Slade's lungs were two sacks of hot glass.
"Recover!" Oliver's voice was hoarse now, the lash of his command reduced to a rasp.
For three hours, Slade had been a machine of ash-wood and iron. The courtyard was a rectangle of packed earth and jagged shale, designed to swallow the warmth of the sun and give nothing back. The training was an industrial process of breaking children and reassembling them into something sharp, into weapons.
He stood in the third row, his legs vibrating with a fatigue so deep it felt like his bones were turning to liquid. The seven-foot spear, which had felt "decent" when he first lifted it, was now an instrument of torture. The ash-wood was unvarnished, the grain raised and thirsty, and it had been drinking the moisture from Slade's palms until the skin began to peel away in long, angry strips.
Slade's world had narrowed to the space between his feet and the boy's back in front of him, the one who had been crying earlier. That boy was stumbling now, his spear-tip dipping toward the mud.
"Keep it up, you little rat!" Oliver snarled, pacing the rows like a wolf in a sheep pen. He carried a shorter, thicker baton of wood, and he wasn't afraid to use it. "If that tip touches the dirt, you start the set over! If you can't hold a spear, you'll be the one the enemy uses for target practice!"
The Phalanx Drill began. They had to hold the spears out at head-height, keeping them perfectly level for minutes at a time. It was a test of the deltoids, a slow-burn torture that turned the muscles into lead.
Slade's vision began to tunnel. The grey walls of the barracks seemed to lean inward, suffocating him.
"Final set!" Oliver roared. "The Gauntlet! If you fall, you don't eat tonight!"
They were forced into a dead run across the jagged shale. It was a chaotic scramble. Spears tangled. Boys collided. Slade pushed through the exhaustion, his feet sliding in the snot-thick mud that formed where the frost had melted.
He lunged at the first hanging sandbag. Crack. The impact sent a fresh wave of agony through his shredded palms. He pivoted, the shale biting into his bare soles, and lunged at the second. Crack.
He was almost at the end. One more target.
But the archaeology of the barracks was a treacherous thing. Slade's foot caught on a pitted stone, a hole worn into the earth by a hundred years of children's footsteps.
The spear-butt kicked back, catching him squarely in the jaw with a sickening clack of bone on wood. He hit the ground hard, his hands scraping across the razor-sharp shale.
Slade lay in the mud, the iron-taste of blood filling his mouth. His jaw throbbed with a white-hot intensity. He looked at his hands — the shale had sliced through the callouses, leaving deep, red gouges that filled with grit. He felt the world spinning, the grey sky and the grey walls blurring into a single, suffocating mess.
"Get up, boy!" Oliver's shadow loomed over him. The baton was raised… a silent threat.
Slade forced his fingers to close around the ash-wood. He pushed himself up, his muscles screaming in a discordant chorus of failure. He wiped a smear of blood and mud from his chin and stumbled back into his spot in the line.
A heavy, oppressive silence fell over the courtyard. Thirty-two boys stood trembling, their spears held like crutches, their breath clouding in the cold air.
Oliver surveyed them with a weary, hollow expression. He didn't look like a soldier; he looked like a man who had seen this same scene played out a thousand times and knew how it ended.
"Training finished," Oliver rasped.
In the bedroom, slouched back on his ergonomic chair, Ahsira let out a long, relieved exhale. The gold banner — TRAINING FINISHED — glowed triumphantly on his monitor.
"Finally," he muttered. He went to reach for his mouse to save, but his hand froze.
Downstairs, a sound.
It wasn't the thump of his mother or the clatter of the vacuum. It was the delicate, crystalline explosion of a glass hitting the floor tiles.
Then, a scream.
It was a high, thin wail that cut through the floorboards like a knife. It was the sound of a child who had been standing perfectly still and had suddenly been struck by an invisible force.
"Hayla?" Ahsira called out. He stood up so quickly his chair flipped backward.
His eyes drifted back to the screen for one heartbeat. Slade was standing in the courtyard, a small, pixelated drop of blood running down his chin.
Ahsira scrambled for the door. And for a second, he could hear nothing else; his heart's booming was furious and incessant, a war drum echoing in the hollow of his chest.
He sprinted towards the door, his own bruised arm throbbing in sympathy with the movement.
There she was. Standing near the corner of the kitchen.
The glass sat in a dozen glittering shards on the tile. Hayla was hunched over, her hands pressed to her face, a jagged sob catching in her throat. His mother was already there, kneeling in the mess, pulling Hayla's hands away to see the damage.
Her small frame vibrating with a rhythmic, silent shudder. "I just... it just slipped."
"It's okay baby, it's just a nick," their mother whispered, though her voice was tight. She reached for a paper towel, dabbing at a small, red line that had opened up along Hayla's chin.
"She was just reaching for a drink and the glass exploded," his mother snapped, looking up at him with eyes full of stress. "Don't just stand there, Ahsira. Get the broom!"
Ahsira nodded numbly.
As he bent down to sweep, his eyes caught the reflection in a large shard of the broken glass. For a split second, the jagged edge of the shard looked exactly like the iron tip of a spear. He blinked, and the shape dissolved back into ordinary debris. He began to sweep, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of the bristles sounding too much like boots on shale.