subservient. They followed his schedule, ate what he wanted to eat, slept when he slept. When he convened with Reave she had to sit someplace else and wait patiently for her brother to return. When they went out on the attack she was expected to stay behind and wait.
Julia played along for the most part, willing to play the role of servile maiden for awhile to spend time with her brother, but if no-one was actually watching her she wasn't just going to sit on her hands. She spied on the contubernia's strategy meetings, and when she found out that they were planning an attack against a small group of wastelanders they'd scouted she had to see.
She slipped away from the camp after the Dead Souls had begun their march, and she made it to the location of the wastelanders before they did. She discovered the coordinates given to her brother led to a small ruin, the calcified skeleton of a gas station or maybe the shadow of a country home. It was occupied by a small group, three men and two women. They made no effort to conceal their location, building a campfire out of garbage that left thick black smoke that could be seen for miles around. They had dressed a fresh gecko kill, it's corpse still splayed open on the rocks behind them. They looked to most likely be raiders, at best mercenaries. They wore scraps as armor, leather and twisted metal, gathered and claimed at such different times and from such different sources they had no uniform amongst their own bodies much less their companions. A hardened bunch to be sure, but no more hardened than any other wastelander, and much softer than any of the Legionaries serving under her brother.
The wastelanders anticipated the arrival of the Dead Souls, weapons drawn at the first sign of company. The Dead Souls made no effort to mask their approach, but surprisingly were not approaching with weapons drawn. In fact, after some tense words with a legionary Julia couldn't quite see the men and women lowered their weapons (which ranged from a military pistol to a sharpened stick) and let the Legion approach.
She saw Heart walk towards the apparent leader of the wastelanders, a man wearing a faded baseball cap haloed with barbed wire. Her brother was easily a foot taller than the man in the hat, had nearly twice as much muscle mass, but that was just her brother. He was at least a half-foot taller than his tallest man, taller than most Centurions. If any man in the Legion resembled its bull standard that man was Mortuus Anima. His face was in shadow, the flickering caress of the trash-fire's light alighting only upon his broad chest. Julia couldn't even tell if her brother was armed. Silently his legionaries circled the small party of wastelanders.
In short order the women and the men save the man in the hat were subdued, tackled to the ground by the Dead Souls. The decanus disarmed the man in the hat, batting aside the brandished pistol. He raised his fists to fight the man in the hat, who looked Mortuus over once and decided to turn tail and run. Scratch, the ghoul who harassed her before, sprang out of the darkness, smacking the man in the face with his ropey, emaciated ghoul strength. The man in the hat fell onto has back, his hat flying off his head and coming to rest at Mortuus's feet.
As her brother picked the man up by his shirt and threw him into the fire face-first, Julia once again witnessed a sort of brutality and cruelty that seemed foreign in her brother, only now realizing that the person she saw as her brother existed entirely in her own perception. This was not Aram Heart, she knew now. That person she had known, that child named Aram Heart had been left behind more than a decade ago. This was Mortuus Anima, the Decanus. This was the dead soul, a man whose face now lit by scattered fires was clearly smiling, enjoying himself as he tore a man apart with his bare hands.
Julia had to recalculate. Her capacity to kill the entire Legion squad had been based on a misconception that her brother was always unarmed. She realized as she witnessed him break a man's face unsparingly with his bare fist, then proceed to kill two other men in a similar fashion, that her brother had to always be considered armed, and considerably armed at that. She didn't think she could take her brother in close combat even with her best pistol, much less while flanked by his men. He wasn't necessarily fast, but he was tough, to the point that even when one of his combatants revealed a hidden switchblade and sliced his arm he didn't even flinch. That was the second fight and he killed the third fighter without bandaging his arm. It was unlikely he was on any medication, as per Legion law, and she hadn't seen him take any steroids or numbing agent in their time together. He was just iron-forged.
Her security at the Legion camp was compromised, although she was fairly certain any harm to befall her person would be responded to with excessive force by her girls. She had stopped noticing them in the hills but it was unlikely they had left. In any case if she couldn't do it herself she didn't want it done. She began making plans for her escape.