Still, he considered Tariq the closest he had to a friend, except for Glain. Glain he trusted.
His uniform jacket was still clean, and he put it on as he finished the coffee. Glain watched in silence for a moment before she said, “You were about to tell me something.”
“Later,” he said. “After the exercise. It’s going to be a longer conversation.”
“All right.” As he stopped to check his uniform in front of the mirror, she rolled her eyes. “You’re pretty enough for both of us, Brightwell.”
“Charmed you think so, Squad Leader. You’re quite handsome yourself today.” Handsome was a good description. Glain had chopped her dark hair closer for convenience; it suited her, he decided, and fit well with the solid curves of a body made for endurance and strength. There was no attraction between them, but there was respect—more now than before, he thought. Some, like Oduya, might mistake it for something else. She might be right to be concerned. Jess met her eyes in the mirror. “That compliment stops at the doorway, of course.”
She nodded. It seemed brisk, but there was a look in her eyes that he thought might be some form of gratitude. “Stop preening and let’s go.”
They left his room together, but, thankfully, no one was in the hall to see it. The squad had gathered toward the end, talking casually, but all that stopped as Glain approached. Jess silently took position with the rest of the squad, and Glain led them out at a fast walk for the parade ground. Despite his sweaty weariness, he looked forward to this; it was a chance to let a little of his anger out of that locked, chained box. There wouldn’t be any real surprises. It was just an exercise, after all.
He was dead wrong about that, and it cost him.
They were in the tenth long hour on the exercise ground when Jess saw a flash of movement from the corner of his eye and tried to turn toward it, but he was hampered by thick layers of cloth and the flexible armor, and just simply too slow, too tired, and too late.
A shot hit him squarely in the back.
Then he was on the ground, looking up at a merciless Alexandrian sky scratched white by the heat, and he couldn’t breathe. The pain crushed all the air out of his chest, and for a split second he wondered if something had gone badly wrong, if all the safety measures had failed, if he was going to die . . . And then his frozen solar plexus unlocked and he gulped in a raw, whooping mouthful of air.
A shadow blocked out the burning sun, and he knew her by the short-cropped halo of hair that bristled up. After blinking a few times, he saw that Glain was holding out a hand to him. He bit down on his pride and took it, and she hauled him to unsteady feet.
“What the hell did you do wrong, Brightwell?” she asked him. There was no sympathy in her voice. He shook his head, still intent on getting breath back in his lungs. “I told you all to watch your backs. You didn’t listen. If these weapons had been loaded with real ammunition, you’d be a mess to clean up right now.”
He felt halfway dead, anyway. The training weapons that the High Garda of the Great Library used were not toys; they delivered real jolts and very real bruises. “Sorry,” he muttered, and then, a second too late, “sir.”
Now that she wasn’t just a silhouette against the sun, he could see the warning flash in her eyes. We’re not equals here. Forgetting that was a stupid, personal issue he needed to overcome, and quickly; she couldn’t afford to let it slip for long without seeming to encourage a lack of discipline in the ranks of their squad.
Hard habit to break, friendship.
The rest of the squad gathered together now from around the corners of the mock buildings that served as their training ground. It was mercilessly hot, as it always was, and each of his fellow Garda soldiers now looked as exhausted and sweat streaked as he did. Glain wiped her face with an impatient swipe of her sleeve and barked, loud enough for the rest of the squad to hear, “Report what you did wrong, soldier!”
“Squad Leader, sir, I failed to watch my back,” Jess said. His voice sounded strained, and he knew from the still-burning ache in his back that he was going to have a spectacular sunset of a bruise. “But—”
Her face set like concrete. “Are you about to excuse your failure, Brightwell?”
“No, sir!” He cut a look at Tariq, who was openly grinning. “It was friendly fire, sir!”
“Oh, be fair. I’m not that friendly,” Tariq said. “And I did it on orders.”
“Orders?” Jess looked at Glain, whose face was as unreadable as the wall behind her. “You ordered him to shoot me in the back?”