Allyra brought a shaky hand to her face, holding it over her eyes and forcing herself to relax and breathe. Finally opening her eyes, she found Alex watching her, his gaze intense and focused.
“Hasn’t anyone told you that watching someone sleep is both rude and incredibly creepy?” She grumbled.
He didn’t bother to deign her with a reply, choosing instead to hand her a large metal stick. It was dull and grey and weighed a ton. She made a manful effort to lift it, but given its close resemblance to a tree trunk, it came as a surprise to no one at all when she barely managed to shift it.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” She asked skeptically, “Club the Revenant over the head with it?”
Assuming she could lift it at all, she added silently.
“You’re more likely to trip over a sword than do anything useful with it. Show me you have sufficient discipline with the stick. Show me you won’t hurt yourself with it – then I’ll consider giving you an actual sword.” Alex replied, his voice dripping with acid.
His lack of confidence in her abilities hurt. She narrowed her eyes at him, but forced herself to nod.
“That stick goes everywhere you go. From the minute you wake up to the minute before you fall asleep, I expect it to become your closest companion.”
To carry the stick, she literally had to tie it to herself; using a pair of leather straps she managed to scavenge from the cave, enduring an ear-shattering tantrum from Mandla who firmly believed the contents of the cave to be his sole property.
The weakness in her first design was quickly shown up when Alex attacked her. No swords were necessary. Using no more than his bare hands, he had her pinned to the ground before she could even blink.
“You need to be able to have your weapon at the ready.” He snapped, “What do you think? The Revenants are just going to wait politely as you unstrap it? Try again – and think about what you’re doing!”
She would’ve slapped him if she thought – even for a second – that she might actually make contact. She swallowed her pride and put her efforts into remaking the strapping mechanism.
Several frustrating hours and more than a few failed attempts later – she finally came up with a system that allowed her to extract the stick swiftly and more importantly, with a modicum of grace. Re-strapping it back on was a different story, but she figured that the game was won as long as she could unsheathe it quickly.
This time, when Alex ambushed her, he still had her pinned to the ground in two seconds flat. The only difference was, she’d managed to wrench the stick free.
It was still utterly useless in terms of actually defending herself, but it was apparently enough to earn her quick nod from Alex. A brief moment of pride flared into life within her, it was something she would have to hold onto in the days ahead, because the physical torture was only just starting.
With the stick strapped to her back, Alex had made her run. Everything from short, sharp sprints to marathon defying tests of endurance. Despite pulling the leather straps painfully tightly across her back, the stick still drummed a steady rhythm across her spine and wore painfully through her skin, rubbing it away layer-by-layer as she gritted her teeth and bore the agony stoically.
Any concern Alex had regarding her ability to sleep disappeared as soon as they started training. Every morning began the same way, being unceremoniously woken up by Alex. He was never gentle about it and after acquiring a couple of blooming, purple bruises, she soon learnt to sleep with one eye open and one hand on the stick, ready to defend herself even before her brain cells were fully conscious. The reality was that she was turning into the stereotypical paranoid idiot, sleeping with a gun under her pillow.
Alex had a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of tortuous physical training methods that pushed her beyond any limit she’d ever known or might even have imagined.
Before she met Alex she would’ve said she was above average in terms of fitness. After all, she could easily run a half marathon – in a time quick enough to land her in her high school athletics team, and earn her an athletics scholarship to university. But after Alex, she realized that she was nothing more than a gooey, soft mess – clay that he was trying to mold into something better.
It was never enough. She was never strong enough, fast enough, or accurate enough for him. She leant to recognize the quizzical, disbelieving look on his face whenever she dared ask for a break. It wasn’t long before she stopped asking – he wasn’t above using pain as a teaching tool.
She raced up and down steep hills, with sharp, rocky pebbles loose beneath her feet, trying to trip her up or swallow her whole, biting into her flesh if she ever faltered.
She ran through sand – silkier and finer than any beach sand, with grains so tiny she might as well have been running in syrup. Chased by the knowledge that if she weren’t fast enough or light enough it would drown her as surely as a rogue ocean wave.
She treaded icy water in a deep sinkhole that Alex dumped her in. It was lined with stonewalls that crumbled under her fingertips as she tried to claw her way out. She treaded water until she no longer knew the difference between her tears and the water flung up into her face by her increasingly desperate attempts to keep afloat.
Through it all, she had her constant companion, the stick strapped to her back.
The Between was a wretched training ground and Alex, the sadistic drill sergeant.
Every day, she thought, might be the day that her lungs finally collapsed or her heart exploded. Fire seared through
