CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Laundry duty was exactly as glamorous as it sounded.
Olivia spent her days in a sweltering concrete room, feeding sheets into industrial washers, hauling wet fabric into dryers, folding until her fingers cramped.
The food prep was worse—peeling potatoes for five hundred people, scrubbing pots, standing ankle-deep in gray dishwater while soldiers walked past the kitchen windows on their way to training.
She watched them. Every day, she watched.
The elite training yard was visible from the kitchen's back window—a massive dirt field where Vanguard fighters practiced combat drills, weapons forms, and something called "essence manipulation" that involved glowing hands and thrown energy.
The trainees were exactly who you'd expect: tall, muscular, conventionally athletic.
Most were awakened. The few normals among them moved with the explosive power of Olympic athletes.
None of them looked like Olivia.
"Stop staring," said Dee, her laundry partner. Dee was fifty-three, built like a fire hydrant, with gray-streaked braids and a voice like gravel in a blender. "They don't want you. Don't waste your wanting on them."
"I'm not wasting anything. I'm observing."
"Observing, my ass. You're plotting. I can smell it." Dee shoved another load of sheets into a washer. "I was a prison guard for twenty years, kid. I know plotting when I see it."
Olivia didn't deny it. "They rejected me without seeing what I can actually do."
"And what can you actually do?"
"Fight. Better than most of them, probably."
Dee studied her with sharp brown eyes. "Then prove it. Not to them—to you."
"How? They won't let me near the training yard."
"There's more than one way to train, short stuff."
That night, instead of collapsing onto her cot, Olivia explored the compound. She found an abandoned storage shed behind the motor pool—empty, dusty, roughly the size of Ironhaven's combat area. Perfect.
She trained alone. Shadow boxing in the dark.
Stretching until her muscles sang. Running through every drill Lucas had ever taught her, every combination, every throw, every disarm.
She used a broken broom handle as a staff, practicing the sinawali patterns until her forearms burned.
She threw herself into wall walks and handstands, using the shed's corrugated metal walls.
It wasn't enough. She needed a partner. She needed Lucas.
But Lucas was busy. His new role as Vanguard commander consumed him—meetings, patrols, combat operations beyond the walls.
She saw him in passing, always surrounded by soldiers, always moving toward the next crisis.
Their eyes met once across the compound.
He started toward her. A captain intercepted him with an urgent report. The moment shattered.
Three weeks passed. Olivia grew stronger in the dark, alone, invisible. She also grew hungrier—not for food, but for purpose. For validation. For the chance she'd been denied.
She learned the compound's rhythms. When the guards changed shifts. Which fences had blind spots. Where the elite training facility was located—the converted armoury building where the real fighters honed their skills.
And she learned about the missions.
Vanguard teams went beyond the walls daily—scavenging runs, rescue operations, reconnaissance.
They came back with supplies, with survivors, with intelligence about the creatures and the changing world.
They also came back with casualties. The mortality rate for non-awakened fighters was sixty percent.
"They're throwing normal people into the meat grinder," Gloria told her one evening. They'd managed to meet in the chow line, trading gossip like old times. "The awakened lead, but they use normals as cannon fodder. It's disgusting."
"And nobody protests?"
"Who would listen?" Gloria's kids were with her, twin girls of eight who clutched their mother's legs and stared at Olivia with big eyes. "The Vanguard saved us. Gave us walls, food, protection. People are grateful. They don't ask questions."
"I'm asking questions."
"I know. That's what worries me."
That night, Olivia couldn't sleep. She lay on her cot, listening to the snores of thirty other women, feeling the compound's walls press closer with every breath.
She was not a laundry girl. She was not a potato peeler. She was Olivia Thornwood, student of Lucas Mercer, disciple of Valeria Vance, survivor of the end of the world.
And she was done waiting for permission.