Hundreds were killed when the enemy took Praying Mantis, and the important people thought it prudent to keep all the conscripts at the Lake of Doom until everyone at Carthia stopped talking about it.
Yes, someone actually thought that was a good idea.
And so, I decided to bring Ta'o, Renou, and Bilal to the Lake where we would choose the rest of our team from among the new recruits.
While we were packing, Renou presented an idea. "Why don't we act like new recruits?"
The rest of us looked at one another.
"Think about it. If they know why we're there, they're going to act one way. But if they think we're like them, they'll be more natural."
I understood. "We'll see who they truly are."
Bilal chuckled to himself and pointed at Ta'o with a gruff voice. "What do we do about this guy?"
With Ta'o's dark-green skin, yellow eyes, and long white hair down his muscular back, he didn't look Herali. "And what about you, baldy?"
"No worries," Renou assured them. "Ta'o, you're from the Labiyei district of Kyoen, and your Herali is flawless. You just have to dress the part. Bilal," he looked up at the man's stubbly scalp. "You had fleas."
"Gee, thanks."
"Does that work, though?" I studied what was left of Bilal's hair; I still wanted to know why he knifed his last captain in the back. "He must have been shaved clean… maybe a week ago at most."
Ta'o gave him a wide-toothed grin. "Fleas are fleas."
It wasn't just because I was his captain, now; I was just curious. Really. I mean, not getting knifed in the back is always a good thing.
"How about," Bilal offered, "I'm a deserter from the Imperial Army, and I came here to hide from the Invisible Hand? I shaved my gorgeous Goloagi curls so my handsomeness wouldn't upstage you three tumors."
Renou raised a finger. "For the record, the three of us all have girlfriends. You don't."
Bilal grinned, again with a thumb to Ta'o. "You think that gimp is his girlfriend?"
Suddenly, Ta'o snapped. "Don't call her that!"
His laughter was gone. His easy smile blinked out of existence. What remained was a hard man, a weapon for a face, with his fists clenched at his sides.
Bilal giggled. "Don't call her your girlfriend?"
Ta'o stepped towards him, every muscle in his body was tense. "I'm dead serious, bro."
"Fine. Fine."
"No," Ta'o pointed one finger at the man's face. "You listen. You call her that one more time, I will kill you. Nice and slow. Do you hear me?"
Renou's eyes bulged.
"Nice and slow."
My heart started racing. Bilal stood motionless, staring deep into the Ta'o's eyes. His face was stone. I had to think like a captain. I had to know when to let them figure it out on their own and when to intervene. What would a good captain do?
I dropped my pack and took Bilal's side to face Ta'o directly. He needed to know his boundaries would be respected, and Bilal needed to save face. "We all hear you, and we will all listen out for anyone else who speaks ill of her."
Renou came to my side. "All of us."
Bilal nodded and looked around. Then he smiled at Ta'o. "That's right, man. Bro."
Ta'o relaxed, and we went back to our plan.
We had to dress like we'd come down from the mountains. We would arrive drenched in sweat and smelling like murder most foul, but in that we would fit in anyway. At present, all four of us wore a yithi, that loincloth of an outfit. Ta'o's front flap was a silk with dark blue graded into black, and it was dotted with silver buds of thread patterned like the constellations, the Wandering Star among them.
Renou and I still had the long shirt, rough trousers and heavy jacket we'd worn on our way in. I had to dust the spider webs off mine and Renou found a snake in his, but Ta'o and Bilal had nothing.
All the clothes belonging to the men killed at Praying Mantis had been sent to a shredder to be respun, and there were so many dead that they still had several piles to work on.
Lucky for us.
Bilal held up a pair of trousers that looked like they would fit him perfectly. Except they were Ales's trousers.
I didn't…
I couldn't…
A good captain had to stay focused on the mission. These men were counting on me.
Besides, Ales would have wanted it that way. He never threw anything away. No matter what it was, he'd find some use for it, and if he couldn't, he'd find someone who could. Broken fish hooks he gave to a jeweler. He'd brought some of his tools hoping he'd be put to work as a boatbuilder and not sent to some outpost to die. When that didn't happen, he gave them to the Elder of Elders hoping she'd know someone who could use them.
She asked him to help the children build a boat.
As soon as he came back.
He'd have been proud to know his trousers found good hands. Legs.
Found good legs.
Now, for weapons. I wasn't about to traverse Jungle unarmed, and Ta'o and Bilal had nothing. Renou only knew how to shoot one of the native short bows, and he wouldn't look like a new recruit carrying one of those around, now, would he?
In the armory we found a eupin bow like the one I carried. I didn't know who was killed to separate it from its owner, but it was there. Except it was taller than Renou, and he almost couldn't pull it at all.
"How's this?" Bilal found two Imperial Army bows in one corner. "We're both deserters. How's your Goloagi?"
Renou answered him within a heartbeat. "I've been told I sound like a native speaker."
He hadn't been lied to, either.
Ta'o also had the cadence of a native speaker, "And with that curly hair, he almost looks like one of you, too. Except he's missing that chin."
"What?" Bilal sneered at him. "What chin?"
"Yeah," I added. "And that rounded bridge, too."
Bilal felt along the front of his nose. Then he looked at Renou and pointed out, "that's true. He's also got those Herali ears that stick out like those mushrooms on a tree."
Renou and I looked at each other. Our ears didn't stick out all that much. Did they?
We all looked at Ta'o, but he hadn't been listening. He gaped at the variety of weapons in the shed. There were rows and rows of bows. Swords, knives, spears, long things that looked like a key of some kind, and some things that looked like a mouthpiece for a vita'o.
Someone had put all the practice arrows in with the war arrows, along with the piercers. The long arrows were mixed in with the short ones, and there were two anglers in there. I got exasperated looking through them. "Someone needs to sort this out. This shouldn't be like this."
Bilal eyed me with a smug grin. "If ever I find myself saying 'someone ought to,' that's me. I'm someone."
That almost made me laugh. "We don't have time for that. We have to get to the Lake."
We gathered up our gear, but then it ate at me. A good captain showed solidarity with their team and respected their thoughts. I'd just missed an opportunity. Hopefully, it wasn't too late. "You know what? You're right."
"Huh?"
"Everyone else who saw those arrows and left them also didn't have time. It's still plenty before noon; if we leave in an hour, we should get there before dinner."
We needed some bins. Two were empty but for some slimy mold, and there was another with miscellaneous knives in it. We took a few knives and found a home for the others, cleaned out the mold, and got to sorting.
"It occurs to me," Ta'o dropped some practice arrows into a bin. "I've never been to Kyoen. There's always recruits from there. What if they realize I don't know anything about the place?"
"That's true," Bilal counted out five broadheads and handed them off to Renou. "And you don't know anything about the army, either."
Ta'o nudged Renou. "OK, well, tell me. What do I need to know?"
I started. "The place is huge."
Renou was more clear. "We're THE largest port in the Empire. We're bigger than Chikai, we're bigger than the Imperial capital. Everything goes through Kyoen; diamond-tree stones, gold, tar, steel, those sugar boats the Emperor used to bring from this place, tinder, cotton, silk, wine, salt, weapons, you name it. Everything goes through Kyoen except slaves. Nevermind, we get runaway slaves, too! We're big."
"And," he raised a finger, "there's an enclave of people who look like you in Labiyei district. Barony. We call it a district, but Labiyei Barony. This, you need to know. Two years ago, the heir to the Barony got caught trying to elope with a Na'uhui woman. Big scandal."
Ta'o shrugged. "Why would that be a scandal?"
"Was she a peasant?" I asked.
Renou answered. "She was an immigrant."
"But…" Ta'o found a spot on the shelf for the two anglers. "I don't understand, why can't he marry one of us?"
Bilal slapped his shoulder. "Gotta keep those bloodlines pure!"
"You don't know that's the reason," I inserted. "Those types, their whole purpose in life is to marry up. Believe me, I know too much about that."
"Ooh!" Bilal grinned at me. "Story time!"
"What?" I reeled.
Ta'o grinned. "Too much about what, exactly?"
"Hey," Renou tapped his chin. "Is this that 'hedonistic debauchery in a church' Gino told us about?"
Bilal's eyes opened wide with excitement. "Hedonistic debauchery in a church?"
"That's not…" I tried to find the words. "That was related to it, but…"
All three of them stopped and were looking at me, but I needed to think about that one, about what I was and was not willing to share. "How's this. I promise, that whichever of you survive the Journey to the Lake of Doom, I will tell you how it all happened."
"I'm ready to go!" Ta'o hoisted his pack.
"Yup!" the other two followed suit. We'd made good progress; the next guy could finish this up.
And so we set out.
We stepped past the alligator. "Hello, Taurus."
Ta'o corrected me. "That's Gaijin."
"Huh?" I looked back. The twenty foot monster stretched out over the irregular slate pieces of main road with his massive tail resting on the wooden drawbridge unfolded over the river.
Bilal poked my arm. "Come on, man, Taurus is black with yellow stripes."
"Those stripes are yellow," I insisted.
Ta'o shook his head. "That's Gaijin, bro."
Bilal nodded. "Yeah, that's Gaijin."
"You did not know that!" I challenged him.
"Come on, everyone knows that!"
"Yeah," Renou confirmed. "I'm surprised you didn't."
They did not know that.
We followed the main road across the open field. The sky was a patchwork of clouds that shrouded the distance in mist so thick it darkened the Terbulin mountains. The road split the jungle in half. On the left, that green-purple sugar grass blanketed the hills into the distance. On the right was the orchard of mangoes, avocados, and a whole bunch of stuff I still didn't know the name for, through which the road splintered towards Praying Mantis. Beyond that was Ahmi's classroom all the way to the river—a dense jungle with a few well-worn teaching areas.
"Ta'o!" a woman yelled after him. She was one of the goatherds. He waved at her, and she waved back. Then, she turned around, rolled her arse at him, and turned back to him with a wink.
While he blushed, Bilal smiled wide at the man. "Well that deserves a story?"
Ta'o fought back a grin. "We're just friends."
"Yeah," I confirmed. "She seems friendly. We're going to need details."
Ta'o smirked out of one side of his mouth. "You'll all have to survive the Journey to the Lake of Doom!"
We'd made it halfway across the field, and I found myself feeling my ear on one side. Did they really stick out?
"Your turn," Bilal told Renou. "As we say in the Imperial Army, 'hurry up and wait.'"
I chuckled at that. "Really?"
"Yeah," he nodded. "The most important thing is to not complain. You wake up before dawn, drills, eat breakfast, do some more drills, break for lunch, drill again, have dinner, and squeeze in some drills before bed. Your bed roll has to have the regulation number of rolls, and your shoelaces have to be tied the regulation way. And when we march, we set up camp before dusk. Night watch goes by rotation, and if you fall asleep that's ten lashes for everyone on that shift but you."
"Wait," I said. "They don't punish you for falling asleep?"
"Oh, believe me, when all your friends watch you go free while they get whipped for your shit, you get punished. Rations are dried grains, dried nuts, dried fruits, dried meat. You rotate chores, everyone gets a chore. The nice commanders ask for volunteers, then give assignments to whoever doesn't step up. Sun up, sun down, every minute is accounted for, except if you're going to stay a while, they usually let you have an hour or two each day."
Renou spoke up. "What's the real reason you left the army?"
And why did he knife his last captain in the back?
We walked in silence for nearly a minute before Bilal smiled and replied. "First you must survive the Journey to the Lake of Doom!"
We hadn't made it twenty yards through the forest when a sekiwa emerged from the tall green-and-purple grasses riding a gray-and-brown splotched lizard.
"Didi zawa!"
It occurred to me that Didi was around the same age as Inferno, and the way she reacted in that meeting when I described the enemy made me wonder what stories she held onto. She looked over us and waited a moment before answering in Herali. "And where are you going?"
"Lake of Doom."
"And who gave you permission?"
I looked among my unit. They all looked at me in expectation, and I turned back to her. "Permission?"
Her vita'o hissed at me, and she spoke. "Go back."
"Look," I said. "We think it's a good idea—"
Her lizard curled his neck up and turned one eye to me, yawning open a mouth full of jagged, serrated teeth. Didi crossed her arms. "I understand Miyani hasn't come to see you. She has been legitimately busy. I promise you, as soon as we can work through the problems we've been having…"
"What problems?"
"There are far too many of your kind there. Usually you come through and move on. We tolerate you to a degree, you come to Carthia, and some of you calm down. But these men coming down from the mountain and staying there… we aren't equipped to handle that many of you at once."
I shrugged. "Maybe we could help!"
She shook her head and scowled. "Go back to Carthia and be patient. Besides, the road is too dangerous right now."
Ta'o stepped up to her, painting a big smile on his face. "didi! ya'uðeɣe ɣʊziɣedu…"
She squinted and answered him in Herali. "Don't even play with me."
"tave zeŋæɣeða ʒa'e!"
She chuckled and bowed her face, covering her laughter in her hands. "Did you even hear what I said? It's too dangerous."
Ta'o tried again. "C'mon! ɣʊ kʌŋʌ yudaði ŋuwe ʃa pɪgode kodusæseɣa…?"
She leaned in close to him. "You are too young for me, boy!"
"ŋuve?" This was a woman twice his age and married. He painted naivete all over his face. "I don't know what you're talking about!"
She sat upright in her saddle and narrowed her eyes at him. "Mm-hmm."
"Seriously," he stood up straight, still flashing his easy smile at her. "How about it?"
I joined him. "Maybe you know an alternate route that's a little safer?"
She crossed her arms and looked at me incredulously.
"ʃʊsi?" I added. "Pretty please? Uh… dowisate ʃʊsi?"
Didi broke out laughing. Ta'o furrowed his brow and opened his eyes wide at me. He spoke though his own laughter. "What the hell did you just say?"
Bilal slapped my shoulder. "That's a good one! I haven't heard that one before!"
Didi shook her head, still unable to break free from laughter. Then, she took a deep breath, looked over us once more, and let it out slowly. "I'm going to have to answer way too many questions for this."
"Thank you!"
"Thank you so much!"
"We really appreciate this."
"Hush," she snapped. "I need to think about this."
Her vita'o chirped and clicked, then squawked. Didi bobbed her head back and forth, then looked directly at me. "Stay off the main road. Go through there, there's a trail along the last line of azʊka. You'll see a giant boulder, and the way drops down on the far side. From there, the trail gets… less obvious. Follow it until you reach the waterfall. Climb up on the right side, not the left, and you can follow the lake to the castle. Please don't try to climb up on the left side."
"ŋuvɪðisa."
"One more thing." Her vita'o carried her close to me and she leaned in. "Did Inferno say anything to you?"
"She said a lot of things; some of it was less than polite."
"Don't listen to her."
That gave me pause.
Didi clarified. "She'll get inside your head. It's what she does. And keep an eye on this delinquent here," she gave a nod to Ta'o, who flashed her a smile in return. "He's only been outside the city once."
Her vita'o carried her a few steps towards the grass.
"vʌ koðosa!" I called out to her.
She answered, "vʌ ɣʊwoʒiwa!" and melted into the forest.
Renou had a question for Ta'o. It was mine as well. "I thought you said you'd never been outside the city?"
Something rustled in the grass beside us. It was like some monkey thing with a long tail, and it tucked between the cane stalks as we approached. I whispered, "we have to be quiet."
And so we marched. The trail was as Didi said, a narrow footpath between the last row of the green-purple sugar grass on the left that reached barely a few feet overhead, and on the right, the chaos of pure Jungle towering into the sky teeming with chirps, whistles, and that ever-present grinding of insects in the chorus.
The giant boulder was easy to find, but the trail, not so much. It was about as difficult a trail as I'd ever followed. Broken branches might as well have simply fallen from high up; it was only on close inspection I could see knife wounds in the wood. Several areas had overgrown so much that I couldn't find a marker, and sometimes it would be over ten yards ahead.
A high-pitched wavering whistle found my ears.
"Knives!" I whispered, scanning the trees above us.
Each of us pulled a knife, my friends what they'd taken from the armory, and I with the one Davod made for me.
Bilal whispered back. "What is it?"
"Right there," I pointed.
About twenty yards ahead of us and perched on a branch directly over the trail was a giant, yellow-spotted cat. It… she licked her lips and gazed her green cat eyes right at us, twitching her massive tail.
"Bro!" Ta'o couldn't close his eyes to blink.
I kept my voice to a whisper, not knowing what or who else might be out there. "There's four of us. She should leave us alone, but we should still keep eye contact with her."
That would not have been a problem for Ta'o, who gaped at the creature, enthralled. He was mesmerized. We passed beneath the branch, and the heavy cat was directly overhead. She shifted around and crouched on the branch, tracking us with her eyes as we passed by.
She and Ta'o might have been having a staring contest.
Up ahead, the trail ended. We were looking up a cliff about four yards high that stretched out on both sides beyond where the trees allowed us to see.
We all looked around for a marker. A footprint, snapped twig, something.
Nothing.
"Now what?" Bilal shrugged.
There was a reason Didi directed us along this route. There had to be something.
I remembered Blue jumping onto the second-floor balcony during that meeting, and it dawned on me. At the top edge of the escarpment was a slight dip about ten feet above us. Amid a twisted tangle of roots and vines was a bare section of disturbed dirt. "Up there."
"Um…" Bilal looked up. "And how are we supposed to get up there?"
But I'd already climbed halfway up. A few of the stones were loose, but it wasn't difficult. When I made it to the top, I found plenty of nice roots to pull myself up with. I looked down at my three friends, who gazed up at me in astonishment.
They all glanced at one another.
"Let me throw you a rope."
"Nope!" Ta'o scampered up the rock face and pulled himself up.
Bilal and Renou looked at one another, and Bilal approached the cliff.
"Wait," I said. I needed to think like a captain. That meant being pro-active to any potential problems. "Which of you is the weaker climber? Let him come up first, and the other can help from below."
Renou raised his hand. "I've never climbed anything in my life."
And he struggled. Even with Bilal beside him, he barely made it a few feet before breaking down. With his eyes closed and in tears, he clung to the handholds and tried to breathe.
Bilal said something I couldn't hear, and when Renou didn't answer, he looked up at me. "Let's get that rope."
"No!" Renou shouted.
At that, Bilal grinned at me, and Renou began his ascent. The three of us egged him on as if our words alone would lift him up. He fought. He made it up a few more steps, and his foot shook loose. I hung over the edge with my arm out, I could almost reach him. Then he looked up at me, reached for the next hold, and climbed right past my hand. I sat up, still reaching out for him, when he hoisted himself up with the vines and joined us at the top.
When Bilal joined us, he stopped and stared at me for a moment.
I started to feel uncomfortable. I wasn't sure if this was the way he'd looked at the man he stabbed in the back and I was afraid to ask.
Then he nodded, and we moved on. Another story for the Lake of Doom.
We passed through an area of underbrush so thick we had to hack our way through. I was weary of leaving such an obvious trail, but it couldn't be helped. We'd made it through one of those red-stem trees with the round black berries, and I ate one.
We all ate a few.
Probably too many.
Then I heard it.
Up-down-up-down-warble.
Vita'o.
"Get down!" I whispered.
We were surrounded in stalky palm bushes that fanned out from nodes along a thick tree-trunk like vine that snaked along the ground all over. I faced my friends, and they all looked at me. I heard it again and pointed towards the direction where it came from.
We all looked.
Through narrow gaps in the bush, we peeked out at more of the same bushes.
I heard that call again.
Bilal started to raise his bow. I tapped his arm and whispered as quietly as I could. "It might be a friendly."
"Might?" he whispered back.
"Might not," I added and raised my own bow.
"Right." And the three of us gazed out towards the sound.
I still saw nothing. I turned towards Renou, and there was a woman among us.
My heart skipped.
Then I recognized her. The day I came down the mountain, she rode a red-and-black striped vita'o that hissed at me when I stared at her legs.
Ta'o noticed her too.
She held up a finger to her lips, and gazed out towards the sound with one hand over her brow like a visor.
"Um…" I said. Renou and Bilal turned around.
She smiled and whispered around at each of us. "Shh! Vita'o is there."
Ta'o cocked an eyebrow. "Is it Kadelou?"
"Maybe," she shrugged with a warm smile.
"Kadelou!" Ta'o shouted. From the bushes before us, directly where I was looking, a lizard with deep red scales with black stripes down the length of his body materialized from the trees and jumped up to a thick tree trunk, bounced off, and landed directly next to our host.
The woman looked up at me with her yellow eyes, the rest of her face dark in the dense jungle canopy. "Didi say that you are lost. Come this way."
Her lizard clicked and chirped. She nodded to him, "yes please," and the vita'o faded into the jungle.
"For the record," I said, "we did not get lost."
She pointed towards a direction perpendicular to the route we traveled. "Waterfall is there; I don't know this trail you follow."
My friends all looked at me, but none of them said anything.
The scout continued. "Didi says that you want help so here is problem. Too many are your kind here! They do not listen. They do not want learn. Yesterday vita'o kills one man, then five his friends want make the gang. Captain Raimont comes back early because wounded men. If he is not here for stop the gang, then…" and she shook her head.
"To make things worse," she led us up along some large, black blocks of stone like a staircase with the rushing water of a creek through the trees. "Your-kind men are disgusting."
Bilal scratched at the stubble atop his head. "Are we really?"
"Yes," she spoke with emphasis. "Your-kind men have terrible attitude is cruel against women. I don't understand how you make babies that your-kind women tolerate this? I don't understand!"
"We'll do what we can," I said. That was weak. The truth was I couldn't imagine what we could possibly do. Talk to them? That wasn't good enough. I had to think of something. A good captain would have thought of something.
"By the way," Renou added. "We're posing as new recruits so they think we're new here."
She faced Ta'o with one eyebrow high above the others, looked up and down over his sweaty clothes, and giggled. "Sure."
Nevertheless, she took us along a separate trail that branched off to the left. We hadn't made it ten paces when Kadelou peeked through the trees and squawked at us.
She answered, scarcely containing her laughter. "mæbeviði ŋuweʒu!"
The lizard rushed over and sniffed each of us up and down, then gave out a long string of clicks, hopping back and forth on both feet. Then with an excited chirp he disappeared into the forest.
We climbed a steep embankment that had us grasping onto the countless trees and branches that sprouted from bare rock. After climbing that for nearly an hour, the final scrap of dryness in our clothes was gone. This proved we'd just come down the mountain; the only thing missing were the mosquito bites.
We didn't really need the mosquito bites, anyway.
I felt my ears again; they didn't stick out that much.
We joined the main road, the same one I took with Davod, Geraln, Ales, and Faren on our way into the Lake of Doom. Kadelou barreled down the embankment from high up on the other side of the road and jumped next to our guide. She mounted him and pointed down the slope. "This road, ten minute."
I made sure to ask before she turned away. "I didn't get your name?"
She grinned. "'iyemi. It is nice to meet you again, Caleb Jungle-Tested. mɪyaŋi will very happy that she sees you. Bilal, Renou…" but she fixed her eyes at Ta'o with a blank stare as meaningless as I'd ever seen. He looked back at her with the same, and they held their gaze until they both started to giggle. Finally, she shook her head with a smile and melted into the forest.
Bilal looked at Ta'o with a hand on his chin. "Ok, so this one is 'iyemi, we didn't get the other one's name?"
"What?" Ta'o laughed.
The outcropping I'd stood on last time still offered the same commanding view. The sun was shrouded by a patchwork of clouds that trailed into a misty darkness beyond the western horizon. To the left, a valley between steep hills covered in Jungle that led to the distant Terbulin mountains, a wall of rock towering into the sky darkening for the day's closure. Below us, hundreds of yards of grass field surrounded the northeastern end of a long, black finger of a lake with trees cauliflowered over the edge on all sides. In the fields, the goatherds grazed their flocks, and a wooden bridge was left unfolded across the water, the only entrance to a wall of stone breaching from the lake with towers and crenelations and men pacing the ramparts with bows out and arrows nocked.
Ta'o, Renou, Bilal, and I came out of the trees, looking like proper mountain men dripping from the sweltering jungle heat.
A horn bellowed out from the castle.
Two vita'o raced out from the trees and encircled us. They squawked and cawed, and slowed down. One of them sniffed me up and down and hissed, baring jagged, serrated teeth. The other one hissed at Renou. Then they both hissed at Ta'o. Hard. He stepped back, and they hissed at him again, before hissing at me again. Finally they backed away, only to hiss at us once more before disappearing into the orchard.
We crossed the field and stepped over the drawbridge into the courtyard.
There was shouting in the kitchen. It sounded like a chorus of men each in their own strings of profanity, and it was getting heated. Four men stood gawking at a sekɪwa over by the stalls. She had her back turned to them with trembling fingers, and the lizard put himself between them, stretching out his claws and baring his teeth. On the left beside the storage barn, that important-looking woman with the silk yithi I'd seen the last time I was here was arguing with the important-looking man who'd told us to move out. Whatever they argued about, he was losing.
In the sitting area, a dozen men had gathered. They parted for us as we approached, and A Woman stood among them.
She was Goloagi, with emerald green eyes and thick tufts of curly hair that cascaded down her back. Around my age and average height, she wore a white, cotton dress with stripes of lace that skirted about her ankles and fluffed around her shoulders leaving her arms exposed. The number, 773-614, had been burned into her arms as a young child.
Ranía.
Of all the unanswered questions.
She looked directly at me with that warm smile she always wore. "Caleb Jungle-Tested!"
The recruits all looked at me. Her voice perked up for each of us. "Bilal of Shonemai! Renou of Kyoen!"
She brushed her fingers through her hair and lowered her voice. "Ta'o."
"You know those guys?" The recruits asked her.
"Oh yes!" she exclaimed. I looked at Renou, who'd scrunched his lips together.
I needed to talk to her. Of all the stories which were now required, I took this one for myself first.
Because I was a captain, and I could do that.