They arrive at the facility in the very early morning, riding in the open bed of a pickup truck as it rumbles across the desert. The shuttlers have no reason to worry about them jumping out and running for it: they're all under orders to stay put, and as Lion has found, no one can disobey a shulk order. When she tries, her muscles jam up and her brain won’t do it anymore. A physical and mental block. If she keeps pushing her mind starts going haywire and she gets forgetful. The logical thing to do would be to stop pushing, but Lion has never been very logical. Her head’s been hurting a lot these past few days.
Besides, it’s the Tanko Desert. If the stories are true, they wouldn't make it a quarter mile from the protective magic barrier around their truck before getting exploded. So despite the fact that none of them came into the empire's hands particularly obedient, they’ve stayed in the truck bed, watching the dust plume up behind them. Lion has been scanning the edges of what she can see for monster-shaped shadows since they left the city. She hasn’t seen anything yet that couldn’t have been just a trick of the light.
The facility is the only building for miles around. They pull into a big garage, where two men are waiting, one with a rifle in hand – seems a little excessive – and a military-standard buzz cut kind of like Lion’s. The other steps forward and slams the trunk open.
“Out,” he orders. They climb out of the truck, Lion sticking close to Raja. The shulk glyph isn't even necessary to inspire them. He looks them up and down, and they watch him back, both parties seeming to dislike the other. The man looks like he's in charge, and judging by his green button-up he's a commanding officer or something else. He's got the eyes for it, at least, hard and sure of himself.
For a moment, the silence almost feels like they’re about to get a fucking explanation, but apparently that’s too much to ask. “Follow me,” he says instead, and they trail after him further into the compound.
The first thing Lion notices is the smell. Hard, sharp iron, blood that's been left to sit and fester and sink into the walls. It’s worse for her, she’s sure, being some kinda cat hybrid and all, but even the humans of their lot tense up as it hits them. Then the lights go on, and she sees the floor, covered in rust brown stains. At some point, the blood must’ve been pooled all over the concrete.
“You're our first shipment for tonight," he says with a slight grin. It's the first expression Lion's seen on his face besides mild constipation, and for a moment, Lion has the feeling they’re all about to get shot. But no, the blood across the floor is so old, and there's only one person with a gun up against 12 kids, they can’t-- Lion realizes with a start that it wouldn't take much work to kill them all, under the shulk glyph as they are. All the soldier would have to do is pass the gun around.
The officer continues. “Welcome to the Margri Outpost and Training Facility, women's branch. Do you all know why you’re here?” Normally, the way he’s puffing his chest out as he crosses his arms behind his back, pacing in front of them in an attempt to intimidate, would give her second-hand embarrassment. As it is, she’s successfully intimidated. In this scenario, she isn’t the one with the gun, and bodies are really very very fragile and she has seen people die - killed a person - and the scent of blood is still overwhelming her sense of smell. None of the kids answer the question. Lion is glad to see none of them are that dumb.
“Didn’t think so. It’s because you were unrehabilitatable,” he says, drawing out the last word, and Lion doesn’t wince. She does get pretty pissed off, because the youngest of their group looks to be a literal five-year-old. Lion might be one of the oldest here, and at what, 13? But she’s been practicing anger management over the past few years. She shuts up and stands there instead of picking a fight like she would’ve back before all this happened.
“Last winter, this was a training facility. Last winter, we found that not a single one of the cadets here was a valid candidate for service to the emperor any longer.” He gestures at the blood stained floor. “Don’t think you’re any less replaceable. Dimitri will show you to your rooms.” The soldier steps forward. “Have a good night”, he adds. Odd sense of humor.
Dimitri, for his part, looks deeply uncomfortable with suddenly being left as caretaker for a bunch of kids. He quietly waves them further into the compound, to a hall lined with rooms. Six bunks each. “Your job to sort the organization out,” he says, and leaves them to their own devices.
The rest of the night is marked by broken sleep. The truck rumbles over from across the desert four more times. New kids come and go in the search for empty bunks, someone keeps crying on and off and someone else accidentally turns the lights on, whispering an apology to the many aggravated voices rising up out of the beds.
Lion has joined Raja in her bunk, because there aren’t enough beds for everyone and like hell she’d let a little kid sleep on the floor. Raja complains, but Lion doesn't think she minds as much as she pretends to. She thinks they might both be the same kind of lonely. And Raja likes her more now than she did when they first met, anyhow: that particular meeting ended with Raja with a puffy black eye, crying, and Lion with blood pouring out of her nose desperately trying to apologize and calm her down. (Lion had been looking for a fight, and had singled out the biggest person in the room. It had not gone as expected.) You can kind of only go up from there.
Lion doesn't sleep. She lies next to Raja and watches people shuffle around in the dark, the two little ones whispering to each other by the window. She wonders how this is going to end for all of them.
She wonders.
The next morning, Lion sits in the crowded lunchroom, looking disgruntledly at the strange brick of food in her hand. Everyone’s eating the same thing, despite the fact that there are omnivores, carnivores, and probably even some herbivores all mixed in together here.
The block is grey. That’s not a meat color. Not a plant color, either- it's probably some synthetic type crap. No way of knowing ‘till she tries it, though.
She jabs at the suspicious bar with a claw. It squelches. Lion recoils, scowling.
“This isn’t actually as bad as it looks,” Raja remarks from beside her, chewing thoughtfully on a chunk. So Lion takes a bite.
It’s absolutely fucking revolting. A perfect mix of revolting and tasteless, actually, she doesn’t know how they managed. Raja, though, is scarfing down the rest of hers like it’s a regular continental breakfast, so Lion figures she’s just being picky. She finishes the bar. It’s an ordeal, though.
Immediately after dinner ends she gets so nauseous she runs to the nearest bathroom and throws up in the sink. It will not be the last time.
The next day, during another session of purging her guts in the bathroom sink, she notices that she’s not alone. Crow, a hybrid who Lion shares a bunkroom with but hasn’t talked to, a polar bear hybrid named Lou, and a few others but most notably that little five-year-old hyena kid. They’re frustrated and sick looking. Hungry.
She goes and knocks on the captain's door that afternoon– skips over Dimitri entirely.
“Sir. We need food,” she tells him, short and to the point. “A third of us are carnivores and we can’t eat the rations.”
When he looks skeptical, barely glancing up from his work, Lion adds, “Biologically, sir. Can’t keep them down.”
“The last batch said the same thing at first,” the Captain responds, meeting her eyes. “They got over it. Using your hybrid status as an excuse to get better food is a waste of my time at best and time and the Emperor’s resources at best.” He goes back to his work.
Lion just stands there uselessly, looking for something else to say.
“Would you like to waste more of my time or would you like to leave?” he asks. Forcing herself to resist the urge to yell at him or fight him (preferably both) is like pulling teeth, but she turns around and goes to the door.
“And cadet?" the Captain calls.
Lion turns back around, freezing a neutral expression onto her face.
"This isn't the first time I've had to have this conversation. The last batch; that one did a lot of complaining. And some over-in-her-head winged girl-" Crow, Lion thinks, "-stopped by yesterday and I talked with her too. It gets exhausting. If I have to listen to this crap again I’ll have you put a bullet in one of those carnivores of yours, alright? You can get out.”
That last bit is enough of an order to make the glyph start up, thrumming in the back of her head as she grits her teeth and shuts the door behind her. Whether it’s her doing the walking or the glyph, though, Lion can’t tell.
“Lion, Raja!” The names are shouted across the cafeteria, and they both tense up and glance around the room for superiors as they hurry over to the source of the voice.
“What’s wrong?” Lion asks the panting goat hybrid.
“We found– Lou’s in the showers, she’s hurt bad.”
When they get to the showers Cal, the medic, is already there. She’s not doing anything medical, though. Just sitting on the benches with her head in her hands. Crow is there too, standing in the corner fuming. In the center of the room lies the body. Pooling deep-red blood spreads out across the floor, a stark contrast to the polar bear hybrid’s white fur.
Her arms and hands are bloody messes of fur and blood, with strips of skin and flesh missing from one. "What. . ." Raja starts, softly under her breath, but doesn't finish. She's confused. Raja's an omnivore, though. Lion is a carnivore and she's fucking hungry. The fur around Lou’s mouth is soaked with blood, and her arms have been ripped into with claws and teeth. She thinks she might have an idea of what happened.
Honestly she's considered doing the same herself, but never really seriously. Just late at night when her stomach is hurting so bad she can't sleep and she realizes she's in the middle of a desert with completely dead ecosystem and nothing to eat and the only person who might be able to get them some fucking food is perfectly happy to watch them starve to death.
They've been eating the rats. It's really fucking gross. Also, this building doesn't have an infinite supply of rats, so. The pool of blood, which has been slowly expanding, reaches the tip of Lion's boot. Oddly enough, that’s what breaks her.
“What the fuck,” Lion says. It’s half a question, but she doesn't know what to ask, where to start.
Raja does. “What happened?” she asks, with all the exhaustion of a soldier years beyond her age.
"She was... self-cannibalization," Cal says. "I mean, we assume." Nobody says anything else, but Raja sits down and wraps her arm around their medic. Lion just stands there staring at the corpse.
After a little while, Lion goes and reports the body to Dimitri, who in turn goes and reports it to the Captain. He comes back to where they’re sitting crouched outside the shower room, close enough to the body to smell the blood but far enough that they don’t have to look at it.
"He said to toss the body in the pit," he says. "And also that this is not grounds to change the food." Well, it was nice that the food came up, at least.
"Where's the pit?" Raja asks.
"We don't have one. We used to, but it-- it got filled up."
"How'd it get filled up?" Lion says, more to see his reaction than anything else. She knows what happened to the last batch here. Still, she wants to know if he gave a shit.
Dimitri doesn't answer, though. Maybe his shoulders hike up a little. He keeps walking in front of them so Lion can't see his face.
Apparently, not having a pit means they get to dig one, so that's what they do. The shoveling takes the whole unit and the rest of the day. At the end of it, they have a big square hole in the desert.
Lion and half the digging crew are lying in the pile of excavated sand and dirt, panting like dogs. Whatever reason they’d been digging for in the first place has been nearly forgotten.
Then Raja and one of the stronger humans go to get the body. By this point, it’s been lying for so long in the shower room with its broken AC that the smell of stale blood won’t leave them for a week.
They drop the corpse ungracefully into the pit, where it hits the ground with a thud. Someone pukes behind her. Lion hears it, but she doesn’t look up from the corpse any more than a quick glance over towards Dimitri to make sure he doesn’t take any offense to it.
There's a whole lot of empty space in that grave. Lion hopes they never see it filled.
Their first excursion out into the field happens at night, since that’s when the beasts aren’t enough beasts out yet this time of year for it to be dangerous. She’s been reading come out. They’re led by Dimitri, and only him. Cin, their resident mage, says it’s because there everything and talking to everyone, trying to claw every last bit of knowledge out into the open. Lion has found her once or twice standing out in the desert right at the edge of the magic border that protects them from the beasts, just watching. That, combined with the broken off way she speaks and the way she holds himself separate from the rest of them, unnerves her. But she’s one of them and she’s useful, so Lion is getting over it and learning from her.
Dimitri is shivering. From the cold or nerves Lion doesn’t know.
Lion is hungry. Lou is dead and Lion is fucking hungry. She feels like she might pass out if she has to move too fast, which is very extremely bad, because this is a battlefield. Even if when she looks out all she sees is sand and more sand, no enemies.
“They’ll be more and more out here the further we get into winter,” Dimitri says in that quiet drifty way of his. “There’s not much out here now, but sometimes in midseason out in the deeper territories there'll be so many it’s like you’re in a sea of them. . .” he trails off. “But that’s not normal. That’s once in a blue moon, and if you aren’t locked down at your base camp probably everyone will die.” He stops. Lion holds her rifle with a tight grip, eyes scanning over the desert.
All of a sudden there’s a heaviness in the air. Like something dense has been laid over them. A flicker in the corner of her vision. Lion turns around just in time to see Lily drop her gun, a dog of black ink, twisting out of its body and into hers–exploding through and out of her, shattering and ripping through her body with black spikes like branches–the branches reaching out towards them–
Two shots echo out across the desert, and Lily falls. Lion looks to the source and sees Crow holding a smoking rifle. She’s panting hard. Dimitri, who’s supposed to be their teacher, is still standing frozen with his gun half raised.
Panic and rage light up in Lion’s chest, and she very nearly punches the man herself, but she’s too stunned to move. If she didn’t know he’d fought these things for two years she’d think he’d never stepped foot out of the compound, but as it is she thinks he’s just very very afraid.
Blood seeps into the sand, the black blood of the beast and red of Lily’s marbling together. Lion tightens her grip on her gun.
Then, with all the grace of a brick through a window, Dimitri breaks the silence. "Better get moving," he says, and that's when Lion punches him. Because he cannot so wholly fail in his job as the only one here with any experience and then ignore the results. He's too fucking tall for Lion to get him in the face, but her fist slams into his throat and he reels back, coughing and wheezing.
“Stand down,” he wheezes out as soon as he can breath again, and the familiar thrumming of the glyph in the back of her mind makes her want to punch him again, but then Crow’s gotten in between them and Raja is pulling her back and whispering “Not the place, Lion,” in her ear with the patience of a saint. So she breathes, deep, and shakes Raja’s arm away.
She re-adjusts her rifle as Dimitri pulls himself out of a coughing fit. It is not entirely unusual, for the sort who didn’t want a fight in the first place, to act like a fight never happened if Lion pretends like it didn’t. To move on like nothing had ever happened. That’s what happens here, though she can feel his eyes on her as she scans the horizon again for shadows. It’s lucky. If he wants a fight, Lion knows he would win. He’s got control of the glyph. If he wanted her to stop fighting back all he’d have to do is say the word.
“Look,” he says. “People die in the desert. Your people are going to die. You’ve all got to learn to deal with it.”
“We can deal with it without ignoring the fact that the person existed at all,” Raja responds for all of them. She’s a good match for Dimitri, Lion thinks. She’s quiet like him, thoughtful, but he’s quiet because he’s afraid; because he’s sad. Raja is quiet because she doesn't need to be loud or to say much to be heard. (Or maybe because she doesn’t get listened to either way. She’s one of the bigger hybrids. Scarier. People tend to assume folks like that don’t have much to say.)
They look at each other, neither saying a word, until one of the others breaks into the conversation. “Is that gonna happen every time we run into a beast? How do we fight that?” Her voice cracks at the end.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Dimitri admits. “There’s supposed to be a warning system.” He pulls two little tin bells off his pack; holds them in his palm. “The bells should have rung when the beast was in range.” They’re painted with white lines like the patterns on their rifles.
“Ah,” he says quietly, nudging one with his finger. Lion sees what he’s looking at. A little smudge breaks through some of the lines, breaking whatever spellwork the designs make. It’s such a little mistake. Dimitri scrapes the paint around with a fingernail, filling the smudge back in, and Lion has the vague sense of wanting to punch him again. She pushes it down.
Nearly immediately after he fixes the paint the bells start ringing in his hand, shaking and clattering against each other. In a practiced movement he drops the bells into his coat pocket and aims his rifle out into the desert, tracking whatever's caused the reaction.
They all follow suit, putting their backs to each other. A shot fires. Out of the corner of her eye Lion sees a beast dead on the ground maybe 15 paces from their group, but the bells haven't stopped ringing, so she doesn’t stop watching.
Another, maybe 30 paces away, seems to form up from the sand almost like rising mist, a distant smudge of black against the pale desert. Only the two white eyes, trained directly on their group, stand out from the figure.
Lion aims her rifle as the beast walks towards them, picking up speed as it breaks into a run. She fires. Two quick shots crack across the landscape, one after another, and the beast falls backwards.
She wonders briefly if they could eat the beasts. If you ignore how they’re basically just raw magic and also probably actively decomposing, they could almost be like a real animal. Real meat. Then the bells stop ringing and Dimitri calls for them to get moving, and she discards the thought.
Lion casts one look back at Sonja. Her crumpled body is nearly unrecognizable in the dust. She catches a few of the others looking back as well, and for a moment they meet each other's eyes, no words exchanged.
Then they walk on.