They don't starve again, except in the off season. Then they starve a little. With the speed beast flesh rots, completely unhindered by any attempt at preservation (and really, they've tried everything, cold, drying, salt -- at the moment they're looking for magical solutions) it's impossible to save food for when they can't hunt for it. They manage regardless, and all other times of year, they eat.
By now, months since that first beast, they've all gotten used to the rotten taste. If they notice some side effects – their blood getting darker, healing faster, fighting better and more fluid, a better understanding and connection to the magic around them – then that's nobody's business but their own.
The effects might not be significant, but they're being changed, for better or worse. (Probably worse.) If the Captain ever finds out he might kill them all on the spot. They won’t let him find out.
Raja had tried the meat once. She'd immediately turned around and puked, and they'd all laughed, which was kind of mean because most of them had puked their first times too and she did legitimately need the food. They'd been on a mission that'd run too long and the non-carnivores had been nearly out of rations, and of course the youngest eat first and Raja was the oldest, so she'd joined the carnivore campfire for the night. She was the first and last to do so.
The days get shorter as they fall into winter, night falling sooner and rising later. The beasts are more active in the night. Cin says it’s more about the cold and less about the dark.
At the moment, they’re on a mission. It’s one of the longer ones they’ve been going on since they got out of training– they still do exercises, but apparently if they know how to shoot a rifle and hit a target and take down a disorderly at some street riot back in the city, then that’s all they need to know.
Lion’s still got no clue why fighting humanoid opponents was on the training regimen instead of something like, who knows, desert survival or shooting moving targets at long distances. That seems like it’d have been more useful, but if there's one thing they tried to teach her above all else it's don't question your superiors, so she keeps her mouth shut about it.
They’ve adopted a pretty nocturnal way of life, since the beasts come out in the cold of the nights and retreat back to wherever the hell they come from when the sand gets sun-warmed again. Yesterday they had a long ways to walk, so they’re sleeping later than they usually do - by now it’s nearly dusk, the sky going red in the west and bleeding over the desert sand.
Lion is sitting in the sand on her sleeping mat, one hand on her rifle and one hand on her cards. She’s on watch, and watch is playing four-top, objectively the most confusing card game to ever exist. The others are passed out on their mats around them, some people lying in shallow ditches they dug into the ground for a little coolness and some with their blankets draped over their heads. The majority were too tired for any of that, though. Lion yawns.
Probably a game that takes so much fucking intelligent thought - something Lion is already lacking - shouldn't be played while on watch, but they haven't seen anything more than one or two beasts during daylight hours in days, and they've been able to kill those before they got anywhere close to camp. Maybe that's why she's so caught off guard when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye and looks up to see a beast circling them a while away, then another, both just out of reach of the sensor bells.
Everybody quickly follows Lion's gaze, and the beasts are shot down before they're even close enough to set off the bells, so they slowly return to their game. Ears stay pricked up, though, and everyone keeps an eye on the desert.
Only a few minutes later every bell starts ringing at once. All of the watch is on their feet with their rifles up as soon as the noise registers, and the rest of camp picks their heads up and scrambles to get out of bed.
"Incoming!" someone shouts out, and the wave is on them before they even finish the word.
It’s a swarm of beasts, Lion can’t count how many -- doesn’t think she could count, with the way she can’t see where the swarm ends – and the magic surrounding them is so thick it blocks out the setting sun. Her rifle feels like a toy in her hands but she holds onto it like a lifeline all the same, shooting one beast and then another.
They aren’t attacking. They’re just flooding past, a river of teeth and smoke, ignorant of everything in their path. Still, beside her a beast rips into a girl’s shoulder with its teeth, not passing though her yet but nearly there. Lion tries to run to her but a beast hits her in the shoulder and pushes her down, feet trampling the ground around her. She curls into a ball.
It’s hard to breathe in the thick air and her panic and the feet kicking up dust around her, kicking into her– one clawed limb kicks her in the side of the ribs, breaking her position, and then there are teeth ripping into her arm. She scrabbles blindly for her gun – finds it, the feeling of cool metal through her gloves a relief – and shoots the beast twice in the chest. If it dies she doesn't see.
Lion fights her way back up to her feet, raising her gun, and stands. Around her the others yell, commands and wordless shouts broken by gunshots. The beasts are quiet on their own but the noise of them together, their feet against the sand, fills her ears. Most of them pass her by but some bump into her, shove her around, try to push her back down to where she’d be trampled. She shoots until she runs out of bullets, then replaces her clip and starts again, but it’s slow work. Her gun is basically useless. She withstands.
And then the swarm is over as quickly as it came, leaving them alone in the desert. The sky clears up and once again the vast expanse is silent, clear and still in every direction. Lion’s white-knuckles hands shake on her gun. She stands there, stiff and tense with wide-open eyes, until a muffled whine to her left breaks through the fragile silence.
Lion snaps back into the present and rushes to the girl’s side. One of the others is already there. The girl on the ground is the one she watched get bit– Alina. So she survived, then. Her shoulder is torn open through her clothes, blood soaking into the white fleece lining of her jacket. Lion focuses on the bright red color: she’s bleeding red blood and not black. She focuses on the slowness of it. All good signs, so she takes a breath, and kneels down to help put pressure on the bleeding. They do that until Cal shows up, sending one glance at the wound before shooing them both off so she can do her work.
The rest of their squad is scattered around collecting themselves. Some, the few of them who’d had the energy to claw out little ditches to sleep in, had apparently hid in the ditches with their sleeping mats pulled over them while whatever fucking stampede that had been had gone over. They’re crawling out now, all dazed-looking.
Raja is wandering from person to person, checking in and helping where she can. Miraculously everyone is alive. Alina – who’s injury is pretty minor, all things considered – is one of the worst hurt out of all of them, which is… amazing. The scattered way everyone is spaced out still makes Lion nervous. Shellshocked and tired-looking kids with their fingers slipping off the triggers of their rifles, standing alone. It makes them look smaller and more vulnerable than they should.
“Everyone round up!” she yells. The loud noise easily catches their attention, and slowly everyone condenses into one more solid looking group. Better defended.
“What the hell was that?” one of the girls asks shakily. No one has an answer for her.
Later, Dimitri will explain it was what’s called a surge, and they’re lucky to have made it through with no deaths and only minor injuries. Of course, their first winter is a long one, and they aren’t nearly so lucky when the next one hits. Or the one after that. But for tonight they’re alive and together, so they celebrate, taking the bodies of the beasts who died in the attack as meat to roast over the fire as people slowly unwind and calm down. They play four-top until they have to start walking again. They’ve got a long trip ahead of them.
Then one day in early spring it’s 8 AM in the middle of drills and Cin isn’t fucking here. Luckily, today they’re led by Dimitri and not the Captain, so probably no one’s going to be tortured for her absence.
Dimitri sighs. “Could someone go find her? Lion?”
“Yessir,” she says, breaking out of line. Crow scowls at her as she goes, half pretending to be jealous at the chance to get out of drills, and Lion grins in response.
Cin isn’t in the bunkrooms or the showers of the cafeteria or anywhere fucking else in the barracks. Knowing her, she’s probably gotten lost in the vents or wandered out into the desert or something. Lion has met her at weird places in the past. Standing out in the desert in the middle of the night or hiding out on the rooftop with all her papers – sketches of glyphs and notes and who knows what all else.
She steps outside, and the sun immediately fucking beams her in the eye. Lion blames Cin. The idea to yell for her like she’s looking for some runaway dog briefly crosses her mind, but the walls here are pretty thin, and if she pissed off the Captian or any other superiors that could be bad. So she keeps her mouth shut and wanders around.
There’s a lump a little ways ahead of her. A lump with some little spire-like thing next to it, poking out of the sand. As Lion walks closer it becomes clear that the lump is actually Cin, kneeling down in the dust fiddling with something. As to the spire, though, Lion’s got no clue. It looks almost like a radio, ‘cept there’s no way there’s any signal out here.
As she gets closer she realizes it really is a radio. Heavily modified. It looks unbalanced. The antenna is twice the length it should be, and the whole thing is covered in spiraling patterns painted in white. Glyphs, Lion thinks with a bit of a sigh. Understandaby, her time in the desert has quickly made her tired of glyphs.
If she pulls her shirt off and turns around in the mirror she can see the black markings between her shoulder blades that keep her under the shulk orders, skin around them irritated and red. Someone tried cutting a chunk of the glyph away a little while ago. Carved out a slice of her skin. If the sight of something like that on a kid younger than her didn't freak Lion out so bad, she'd have admired the dedication. But the glyph hadn't snapped, and black ink had risen back up on top of the scab as soon as the bleeding had stopped. Not in a natural way.
Lion is sick of glyphs.
Cin hadn't looked up as she walked over, too focused on adding another curve to the chalk design on her spire.
“The fuck are you up too now?” Lion asks by way of greeting.
The other girl doesn’t look over. "Hold this," she says, grabbing her wrist and pulling it over to the spire. Lion thoughtlessly grabs hold. Then - and now that she’s looking, she can see the blue shimmer of the magic barrier, sunlight glinting off it oddly - Cin steps through the barrier. Zero hesitation.
She kneels down and pulls a slip of paper from her pocket; sets it down on the sand. Just as she steps back through the barrier a little explosion cracks out like a firecracker. It's just enough to make a loud noise and a little crater of sand. Then the paper fades away, like it's burning slowly with blue fire.
Lion eyes it warily. "Cin," she says, "We've gotta be at recon practice." She's ignored. Probably she should be used to that at this point. "What the hell is this?"
“The beasts are attracted to disturbances in the mana field.”
“Why the hell would you wanna attract a beast?” Lion asks, but apparently explaining time is over, because Cin just takes back hold of the spire as she shoves a rifle into her hands.
“Kill any who show up.”
Lion goes to protest but is immediately cut off by the ringing of a bell, and then a beast bursting up out of the sand at them. Its broad head slams into the barrier just as Lion gets a handle on the rifle and fires. The beast falls backwards.
What the fuck. Lion turns to look incredulously at Cin, but of course she’s too busy with her glyphs to catch it.
Having been studying magic since they got sent to the desert (and honestly a little before that while she was in juvie, but don’t tell the supervisors: that’s a felony!) Lion knows enough to tell that she’s connecting herself to the energy field to monitor flow patterns. Fuck if she knows why, though.
“Cin, we really should be in training,” Lion says, reluctant to be the voice of reason. When Cin just continues staring into her glyph, eyes now faintly glowing blue, she decides to give it up.
“I was right,” Cin whispers. It’s a deeply ominous statement. See, she sounds borderline gleeful, but Lion has found that she and Cin do not get gleeful at the same news. For example, she was giggling when she told them that there were no ways to get a shulk glyph off. None. People in various situations had been trying for thousands upon thousands of years and not once had someone found a solution that didn’t include killing the glyph holder, but that was the emperor, and he was a god. Not that gods are entirely impossible to kill, but this one was miles and miles away and none of them would ever get the chance to try. Anyways. Ominous.
Lion waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.
“...Right about what?” she asks, vaguely dreading the answer.
“The beasts regenerate.” Maybe this time she sees the confusion on her face - why’d that matter? - because she explains further.
“You can tell from the equal fall and spike in magic. They regenerate so immediately after we kill them they come back to life somewhere else in the desert.”
There’s a moment of silence while that hangs in the air. “So the war is pointless,” Lion summarizes.
“Yeah.” Cin doesn’t sound particularly bothered.
“And we’re all gonna die out here for nothing. Everyone who’s died has died for nothing.”
“Yeah,” she repeats. Obviously she’s not the best at comforting. But Cin does sound more affected than she did. She does care about all of them. She wouldn’t be running these experiments if she didn’t. (Well, maybe she would, but Lion’ll take the help for what it is.)
Pointless. Lion looks out at the desert and determinedly doesn’t start furiously crying, because she’s 13 and not three.
"...Do you wanna get back to practice now?" Cin asks.
"Nah," she says shortly.
"Alright."
Lion is tired of glyphs but she's tired of this facility more; the Captain and Dimitri and all the rest of the administrators. So they stay and awkwardly talk magic until the dinner alarm blares, watching dark shapes move off in the distance.
By the start of summer, the new recruits start pouring in, replacing the winter’s losses. Their ages are in the same range as Lion’s batch of kids are, but somehow they still seem like babies, peering through the windows trying to catch a sight of the beasts and fumbling with their rifles.
The trainers, who’d fucked off to wherever they’d came from around when they started going on longer missions, have returned like nasty little birds migrating back in the summer. Lion thinks they’re doing a worse job of training the new kids than they did with her batch and’re expecting them all to fill in the gaps. They drop their guns out in the desert and freeze up when beasts come near, entirely unreliable as soldiers.
Though, as Raja reminded her once as she held Lion back from going to yell at some kids who’d nearly gotten themselves killed – hadn’t shot when they should have – most of them were like that too back when they first got here. So she tolerates them, and fights back against the trainers for them when the trainers get too rough or careless or occasionally rapey. On one occasion murdery. Crow dealt with that one by way of a rifle to the trainer’s kneecaps.
As the compound fills up, it starts getting harder to feed all the carnivores. But they figure it out. They learn to survive, and strain against their bonds. She thinks the captain might be afraid of them, now. He responds by bringing down the hammer. So at base, they’re perfect imperial subjects. Outside of base is where the beasts are, but often it’s less terrifying. They come to love the desert and the freedom it brings.
She, Crow, and Raja are constants, even as people die and are replaced. They were leaders before, but it’s more official now. They’re getting comfortable in their places. In this place. Lion is never going to get out of the desert. She finds that, honestly, she doesn’t mind. Lion was never going to have a good life. She was in juvie because she’d murdered her dad, after all. He’d been trying to drown her – finally got sick of her shit, she supposed – and she’d fought, because that was what she always, always did. She’d shoved him away and he’d fallen, hit his head on the blunt corner of the bathroom sink. Landed in a pool of blood. She hadn’t called for help.
That is to say, she was probably never going to end up anywhere better than here. Maybe the other kids don’t deserve it, but nobody ends up in the desert because they’re a good and socially acceptable child, and besides there’s no point thinking too hard about it. There’s no way out of this desert.