Pieck felt the transformation take her the way sleep used to — that falling sensation, the brief mercy of not being herself. Then the pain arrived, as it always did, splitting her spine outward into something that had no business existing in a world with a sky this blue. The Cart Titan rose from the crater she'd made of a ditch outside Fort Slava, mud raining off its pale shoulders, and the gunners atop its back were already screaming coordinates she no longer needed to hear. She knew where the armored column was. She could smell the oil in their engines.
She ran.
Not because she was ordered to. The order had come twelve minutes ago, relayed through Magath's clipped fury over the radio she no longer wore — couldn't, in this form — and she'd internalized it the way she internalized everything now: cleanly, without argument, the way you accept weather. She ran because stopping meant thinking, and thinking on a battlefield meant dying, and Pieck Finger had survived four years of active deployment by being very, very good at not thinking.
The fort's eastern wall came apart under the first volley. She felt the recoil travel through the mounting harness into the muscles along her neck — not pain exactly, more like memory. Like every previous recoil, stacked. The screaming that followed wasn't hers.
It never was.
The boy was in the wrong place.
She saw him in the gap between volleys, in one of those compressed silences that battlefields manufacture — a Marleyan infantry soldier, a kid, barely past the candidate age, pinned behind a collapsed section of wall with a rifle he'd forgotten how to hold. His hands were shaking hard enough that she could see it from forty meters. He was looking directly at her. At the Cart Titan. At whatever she was right now, and his mouth was open in a way that meant he'd already stopped breathing correctly.
Pieck had a decision to make.
She could move left — the efficient line, the one Magath would approve of, the one that kept her gunners in optimal position and took her away from the infantry pocket entirely. The boy would probably be fine. Probably. The word she used most, these days, when she meant I can't know and I won't look.
She moved left.
The second volley fired. The wall the boy was hiding behind disappeared into a column of smoke and shattered stone, and Pieck did not look back, because looking back was not something she did anymore, and this was fine, this was how you survived, this was the job, this was —
The radio crackled from one of her gunners. "Commander Finger. East perimeter is clear. Regroup at Point Galliard?"
"Yes," she said. The word came out steady. It always did.
She wondered, briefly, when that had started.
They gave her three hours between engagements. She spent most of it in her human form, sitting with her back against the Cart Titan's foreleg — she did that sometimes, leaned against herself, found it steadier than walls — and eating a ration tin that tasted like nothing in particular.
Porco found her there, because Porco always found her, like a bad habit the war kept sending her.
"You look terrible," he said, by way of greeting.
"I always look terrible after a battle, Galliard."
"You looked terrible before this one."
She offered him the ration tin. He looked at it the way people look at things they want but won't admit to wanting, then took it. They sat in the specific silence of people who have watched each other survive too many times to bother performing dignity.
"There was a soldier," Pieck said. "East wall pocket. Young."
Porco looked at her. He didn't say and? He knew better.
"I moved left."
A long pause. The distant percussion of artillery somewhere south.
"Were you ordered to?"
"I was ordered to maintain optimal positioning."
"Then you followed orders."
"Yes," she said. "I did."
She waited for him to say then stop thinking about it. He didn't. That was the thing about Porco — he was exactly as smart as he needed to be, exactly when you didn't want him to be.
He handed the tin back. Half-eaten.
"Get some sleep, Finger."
She didn't.
At 0300, a runner came from Commander Magath's tent with new orders. The Mid-East Alliance remnants had been sighted regrouping seven kilometers north. Full engagement at dawn. All Warriors to deploy.
At the bottom of the dispatch, in Magath's handwriting, a single additional line she wasn't supposed to read — she always read everything she wasn't supposed to:
Confirm status of Warrior candidates. Command suspects one has been compromised.
Pieck read the line twice. Then she folded the paper exactly as she'd found it, returned it to the runner, and sat very still in the dark for a long time.
She thought about the boy at the east wall.
She thought about how, in the smoke and the chaos, she hadn't actually seen what happened to him.
She thought: I moved left.