he sprawled over his bed wearing an old, fairly disreputable pair of boxers. He snored heroically.
She moved to him, laid her hand lightly—very lightly—over his right shoulder. Stiff, achy, she noted, but a clean wound already well healed.
Her mother had serious skills, Fallon reminded herself. Still she took another minute, touched his hair—a darker blond than their mother’s and worn these days in what he thought of as a warrior’s braid: short and fat.
He had a warrior’s body—muscular and tough—with a tattoo of a coiled snake on his left shoulder blade. (Done at sixteen without parental permission.)
She stayed a moment in the chaos of his room—he still collected whatever small treasure appealed to him. Odd coins, stones, pieces of glass, wires, old bottles. And had never learned, apparently, to hang, fold, or put away a single article of clothing.
Of her three brothers he was the only one without magicks. And of the three, the one who seemed born to be a soldier.
So she left him sleeping, walked downstairs, down again to her rooms on the lower level.
Unlike Colin’s, her room was scrupulously neat. On the walls she’d pinned maps—hand drawn or printed, old and new. In the chest at the foot of the bed she kept books, novels, biographies, histories, books on science, on magicks. On her desk she kept files on troops, civilians, training, bases, prisons, food supplies, medical supplies, maneuvers, spells, duty schedules, and rotations.
On the stand by her bed sat a white candle, a ball of crystal—gifts from the man who’d trained her.
She shed her clothes, dumped them in the basket for later laundering. And with a heartfelt sigh, stepped in the shower to wash away the blood, the sweat, the grime and stench of battle.
She dressed in jeans, worn at the knees and barely hitting the ankles of long legs, a T-shirt that bagged a bit over her slim frame. She pulled on her second pair of boots until she could clean the ones she’d worn to battle.
She strapped on her sword, then went upstairs to have breakfast with her father.
“Your mom’s back,” he told her as he moved to the oven to pull out plates. “At the clinic, but back.”
“I’m heading over there after breakfast.” She chose juice, as she wanted something cool.
“You need sleep, baby. You’ve been up over twenty-four.”
Eggs, scrambled, bacon, crisp. She dug in like the starving. “You, too,” she pointed out.
“I caught some sleep on the way back—and had a nice porch doze, as my dad used to call it, before you got here.”
She shoveled in more eggs. “I don’t have a scratch on me. Not a single scratch. Soldiers I led bled. Colin bled. I don’t have a scratch.”
“You’ve bled before.” He laid a hand over hers. “You will again.”
“I have to see the wounded, and they should see me. And the rescues. Then I’ll sleep.”
“I’ll go with you.”
She glanced at the ceiling, thought of the soldier who slept. “You should stay with Colin.”
“I’ll pull Ethan back to sit with him. Your mom said he’d likely sleep until afternoon.”
“Okay. Give me a sense of the prisoners,” she said, and he sighed.
“A mix. Some hard-asses with a lot of hate and fear of magickals. They skew older, and it’s not likely we’ll have much luck turning them around. But we may be able to educate a few of the younger ones.”
“They need to see the lab recordings. They need to see people being drugged, strapped down, tortured, experimented on just because they’re different.”
Though what she’d reviewed at the prison turned her stomach, she continued to eat. She needed fuel to function.
“Let that educate them.”
He couldn’t miss the bitterness in her voice, rubbed her hand again. “I agree. It should wait a few days. A lot of them expect torture and execution from us. We show them we treat our prisoners humanely, decently.”
“Then show them proof of the contrast,” she finished. “All right. But some won’t ever change, will they?”
“No.”
She rose, took his plate and hers to the sink to wash. “There’s no point asking why, but I keep circling back to it. Twenty years ago the world you knew, Mom knew, ended. Billions died terrible deaths from the Doom. We’re what’s left, Dad, and we’re killing each other.”
She turned to look at him, this good man who’d helped bring her into the world, who’d loved her, fought with her. A soldier who’d become a farmer, now a farmer who lived a soldier’s life again.