“Come on, rise and shine,” Bryn said, grabbing the frame of my bunk and giving it a shake. “When I missed you at the party, I came back to find you. You’re not wallowing up here. Feeling sorry for yourself doesn’t suit you.” She pointed at me. “You’re officially a cadet private. Yeah, it wasn’t the entrance you pictured, but I’d die for that kind of glorious reveal. So get your ass down here. We’re getting a drink. You’re going to celebrate like there’s no tomorrow. Wear your sisterhood like a badge of honor. And if any asshole tries to give you grief, you’vegot me at your six.” She grinned. “Let’s take on the world.”
I had never run from a fight. But this was a different kind of battle than what I was used to—no fists, no weapons, just the weight of a thousand stares and the wreckage of a twenty-year disguise. Still, I wasn’t going to back down.
“What should I wear?” I eyed her uniform.
“Your best uniform.”
“They all look the same. I have three sets.” I paused. “Two sets. The dragon fire burned the third.”
“Then wear one of the two. Easy. Go change.”
I dropped from the top bunk and pulled a uniform from the trunk.
“You can just change right here,” she said. “No one’s around. I’ll wait at my bunk. We’re in the same barracks now. Woot!”
“I’ll change in the bathroom.”
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. “No soldier’s shy about nudity. Now that you’re officially a woman, you can join us in the shower hall.” Her eyes widened. “Wait—where did you shower before? You definitely never showered with those dicks.”
“Uh. Somewhere else.” I darted out of the barracks with the uniform in my hand.
I changed fast, laced my boots tight, and returned. Bryn was waiting by the door, already bouncing on her heels.
She led the way toward the soldiers’ hub, the place where the entire base went to celebrate or forget.
Dustyard,the sprawling camp town a mile and a half outside the fortress walls, was a vast village unto itself.
It spread along the south road in a grid of timber-frame buildings, canvas-roofed market stalls, and repurposed shipping containers converted into shops, eateries, and bars. Stormglass lanterns hung from poles at every intersection, casting light across packed-dirt streets. After the Q-bomb rendered technology useless and razed skyscrapers, camp towns like this rose up in their place, especially around military bases.
Bryn said that the fighting rings, gambling joints, and pleasure district that was marked by rows of red lanterns were the town’s most steady business. She confessed that she’d visited the pleasure parlor that promised happy endings quite a few times. Well, I didn’t judge. We all had needs.
Cadets, soldiers, and officers poured through the streets, blowing off steam between deployments. The officers’ haunts sat on the north end, cleaner, quieter, separated by an unspoken line that rank drew in the dirt. The enlisted side was louder, dirtier, and alive with the desperate energy of people who knew tomorrow might kill them.
“This is what’s left of civilization,” Bryn said as we walked, her boots crunching gravel. “We inherited a broken world.”
“It’s still better than the mines.” I stepped over a drainage ditch. “The world was broken since day one anyway.”
“Are you referring to the Adam and Evie story?”
“Adam and Eve,” I corrected.
“Yup. Broken since day one.” She warmed to the subject. “Historians blamed the first woman for all of it. Come on. When the first real test came, it was the man’s weak knees that buckled. Adam, the first man, threw the woman who’d built a life beside him under the wagon. ‘The woman you made for me to sleep with gave me the fruit,’ he told God when he was confronted. Pointing the finger when he should’ve manned up. And every man since has followed that playbook, blaming women. Why the fuck not? Kingdoms didn’t fall because of women. They fell because it was time, because of men’s greed and stupidity.” She kicked a rock. “And what burns me most is that half the time, it’s other women helping to hold the rest of us down.”
She talked a lot.
“People suck, all right,” I said, just to let her know she wasn’t alone in this.
At some point, we moved from the subject of humanity—good or bad—to religion. And went straight for the throat of the devil. He wouldn’t hear us anyway.
“In Genesis, it’s a serpent that tempts Eve in the garden. Is the snake Lucifer? The scripture never confirms they’re the same being.”
“The devil has many names and wears many faces,” Bryn said, as if she were a demonology expert. “And I’m one hundred percent sure that the White Witch is the antichrist.”
It was a luxury, this—having someone to talk philosophy and history with, even though I knew we both hadit wrong. To pick apart the world’s wreckage while walking through it. I’d never had this in the mine.
A burst of laughter detonated inside my skull.
Humans talk about Lucifer Morningstar like he’s a footnote. A cautionary tale for children.The demon huffed. I couldn’t even prevent it from hitching a ride on my first night out with a friend.You should know better, Max. Do you know who your real daddy is? Ask me, and I’ll tell.
