DEVILMAKER
O. Prologue (Cerberus)

✶

Elke returned to Shiganshina short a best friend and a finger. They were lost together, and so would likely be buried together, scooped from the rubble and hauled into one of the wagons to draw home. Liesel, with her dark, matted hair splayed on the canvas, might have laughed at the image of Elke's pinky still stuck in hers. The bones happened to crush under the rock that way. Elke let her keep it out of the same fairness that one surrendered the winning end of a wishbone, and an itchy feeling that warned her not to steal from the dead. It was Liesel's memorial token, cool and pale in her shattered fist. Elke twitched the finger out of curiosity. The nerves felt somehow still attached, like she could brush against the calluses of Liesel's palm and hold it, but all that remained was a hot, wet nub in once-white gauze, twitching at the knuckle.

The wagons rolled in through Maria in basic return formation: scouts on the perimeter, corpses carted through the middle. Civilians were split in a similar way, though under no orders but Erwin's forward march; the lively ones pushed to the front—eager children and partners of soldiers—while the precocious dead clung to the stone of homes and storefronts, with little faith left that the scout regiment did anything but delay the inevitable.

The air was heady with the smell of death in heat, blown like steam from the sun-beaten canvas and the bodies wrapped inside. There were less lively faces today than upon their last arrival, and Elke scanned the crowd for Poldi's.

Summer had restored the colour to his skin, though his hair was tousled all the year to something wild, but he wasn't there, and she began to feel, for the first time since Liesel's eyes went blank: fear. That was good, wasn't it? She was afraid because she was alive and she still had a brother to look for. How many of the soldiers around her could say that? How many of them kept on through the motions because it was all they knew how to do? Half of the scouts chose the regiment because they had nothing left but the purpose it offered. Elke had Poldi. Elke had more reason to come home than to go out and fight again.

A commotion stirred the crowd. It wasn't the first time a mother had rushed to the front for a dead son, but never had Elke hauled a limb from the cart to pass down the scouts for her. Never had she watched a woman fall to her knees and cradle it like the infant body it had once belonged to. Never had a squad leader described war so aptly as to call its fallen soldiers brave but meaningless. The mother's sobs fell to the wind dancing through her shawl, and caught in the blood that darkened Elke's blonde hair, wild and tangled in her hollow eyes.

She washed it clean in a tepid pail and changed her bandages, threw up in the kitchen and cleaned that too, then perched in the rocking chair on the porch where Poldi gave names to stars.

It couldn't have been long before he came running down the canal, skinny and breathless and bright-eyed, his polo a shade browner than when she'd left. The sun hung beaming at the height of midday. Freckles and a pink streak draped across the bump in his nose, scrunched up when he smiled. Elke sank to his height to meet him, knelt like the weeping mother, peppering his sunburnt cheeks in kisses. Poldi winced through his laughter.

"You're okay," Elke said shakily, inspecting him for scrapes and bruises.

"You're okay," he copied.

"'Course I am." She smiled, but her cheeks were taut from crying. "Bad news about our secret handshake though."

Poldi frowned, then glanced at her bandaged hand and gasped. "Elke!"

"I know. Sorry."

"What... What happened?"

Elke swallowed. "It doesn't matter."

"You can tell me," Poldi insisted, taking her hand gently in his.

There was as much restraint in him as there was kindness; Elke saw how desperately he wanted to know how her world had grown beyond the Bait City, how tall the trees were, how many abnormals existed for every titan. Poldi had sworn a hundred times he would one day train in the cadets like she had to fight at her side. Elke forbade him. He worded it in more cunning ways, days or weeks later when he believed she'd forgotten, in an attempt to persuade her. Elke grinned at his cleverness and denied him in the same verbose arrangement. The only command you have to follow, little fox, she'd tease, is to stay in your den. Poldi would huff in resignation, and return again in time with the same proposal.

"Come on," she beckoned, exhausted and still itchy with the phantom swathe of Liesel's blood. It was one of those deaths—harder to erase than the regiment had trained her to make them. "Are you hungry? They brought those big potatoes back from Dauper, and you look like bones."

Poldi blinked, rushing into the kitchen after her. "Dauper?"

"Mhm. The squadrons split up—not sure what mission Hange squad had that got them in Wall Rose, but I won't complain about extra food."

"Where did you go?" Poldi asked. Elke should have known he wasn't finished. She turned with a white peel dangling from her knife, and contemplated whether she should really be handling food in her condition. With a huff, she tossed the potato to Poldi, then handed him the knife. He was nearly as eager to help as he was for her answer.

"Out," she deadpanned.

Poldi sighed at her finality and hopped onto the counter.

On a survey mission, the heat was suffocating, drenching Elke's back each morning and dulling her senses in battle, but here it was tender. It roiled blissfully through the open windows, her elbow on the sill to watch the birds. The cheap wood creaked under her arm as it creaked under Poldi's softly kicking legs. He'd left the place well enough, but there was only so much to do to tidy what had never been clean to begin with. It was an old house. The furniture was scavenged. A big hole resided hidden behind the breadbox where termites had begun to crawl upward from the underpinning.

"Did Mr Arlert not feed you while I was gone?" she asked when Poldi stared long enough at a potato for her to wonder if he was going to eat it raw.

"What? No. I mean, yeah, he did. He's a good cook."

"Good. Try waiting until those are cooked before you start drooling, then."

He chopped them in relative silence and didn't complain, or question her, or test her fragile patience. She hummed a song Liesel used to sing under her breath in cadet training, and wondered whether her parents would be able to eat tonight or if they'd sit around the dining table staring wordlessly at her empty chair.

Poldi pushed the bowl towards her.

"All done?"

He nodded.

"All right, I'll boil 'em. Wanna feed the extra bits to Krümel?"

"Are you—really?"

"Ow, okay, don't sound so surprised..."

Beaming, he thanked her in abundance and leapt from the counter, scurrying down the porch again. Elke lit the stove-top with a match and a keen eye on the canal. It took only a minute for Poldi to descend to where the strays slept along the water. Krümel, the oldest, gentlest dog, lying in the shade of a blackberry bush, chewed the offered scraps with carious teeth and soft gums, his tongue perpetually lolled to the side of his mouth. Poldi split them into smaller pieces to help until Krümel had licked his hands clean, his tail weakly wagging. He didn't have much time left, but that didn't mean it couldn't be kind.

A stray flame dashed across Elke's cheek. She tumbled backward with a curse. Her injured hand rose instinctively to guard her face, and her vision flickered white at the feeling of her gouged knuckle pressing against the burn.

"Fucking—"

That was the house: erratic flames no matter the wood, water that varied from clear and thick to thin and muddy. Elke almost missed the barracks, but saw Poldi skipping back to the house with his knees stained green and his cheeks dimpled to craters, and imagined, wincing, that she would dive headfirst into the fire to see that he looked that happy forever.

His smile fell as quickly as he came in. "What—are you okay?"

"It's fine," she said hoarsely. "I'm—yeah—can you just watch the pot a minute? Don't stand too close, I—fuck."

"Did you get burned?" Poldi gaped as she scurried to the sink. He had this quiet voice when she was tense like he expected to be reprimanded. She hoped she hadn't given him that. She hoped no one else had either; it was nicer to believe everything Poldi was was simply him.

"Mhm. It's fine."

Nothing was fine. The brusque language of such minor pain was what every cadet learned: bite your tongue in the moment and weep softly into your pillow at night if you must, but never cry on the field, and never scream unless it's the last thing you do.

Liesel hadn't screamed. The walls crushed her so quickly she hadn't had the time.

"I'll set the table," Elke muttered.

Poldi cut and salted the potatoes, cooked them in the pan, and poured them over two plates. Elke let him. It made him feel useful.

She sat and thanked him, and he smiled how he always did.

Water still trickled through the mesh of the filter, so they would wait to drink. She almost apologized for filling the pail full for something as frivolous as her hair, but thought of Liesel and couldn't find the words. Poldi wouldn't have accepted them if she tried.

"Of course," he answered, and cut through ribbons of steam to the crisp, mealy flesh.

Elke stared at her plate. The smell was simple. The skin was golden. Grief came down on her here, at the kitchen table, hungry in an insatiable way, with no desire to eat.

It was some sign that the tremor struck with the first cut of her knife.

She felt it in the legs of the table, and it trembled from there to the chairs, to the creaking counters, to the breadbox hiding the hole in the wall. Abstractly, Elke understood that if the whole house was shaking, it was because the ground was shaking, and wondered what it might have been like to grow up in a world where the natural order ended there: where only the earth could shake the earth. She glanced at Poldi's ashen face and saw that he knew better too.

"Put your boots on," she said blankly.

Elke hadn't taken hers off. She tied them in double-knots and waded across the thrumming floorboards toward her gear. It was propped at the door, glinting in the auburn flush of sunlight. A long time ago, Elke had plenty of things that shone like that. That sort of beauty had come to nauseate her. She saw in it now the brilliant shine of a sharp object, and latched the plating to her back. She pulled the straps of the harness up her thighs and buckled them. She reeled the still-dangling cables of her last mission back inside their winches. The canisters were harder to balance with unsteady hands, and her blade sheathes smacked her wobbling knees. Every movement was punctuated by a crash. Every slip of Elke's fingers was met by the distant onslaught of shattering glass.

Poldi watched her numbly from the table. "...Elke?"

"Now!" she screamed. The ferocious bite of the command frightened her.

Poldi lurched forward like he was going to be sick. He pried off his house shoes and frantically jammed his feet in his old boots. Elke didn't know what she was preparing for as she stuffed a bag of potatoes and dry rations, two kitchen knives and a pack of matches, the sopping cloth of the water filter hastily snatched from the flagon. Finally, she grabbed Poldi's coat from the wall and shoved it into his arms, then flitted between two others on the hook.

Her scout jacket hung beside a dark, unassuming shawl.

People began to scream.

Elke took the latter.

"Come on," she said, tying it at the neck, and offered no time for Poldi's answer if he had one to give.

Hand-in-hand, they hurried onto the street, and looked out on the broken wall together.

Elke froze. Maria was punctured through the gate by a hole the size of the old house, and two great, blank eyes loomed over the edge. She'd never seen a titan so big—raw and red with corded sinews and pressing on fifty meters of stone like it was nothing. The force of it cracked the wall to burst. The resounding explosion sparked across the sky and showered upon the rooftops, the shrapnel of thatches spinning through the air like knives. Elke couldn't tell if the screaming got louder when the boulders struck or if the net of debris was cast so wide it silenced dozens with each crash. Her ears had gone fuzzy, so it might not have mattered.

Bodies sprinted down the canal. Just bodies. They carried nothing. They ran as far as their pen would let them. All of the dogs had been pushed in the water, and Krümel wasn't there. The city was cast in steam like a dinner plate.

"Oh," Elke breathed. Her hand was numb. Was it Poldi crushing hers, or her crushing his?

Desperately, he tugged at her wrist, and she came back to him. His eyes were bloodshot. His sunken cheeks were wet. He was screaming at her and she couldn't hear him.

"Poldi," she said, her mouth dry. She brushed the hair from his face. "Hold on to me."

He was skinny enough to pull into her arms without much effort, but Elke had no command to obey. It left her stupidly still, waiting for Erwin, for Keith, for Liesel to whisper their instructions and giggle when she drifted off. She carried Poldi for a moment with terror equal to the day they ran away, and like then, had no idea what to do.

Her comrades were corralling civilians to the inner wall, and she supposed that was her command. Her grip on her brother's shoulders tightened at the thought of following it. The crowd was in a frenzy. The strays flailed in the water. The streets were stained with more blood than just what the titans had claimed, bodies trampled in the bedlam of escape. Time was what Elke needed, and she wouldn't find that on the ground.

She shot her hook to the nearest standing building, and swung unevenly onto the rooftop with the foreign weight of Poldi confusing her balance. Her knee caught the brunt of the landing. Blood trickled down the thatches. She stumbled to gather her footing again, but it was from there she could finally see the titans pouring in from Maria's open wound. The number of them was astonishing. It seemed impossible to believe they had they concentrated such a large group so quickly; Keith squad had just scouted the perimetre—Liesel had died for that mission—and yet the titans marched in like an army, like they had the good sense to tear the thorn of Shiganshina from the wall before attempting to claim the rose.

What good was a bait city if it could fall this fast?

The remaining scouts bolstered the garrison on the ground, splitting off to cut down the nearest titans, and Elke couldn't find a point in it. That many civilians would never fit on the boats even if they made it in time to catch them.

"I'm sorry," she said, with too many people to know who she was saying it to.

Elke pulled the hood of her shawl over her head and launched from one roof to the next, southbound where the gate stretched wider. The incoming titans' awe at the masses deterred them from what swung at eye level, too quick to look up and catch like flies. Poldi was quiet at first. He didn't understand yet. It was only when they crossed the nape of a titan with blades still sheathed that Elke felt him stir.

"Elke? Why are we—where are we going?"

She didn't answer.

Elke had passed ODM gear training faster than anything else they'd taught her in the military. The simple, mechanical surge of gravity to prompt flight, to grapple, latch, slice—it made sense to her. The rhythm was quick. Thinking and acting were unanimous, without the droning, anticipatory weight of making a choice. Swing. Cut. MP politics would have killed her sooner than the scouts, and the garrison was too idle. Elke knew enough about sitting around from Mitras: she was good at her bendir too, when she still had one to play. Percussion was easier than woodwind; moving was easier than planning. It was like that now, when the titan crouched to pluck a shrieking woman from the ground, thrashing in a fist that slowly squeezed the sound from her lungs.

Elke could have stopped it. Titans ate with such sluggish glee that there was time. Instead she sank her hook into Wall Maria in tune with the crunch of bone and the slick, bloody swallow of a warm, bisected corpse. She could find a certain percussion in it, though shrouded in wind and Poldi's scream. It reverberated in her ear as his fists wailed on her back.

He might hate her for this. As long as he lived, Elke didn't care.

They landed more smoothly on the flat parapet of the wall than the slanted roofs. The red titan was gone. Elke blinked, her face wet with blood she couldn't remember losing. The sound of Poldi's scream dulled to a broken whine, and she leapt with a firmer grip into the wide, endless terrain of titan territory. Sunlight glared over the mountains. Death's song echoed off the walls. There were so many titans accumulated in Shiganshina that the fields were nearly empty; Elke could fix her cable to a ten meter and fling herself to the next by the skin of its nape.

Erwin had used titans as plinths once, on a day she would've called the scouts' worst before this, and she attempted with inexpert mimicry to do the same. The shallow gashes of each insertion didn't kill them, but they did knock them off their feet. Steam fizzled from the wounds like little geysers.

All Elke needed was to slow them down. All she needed was to make it to the forest.

A final titan staggered bowlegged and grinning from the trees, and it filled her with as much fragile hope as it did panic—that they were still spilling into the city was what she'd anticipated, but it also meant she'd have nothing to hold onto in the last stretch. They'd have to make that distance on foot.

"Hold on," she shouted, though Poldi was.

She swerved onto the back of the nearest titan's head. The landing kick to its nape set it scrambling, fat fingers clawing for purchase to pluck her from its body like a burrowed tick. Now Elke drew her blades. The bright, reverberative hum of them sliding from their sheathes buzzed in her ears. She moved with the same precise speed as she had that morning, when the titans crowded around the windmill and the world blurred to Liesel, stuck on the first floor, writhing battered limbs under the croaking weight of the walls. Then, Elke had killed two.

One would be easy.

A clean cut of her sword severed its nape down the middle. Blood sprayed across her cheek. She made a rope of the titan's hair as it plummeted to the ground, and wrapped her fists around it, her boots wedged firmly between its shoulder blades like when Shadis first trained her to climb. The impact still toppled her, and she grunted as she slid down uncannily thin, dry skin with Poldi fastened to her chest like an infant. It made the descent easier, and she wasted less gas this way.

The remaining few titans turned from wall Maria toward the commotion. Their footsteps indented the ground behind them.

"Come on," Elke panted, setting Poldi down. He gripped her hand the same way Liesel had under the rubble. If they died this way, they would die together. The thought was almost a comfort.

They ran like that, willfully fettered, the furious beat of Poldi's pulse bouncing in Elke's palm. She guessed they were mere minutes from the forest, its great trees etched on the horizon. The terrain was flat and gentle. The detachment horses traversed it easily on missions, and whenever the scouts were forced to the ground, so did they. But Elke was only one. She had no formation behind her should the remaining titans amass, and without looking back she could feel the earth tilt under their vigorous advance.

"Fuck." She glanced backward. "They'll catch up before we make it."

"What do you—"

"Remember Mitras?"

"I... yeah, but—"

"I want you to run like that."

Poldi clenched so hard on her wrist it stung. "No! Elke—don't, please don't—"

He was so young. She didn't think she'd ever be able to look at him and see anything but a boy.

"I'm right behind you." At his sustaining objection, Elke shushed him softly. She smiled, but her fingers trembled the moment she wrenched her hand free. It hurt to part from him more than any pressure he could squeeze her with. "That's an order, little fox. No time to argue."

Poldi's bloodshot eyes welled up again. He stumbled over his feet, her perfect soldier, and ran for freedom. Elke turned the other way, and ran for him.

There were three titans surging toward her in a line, their stomping feet echoing under her steadfast counter. Two of them were short, thinner in stature and slower than the third, and so Elke would take them first. She pulled her blades out again. Her boots carved a line in the mud as she slid sideways through the grass. A shot of her hook to the first titan's eye barely incapacitated it—it gave no more than a gaping mouth to interrupt its smiling. She swore between gritted teeth as she hoisted herself up its protruding spine like a ladder. She slit it by the nape and leapt to the next as it fell. Her wounded hand throbbed, and her burned cheek ached with the heat of its dying steam.

The second titan swayed at her heavy landing, a gasp punched out of its throat. From its shoulder, Elke could see the tallest ahead, sprinting with giddy, swinging arms, closing in on the forest. Poldi was still too far from the threshold. Panic seized Elke's chest.

This was the intersection where thinking hindered acting, when desperation made her reckless. This was why Poldi couldn't fight at her side no matter what words he dug up as reasons, because no amount of training could heed her from saving him at the cost of everything else. Her wide-eyed gaze was stuck on him. The grip of her blades was suddenly too heavy. She doubted the weight, the foreign slant of gravity in her bad hand, how her wound welled with a fervid ache each time she squeezed the hilt—and she felled the second titan with the worst instinct a soldier could have: doubt. A crude, deep slash did it, but the technique was bad. The force flung her from its neck under the halo of something shattered, bright as a bursting star.

Elke couldn't reel her cables in fast enough. It sliced her lip clean down the middle.

She collapsed on the grass on hands and knees. The pain of her missing finger was gone, but hazily, she understood it was because a greater agony had surpassed it. Dirt stained her twitching knuckles. Pebbles encrusted the skin like glass. Her mouth was hot and full of a wet, copper taste she knew must have been blood, and she sundered a dangling gob of it with curious fingers. They parted to viscid, crimson webs. The injury disoriented her. She'd killed the second; had its jagged bone split off at the nape? Had she cut it that badly? No. The pain was sharp and thin, and Poldi was still running. Elke didn't have the time or wherewithal to make sense of it, shoving off her knees with a moan, though every dizzy lurch forward shook at the blade still embedded in her lip. She drooled around it. Her periphery spun.

"Poldi..." she slurred, and her legs almost gave out at the white-hot agony of trying to speak.

He was golden in the setting sun, with all the colours of their father, his dark, loose curls dancing in the wind. He was running, but not screaming—because Elke had told him to run like in Mitras, and Poldi was always quiet then

She gasped on a sob as she staggered over the fields, bound by an old, pretty memory of sunlight just like this, of Poldi and Armin spinning down the hill until they collapsed at the bottom.

The tallest titan reached down. Elke ran faster.

Poldi only screamed when its hand closed around him, and even that didn't last; the sound was muzzled at once by the pad of a finger the size of his head. Elke cried out despite the excruciating pain in her mouth, but it wasn't terror in her voice. Her scream let out the furious disbelief that this thing—this filth, this monstrous, mindless fucking nothing that had stolen land and loved one and life from her—would try to take him too.

With her left blade, a blood-seething, severed mouth, and half a canister of gas at either hip, Elke fired her hooks into the titan's ankle and pulled. She shot across the plains like a bomb. The landing blow was not gentle, the movement so quick she felt like the friction of that first contact might set her on fire. She wasted no time waiting to find out. Her blade found the titan first, stretched with a wide arm, lacerating the skin at the heel. The titan teetered, but continued to raise Poldi in the air. She swung to its other leg and hacked until it was hanging by the bone. Shadis hadn't taught her that. Erwin certainly hadn't. But Elke soared skyward as the titan's legs gave out, growling through her breaths onto its welcome nape.

She stabbed before she slashed. She made it deep. She let the blood spray across her face.

The titan's grip went beautifully slack, and Elke surged from its shoulder to haul Poldi in her arms before he could hit the ground. One last burst of gravity propelled them from its instantaneous crash.

She secured her hook to the first tree in sight, and they dropped to the thick, sturdy branch in the canopy with concurrent groans. Elke spun onto her back to shield Poldi from the impact. Half of the blood vanished in smoke. The other half was hers, dribbling down her cheek. In the stillness, without the mercy of adrenaline, the pain returned to her quickly. Her eyes were dangerously heavy, and she felt the frantic shuffle of Poldi's inspection more than she saw him above her.

Elke never wanted to be parted from him again.

"Elke?" he gasped, and then his breaths split off to sobs. Whatever she looked like must have been bad.

"It's..." She licked the edge of the sharp object still embedded in her lip. "Okay... Safe. You—"

"Don't talk!" Poldi exclaimed. "How do I—I never—oh. Oh..."

He disappeared from her vision, and then she felt little hands prodding at her shoulder like paws, turning her on her side. The motion dislodged more blood from her throat. She clutched her stomach as she heaved, and he patted hard on her back to eject anything stuck. She spat up half a tooth.

"Okay," Poldi rasped. "Okay, okay. Should I take it out?"

Elke whined out an attempt at encouragement. Poldi knew all her language, and so obliged her.

He eased himself onto his knees to face her, holding tight to the cable fixed to the tree for balance. He refused to look down. Elke grabbed his hand and squeezed.

Poldi's first tug at the shard stole all the consciousness from her. She'd never felt pain like it—so terribly cool in the heat of the wound that it was like burning ice. It was there a moment and then gone. A nauseating darkness overtook her, and she plummeted headfirst into sleep like a shallow fountain. Her head slammed against the edge. She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, flotsam in the water, tainting something beautiful, but she knew she couldn't stay. Her brother was waiting for her. Elke had to return to him.

A long string of blood greeted her when she woke, dripping down her cheek, still early enough that sunlight filtered through the trees, and then—blurrily, perfectly—Poldi, canted over her with wide eyes and a face too pale for his usual complexion.

She clutched his hand again, slipped at some point from her shaky fingers, and he gasped. His forehead pressed to hers with a shuddering sob. If she could reassure him, she would have. Instead she let him cry into her shoulder, relishing despite everything that he had lived, that she had made it here to protect him. Night fell without either of them daring to separate, and Elke set aside the desperate voice that urged her from idling so long. Rationally, she knew it would be a mistake to travel in this condition. In the morning, they would move again.

In the morning, she would have to decide what exactly that meant.

It came swiftly enough. Sleep was easy after what they'd endured. Still, Elke never slept through sunrise; dawn in the barracks allowed for no rest, and that habit clung to her long after graduating to the scouts.

The pain was bearable, comparative to the night before, though Elke realized that didn't count for much. She could touch it without doubling over, but without a mirror it was hard to tell the extent of the damage. With a sigh that stung, she wrapped her shawl over a less easily stirred Poldi, washed in the same pale pink light as his favourite flowers.

The wound wasn't a straight line like she imagined: there were soft, jagged ridges curling from the crease of her cheek to the middle of her lower lip, split halfway down her chin. Some of the blade had gone all the way through. Enough of a gap puckered the skin to feel the cool morning air kissing her teeth. Elke tried not to prod with dirty fingers to encourage infection, but the half-tooth she'd spat up appeared—by what her tongue could trace—to be right from the front. It was wishful thinking to hope for a molar; objectively, the loss of her pinky was worse, and she hadn't been afforded the luxury of vanity in years. That didn't make it hurt any less to know a new reflection would greet her when next she saw it.

Quietly, she tested the adhesion of her hook to the tree and then slid down the cable. The verdure was unfamiliar, littered with brushwood and berries that didn't grow in Shiganshina's gardens. Elke wasn't versed enough in botany to guess from which she could eat, or even touch, so she waded the overgrown grass with caution. The last thing she needed was to drop dead of poison, after all the better deaths she could have had.

It didn't take long to sound out a water source, and from there, she began the tedious endeavour of reconstructing her filter. She burned sticks in a small fire and ground the charcoal as fine as she could, stuffed the cloth halfway in the flagon and began to fill it: with the charcoal first, then with the coarse sand of the river, then rocks, then sand again. Elke was certain she'd missed a step but had no means of confirmation, so dipped the flagon into the river and tucked it upright to her chest during the walk back.

Poldi was still sleeping when she ascended the tree, and she winced through a smile as she ruffled his hair. Blearily, he blinked up at her.

"You're okay," he said groggily, unable to hide the way his eyes darted to her mouth.

"That bad?" Elke mumbled. The words were misshapen by the wound. She was going to need stitches.

"I thought..."

"Don't. I'm not—ah—going anywhere."

Poldi sat up and shuffled to press his back against the tree. He fidgeted with her shawl. "Elke?"

She squinted through the top of the flagon like she'd be able to see the filter's progress. "Mm?"

"Why did we run away?"

Elke froze.

"We could have... We were all supposed to evacuate into Wall Rose," he continued. "The rest of the scouts were fighting—"

"Ask me again when I can talk right," she said flatly, avoiding his eyes.

Poldi left it at that.

It took until midday before no water remained at the top of the flagon, and Elke boiled what had traveled through the filter just in case. She cleaned her right hand and her wound with it, dressed it haphazardly in gauze and kept the little water leftover to drink. When they left that evening, she repeated that morning's process at the river and continued through the forest on foot.

They saw no titans for three days.

With dry rations, potatoes, and an abundance of animals, navigating a blind trek south wasn't nearly so daunting as Elke had feared. She insisted—mostly with hand gestures Poldi may or may not have understood, but obeyed regardless—on traveling by foot and only using the ODM gear to ascend the trees at night. It was impossible to know when a threat might present itself, and assuming she had even half a tank of gas left was generous.

The forest, eventually, grew sparse. If not for the hills in the distance, she'd assume they were just outside the walls again. The terrain wasn't dissimilar to Maria's external farmland, though untilled and greener. There, they rested another two days at lakesides and river maws for water, and still saw no titans. While Elke's hand had healed decently, her mouth had swollen beyond recognition; she caught a glimpse of herself in still water and sun one morning and almost threw up. Whatever colour it had turned was indeterminably bruised, but the scar was long and tumid, her lip still split like a serpent tongue. At this point, she wasn't sure stitches could even help it close.

Poldi said nothing. Her terse command not to speak of what she'd done began to seep into the rest of what they had never said to each other, like the first time she'd run away to save him. It made sleep difficult. Elke could find no rhythm in the cricket hum and breeze of the plains. All she heard was Poldi's silence.

They climbed the hills that had before seemed to exist on an unreachable horizon, too small to be what she'd inexpertly consider mountains, but orography, like botany, was not her forte, and she had never met someone boring enough to make it theirs either. Summer was gone at the acme to the cold, tough air of a foreign height. It began to rain. By the time they found an alcove in the cliffside, their clothes were soaked and their curls limply dripping. Elke set a weak fire with one of three matches she had left, and prayed it would last the night. Here, it was impossible to see what laid ahead. The other side of the hill was shrouded in fog and rain like a rooftop mantled in snow, and they had no choice but to wait until it subsided in the morning.

Elke didn't know the word for the land called desert when they found it. All she knew was she saw no end to it.

"Holy shit..." Poldi mumbled. Elke didn't bother to amend his language. She gaped at the interminable expanse of soil she hesitated to describe as wheaten—a colour like that was living, there was something in the earth to pull free and cut, cook, eat. This was... nothing. The birds above goaded in the face of all the emptiness beneath them.

"Come on," Elke said hoarsely, testing the weight of the flagon. It was not nearly heavy enough.

On the first night in the badlands, they had no need for the last two matches or the coats taken off the rack back home, and used the bloody, dirt-ridden fabric as blankets on ground harder than a pallet. On the second night, the vultures swept down and pecked at the scabbing blisters of heat before Poldi's scream woke her from the dizzy spin of a dream. On the third night, Elke didn't sleep at all. She sat on guard, motionless and probably half-dead, and when the first vulture returned she slit it from one wing to the other.

They ate it for breakfast. One match remained. The flagon was empty.

None of it mattered when the dust settled on the badlands' ambit, in a clearer sky than had been above them since they'd felt grass under their boots. There was an end, somewhere, with tall crags bordering either side of its flat, beige earth, with Elke's forked, bloody lips licked by a uselessly dry tongue, without a best friend or a finger. Adrenaline surged through her. She swore she felt it surge through Poldi too: a desperate, sated pulse beating in her grasp. He laughed. It had been nine days since she'd heard him laugh.

"What is—" he sputtered between elated gasps— "Elke. What is that?"

Elke squinted. One of the crags stretched on too long, too flat and neat. She thought—but that was impossible, and she must have been dehydrated and sick with infection—it almost looked like one of the walls.

"I don't..." Her steps faltered. "I don't know."

A strange unease came over her, but she had no choice but to go on with its added weight. They would die if they stayed here, and it was too late to turn back.

"Come on," she said again.

Poldi squeezed her hand. It terrified her to know he would follow her anywhere.

The closer they got to the perfect cliffside the more undeniable it became that it wasn't one at all. This was grey, wythe-lined stone. This had been made.

Elke's fingers brushed the rampart with a shiver, cool in its own enormous shadow, and they began to walk alongside it to find an edge. If it was truly like the other walls, they never would. But then the sand started to slip under their feet at a faint incline, their boots with less and less to cling to as the ground grew softer, as if feet had tread it before. They pushed upward until the wall was at their height, and then below them, and then they were looking at each other with the unspoken understanding that another land without a word to call it waited before them. It sounded like water. The soft lash of wind traced the lapping waves. Birds bayed on what must have been a massive lake shore.

At last Elke took the last step into a world wider and bluer than what she'd ever imagined. It was a second sky, cupped around its mirror like a darker silhouette. The sunlight that had batted so harshly upon them in the badlands was suddenly beautiful again; it sparkled on the water in strings of white and gold as though a pendant had been hung over the surface, rippling across the waves. Five stone berths extended from the port in expertly measured slots. Some distance away, a rock dotted the water so large that it might have been land.

Without knowing what this great blue mirror was, or how the path to it had formed, Elke decided it had always existed. This was where they'd been going since Mitras. Everything led here.

"We can go back," Poldi said, so quietly she almost didn't hear him.

Elke's smile fell. "...What?"

He couldn't tear his eyes off the water. "We can go back and tell everyone. There's... Elke, there's a world out there! We don't have to live in the walls! They can built boats like the ones in the canals! We can—what if—you know they'd forgive you for deserting if—"

"I didn't desert—"

"—None of it matters anymore! We haven't seen titans in days. M-Maybe they don't exist out there. Maybe we can—"

"We're not going back."

He turned to her with a hitch in his breath like betrayal, tugging his hand loose. "Why?"

"It's not safe. We can make our own boat; I think that's land out there—it's not too far."

"You... we can't... Elke, what about everyone in the walls? They deserve to know!"

"We're not going back!" she snapped. Poldi recoiled. "Do you know what they do to people who leave the walls? Not just deserters, Poldi: think about the Arlerts. They don't want to know. You can't help them."

His eyes welled up with tears. A long sigh swept over the waves, and the pendant of light was fractured by the big rock.

"I'm..." Elke clenched her empty fist. She struggled for the right words. "I'm sorry, but even if we could make it back, we don't even know if the walls are still there. Titan territory was empty, Poldi. Where do you think they all went?"

"You don't... We don't know that."

She didn't. Elke didn't have a fucking clue. The scouts were good, and even the garrison had been fighting when they fled. The MPs would defend Mitras and the rest of Sina's major cities until the king couldn't breathe to command them anymore. That didn't mean they'd make it—will alone hadn't saved her comrades before—but there was hope. Elke couldn't afford that. It was a forethought hypocrisy that she'd sheltered Poldi well enough that he could. His heart beat for hope. Hers warmed only with the knowledge that she had given him a life that let him.

"I'm sorry," she echoed in a thinner voice, and wiped the tears from his cheek.

There was nothing else to say. He had never had the power to change her mind, and he was a soldier to no one but his sister. So they went to the water together. They untied the worn knots of their boots and rolled their trousers to the knees. It was warm, easier to wade than she'd imagined, but with enough of a current that Elke could slip momentarily from herself, ushered by the waves of a body that endured no wounds, and worried not over walls or brothers or hope. She tossed her shawl to the sand and sank into the bliss of unbecoming. It was nice just to float, and not be her.

"Elke."

Poldi always called her back. She supposed she was only her in relation to him.

"Elke!"

Her tired, wet eyes shot open. He didn't have to tell her what to look at.

The big rock on the horizon had gotten impossibly bigger, the string of sunlight sundered beneath its hull, and Elke understood it was a hull because it was coming closer, because the big rock was not land but a boat, pushing steadfast toward them at a speed she didn't know boats could move.

"Out," she squeaked. Between the empty flagon, her wound, and more talking than she'd done in days, a raw ache grasped at her throat.

Still, Poldi listened. They pushed for the shore sopping wet and heavy, and Elke cursed that she'd let her guard down. Somehow the boat instilled the same panic in her as the blank eyes of the red titan, of Maria's deathblow and the strays kicking in the water. It was the realized terror of the unease she'd felt when they got here, glancing backward from the parapet at the massive boat and thinking it looked like exactly the sort of innovation that might also create the walls.

The boat docked just as Poldi hid around the edge of one of the crags. Elke was halfway in her gear and carrying the rest, and the space was as narrow as the alcove they'd slept under in the rain. She couldn't fit. She cursed under her breath. "Stay here."

"Elke, no—"

"Stay," she hissed. "That's an order, little fox."

Poldi hesitated, then nodded wildly when her demand withered to pleading eyes.

Elke sank to the ground and crawled along the parapet like Shadis had taught her. On the other side there was a ridge in the hill wide enough to position herself, but the boat's engine roared to a halt and time was short.

It was more similar to the ships in the Shiganshina canal than she'd thought—so big it could house dozens to travel—but it was a shiny, industrial monochrome, with two tall plinths on either end of the mast for reasons beyond her understanding. Its technology seemed complex. The water stirred violently under its mooring, little whirlpools spinning and severed by the overwhelming force of the vessel. Elke tried to guess what kind of place a boat like this could come from. What kind of people could build it?

Her gear skidded across the stone until she reached the ridge, and she hauled herself with all the strength she had behind its cover. The wet burden of her clothes didn't help. She peered with one eye from around the corner. Harsh, hollow breaths escaped her in pulses. None felt deep enough. Her head was dangerously light.

A door to the accommodation room creaked open, followed by a large hatch in the stern.

"Bring them out in a line," said the first man to come out. He looked... common, with short brown hair and pale skin and a long, straight nose. He looked like anyone else Elke had known within the walls. She didn't know what she was expecting.

His order was answered swiftly; a queue of prisoners poured out from the stairwell at the hatch. Their faces were covered and their hands were bound, and guiding them were what must have been soldiers. A few of them resisted with the limbs available to them, but without a united effort stood no chance. They were kicked behind the knees to the hard floor of the deck, and then battered by soldiers in passing to display some kind of lesson. No—Elke tossed that theory quickly—there was no lesson to give people who couldn't see it. They just wanted to hurt them.

Some of the prisoners screamed, though it was hard to determine the threatening from the begging. They were shoved to the ports and led up to the parapet, and all Elke could gather to find some semblance of difference between soldier and prisoner was the unanimous grey of the soldiers' strange military coats.

Eventually, they jostled the protestors from the deck and tossed them beaten and bloody with the rest. There must have been twenty of them altogether, brought to their knees at the top of the wall, a soldier dispersed between every two.

"Use Bruhn," commanded the first officer. "Take his hood off first. He was a pain in the ass to catch. I want to see how long he can run this time."

"Yes, sir."

The other soldiers were mechanically receptive to his instructions. The nearest to the man Elke ascertained to be Bruhn yanked the black cloth from his head and pried his chin up between his fingers. He blinked to adjust to the blinding light of the badlands. He was terribly skinny, with a patchy beard and hollows under his eyes so deep they looked like bruises.

The first officer strutted across the parapet with barely-contained glee, and let the soldier over Bruhn lift his chin even further to face him rather than debase himself by kneeling.

"Welcome to Paradis," he jeered.

Elke anticipated a speech. He gave  none.

Bruhn was so thin it took only the kick of the first officer's polished boot to push him from the edge. His scream was cut short by the impact of him tumbling down the sandy hill, and Elke realized in horror why it had been so soft on the climb.

She searched for Poldi across the wall. He was shaking violently behind the crag, clutching it for balance as he wept softly. His clothes dripped on the stone.

Bruhn began to run like he somehow knew what came next, still quick as the first officer warned, but hopeless in the endless terrain. Thirst would kill him if he were to survive whatever the soldiers did next—and what they did next was unsheathe large metal syringes from their belts and come beside each remaining prisoner. These ones had not the dignity of having their hoods removed. It didn't make sense. Was this these people's religion? Were there madder cults out there than the Wallists to call for human sacrifice? There was a glint of hatred in the first officer's eyes that Elke had only seen in the way some of her comrades glared at a titan before slashing its nape. But these were people, eagerly injected at the neck and thrown into the unknown to die. That was what Elke thought, anyway, and maybe what became of them was another sort of death, but one after the other, the prisoners descending the hill went limp, and up shot a bright, acrid light from each of their bodies.

What rose from them was not human. Elke sank to the ground with a hand stifling her gasp as she watched men make monsters.

They shifted in grotesque transformation, with the same variance of height and appearance as the ones that had sieged Wall Maria, that had cornered Liesel in the mill, that infested this land Elke had once known to be the world. The distended limbs of their bodies struggled through a crawl first, and then tottered upright like infants learning to walk. They took to it quickly but uncannily. Their arms swung the way Poldi had always found so fascinating. The smiles didn't form right away—not until they saw their prey. Bruhn was halfway across the dry expanse, and it didn't matter. In minutes, the titans were on him.

Nothing was left of him when they moved on but a spot of red in all that brown.

Elke looked to Poldi again. An unfamiliar sort of grief held him in place, knuckles white around a slope in the crag. His clothes still dripped. A puddle bloomed on the stone, and began to trickle down the ledge of the wall. There was a faint patter of water each time it struck.

The first officer turned toward the sound.

Elke's body knew it would happen before she did—when all the life seized up in her chest and her blood ran cold, and she was a vessel tethered to its brother more than it was tethered to the ground.

She shot her hook into the first officer's skull before he could shout an order.

Her movements were a blur of wind and blood and Poldi at the end of her sightline; she had one blade to cut along the row of soldiers and a second cable bolted to the cliffside. The first was unretractably lodged in a soft, gushing brain and the inconvenient cage of a skull. Elke snapped the winch from her side and glided down the rampart with her arm over her head for a clean, quick slice where she imagined the soldier's necks would be. More fell in her path than she had time to count. More still were taller than her arm could reach, and she struck only the collars of their uniforms or the curve of their shoulders rapidly turning away.

Killing people wasn't very different from killing titans. The figures were foreign in shape, the skin thicker, the blood sticky, but the motion was the same. She propelled backward from her grappling point to finish the rest of them off, soaring through the air like a wingless bird. She managed only one, a fresh-faced soldier wrestling for the gun stuck on his hip. He stared up at her with more fear than hatred, and that was nice. His scream cut in two with her sword. She lurched in the wet, red warmth of life spilling beneath her.

She blinked up. One of the soldiers had fared better in finding his weapon. The cool barrel was pointed at her head, and he was screaming too. Elke couldn't break this one, but she did relish that his gun was shaking.

That hesitation cost her. Another came from behind her and thrust her by the neck into the ground. Hot stone scratched open her wound, and Elke howled.

"Island fucking devil," the soldier spat.

"You, Ahler, grab the fucking kid!"

Elke thrashed against the soldier's grip until it broke skin. "Don't fucking—I'll fucking kill you all!—I'll rip your fucking—"

Something hard and solid slammed into her back. The breath was dislodged from her throat with a string of blood. "Shut up, devil bitch."

"Elke!" she heard Poldi crying, over and over until something shut him up.

The soldier flipped her over. In the fog of pain, she couldn't see anything but the blond outline of his hair in the sun. He threw her to her knees and kicked her in the gut. She doubled over, but he didn't let her stay there long. Forced upright, he grabbed her by the chin like they'd done to Bruhn, and she thought maybe they'd kill her like him too.

"Put a bullet in her already, Lutz!" One of the soldiers—Ahler?—shouted. He clutched at a gaping wound in his shoulder.

"Got you," Elke gargled through a mouthful of blood.

Ahler lunged at her, deathly pale and calling her all manner of murderous things. The bruising grip Lutz had on her shoulder slipped free to put a hand to his chest.

"Don't be stupid," he rasped. "There've never been devils this far out. We need to—fuck... Calvi will want to know."

"Know what? That one of them killed—" Ahler took in the massacre around him— "God, she killed six of our own, Lutz! She killed Koelsch!"

"We have orders."

"Koelsch had our fucking orders!"

"I want one of them," spat another soldier. Elke glared as far sidelong as she was able with her head restrained.

Poldi was too. The soldier had him in a headlock. She writhed helplessly in Lutz's grasp.

"What?" Lutz asked through gritted teeth, struggling to hold her down.

"We don't need to bring two back, do we? I want to kill the runt. Let the bitch watch."

Elke tried to bite her way out. Her mouth didn't open properly, and half her canine was somewhere in a forest nine days behind her, but she tried nonetheless. Lutz snapped her fractured jaw shut. Everything went temporarily black.

Poldi was half the size of the man behind him, slim as his favourite trees next to the canal, and his sunburn stretched across summer-dark cheeks and the heat scabs of the badlands. Everything she'd put him through to get here was plain on his face, and for the first time in their journey Elke wondered if she had made the wrong choice. All she wanted was to sit on the chair in the front porch and name stars with him.

She had trained all her life to protect him, and had no training for when she no longer could.

"Let me kill him," the soldier begged.

Lutz considered it.

Poldi was mouthing something to her down the parapet. It took her a moment to shape the words, his mouth was almost as brittle as hers.

I love you, he said, again and again. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Elke, with nothing else to do, cried. She could see it even from here; the moment she stopped fighting was when the last hope left Poldi. He slumped against the soldier's chest and waited to die.

"Fine," Lutz said. Reason didn't outweigh hatred.

Ahler had to pin Elke's legs down when the soldier withdrew a syringe from the same belt as his gun. It gleamed in the sun, like Elke's gear and jewels in Mitras, like a needle in a box just as sharp as this one. It pressed against the hollow of Poldi's jaw.

"Please," Elke hiccuped. She couldn't breathe. Lutz kept her head up. "Please, please, kill me. Don't kill him. Please kill me."

"Tough luck," snarled Ahler.

The soldier plunged the syringe into Poldi's neck.

He fell from the parapet without ever looking away from her. She hoped the metal was like ice. She hoped it cooled the wounds the heat had given him.

"I love you," she said back, again and again and again.

The light of his transformation was devastating. It blasted the badlands in a blanket of green so wide it could've been grass on the plains. It could've been Shiganshina. Poldi could have been alive.

Instead, the roar of a titan echoed out in a voice that couldn't be his. The rest of them were far gone now, dust on the horizon, and Bruhn was a stain in soil that grew nothing. Elke wanted to leap from the rampart to die too—and then Poldi could have her. She could be part of him. But the light funneled skyward too long; her eyes were assaulted by the blinding, endless wave that rippled up the wall in a torrent, and Lutz and Ahler held her tighter like she might try to escape through the fog. To what end? To keep her from a good death? They'd regret taking her across the water. She'd kill everyone on the other side.

"What the hell is this?" Ahler shouted through the wind.

She felt Lutz's voice in her temple, her head wedged against his chest. "I don't know! It looks like—"

Like the way the earth trembled when the red titan felled Maria.

The light of Poldi's death faded to a terrifying shadow, swallowing even the cascading sun on the water. The fog eddied, then split. What emerged was unlike anything Elke had seen before.

Towering over the rampart was a taller, lither form than the other titans the soldiers had made, tan and dark-haired, sluggishly risen as if not yet capable of balancing its weight. And its weight was meted across three scarred napes, lined flesh-mauve like cords of muscle protruded from the skin. It clutched the parapet in a frenzy, and the stone shattered in its careless fist. The soldier closest to the impact fell into the black maw of its shadow with a scream, and was crushed at once under its feet. No one else seemed able to move. Its talons dug into massive palms, it flexed the muscles of its fingers, and it blinked down at them with six wide, frightened eyes.

The three-headed titan was Poldi, and he was looking for his sister.

AUTHOR'S NOTE       ✶      sooooooo the prologue was supposed to be a little blurb of a synopsis and then ten thousand words happened. hello! welcome!! i hope u had fun! i proofread this a few times but it's a long one and it's currently 1am so i apologize for any mistakes. let me know your thoughts hehehe ....

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