My mouth twisted. “I’m sure you can teach me all about swallowing. And I’m not bitter.”
“I’ve known you since you shat your swaddling every day, and I can see the quirk of your mouth from here.”
I forced my lips flat. What did Theo know? I angled my face away, toward a different part of the plains.
He let out a soft chuckle, carried to me on the air. “Youand I both know you can’t see a damned thing out there, no matter which way you turn your flaxen head.”
I didn’t respond.
“Come on, Eurydice,” Theo said. “That was hardly a hazing. Here’s your real hazing: ‘I’m just like you, but I am not you. What am I?’”
Another of Theo’s riddles. I took on a prim stance, eyes still elsewhere, and ignored it. I’d never solve them before he told me the answer. “Hazing’s illegal in the guard.”
He chuffed. “So’s sneaking up to the wall when you’re not even in the guard.”
I sighed, and it was a relief to turn my eyes on him. Finally, something material to study—the freckled face of the only boy who didn’t hate me for how small I was. And now here I was, bedecked and standing taller than him.
My gaze must have been imperious, because he revealed his crooked smile. “Nobody stands all night.”
“Surely the regiment commander will come through later.”
“Surely,” Theo said. “And when he does, we whistle.” At that, he pressed his lips together and let out a soft three-note sound.
My mouth twisted again. “And he hasn’t caught on to that?”
“We stay ahead of him down the line. The wind takes it.”
“And how long has this been a thing?”
He shrugged. “I was told about it my first night. Not like this is an honor post, Eury.”
After those three months of training, all the grueling mornings and hours in the yard and that graduation ceremony where we were told the importance of our work as guard, and this was what it came to.
My first night, and I was invited to sit on my ass and dangle my legs off the wall.
“I don’t care what kind of post it is,” I said, facing forward. My hands went to the small of my back, clasping there in the position of attention. “You do as you like, Theo.”
“Well, gods spare your legs. It’s all pomp, anyway,” he said. “We’ve got no vision past the backs of our outstretched hands. What are we going to see?”
He was right. But that didn’t mean I had to answer.
“Nothing,” he went on. “We’ll see nothing, and that’s all the kingdom wants. They want their walls, their vigilant guard, and their torchlight. Keeps them sleeping well.”
I snorted. “It’s been a good first year for you in the ranks, has it?”
“You get used to a numb ass.” He let out a one-note laugh. “And sometimes one of the boys sneaks around a flask.”
The boys. Yes, that was right: every one of the guard to my left and right was a boy between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. Girls didn’t join the guard; at least, not in the past twenty years. Not unless you were weighted down by need.
Everyone knew I had something to prove. I could protect this kingdom—the land of acid storms; the last bastion of humans—as well as any boy. Better, even. Boys were born into the expectation of strength, of power. They were gifted it before they even knew what a gift was—the promise of it, at least.
And girls…
Girls had to stand all night if they wanted to prove anything at all. They could never sit, not for a moment.
So, in the silence that fell, I stood for two more hours.
“You’re really going to stand all night?” Theo called out after the fourth hour. “It must get uncomfortable jutting your chin out so far.”
