Annie lashes out, and in a second she has me pressed against the tree, pulled around to the trunk's other side. It's certainly not a lot of privacy; anyone who looked at an angle would see the two women in the shade. When my back slams against the wood, a cough rumbles up from my chest and sputters out in pathetic ripples.
"What did you say?"
I wrestle my coughs under control, clearing my throat and trying not to look too wimpy with Annie's cold stare and firm hands pressed against my collar. "I won't repeat myself. Not here."
She clenches tighter, fistfuls of the fabric squeezing my throat. "I could kill you."
"You could," I acknowledge, even though it shames me to admit it. "But it wouldn't do you any good."
"Neither does leaving you alive." Her glare seems so sharp, so pointed and lethal. I've no doubt that if I so much as inhale in a way that doesn't please her, she won't hesitate to snap my neck. "Tell me what you know."
I press my lips together. "I know enough."
She snarls, throttling me. My head smacks against the trunk hard enough to make me wince. "Tell. Me." My hands fumble up, trying to get her to stop squeezing the collar of my shirt. My skull aches. My neck feels tight, constrained.
I shift my fingers. Tap her ring with my mother's, letting the metal clank against metal. Gold and silver. "I know what this does. What you do." Annie's fingers twitch. For a second it seems almost like she'll release me, but her scowl deepens and she shakes me again, harder this time. My head strikes against a particularly sharp point in the trunk and I gasp out.
Annie leans closer, breath seething and hot against my face. "Then you know what I am capable of. I will not ask again. Tell me everything you know, or I will gut you here."
I drop my hands. "This is not the place to talk about your homeland." A peculiar whim strikes me, and in a sudden flare of inspiration, I add, "our homeland." The look on Annie's face just then is priceless: disbelief, suspicion, shock and distrust. To think that such small words could have such a poignant effect on her almost makes me want to laugh. I feel sap slip down from my scalp onto the back of my neck and grimace instead. "We are not from here. Is it so wrong of me to seek the company of the only woman here who can understand me? We do not need to be at odds with each other."
Technically, I left my homeland by dying. But Annie doesn't need to know that. The truth in my words seems to be enough to give her pause for now, at least. Slowly, her hands uncurl from my collar. She steps back, one finger idly toying with her ring. The implications are clear enough. "How."
"How, what?"
"How did you know."
I swallow. To make myself seem less threatening, I slowly adjust to sit against the tree, ignoring the hammering of my heart. At least she hasn't killed me yet. Can that be considered progress? Or are my standards really that low? I play for the humble fan, lightly shrugging. "Back home, everyone knew who the warrior-candidates were." Another stroke of genius falls, like a guillotine blade dropping, and I remember the flashback we see later in the show. I remember a younger Reiner waving at his mother in a festive crowd. I look Annie dead in the eyes, smiling sheepishly. "I watched the parade. Watched the four of you wave down at us from the carriage."
Suddenly Annie's sharp again, arms crossed over her chest as she peers down the length of her nose at me. I realize that I've entered into unfamiliar territory by mentioning the other warriors. Fuck; what was the name of the other guy? I can't recall. Nervous sweat blisters up on my brow. I turn my head around, looking back to where the cabins are. Foolish, foolish girl, charging into this conversation without a decent plan. The only thing I can do at this point is to go with it. "I see that Bertholdt and Reiner are with you, but where's…"
"Gone." Ice drops down in barbed icicles between the two of us, punctuating the finality of her words. I turn back to Annie, but now she's the one looking off into the distance. Reflective, but not entirely lost. "That does not explain why you're here."
Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. When she turns back to me, all thoughts leave my head. Why would I be here? I'm sickly, alone, enlisted. Why on earth would Marley send a weakling like me to supervise the progress of this mission? Simple answer: they wouldn't. Why, then, would I be here? People don't magically swim across the ocean to get to Eldia. People don't joyride here for fun.
I realize that I've stayed silent for too long. Annie senses the hesitation like a shark finding blood in the water and begins to swim towards her prey. "Answer me." In one swift move she yanks me up to my feet, where I stumble and sway, weirdly lightheaded. My head pulses and idly I put a hand to my nape to touch the sap I felt there earlier–only my hand slips over it like water, and when I pull it back to see why, my fingers return raspberry-red. The two of us stare down at the stain for a moment, neither moving, neither saying anything. Suddenly my head hurts a lot.
Annie huffs and pushes away from me, turning and heading out of the treeline.
"We're not done with this," she promises, and I dread the moment she decides to revisit this conversation.
But for now, I've bought myself some time to think of a decent reason why someone like me would be here, an ocean away from Marley without any qualities to pass me off as a warrior-candidate. And more than that, I've slipped past the boundaries Annie put up. I've introduced myself as someone not entirely dissimilar to her. Someone she could use later on. Not a warrior, no, but a Marleyan nonetheless. In the years that the warriors will spend on this island, the weight of their secrecy will drain on them. To have even one other person with which they can be more honest is a boon they'll soon learn to appreciate more.
Or maybe she'll slit my throat in my sleep. Who knows?
In any case, it won't do me any good to bleed out the back of my head while Annie decides what to do with her not-so-innocent bunkmate. I wobble off towards the infirmary, one hand pressing against the back of my head and the other swinging idly at my side. I'm exhausted from the running I did earlier, weary from the weight of my conversation with Annie, and irritated about the injury I sustained.
I walk through the fall gravel pathways like memories, reflecting once again on everything that led me to get here. Think, Aliva. What's your next move? Use that brain of yours and get yourself into the next stage of the plot. I pass signs with weird squiggly lines, stuff that I haven't been able to read a lick of since I first stumbled into this world. I stare each sign down, like if I look at it long enough it'll give up and translate itself into something legible. But it doesn't. The words are every bit as inaccessible as they were to me on the day I waltzed into Shiganshina.
I've hidden my illiteracy well enough; when you're a refugee, you don't need to read to know what a shovel is. When you're a trainee, you don't need to read a chapter aloud in order to balance with the belts. But in the classrooms, if I stop listening for even a second, I'll lose the conversation entirely. There is no reading the words scrawled on the board to get a jist of what we're studying. There is no margin for error. None that I can afford to thrive in.
Again, my objectives swirl around my head. Find good friends; keep them close. Get stronger. Get smarter. Outlast the plot and survive. My head feels dizzy with the weight of it all.
Or maybe I'm actually just dizzy. I double over for a second, wheezing a little as I attempt to control my breath again. I let my eyes close, let focus return to my mind. Maybe it'd be a good idea to stop trying to one-up the plot. Just for a little while. Maybe I should just focus on getting this body up to a level where I won't immediately become titan fodder the second I graduate from the 107th.
"H-hey? You okay?"
I crack my eyes open and stand up a little bit to see Jean and Marco standing in front of me, Marco with kind, worried eyes. "Oh. Yeah, I'm okay. Just a little winded." I go to wave them away, only to forget that the hand I waved with was the one pressed to my head.
"You're bleeding," Jean says, with the kind of dumb obviousness that's half-amusing, half-annoying.
Marco's eyes widen a little. "We should get you to the infirmary. Can you walk?"
"Yeah. That's where I was going, actually."
The two of them share a look. Jean scratches his head and points a thumb over to the other side of camp. "It's uh…not over here."
I squint and frown. "I thought it was." I point at the building behind the two of them, with people in long, pale coats drifting in and out of the door.
Marco frowns. "You mean the officer's quarters?" Yikes.
"I guess I wasn't paying attention," I say, laughing lightly.
Jean gives me a look that says, really? "What, can't you read?"
I purse my lips, shame heating my face, but luckily Marco is already smiling and talking over Jean. "We can take you to the infirmary, if you want. I cut my knee last week, so I know the way."
I nod, letting my eyes drift to the ground. "Thanks."
I follow the two of them, tuning the boys out for the most part as I let them guide me to the infirmary. I don't think my head is bleeding anymore, but I keep a hand against it just to be safe. I nearly failed my biology class, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that head wounds bleed a lot for no reason at all.
I think of my father's blood on the windows of the flipped truck and shiver.
"How'd that happen, anyways?" It's Jean who speaks, eyeing me with feigned disinterest. Typical, from the boy who pretended not to care about Eren's story that first night until he finally had something to say.
"Hit a tree," I say, shrugging.
Marco turns to me, head tilting. "Really?"
"Really," I laugh softly. It's a half-truth–it appears I have a knack for telling those–but there's enough sincerity in there that they don't pester me further.
"Well, you should take it easy from here…I heard a rumor that we're going to be trying out the ODM gear first thing after the winter. Can't have you injured when that happens, otherwise you'll fall behind."
My heart flips in my chest at Marco's words. I look quickly between the boys, nervous for everything his words mean. "You're sure?"
Jean snorts. "Connie heard about it from Sasha, who overheard it from the cooks when she tried to sneak into the back of the mess hall the other day. Said that they were preparing to switch up the meals, start bulking us up for the winter and the equipping we'll do once the snow thaws."
I gulp. That was that, then. I had between now and the end of winter to develop enough control over my body to tolerate the ODM gear. If I couldn't do it–if I wasn't ready–then I'd be cast off to a settlement.
Regret slipped into my skin like air, kissing goosebumps of apprehension to life against my forearms. I shouldn't have pulled what I did with Annie earlier; no, I should've bided my time and waited until next year to bring it up. Now I'll have to worry about her pushing me off a mountain during the winter training when the only thing I should be focusing on is getting ready for the spring.
I hardly notice when Marco and Jean deposit me at the doorstep of the infirmary. I slip numbly inside, absently fingering my necklace while my head gets washed and bandaged. My fingers clench tightly around the chain and for a second all I can think about is those words Aliva's father gave me, back when I first met him. I think of the way he dropped the chain in my awaiting palms.
I wonder how he died. Or did he survive, somehow, and live out his life as a refugee without ever once running into his wife or his daughter?
How would he feel about knowing that his wife got drafted? That she kissed her daughter's brow, her tear-stained cheeks, and gave her wedding band to her before reporting for duty?
In one hand, the father's locket. In one, the mother's ring.
"Excuse me." The man tying off my bandages stops for a second, as if surprised to even hear me speak.
"Yes?"
"Do you have Antaneva?"
He blinks slowly for a second, processing the name of the drug that Armin slipped to me earlier today. "...No. Not on hand." He eyes me for a second. "It's not something a trainee should need."
I think of that whitish-purple drug swirling around in the vial. The drops, the aftertaste that pulls me back to summer skies and ripe green olives.
I close my eyes. Blearily open them.
"And if a trainee did need it?"
I watch him set the scissors down, the extra bandages next to the thread. His gloves are red. "We don't order in specialty medicine for trainees." Something in his voice deflates my drive, upends my hope. Yet he does not stop speaking. "We can only pull shipments for the officers."
I am about to do something stupid. Something reckless. "I've come here per an officer's request. He does not want to be seen here personally. But he would appreciate it if you fetched this medicine for him…" My fingers clench against the chain for a split second before I unclasp the locket and hold it out to him. "...quietly."
For a terrible moment, the man hesitates. And then he accepts the bribe and tucks it away. "Tell him that I'll have it in two weeks. Come back and ask for Johan."
I nod. "I'll let him know."