DEVILMAKER
I. Trial 49

✶

It was hard to determine which eyes Elke should look at. In all of them, brown and wide and reflecting the water, Poldi couldn't seem to hone his vision to a single point. His gaze darted over the port in pursuit of an inscrutable target, as if Elke dangled somewhere beyond his memory, in a place the titan couldn't reach. She had no way to guide him back; her arms were pinned by Lutz, and Ahler had her legs wrangled at the calves to stop her kicking. It didn't work. She landed one hard boot on the bridge of his nose before he bound her knees together with a bloody snarl. It spilled down the snapped cartilage to his lip, and dotted red on the white fabric of her pants. Control was ceded once more to the milky vertigo of Elke's pain.

Poldi sank to the ground with a thud that shook the foundation of the rampart, thrashing his fists into the ground like a babe left alone in his cot. Three heads wobbled on his skinny shoulders. His dark hair shadowed the grief and confusion of each face, but his wails were inescapable; they rang threefold up the wall in a long, cold echo. How many times had Elke cradled him when he cried like that, when her arms lacked the muscle to hold him right? Mitras women propped their babies on their hips. Mitras women handed them off to nursemaids and governesses and eldest daughters. Elke didn't mind that. She could shush him to sleep from a tantrum, rocked over her lap on the woolen, hand-spun rug splayed out in the nursery. He'd drool on her shoulder with sticky eyes, sick on her silks, crush a pinky she no longer had in his chubby fist.

Elke screamed for him over the wall, but there was no soothing the creature that remained of her little brother.

"Let me go!" she howled, her wrists sore in Lutz's callused hands. "He's alive! I can save him! Let me go!"

"Save him?" one of the soldiers exclaimed. "Your devil brother is a fucking—"

"Enough!" Lutz shouted.  "The kid is conscious in there, if we leave him here he could end up going back to his people!"

Poldi was clawing through the barren wasteland with nails like talons. The force of his scream threw them backward.

"You want to bring him back?" Ahler asked incredulously, squeezing Elke's thigh so hard she had to bite back a cry.

"What the hell do you want to do, Ahler?"

"What do I—I want to push the bitch off the edge for the three-headed runt to eat and get the fuck off this island!"

"The kid's not even fighting," Lutz barked, and Elke's hand wrested free long enough to aim for his throat with it. She didn't get far. He slammed her head forward with such force it knocked the wind out of her. "Fucking—you don't know when the fuck to give up, do you? Someone get an angle and start shooting the damn thing! He's in one of those napes, isn't he?"

Three of the remaining soldiers took to the instruction without hesitation, aiming their guns down the ledge of the rampart where Poldi was grasping at the middlemost skull of his titan. Elke didn't need to see the harsh beam of light escape the barrels to know what they did. A bang cut through the horrible wailing stirring a sandstorm up the wall, and the titan slumped forward as a deluge of bullets shot through the first neck.

Elke held her breath. Lutz wanted to bring Poldi back, but what was this but an attempt to kill him?

Then, two of the titan's heads rose up again, bobbing to the right where the last one hung limp from its bloody nape, and she realized that killing him was not such an easy thing to do. Poldi squinted dissonantly at his wound. The soldiers shot again. This time, they struck him through the second nape in a blitz of embers Elke had only the vocabulary to call canon-fire. She'd never seen guns used, but had seen demonstrations of canons in scout training before, though never with a real target. The assault was brutally effective. Blood and steam burst from the weeping craters the bullets left in the titan's neck, the flesh sagging pink and wet from the jugular.

That was it—Poldi was in that one. The titan clutched helplessly at his nape as he staggered with heavy, crooked strides toward the wall.

Lutz and Ahler shouted a series of commands that were all lost on Elke but one: move. The soldiers hastened down the ramp in a frenzy. She continued kicking and elbowing and biting through her human restraints in a mindless fervor, and Poldi's titan, grasping for life, shadowed all the light in his palm. Elke went quiet. She had so tired of the sun.

Her captors had her her halfway down the incline to port when he slammed into the rampart. The stone shuddered with Elke's bated breath before it burst, and a shower of rock hurtled from the sky like Poldi swore the stars sometimes did. All of the soldiers dove into the water. Maybe half of them made it there. Elke saw more heads flying from bodies than she saw splashes in the shore. Had they gotten Ahler too? She hoped so. He was gone from her feet, and she could kick again. There was an awful lot of blood on her—maybe that was his? But Lutz was still holding her, and instead of diving free from the burden of her weight, he wrapped around her like armour and directed them both to the water. The momentum was late, contorted by the gravity of the rockfall. It shot them onto the first dock with a rough tumble.

When the dust settled and her ears stopped ringing, Elke flexed her fingers to be sure she was alive. It certainly seemed that way; she tasted salt and the hot metal she knew to be blood, and saw two decollated heads rolling to a halt on the dock, their eyes blank and full of sand. Her imagination wasn't good enough to make up something so awful.

Lutz's dark, heavy shield still covered her, and Elke could not invent any reason for his protection that made her feel safe. Valuable cargo was not the same as a valued life. She shoved him off and barreled toward the shattered rampart. Her legs were weak, the air was clouded grey with debris, and all of the army she had failed to kill ambled heavily from the water after her, but Elke had weapons they didn't understand either. She tested her winches. One still worked. A wheezing dispatch of her last cable landed her on her knees at the shattered rampart. Poldi's titan sagged over the ledge. The soldiers shrieked some desperate command like escape was still an option—like Elke still cared about anything but being beside him.

His death was hotter to stand over than any stretch of the badlands had been.

"Poldi?" she whispered, brushing back his scalding dark hair even when her fingers burned. All six of his eyes were shut. Two of his napes looked like they'd been carved through by a butcher's deft hand, split open and spilling in clots on the stone. The third, unmarred, had gone the same ghastly white as the first. But the second—the second nape still stirred under all that gaping red. The muscle swelled like a parasite sought to burst free. Elke almost stopped hearing the soldiers then; she stumbled over the bones of an already husked wrist to the pulsing meat of his neck, and dug out her brother.

His little fist punched through the flesh to meet her. Elke laughed over a sob as she pulled and pulled. It was like being possessed; the ache was terrible, her muscles felt string-thin and desiccated, and she couldn't stop.

Poldi gasped from the corded reins of the titan as his head came free. Remnants of the body clung to his cheeks like rays of a bloody sun.

"Poldi," Elke begged. "Come on. Come on."

He was trying so hard to listen. His fingers itched for the command. She had her arms around his torso now, heaving over the incredible density of the sinew. Lutz had taken her blade, hadn't he? She searched about her gear but couldn't find it.

The steam of the dying titan cleared from the sky like parting clouds, and she saw in the gaps that the soldiers had risen to formation. None of them moved. Not even Ahler. They stared at her with Poldi draped halfway across her lap, damp and pink in the titan's residue like the film of amniotic fluid. She remembered swaddling him on the rug beside his cot. She remembered letting him teethe on her fingers. She remembered another face, too, though it had been a long time since Elke had seen it.

"Help me, then!" she snarled. All of the soldiers' fingers twitched over their guns. She found them so disgustingly timid that there was suddenly no way to believe this ended with them shooting into her neck too. She would live, and they would die, because she was more than them. They were nothing at all.

"What good are you people?" she screamed, laughing. It was somewhat hard to see. "Your captains train you like this? Can you even fight without those things? I killed six of you without them—ha!—I killed your captain! Give me one and I bet I can kill the rest of you! Give me my sword back and I'll do it! Or—" Elke slipped on the titan's corpse as she tried to stand. There was blood up to her ankles. "—Help me, and live."

The weakness spread to her knees. She wobbled over the body until she landed on her back in the hot gush of its wounds. The soldiers blurred to lines like a fence-post on the edge of the shattered wall, and all she could do as her vision went black was hold onto Poldi and hope; they couldn't kill them, because they were nothing.

She woke in a room like a metal box.

One slim window was all the light she was allowed as she struggled to rouse unwilling limbs. It had the violet hue of dusk. A nauseating stupor bid her instincts to the barrack cells, five years ago, awaiting a scolding from Erwin for something she'd done the night before after the cadets got drunk on stolen wine. Then she adjusted to the bleary blue hue and her inch of movement, and realized it was not intoxication or even injury that arrested her. Elke was strapped down by two cross-body belts and four padded steel manacles affixed to the bed. The bed was metal too, like the walls, though rusting at the footboard where she thrashed with aching feet, and it creaked with her upward lurch. All that budged were her toes. She tried her fingers, but Elke didn't have the strength to tear steel from steel on her best day. There was a strange swaying underneath her too—a little jolt at the unpredictable lap of waves like gliding on ODM gear with faulty gas. She waited for an inevitable fall, but it never came.

"Let me—" Her voice was completely gone. With all her effort, it sounded like a whisper.

It took until the door opened and a soldier came in to inspect her that she started pushing against her restraints again. He offered her a glass of water that was not nearly enough, half of it wasted in his careless provision, spilled down the blood-stiff collar of her shirt.

"Let me go," she demanded hoarsely. The soldier was old and wide with fat red cheeks. If she could get a hand free, she thought she could probably kill him through surprise alone.

He spat on her. The thick, warm gob landed on her cheek before she could flinch away. Elke gagged. The soldier snickered to himself before turning for the door, and her disgust faded as it began to close behind him. It was nearly night outside her window. The soldier's lantern was the only light and colour she had, and she wanted so badly to keep it. Petulantly, she wanted to sleep with something warm kissing the backs of her eyes.

"Wait!" she tried to shout, and it scratched at her throat. "I need to see him! I need—"

The soldier turned with the lantern lighting his face from below. It was another petulant thing—which might've been what the dark made of everyone—a reminder of a childhood where friends told tales at the fireplace of monsters beyond the walls. None of them ever believed they'd meet them.

"Ask again," said the soldier, "and your brother dies."

Elke did not make a sound for two days.

The soldiers brought her meals, led her blindfolded to the head at an interval that felt like an hour, and changed her bandages twice through both cycles of light. She watched for it: the pale pink of sunrise to a blue afternoon to a fuchsia dusk, and then the long, black night. It rose and fell in her little window, pitching her room to total darkness. Sometimes it was a new face that came, but not many were left. Usually it was Lutz. Once, she tried to bring up Poldi, and he warned her not to without reiterating what would happen if she asked again.

It took until mid-morning on the third day for Elke's entire body to dull to a dumb, blinking machine that opened its mouth for stale bread and soup and slept when the sky told it to. When Lutz brought her to the head—and it was always Lutz who brought her to the head, without even the dignity of turning his back for her privacy—she brushed discreetly at the walls in the hope of determining some useful, heavy shape. Some of the toilets in Mitras had bars for the elderly; if the ship was old, and the structure rusted loose like her bed frame, she might wrench one free and batter him to death with it. That was supposing some similarity to the world she knew. It was also supposing Lutz would ever look away to give her the chance. And so he flanked her with his weapon at her hip in warning, there and back and there again, and she went on in the dark, silent fugue, swaying whichever way the water took her.

She thought of Poldi all the while. Caught on the rampart, she'd needed to fight to protect him. Now, she needed to lie down and accept this temporal cage. Whatever it took, she would do. Whatever she needed to be, she would be. But if she could just see him, then maybe...

The ship steadied to a halt. There was the same churning buzz as had spun under the hull when it docked in the badlands. Elke would have shot up in bed if she had the room for it. Instead, she panted desperately against the belts latched over her chest and waited. It didn't take long for the lock to click open and for Lutz to appear with the keys. He was without a blindfold this time, and Elke faltered as he unshackled her and ordered her to stand.

That she would finally be allowed to see meant they no longer believed she could escape.

They were joined by Ahler and another soldier at the end of the hall when she forced herself out of her panic. It was strange to see it after walking it blind so many times. The light was dim enough that behind the cloth they'd tied over her eyes, nothing seeped through. Droplets spilled down the walls with the sullage-rotted scent of something spoiled. There was the constant tap of a leak on the toe of Ahler's boot, seeping into an open hole.

He looked terrible. One of the rocks from the rampart had appeared to have taken roughly a quarter of his face off, a discoloured wad of gauze wrapped around his jaw to hold the skin in place. He was mottled with bruises, and angrier than Elke remembered, but so would anyone be who had survived that. How many of them remained, she wondered, after her blade had cut down six? Poldi's titan had beheaded at least two.

The rest must have been with him now. It was deliberate that they were withholding her from him, and perhaps more important that they were withholding him from her. If Poldi had a titan, there was nothing to stop him from taking Elke and running but the uncertainty of his own control and the obscurity of her location.

That was her plan, then: to watch, and wait for Poldi, to find him if the opportunity arose. That was all she had.

The prisoner's hatch creaked open with a grating yawn. A great staircase loomed above, and Elke's fettered hands jittered in her new cuffs. How many had known this view last before dying? It was the first full beam of light she'd seen in days. She cowered at how it blinded her despite her hunger for it, and Lutz and Ahler shoved her unceremoniously up the steps.

Elke wasn't sure what she was expecting at the top, but a city like home was not it.

The water stretched on beyond comprehension, glittering pink in the dusk, but the land—there had never been a reason to think of land like this. Scout training had brought her up mountains and back. She'd carried Poldi through treetops and badlands and storm-battered bluffs, but the land across the water was something else. The port was three times the size as the one on the island, with dozens of ships like the one beneath her. The rooftops were red as carnations, and wider altogether than any meadow a bait city could house. There must have been a thousand of them, little pockets of residences interspersed with roads as pale and wide as the ones in Mitras, and a pocket of smokestacks and industrial plants condensed to the city outskirts. Beyond them were the woodland hills of another world, cupped around a rising moon.

It almost made Elke laugh that she'd mistaken the ship on the horizon for this. She wondered how far home was behind them.

Bodies shuffled over the harbor wall like ants. It was a secondary brigade come to greet them, and her gaze darted over their readied weapons, glinted silver and thick in their slings. If she couldn't make a move here, she could at least learn from watching. They had no ODM gear, and the soldiers hadn't seemed to recognize it when she'd used it before. Did that mean there were no titans? Did they fight them with guns alone? Canons lined the bastion like Wall Sina, so they were prepared for an invasion, only these were pointed at the water, which meant they weren't for titans at all. They were for people.

There was no time to dwell on the revelation. Lutz and Ahler led Elke down the bridge to port, and her feet felt soft and strange trying to walk again after days rocking bed-bound on the water. The secondary brigade signaled commands of some indecipherable code as they approached. They observed her from the wall like something they'd never seen before. Maybe they hadn't.

"Lutz?"

Elke's neck craned all the way back. The brigade rallied above, the harbor wall a gate they had ostensibly not permitted be opened yet.

A female soldier peered over the ledge. "Your unit is two days late! Why aren't you docked at the eastern berth? What happened to... Oh God, Lutz—"

"I know," he said through gritted teeth. His gun dug into her back. "We need medical, now. Two devils made it to port. One's still on board—a shifter. The rest can wait."

"I—" The woman had a face like a cherub, with auburn hair pinned back in a cap, and stared down with stunned, sunlit eyes. They were a beacon of her terror. Easy targets to gouge.

"Lieutenant Reinhardt!" she exclaimed. "The gate—"

She vanished over the wall before Elke could glean the rest of her flustered petition, but the response was quick enough to deduce its importance. The long black pikes of the gate slowly opened to the city, and the brigade hurried down the ramp to usher them in. Ahler and the other soldiers from the ship dispersed forthwith, lugged onto a ready few stretchers and held up in the arms of their comrades when those ran out. Everyone who had survived the port was wounded, but not many had survived the port. Elke had been guided off the ship by a measly five men. If she had to guess, they hadn't left a great deal more to handle Poldi.

The cherub soldier from the wall rushed in before them. Her gaze, cool in the shade of the harbor's underpass, was removed of terror. Up close, she had the same unpolluted hate as Koelsch had for Bruhn before he pushed him off the edge. Elke's eyes darted over the brigade. They all did.

"Is this a..."

"Yes," Lutz rasped. "Get her to Calvi, or Magath, or—fuck if I know, Meyer. Just get her the fuck away from me."

"Of course. Weiss!"

Elke was removed from Lutz, who had seen her cry and cackle madly and use the latrine blindfolded, and she was relieved in a more human way than she'd been in the days they'd made her a machine to finally be away from him. She supposed humiliation wasn't something she could afford anymore. That didn't make it go away.

The other soldiers ushered her through the gate with rough hands clutching her wrists, and she stumbled onto the street with a gasp. Whatever she'd seen from the ship was incomparable nearhand to Shiganshina, or Trost, or even Mitras. There was no city at home that had what this one did. She'd apparently been thrust into the heart of a great market. White pulses of light roosted atop long black poles with no apparent flames behind the glass. The people wore coats and frocks of fabric and colour only the wealthiest of Rose could afford, and only the wealthiest of Rose had reason to wear. Strange vehicles sputtered along the road, carriages that needed no horses to propel them, and none that stank of death, because there appeared to be no dead here.

Where was she?

Stalls littered the harborside with all manner of delicacies, steam licking up vibrant signs in languages Elke couldn't read, hands passing food and coin in an exchange of colours she'd almost forgotten in all her days of sand and metal. The smell was sweet. A boy on the street lapped at some foreign confection, powder-pink and dewy and breaded in a soft brown shell. He tilted his head in curiosity at the soldiers spilling through the gate before they circled around Elke like a secret. She caught only the startled blink of the boy's dark lashes before her vision was restricted to a barricade of uniforms.

They steered her through the crowd under a barrage of civilian commands far gentler than had ever been given to her. Only the children on their parents' shoulders could see Elke over her guard, but they pointed and called out and declared her something ruined. The late, dark heat of the setting sun itched at her swollen lip. She wondered what she must have looked like. Would they not deem her a monster if she were beautiful, or would she just be another kind?

"By God," she heard a woman gasp.

"Is that a—?"

"They caught a devil."

The steam from the stalls sizzled flat on smothered fires, and all the sweetness dissipated to salt.

She was thrust summarily into a warehouse at the end of the street and left there. Two of the soldiers came in with her, but didn't speak, and she didn't bother trying to coax them. If Lutz had imparted his rule of silence onto the rest of them, Elke had no interest in finding out. She could keep her mouth shut and listen as long as it was what served Poldi.

It took the soldiers outside long enough to decide what to do with her that by the time she was shepherded back into the fray, the sun had set and a milk-white moon hung over their ghastly faces. A few new ones stood among them. Elke did not bend to the hostile burn of their gazes—men who were evidently of greater position than she had met since their slaughtered captain—and instead swallowed the bile of her fear and held her head up high.

One immediately compelled more power than the rest. He was tall and slight with a flat, pale mouth and a slick part in his hair. There was a red sash through the webbing of his coat that Elke assumed denoted his position because the other soldiers were without it. To his left was a second man, though stouter, with skin a shade like her brother's and hair of the same dark curls. The man on the right, however, bore another emblem of status; around his arm was thick red band embroidered with a white star, and on his coat pocket were all manner of military pins and badges. His hair was blond and messy and grew down his jaw to a beard. A pair of thick round glasses reflected the strange roosts of light on every corner, obscuring his eyes in fulgent white. He pulled them down to look at her. What Elke saw behind them was something, finally, other than hate.

It disarmed her that she couldn't determine what that was.

"Take this one to Volke," said the one in the middle.

"Yes, sir."

Elke felt dizzy as they hauled her away. She didn't tear her eyes off the blond man until she had no choice.

The staircase they brought her to was inside a building more residential than the last—a narrow townhouse squished along an analogous row. The walls were old but tended, the stone freshly washed. What was inside was not. The stairs descended to a dim, cavernous underground where the air was thin and wet. Elke coughed as the hands pinned to her back guided her left down one hall, then right down the next. Every door was barred at the window, some with smaller slits on the ground to slide meal trays through, and the unmistakable sound of weeping spilled through each gap. A mechanical droning filtered out from another, and lastly, at the door next to the room they readied for her, Elke heard a man beg to die.

Two men in distinctly nonmilitary vesture shuffled out of the room after a soldier's pert knock. They donned uniforms more like scrubs, fine as sheets and ostensibly once-white, now spattered brown with what Elke suspected was not dirt, but the desaturated velum of dry blood. In their hurried exit, she caught the gleam of tools in washing pails and rags in wicker baskets.

The soldiers shoved her forward.

Her room wasn't too different from her lodging on the ship, as far as comfort went; a metal pallet resided in the middle to sleep, with the same padded cuffs and belts, but against the walls were a bizarre assortment of medicine-filled cupboards, shelves, anatomical charts and sanitary tools. There was little time to dissect them further before the soldiers laid Elke on the pallet and unlocked one of her cuffs to equip another. Sturdier than her bed on the ship and inbuilt with locks and buckles, she understood it was not a pallet at all but a table—because this was not a cell. It was a laboratory.

She couldn't bite down her panic even for Poldi's sake. If they detained her here, when would her next opportunity be to escape? There were no proper windows, her gear was gone, and the walls were impenetrable stone.

Elke bit the cherub soldier with the jagged edge of her broken teeth. The taste was vile. It was an unthought plan. She didn't have the element of surprise she'd had on the port to give her an advantage, and there were all manner of faculty in the halls even if she did manage to take out her guards. Still, the soldier jolted backward and fell on her knees. Elke spat the excess blood onto the second soldier's face like that might blind him, and he knocked her over the head with something hard. Elke slumped against the table, inert from her pathetic excuse of a fight. She felt the familiar prod of steel cuff her wrists again.

"Fucking—where'd she get you?" the male soldier asked.

"My... hand. It's fine. Oh, God."

"Hell, Meyer."

Another figure emerged from the open doorway, inhumanly lithe in Elke's warped periphery. She was dressed in white too.

"This is the Subject of Ymir?" she asked in awe, staring so openly at her that even through the vertigo Elke could tell.

"They're all Subjects of Ymir," scoffed the soldier. "I'm getting Meyer to medical for that bite—real medical, not the freak show Calvi lets you run down here."

"I beg your pardon, Jans, but there's an important distinction betw—"

"Carry on, doctor."

Meyer was dragged out the door moaning, slung under Jans' arm, and the doctor huffed something else before moving to the desk at the wall. It was hard to follow her figure. The light was scant, Elke's brain was fuzzy, and she wanted very badly to give up and sleep. She licked away the blood on her lips. The doctor rummaged around the cupboards, then picked up something small and shiny from her bedside. Elke wanted to twist away from her as she approached but couldn't. A cool hand brushed her cheek.

"What a wonderful creature you are," the doctor whispered, and then the point of a needle pricked her neck. A tender, gelid fluid spread through Elke's body. Numbness apprehended her limbs first, and then her lungs. Her breath came out in shallow pants. The terror of her body's cage was mercifully short; she was asleep before she could hope to scream.

Elke dreamed of memories gone wrong when she had so few that had gone right. The first was of a stage play in Mitras, hosted by a family whose surname she couldn't remember—patrons to a pair of siblings plucked from the streets of Strokirch for having sung so well. It was an acceptable sort of miracle and so happened every few years, a fragment of hope that did not demand to save every poor child the bait cities spat out, but to at least savour the gifted. In Elke's dream, they sang without voices, but she carried the memory of them as she watched, like a coin she was certain she'd put in her purse and couldn't find. She rummaged around for it in the silence. The leather sound of her pursuit echoed off the walls of the amphitheater, and she itched with the familiarity of an absent melody as her hands came out empty.

She woke. The doctor had her hand in Elke's mouth. She bit down on instinct, but found something metal barred her jaw from closing. Saliva pooled down her chin. She screamed at the stretch of the steel prop holding open her mouth, her wounds still tender.

The doctor wrenched her gloved fingers free. "Oh, dear. You're awake."

Whatever Elke had been injected with made everything taste like rubber. Her tongue was fat in her mouth like she imagined old Krümel's, and she couldn't seem to fix it to her teeth or the roof of her mouth before it lolled backward to her throat. It felt like she was going to choke on it.

The doctor tsked, rifled through one of her trays, and returned with a sympathetic frown. "Your body withstands the drug so much more effectively than the others... None of our Eldians last so long."

Another dose breached the side of Elke's neck before she could hope to glean her meaning. She whimpered at the unbearable cold of it in her throat. Her efforts to fight the immediate, overwhelming weight dragging her unconscious were pointless. Despite the doctor's twisted praise, this wasn't something that could be beaten.

Sleep took Elke again.

This time, she dreamed of the woman called Nefes who had been made her mother. Names were hard for Elke, here in the drug-induced milieu of her memory. Maybe she hadn't been called Nefes after all. Maybe Poldi's name had always been Poldi, instead of something she gave him to forget the truth. It didn't matter in this place. Elke could watch the dream of Nefes like she had watched the Strokirch protégés in the theatre, and not worry so much about being her daughter.

They sat in the nursery in a dull afternoon light. Nefes nursed Poldi on the rocking chair by the hand-spun rug, staring out the window to the manor garden. Autumn had shrunken all the flowers along the sill, and when she wasn't at school, Elke liked to crush them in her fingers like fallen leaves. Nefes even smiled at her for it some days. The simplicity of her joy made Elke frown where she sat, wondering what was wrong with the dream.

"Ana?" she asked, taken aback by how small her hands were when she pressed them to the glass.

"Elke," Nefes answered. She never looked up from the babe.

"When will he be big enough to walk?"

"He?" Nefes asked.

Elke blinked. The infant at Nefes' breast was not Poldi. It was the face Elke sometimes saw but couldn't pin, always a fraction out of focus: a little girl with black hair and eyes like chestnuts.

She woke again. This time, the doctor was writing something down at her desk, and Elke could move her jaw. She tested her binds. Her fingers were so awfully heavy she didn't think it would matter if she weren't restrained.

"Wh... Pol... Pold...i..."

"Ah!" the doctor jolted from her seat. "Awake again! Incredible. But don't exert yourself trying to speak, you'll only... ah, where did I put it?"

"Please..." Elke didn't know what she was begging for. Her fingers twitched for flowers to crush.

"Poor thing. Your physical won't be much longer, and then we can have a proper conversation."

Elke didn't bother protesting when the doctor injected her this time.

The dream it evoked was longer than the rest. How old was Elke here, tall enough to reach the top shelf of her father's desk but not the pastries in the kitchen cupboard? She watched herself tiptoe through his office in the navy cast of moonlight, peering in through the doorway. Then, she wore gowns to bed and layers of skirts come morning, and the silk was so fine it made her feel like she was swimming.

Draped on this night in a pearlescent blue, Elke pressed the key into the lock and turned. The drawer clicked at a volume that made her wince, slowly sliding it open to a stack of folders stuffed full. Elke sat on her knees in her father's upholstered chair, bruised from some dance she'd been practicing the day before, and placed the first one on his desk. It was harder to read now than it had been then, ogling over a more slender shoulder, but enough stuck to remember what mattered:

Trial 47

Ayhan Fidan, Historian to the first King Reiss, his most loyal Subject.

Subject responded to [...] fluid instillation with three seizure clusters [...] Blood transfusion alleviated the side effects during recovery. [...] Notable that it was [...] Ackerman.

Subject will not undergo a second trial under direct order of King Reiss. All tests suspended until [...] Approval has been given to utilize offspring of the Subject for further genetic experimentation.

Elke read the second folder.

Trial 48

Mazhar Fidan, Historian to King Uri Reiss, Heir of Ayhan Fidan, Historian to the first King Reiss, his most loyal Subject.

Subject responded to spinal fluid [...] with one seizure cluster as observed in Trial 47. Notable improvement in Subject's initial reaction, but transformation proved unsuccessful [...] Amputation of left arm ineluctable without the blood [...] Lesser experiments conducted on the Subject Nefes Fidan promise genetic variety in the next generation [...] unobserved in the bastard. Approval for a secondary trial to be determined.

Shaking, Elke read the third.

Trial 49

Demet Fidan, daughter of Mazhar and Nefes Fidan, Historian to King Uri Reiss, Heir of Ayhan Fidan, Historian to the first King Reiss, his most loyal Subject.

Subject did not respond.

Elke woke to the doctor observing her missing pinky through a magnifying glass and a harsh white light in a steel pocket.

"Where am—ah... I have t..."

"Oh," the doctor said, less jumpy than the last time. She clicked the light off and set it down. "You're more coherent already. Your body seems to be metabolizing the drug as though you possess some genetic disposition for it. It's... you are remarkable, Miss Haase. If only you could have heard all the times I said it while you slept."

Elke hated that she knew her name. She hated that she could feel the unidentifiable markers of all the things they'd done to her in her sleep, that she had been altered somehow, touched and plucked at and stolen from—a wet film on her skin, a gouged-out wound inside her.

The doctor wrote something in a notebook and offered her water. "I'll give you an hour to recover. There are nurses outside, but only beyond the guards. If you need them, call out. They're under my authority."

In a better state of mind, Elke would try to store that information to comprehend her enemy's ranks. This was a doctor who had the power to delegate soldiers. Had the man with the red sash given her that? Calvi? Was there someone above him? She was left alone with the question and nowhere to keep it. Her retention bore as many holes as a sieve; if there was an answer, it slipped straight through her.

Her dreams still flickered. Skewed across a mental wreckage, she remembered them in different colours: Nefes on a summer night, then an autumn morning, siblings singing in the dark and silent in the light, a single line rearranged, over and over again. Subject did not respond. It could have been an hour or ten that Elke stared at the ceiling inventing the letters and she wouldn't have known the difference. All she saw was the pale brown of the infant's eyes, so different from the deep black of her brother's.

It was almost certain Poldi was being held in a place just like this, suffering the same experimentations she'd run from Mitras to save him from. There was little reassurance to be found in hoping his inclination to cooperate would earn him leniency, if they even kept him conscious long enough to do so. Poldi was a titan. If they thought Elke was inhuman, what did they think of him?

"How do you feel?" asked the doctor when she returned. "I'm sorry for the tube. I suppose we can start feeding you properly now."

Elke hadn't noticed a tube. She looked down at her stomach and immediately regretted it. "Take that out."

"It's a bit more of a process than that, Miss Haase," the doctor chuckled.

"How do you know my name?"

"How do you think? Your brother woke weeks ago."

Weeks? "Where is he? Why can't I see him? I'm not even—I'm not a threat anymore, you have me... drugged up like some—"

"Miss Haase, you killed five decorated soldiers and their captain."

Elke canted her head. It was hard to pretend to be confident when her fingers were digging into the sheet on the table and her words all came out slurred. "What do you want from me that you haven't... haven't found already?"

"We've hardly lobotomized you, and not even brain matter can offer us insight to your memories. You understand we've never seen one of your kind before, yes?"

"You think I'm... some kind of animal."

"You're different; that isn't a question."

"Yeah?" Elke glanced around the room in disgust. "I hope so."

"Why did you join the military?"

"The—I'm not a part of some—you don't know anything."

The doctor smiled. "That's why I'm talking to you."

"Because I'm no good without a brain. But if you could jus-s—just pluck it out and get what you want... you would, right?"

"It is my current instruction and objective to make the most of our unique predicament. Death is not necessarily our only course, and not the one I hope to reach."

"That's nice."

"Remember who fired first, Miss Haase."

"You turn people into titans, you fucking psycho!"

The doctor sighed, rubbing her eyes. If the bags there were any indication of the time they'd spent here, Elke could only guess she looked dead by comparison. "It was our intention to share only the information that would prompt—"

"Bring me... my brother... or go back to cutting me open. I'm not telling you shit."

The doctor shook her head sadly and tapped the glass of a syringe at Elke's bedside table. The fluid bubbled inside. She wiped the sticky curls from Elke's neck and leaned in. "You will."

"No, no, no, wait—"

Another dose knocked her unconscious.

It was impossible to tell how long they kept her there, drawing blood, swabbing saliva, plucking hairs, paring slivers of skin from each limb like vegetables. They tested different gauzes and medicines on her to see which resulted in the fastest healing. Some of them made her itch. Some of them made her vomit for days. Some caused her to convulse on the table until the pain sent her to sleep again.

"Were your mother and father titans, too?" the doctor asked when Elke was lucid enough to hear her.

"Did you know your brother possessed the ability to shift?" the doctor asked.

"If we were to inject you with the serum, would you too transform?" the doctor asked.

Elke stared up at the ceiling as a tear slipped free.

"Where's my brother?" she croaked.

The doctor sighed.

For a long time, Elke was left alone to heal while they studied their findings. The room was neither warm nor unbearably cold, but in her thin gown she shivered nonetheless. Skin grafts painted her arms and legs like a patchwork quilt, and she'd lost as concerning an amount of weight as she must have lost blood. She might as well have been on the boat again. She'd fall unconscious and dream of Poldi, of the barracks, of Mitras and the face long-gone, and wake to a bowl of broth spoon-fed by a stranger. They took her tube out and bandaged the itchy leak. It was not Lutz who brought her to the latrine now, and no one believed she had enough fight in her anymore to worry about turning their back when they did. They'd stand in pairs, muttering to themselves about her on the other side of the door like she wasn't there. There was more light in the latrine than in the lab without the doctor shining her little white torch, and day by day, Elke watched her fingers thin to the musician's digits she'd had as a girl, her muscles reduced to protrusions so faint they felt like bug bites. She should have fought against it. She wondered if she could still carry her brother.

The doctor came back and began again. The second round of tests sent Elke stirring into the past, only this time without the reprieve of rest. She was to be kept awake for some variability in response. There were wires adhered to her skull, her fingers, and her toes. Sometimes the doctor shocked her, but sometimes she just set a faint buzz throughout her body like the hum of an insect. Whether the doctor was calling something inside her or driving it away was impossible to tell. Elke didn't know why crickets sang either.

"Where's my brother?" she asked again, her tongue her only conscious muscle, her throat dry from screaming. She'd laid flat on the cool metal of the table for a time too long to say, and couldn't feel her body anymore.

"Let's begin this conversation with a series of rules, Miss Haase," said the doctor, pacing before a series of notes pinned on a wall too far for Elke to read. "Ask any question you'd like about where you are, who we are, and where you come from. Ask about our culture, our religions, our nation. But do not ask about your brother."

"I don't give a fuck about your nation," Elke choked out, dizzy with a laugh. Her mind was muddy and moulded in more directions than a compass could spin.

"You've been taken across a sea you must not have known so much as existed, and you have no interest in learning more?"

A sea. So that was the great blue mirror? Of course Elke wanted to know, but she had to try to think. "What do you want from me for your answers?"

"Smart girl," said the doctor, shuffling a chair closer. "I want yours in turn."

"Tell me why."

She grinned. Her teeth were amazingly white. It occurred to Elke that she hadn't at all considered the doctor's face despite it looming over her in the gaps between her dreams, but it was a white, squarish one, with lips red like she'd bitten them all day and eyes a wide, gleaming blue.

"Now there's a question!" She opened her notebook. "Unfortunately, I'll only be able to answer it with one of my own. I know, I know—it's hardly a fair start, but gathering a baseline of knowledge will inform where I should begin to correct it."

The doctor's presumptuous language was insufferable, though perhaps more for the fact that it couldn't be argued against. Elke didn't know a damn thing. She steadied her fidgeting fingers over the soft edge of her cuff. The tips of her fingers could barely move enough to brush the steel exterior, but she found the coldness refreshing, like the fluid of her old silks. She could pretend she was on ice. It was a close enough thing to swimming.

Thinking of Poldi, Elke relented. "Fine."

For two days, they spoke of the world. Elke told the doctor as little as was possible to not give away detrimental information: that her people lived on the other side of this apparent sea, penned by walls like animals in a paddock, sheltering from monsters this foreign nation created. The doctor protested; they did not make the monsters, but released them from their human shells. Elke gritted her teeth and fought no more over it. She told her of a vague history spread a century ago to fill in the gaps, but that no one who knew the source of the walls or the titans existed anymore to tell it. Except, now, for her.

The doctor smiled at that, held true to her promise, and told Elke the truth.

AUTHOR'S NOTE ✶ condensing this was actually painful 😭 i intended to squeeze a Looooot more marley into the first chapter and before i knew it 8k words were ahead of me and paradis was still not on the horizon. hold out for levi pls... i promise we'll get there soon...

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