A shadow fell over me and shifted as the figure crouched. Theo, with a cup of water between his hands. “How many laps was that?”
I shook my head, reaching for the water. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to.
He watched as I drank with barbarous grace, half of it spilling into the dirt. Finally, I said, “Sixty-one.”
“Gods, don’t tell the others that—they’ll hate you more than they already do.”
I stared into the empty cup. “Sixty-one is good?”
“In yourleathers?” He blew out air and rose, extending a hand to me. “It’s a death wish, Eury.”
I let him haul me upright. My legs were boneless. “But not impressive enough to overcome your stupid whistle.”
He chuffed. “It’s the suffering, not the achievement, that overcomes it.” A pause. “And it’s not stupid.”
“Have I suffered enough?”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Maybe for today. The other guard fell asleep two-thirds of the way through your penance, anyway.”
“They’re in their bunks? Thank Arxius.”
“Dead asleep.”
We started walking toward the women’s bunk, once a storehouse, repurposed when I’d joined the guard three months ago. Theo passed me a bundle wrapped in cloth; I unveiled it to find a thick hunk of wheaten bread. “All I could get.”
I started in on the bread at once. Stale, glorious. “This’ll be a problem for you.”
Theo let out a sigh, eyes lifting to the sky. “Yes, well, you really should have joined the bakers and saved me these problems, shouldn’t you?”
The bloody bakers. They wore flour like paint—it never came out of the crevices of their skin. I should know; my mother had once spent a day trying to clean herself of it and not succeeded.
I tore off another oversized chunk. I’d rather die in this yard.
We came to my bunk—twelve beds inside, and only one made up. That was mine. I turned to Theo. “I tried, you know.”
“To bake a round of bread?”
I slugged him in the shoulder. “The whistle. The line.”
“I know you did.”
“Really, Theo. I did.”
He gave a sloppy, one-sided smirk. “You better be a songbird tonight, or you’re fucked.”
The regiment commander’s words echoed:This. This is what keeps humans sane.Pointless ritual. But this was what dictated my life now.
I crossed my fingers in front of my chest. “I swear it.”
Theo turned, headed across the yard. I ate my bread, watching him go. He’d had the same walk his whole life, ever since we were a few hands tall. Ever since that day in the southern district when he’d sunk his teeth into the face of another boy who’d made fun of my last name.
That was Theo. Vicious in his loyalty.
The other boy had grown into a potter who still wore a half-crescent scar on his left cheek. And he never did so much as look at me after that day.
Maybe the regiment commander, that old bastard, was right about sanity. But I still hated him for running me into the dirt.
I passed inside the emptiness of the bunk. As I approached my bed, sunlight from the window glared off a sheen on the sheets. I lifted the top blanket; it came away sodden.
