Max
Faint purple bled into gray on the eastern horizon. The air was cold enough to bite. The track was a wide oval of packed dirt, and by the time Bryn and I hit the first stretch, a dozen cadets were already on it.
Our boots struck the ground like rain on stone. Our breath fogged in pale columns. The fortress walls rose on three sides, banners bearing Zodiac signs slack in the still air.
Bryn kept up with me through the first two laps by sheer stubbornness, her breath coming in measured pulls. By the third, the gap between us opened, not because she slowed, but because I was getting faster. Stronger. Something had shifted in me since I returned from the outpost.
Cadets shot looks at me as I passed them. The ones already ahead glanced back over their shoulders, as if they could sense me coming, as if my presence unsettled them, until I passed them too.
I caught up with Bryn on the fifth lap and slowed to match her pace. We swung into the less crowded outer lane.
“I feel like we’re drifting apart, Max,” she said, breathing through her mouth.
“We’re still running side by side.”
“You know what I mean.” She cut me a look. “You’re no longer the lowest cadet. Not like me.”
“Look at my fatigues.” I gestured at the plain gray-and-slate. “I’m exactly where you are.”
“You wear the same uniform,” she said, “but you’ve been lifted above our station. The heirs hand-picked you for a deployment every cadet here would kill for. And it isn’t just that you’re good with metal. They want you by their side.”
I’d told Bryn about Coldiron. Classified, technically. I hadn’t told her everything. I was a soldier, obeying orders and loyal to the heirs, but I trusted her. Bryn knew how to carry a secret. She only talked freely about things that didn’t matter.
“Rank won’t define us, and it won’t separate us,” I said. “You’re my friend. We aren’t drifting anywhere. You got me?”
She nodded, loyalty clear in her eyes. “We aren’t drifting anywhere. I got you.”
The mess hall was a long concrete building with long timber tables, and the ambient noise hit you like a wall when you pushed through the doors—thousands of cadets eating, talking, the clatter of trays and cutlery bouncing off hard surfaces.
It smelled of bread, fried egg, cheap coffee, and the human-and-sweat baseline of a military installation that never fully aired out.
Every head turned when I walked in.
The whole room performed a slow, rolling pivot, table by table, like a wave moving outward from the door. Conversations stuttered. Forks stopped halfway to mouths. Someone dropped a cup.
I kept my face blank and went to the line.
Overnight, apparently, I had become interesting.
A first-year cadet who’d deployed with the heirs to a combat zone, come back with a Spartan company in a vampire prince’s car.
Rumor had a faster metabolism than any official dispatch, and I knew exactly what version of events was circulating by the way people looked at me—half hostile, half unable to stop looking.
I took my tray. The serving woman, who had iron-gray hair, loaded my plate without being asked. Oatmeal, two egg-and-cheese sandwiches, potatoes. Then she reached back and added another scoop of potatoes.
I nodded my thanks.
“Excuse me.” The male cadet in front of me hadn’t moved on. He turned back to the counter, pointing at my plate. “I didn’t get an extra helping.”
The serving woman looked at him with a bulldog expression. “Move along, or you’ll get no potatoes next time.”
He shook his head and went away.
Bryn appeared at my elbow, looking at my tray with visible longing. She hadn’t gotten the extra scoop.
“I’ll share,” I said.
“Nah.” She straightened. “You’re double my size. You need it.”
“That’s not flattering to any woman.”
“It’s math, Max.” She smirked.
We found a table near the wall, away from the center of the room. It didn’t help. The stares followed me.
“It’s not over,” Bryn said, setting her fork down. “Last night, I mean. Delia’s crowd isn’t going to let it go.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“They won’t come at you with fist fights the way Slade and Kevin did.” She picked her fork back up. “They’ll stab you in the back every chance they get. They’ll work the rumors. The whispers. Chip at your credibility from a distance where no one can prove anything, until they ruin you.”
I ate a bite of sandwich and considered this.
In the mine, overseers controlled your water ration, your shift placement, who got the safest shafts and who got sent to the cursed deep, where I’d always volunteered to be.
Delia didn’t have that kind of structural power over me.
But she had social currency, and that was its own kind of leverage.
“I never had much credibility to begin with.” I shrugged. “Let them work.”
Bryn blinked. “You really aren’t concerned?”
“I have more important things to think about.”
Being called a whore and an outcast wasn’t fun, but I didn’t come here for fun. And compared to a decade underground—the dust in your lungs, the darkness so complete you lost track of your own hands—this was practically peachy.
“Relax.” I smiled at her. “Let them have the rumor mill. Try the potatoes.”
I spooned some into my mouth and nearly moaned.
A pretty cadet with a high ponytail cut across the aisle with the practiced confidence of someone used to being looked at. She stopped level with our table and fixed her glare on me.
“Suck a dick, Scarecrow slut!” she shouted, loud enough for half the hall to hear. Loud enough to be a performance.
The mess hall noise dropped. Bryn’s head snapped around, jaw setting.
“I will, babe,” I shouted back. “Exclusive arrangement, though. You aren’t invited.” I picked up my spoon. “Sucks to not make the cut.”
Forks clattered across nearby tables.
The cadet stared at me for two full seconds. Then she turned and left at speed.
The male cadets at the nearest tables erupted. A few women near the back joined in. Bryn sat with her mouth open, blinking at me like I’d just said something in a language she understood but hadn’t expected me to speak.
The male cadets were a different calculation than they’d been before.
Slade and Kevin were gone, and the organized hostility they’d built had no one left to maintain it.
The Sorting had changed things too. I’d walked into dragon fire and come out glowing, the heirs had treated me with open fondness, and I’d deployed with Spartans.
And now that I was outed as a woman, the male population saw me in a different light. Something closer to respect.
You’re desirable to that lot, the demon offered, more so because you’re unattainable.
But women were harder to gauge, probably because we were the same gender.
While Delia held her court, not every female cadet was against me. Some were simply watching, which was fine. I wasn’t collecting allies. I just needed to get through training and get my sister back.
When the laughter subsided, snickers and low talk buzzed in its wake. Something in me recognized the closing window—speak now, or let the factions harden and lose the room entirely.
I pushed my tray back and stood. My height, for once, played in my favor.
“Can we quit this?” I didn’t shout. My voice carried on its own, low and rough, cutting through the ambient noise. “All of it. The staring, the mean commentary, the rumors, and the fucking scoring points off each other.”
The hall hushed.
I swept my gaze across it. Hundreds, thousands of faces, most of them turned toward me now by choice rather than reflex.
“We’re training to be soldiers,” I said.
“One day we’ll be on the same battlefield.
What happens that day, whether we hold or we break, depends on what we’ve built here.
Not our bloodlines. Not who we’ve fucked or haven’t.
Not our past. What we’ve built.” I paused, then let my voice climb.
“We fight together or we fight divided. That’s the simple truth, with consequences that don’t give a fuck about mess hall politics. When we bleed, we all bleed red.”
Several faces turned toward me in surprise. I’d always been a woman of few words and occasional dry humor.
“The federal government is gone. The old system wiped out,” I said. “But we’re still here. Still Americans, most of us, or the children of Americans. That used to mean something—what we owed each other. It still can. We still fight for freedom. Fight for the right side of history.”
I glanced at Delia’s table without stopping on it. “So how about we stop comparing whose tits are prettier or whose dick is bigger and start fighting to keep each other alive?”
A beat.
Applause broke from somewhere, scattered and genuine. A few hoots from the nearer tables. Some booing, predictably, from the quarter of the room that had already made up its mind.
“One last note,” I added. “Good-looking men, princes included, should not get in the way of fighting to live another day.”
More laughter, easier this time. The tension in the room released a notch.
I sat back down.
“Stand on the table next time,” Bryn said.
“Absolutely not.”
“You’d be magnificent.”
“I’d look ridiculous.” I pulled my plate back toward me. “And you know it.”
The mess hall let me eat my breakfast in peace after that. But I knew it wouldn’t last.