I nearly knocked over a lieutenant when I staggered out of Captain Monroe’s office the next morning.
“Watch yourself, novice.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled automatically. “Sorry, sir.”
I stumbled down the stairs and out onto the street, shielding my eyes to block out the glare of the sun. A Humvee laid on its horn and blew past me. Cormorant had come alive in the hour since I had been inside. Soldiers grunted up on the training field and the air was thick with dust and diesel exhaust.
I fell into a stream of citizens who were bustling from their barracks to mess. They were all talking and laughing. I thought of how each had slept that night in a private room in a real bed.
“Hey, Cal!”
I turned to see James peeling off from a group of friends and rushing toward me.
“Get to mess, James.”
“How was your meeting?”
“Later. I have to get to work.”
“But—”
I whirled on him and shouted, “Just leave me alone!”
James nearly toppled backward. I shoved my way through the rest of the crowds and left him. My head was pounding and it only got worse when I reached the crest of a hill that led down to the kennels. I could already hear the rolling growls of the dogs and the rattling fences down below. The air was thick with the smell of meat, urine, and fur. I stepped into it, pushing through the stink and noise until I found Quarles out back on the edge of the training ground.
“The hell you been?” he croaked.
Quarles was balding and fat, dressed in layers of greasy wool despite the heat and sun. His blotchy skin sported a constant growth of stubble.
“Ops,” I said. I was about to remind him that I’d been with Monroe, but I couldn’t make my lips form the man’s name.
Quarles glanced down at my arm, then up at my face. “Should have figured,” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth like wet gravel. “Only a matter of time before someone decided to put a beating to a kid like you. Useless to me busted.”
“I’m fine. Let’s just get going.”
Quarles stared me down with his rheumy eyes. I was close to insubordination, but sending me off for discipline would mean he’d have to see to the dogs alone that day. Quarles broke and nodded toward the kennels.
“Feed ’em,” he growled. “But half rations! I want those monsters blood hungry this morning.”
The kennel was a narrow concrete-floored room lined with cages, ten on each side. Each steel mesh cage was barely two by three feet with an exit on either side, one leading to the yard and one into the kennel’s central aisle. I heard Quarles out in the yard, setting up the dogs’ practice dummies. I looked up at the pull chains hanging across from the back door. One pull and every cage would open at once, leaving him surrounded by twenty starving animals. Of course, with my luck I’d grab the wrong chain and send them all into the kennel with me.
The ammonia stench of urine clung to my skin as I crossed the kennel and found the bucket of kitchen scraps. It was a gloppy mess of day-old meat, rice, and rotten vegetables. I grabbed a scoop off the shelf and stepped into the aisle, kicking the bucket ahead of me.
The dogs threw themselves against their cages and howled. I just wanted to feed them as fast as possible and get out of there. My arm and my head were screaming. I tossed half rations into each cage, which blunted their frenzy for the ten seconds it took to gobble it all down. I paused at the doorway, looking back at the dogs as they threw their scrawny bodies against the steel, eyes wild, jaws snapping.
Disgusting as Quarles was, Monroe put up with him because he knew how to train an attack dog and how to do it cheaper than any kennel master Cormorant had ever had. Most of the dogs came in as skinny strays, scared and hesitant. They left with a streak of violence running through them like an electrified fence.
I glanced out the door at Quarles, then threw an extra scoop of food into each dog’s cage. They fell to it savagely. I felt heroic for half a second, before I realized that there’s nothing heroic about giving an animal what it deserves.
“What now?” I asked, standing in front of Quarles on the practice field. “Want me to clean the cages?”
The sun was high and Quarles was sweating heavily, his skin blotchier than usual. He sneered at me. “You’d rather muck out cages than watch them tear apart a few dummies. What’s the matter, Roe, feeling a little delicate this morning?”
“They don’t perform well when I’m here,” I said. “You know that.”
Quarles considered a moment. I looked back and saw a company of men kicking up dust as they descended the hill.
“They’re almost here,” I said.
Quarles scooped a dogcatcher pole off the ground and handed it to me. It was a long stick with a sliding handle that tightened a noose at the end.
“Got report of a stray out by the highway. Go see if you can bring him in.”
“With my arm like this?”
A stiff-backed sergeant appeared out of the glare. His men were arranged around him.
“Are you ready, Mr. Quarles?”
Quarles’s own back went straight. “Yes, sir!” he announced, his voice without slur or stutter. “We’re ready whenever you are.”
The sergeant directed his men into the kennel. When he was gone, Quarles looked at me, his hand resting on his belt, between his black club and his revolver.
“Go get that mutt or you’re gonna be down one more arm,” he said. Then he climbed the dusty hill, up to the range.
An abandoned shopping center sat on a little-used highway at the edge of the base. There was an old supermarket. A gas station. A pawnshop. All the windows had been shattered and their signs were bleached to ghostly shades by the relentless Arizona sun.
I stepped onto the cracked parking lot, then circled around to the back, where scrubby weeds gave way to desert. In the far distance were the tops of rock-pile mountains. No dog in sight.
It had taken me nearly an hour to walk to the lot, which meant the soldiers had at least another hour of training to do. There was no way I was going back until they were done. I propped the dogcatcher over my shoulder and walked onto the hard-packed dirt. It was like wading into the ocean, the asphalt shore and sun- bleached bones of the shopping center at my back, an endless plain ahead.
I dropped onto a gravel-and-dirt hill, broiling in my dress uniform and my shined shoes. I hated myself for every second I had spent in the mirror that morning, combing my hair, brushing my clothes. I wanted to look so on Path. The picture of a citizen. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a small metal token. A sunburst bisected by a razor-sharp line. It glowed, growing hot in my palm.
“I have wonderful news,” Monroe had said, standing up behind his great oak desk as I entered. “Quite an honor.”
I stood there, grinning and attentive as a fool, ready for that single word to part his lips. I wanted to hear it so bad I almost swore I had, but then Monroe slid the token across his desk, and the illusion was shattered. I stared at it, my world collapsing down onto that gold pin.
“Generally we make novices become citizens first,” Monroe said. “But your work yesterday was so exemplary, so indicative of a young man on Path that you are excused from that requirement.”
I tore my eyes from the pin. “Sir?”
Monroe beamed, clearly pleased with his own generosity. “You’re our newest recruit, son,” he said. “You are now Private Callum Roe in the Army of the Glorious Path. You’ll be assigned to Sergeant Rhames’s platoon.”
He paused there, waiting for… what? Joy? Thanks? I knew that was what he expected and what I needed to give him — for me, for James — but I couldn’t find it inside me. When I finally managed to speak, my voice was
