[ Marley, Warrior Training Grounds, 854 ]
The candidates were younger than he expected.
That was the thing nobody told you about knowing the future. You could hold every fact in your head, every name, every date, and still be caught off guard by the basic reality of it. Zane had known Reiner Braun was a child. He'd known it intellectually, the way you know that a city is large before you've actually stood in it. But standing at the edge of the training ground and watching a twelve-year-old boy throw himself at a combat drill with the kind of desperate intensity that only comes from having something to prove, that hit different.
Reiner was bigger than the others. Not just tall, but built like someone who'd decided early on that his body was the one thing he could actually control. He trained like he was angry at the ground beneath his feet. Every movement had this furious precision to it, this need to be correct, to be good, to be seen being good.
Zane recognized it immediately.
That's a boy who doesn't believe he deserves to be here, he thought. And he's going to spend the next decade trying to earn something that was never on offer.
He made a note. Not on paper. Just in the part of his mind he'd designated for things that mattered.
"The big one's your favorite already, isn't he."
Zane didn't turn around. He'd heard the footsteps thirty seconds ago, recognized the cadence. Theo Magath walked like a man who'd stopped caring whether people heard him coming.
"Braun," Zane said. "He's going to be a problem."
Magath stopped beside him, arms crossed, watching the drill. "He's the best one out there."
"Yeah," Zane said. "That's the problem."
Magath looked at him sideways. Zane kept his eyes on the training ground.
It wasn't a lie exactly. Reiner was the best one out there. He was also a boy held together with the wrong kind of glue, and the more pressure you put on him the more you'd see the cracks, and by the time anyone noticed the cracks it would already be too late. Zane knew that. He just couldn't say it out loud without explaining how he knew, so instead he filed it under instinct and moved on.
"What about the others," Magath said. It wasn't really a question.
Zane let his gaze move across the field.
Bertholdt Hoover was at the back of the pack, not because he was slow but because he kept leaving space for everyone else. That was the tell. Not the height, not the long limbs he hadn't grown into yet. It was the way he made himself smaller than he was, constantly, like he was apologizing for taking up room. Like he already knew something about himself that he wished he didn't.
Annie Leonhart wasn't participating in the group drill at all. She was off to the side doing footwork alone, precise and repetitive and utterly indifferent to the fact that everyone else was doing something different. One of the instructors had clearly told her to join the group at some point because there was a look on his face like a man who'd given up arguing. Annie's expression had exactly nothing in it.
Zane had read once that the most dangerous people weren't the ones who wanted to hurt you. They were the ones who'd simply stopped seeing you as a variable worth accounting for.
Annie Leonhart at twelve years old looked at the world like it was a problem she'd already solved and found uninteresting.
"Leonhart's going to be your best fighter," Zane said. "Don't try to make her a team player. She isn't one and pushing it will just make her worse."
"And Hoover?"
"Put him with Braun." Zane paused. "They'll stabilize each other. Braun needs someone he can protect, Hoover needs someone loud enough to drown out whatever's going on in his own head. It works."
Magath was quiet for a moment. "You got all that from ten minutes of observation."
"I got all that from watching people my whole life," Zane said. "This is just a faster version."
That was true enough. The other thing, the part where he'd read about these exact children in a story from another world entirely, that part stayed where it was.
Magath grunted. Something that might have been approval. "There's one more you haven't mentioned."
Zane already knew who he meant.
Pieck Finger was sitting on a fence at the far edge of the grounds, eating something out of a cloth wrap, watching the drills with an expression of mild academic interest, like she was observing weather patterns. She hadn't been asked to sit out. She'd just decided to, and apparently nobody had felt strongly enough about it to make it an issue.
"She's the smartest one here," Zane said.
"Smarter than Leonhart?"
"Different kind of smart. Leonhart reads bodies. Finger reads situations." He watched her take another bite of whatever she was eating, eyes still tracking the drills, cataloguing. "She already knows which of those kids are going to wash out. She probably knew ten minutes in."
"How do you know that?"
"Because she stopped watching the good ones and started watching the struggling ones. That's not what you do when you're looking for competition. That's what you do when you're doing math."
Magath was quiet for longer this time.
On the field, Reiner had knocked another boy flat and was already reaching down to help him up, that painful earnest decency that would eventually become the thing that destroyed him. Bertholdt hovered nearby looking relieved that it hadn't been him. Annie did her footwork. Pieck finished her food and folded the cloth wrap neatly and put it in her pocket.
Zane watched all of it and felt something he didn't have a clean word for. Not guilt. Not pity exactly. Something closer to the feeling you got standing at a memorial for something that hadn't happened yet.
These were just kids.
He knew what they were going to become and they were still just kids.
"You'll want to assign me to their unit directly," he said. "Not oversight from a distance. Actual proximity."
"That's not standard."
"No," Zane agreed. "It isn't."
He didn't explain further. Magath, to his credit, didn't push for an explanation he sensed he wasn't going to get.
"I'll consider it," Magath said, which both of them understood meant yes.
He left. Zane stayed.
On the field the drill ended and the candidates broke apart, the easy social sorting that happened automatically between children. Reiner gravitated toward the struggling kids, already playing protector. Bertholdt followed him like a shadow. Annie walked to the water barrel alone and drank and didn't look at anyone.
Pieck looked directly at Zane.
Not a glance. Not the accidental eye contact of someone scanning the area. She looked at him the way you look at something you've already decided is worth understanding, direct and unhurried and completely unintimidated by the fact that he was an adult soldier and she was a twelve-year-old kid sitting on a fence.
Zane looked back.
After a moment she tilted her head very slightly, the way a person does when they've filed something away, then looked back at the field.
He made another note.
Watch that one.
End of Chapter 2
Next Chapter: The Art of Being Forgettable