Chapter Text
Ymir wouldn't recall the night spent on the canopy bed in great detail. Must-induced sneezing, a curtain tieback over her eyes, the key used, dropped, lost somewhere between coverlets, and recrudescing periodically to stab her in the thigh. Awful happiness. The passage of time to her remnant senses like bobbing downstream on a fast current: beaten about by darkness, weight, strange weeds and chunks of ice—plus just the shock of seeing air foam livid past clenched teeth. As though, in love, she could surface from her body, and gasping gnaw the light.
Beyond that—
It was a simple transposition. When she woke up back in her cell, chained to the wall and lit not even by wall sconces, she was disposed toward nostalgia. Historia, in helping her dress before returning her to the Military Police, had forgotten some articles, and Ymir detected the scrape of burlap on new skin when she crossed her legs. She did so, several times. She wanted to preserve the specter of Historia's haste.
Instead, she found herself thinking of another day, long ago, when she had taken Historia—Christa—to practice arboreal maneuvers while the rest of the 104th was doing its washing. Their third year, and she had been afraid that Christa wouldn't qualify for the police. Sabotaging her own scores was one thing, but there was a limit to the number of other trainees she could incapacitate, break the spirits of, or bribe. In the end Christa would have to make it on merit, and not the backs of fallen peers.
Less clear was why Ymir had thought one afternoon stolen would spare her. But: “Ymir,” Christa had said, standing over her where she lay at the foot of a flowering oak. “Why do Connie and Sasha have my underwear?”
“They're doing our laundry this week,” said Ymir. “Don't make that face, it was two breadrolls each for the privilege. Aren't you used to washerwomen taking your colors and whites?”
“No.” But Ymir couldn't tell, then, whether she was lying out of chilly disapproval that Ymir would bring up her past in public, or out of— “What do you have planned?”
“I want you to try the drops again.”
The problem was the recent artifact of their northern expedition. Nothing to do with Dazz over the cliff, although the thought had occurred to Ymir: since their argument on the mountainside, yelling incomplete confessions while frostbite crept purple-black up their teammate's toes, thoughts like that were always occurring to her, as though she had stepped back five, ten paces from a cliff or wall of her own making, and guilt—that bitter draft—had rushed to fill the void. Except it was spring now, going on summer, and cold itself was opulence. The turning of this world, that could serve up your conscience as a seasonal delicacy. To be held like a chip from some Sina chef's ice cellar, clear and hard on the tongue, in the well of your arm. Pulse points, so it would carry on your blood through all your limbs.
And like the ice blocks underground guilt aided memory. Moments which would have rotted to sawdust, you could bite into, between the freezing walls of shame, and taste their death throes. No doubt that was a part of Christa's trouble: she couldn't unlive anything that had followed on mortification. Dazz's near-murder, first at her hands, then at Ymir's. Which the problem with falling had come after, if it was not its direct result.
She had developed a fever on her return to base. She spent the week bedridden, tossing and turning under the quarantine-mark on her door. As though winter was catching, or the nonexistent will to live. But then maybe both were. Humans were porous. Put a Titan in a room with a Titan, and there's no calm exchange of ideas. Give it a minute, and there isn't a room.
Anyway: the disease. Ymir sat with her through it because they wouldn't let her leave. Not knowing about the difference in species, and the boundaries germs wouldn't cross. Not knowing that few fevers could match the climate of her healthy body. So she'd gotten to see Christa with her brain on the downlow. Scary stuff, she reported when Sasha asked after; snickering and meaning it completely, frightened out of her wits. Christa had punched her. A broken nose reset and healed in as long as it took for the girl on the cot to segue between dreams. But she hadn't done that, Ymir noticed, to any of the nurses. She hadn't sleep-talked for them either. With Ymir she sometimes called out to a woman whose name she seemed not to know. Geographia, Mathematicia, lady of the big red book—you there, jumping the fence! Ymir might have bothered to be jealous, except experience had taught her that the only people who showed up out of Christa's old life were priests and hired assassins. The only other woman Christa dreamed about was her mother. On which occasions it was I wish, I wish you had never been born.
Probably Ymir had done the past a disservice when she compared it to spoiling beef. There were other things that ice preserved. Ancient monsters, tusked and skinless, locked behind the glacier wall. Whatever Christa had sold her name for, it wasn't a stipend to live on. Her little hands clenching upward. Her thumb between her knuckles like the fit of dull white teeth.
“And you for my tutor?” said Christa now, by the river, her doubting face dappled in the shade of the oak. As removed from prior torments as the pearl, from the grain.
“Who else?” Ymir replied.
She was conscious of deserving skepticism; she had more than once persuaded other trainees to work with Christa outside of classes, but she herself found teaching difficult. When she'd last tried, she had in under half an hour begun to hate Christa for an idiot, and then for an obstacle, her curled hands twitching to give that stubborn mass a shove. It didn't matter. Today light from the river wound green chains up black branches, and tattooed Christa's arm scar-whitely where Mikasa's thing showed blue. Today Ymir would help Christa, out of the goodness of her heart. The vertigo and irresoluteness that had stayed with Christa since her delirium—to be eradicated, straightforwardly, by Ymir's force of will.
Or that was the plan. Or, if she was being honest with herself, as happened when she wasn't busy telling the truth to people she liked, she aspired to wake in Christa a courage that would square with her own selfish competencies. She would push, Christa would push back—a stabilizing struggle. That was all she asked for. An answer, and maybe a little extra: enough to keep the conversation going. Something to let them survive this war together, and not only persist alone.
They suited up closer to the training grounds, where no black mud was apt to crawl into the workings of their gear. Trainees were allowed to requisition equipment with the written permission of their instructors, and Shadis really had signed off on it, possibly out of pure shock at the spectacle of Ymir seeking a higher-up's attention. Shadis, she conjectured, knew in a discontinuous uninvolved way that Private Ymir was a cheat and a liar: her test scores were lies, her kill count was a lie, her stumbles and showy occasional triumphs the same perjury in two languages—embellishments, all of them, on the tall tale of her skin. Although she had kept her true name, Ymir wasn't blind to the need to put up a front of frangibility. It was arrogance to think your caretakers never watched you, just as much as it was to think you must make for an interesting view. But there was only so much feeling she could dredge up from the past's dim seabed. An ancient fish, fear, blind and slack-jawed, the jewel of light bound to its brow less a distress signal than a lure... After all she had been sacrificed, survived, and in the tumult snapped those lines mooring her to the lives of others. Duty felt by a daughter toward parents now long-dead. Gratitude encouraged in all citizens not chosen as town scapegoat. There was no danger inside the walls as could compel her, or even leave a scar.
And say this much for solitude: it was as fast a healer as the other dead-girl gifts. She was whole, like this, despite enduring childhood amputations. From hearth and home. Or if not, and her heart was lame... who could convey the truth to her? Maybe that was the secret to the Titans' fast-knitting flesh: they were all apart. In their swarming masses, they moved without coordination, and never paused to help a grotesque sibling as it fell. Drawn onward by the single compulsion of murder, they could not even recognize the body's communications of laceration and pain.
It seemed possible that humans died of their injuries out of a polite sense that it was expected of them. Died glad, at least, to have honored the sacrifices of past generations, in aping old despair. Ymir couldn't blame them. She would have done it. Repaid mother and father, and whatever ancestral delinquents came together to form the no-last-name line, by bleeding, bleeding out, scarring and sweating, dying and not waking up again; if only they hadn't—left her there—
She wondered whether Christa made the same promises to ghosts. To the mother, whose blood had spread to oil half the alley, so that the next morning a younger Ymir had found acolytes still hosing off the tacky cobblestones.
It didn't matter. No one watched her the way they did Christa, who couldn't seem to master the first tenets of restraint. Christa's reputation stacked up and up, inflated beyond even the fairy tale model by the simple fact that when demands made on her passed a certain threshold of absurdity, she would lapse into actual irritation at the near-stranger's gall—only to repent and punish herself for the crime of having limits. Then she would both grant the wish and come up with ways to pre-empt it for next time. It was not unheard of for jokers to ask nonsense boons of her, like hunters laying pit traps for a running animal. When they did... they got what they deserved. The goddess didn't make people happy. She awed them with what she would pursue. Jealous as though of the sun, the rain, the sliding ice, the processes of erosion and respite which laid bare earthly flaws, she dug past holes of avowed desire to expose, without fail, an abyss beneath. Ymir might criticize, might call a spade an idiot—but how much worse to meet Christa, down at the bottom of your soul! Christa with a shovel, filling in the open grave.
She was looking at Ymir with similar penetration by the time they had reached Ymir's chosen starter point. Like she was measuring her, shoulder-width by height, for volume and price of dirt.
“Ymir,” she murmured, “if I drop out, it's not your fault.”
“Excuse me?”
“I'm not sure I was ever going to make a good soldier. Perhaps I would do better work farming the wasteland, growing food for humanity.”
This pensively, her hands folded on the scabbard at one hip, and not a shimmer of mirth to say she was fucking with her dear friend. Though Ymir knew she had no such humility, and no intention of dying where fat churchmen couldn't see.
“Aren't you just full of suggestions.” She slid her thumbs under the trigger guards.
“Yes, well—wait. Now? Wait, hold on just a moment—”
The drops were a series of conifers whose lower branches had been stripped away. Preparation, not for the challenges of ascent outside the walls, through brush and darkness and who knew what thorns, but for that more-unlikely task of falling unassisted. Ymir aimed her grappling hooks at a point five feet above the first platform nailed to the trunk, a destination that—even in the early stages of their training—had given off a nearly cozy, domestic air; it could have been an unfinished treehouse, or a birdwatcher's post. Almost three years into the program, that ease of access had gone from existential consolation to insult, and she was hoping to kindle in Christa some flash of defiance at her choice. At the same time she felt a pulse of steady pleasure come when her feet touched to the planks. A reward not at all proportionate to the trouble of the journey. There was always that moment of lightness, not as you arced through the air—then you were aware of nothing so much as your own plummeting weight—but in the seconds before you fully adjusted to safety, with your body half laid on the ledge and half on slender cords. Your hand or sole had purchase, but your back seemed cupped by sky.
She stepped forward, almost skipping out of Christa's way. Sunlight spotted the aging wood (and the toes of her boots) like a frond of golden lichen. Actual lichens bleached to insignificance in its beams. Christa, when she arrived, appeared under the canopy as a piecemeal of past selves—white fragments wan as sickness, leaf-shadows brown as rot... no, not a past her, scratch that hypothesis. Christa had never burnt so dark. That color smacked of Ymir, then and now.
“I'm serious,” said Christa, retracting the wires. She was conscientious about unhooking, as the handbook directed. Leave yourself tethered longer than necessary and a Titan might trap you with one finger on the line. Like a child, stepping on a cat's tail—a cellist stopping one high note. For her part, Ymir liked to test just how much slack she'd first been given. “I thought I could graduate, before our winter mission, but this—”
She removed her hands from the 3DMG and spread them helplessly. A rare expansive gesture: for a moment one saw the nobility in her, and not the bastard fear.
“I'm sorry. I know you've put a lot of time and energy into my successes. But, Ymir, maybe now's the time to focus on your own work...?”
“Oh, shut up.” She walked back to the edge of the platform. They were less than seven meters up, and the root system below bulged varicose in her vision. The dark hand of the clearing, furred over with young grass; fingers of stamped earth disappearing scandalously between lesser pines. As always, Christa was following orders. “Don't shut up. Whaddaya mean, energy? Was it someone else's energy that got you—what is it now, fifth in Theory, eighth in Edificeering, ninth in freaking hand-to-hand?”
“Yes, of course.” How reluctantly Christa emerged from the brief quiet—turning her head away, then back; pressing her lips into a pale armored smile. Only a moment's gleeful literalism, but she mourned it like a vow of silence, kept for years. “What was it you said about me? I've completely surrendered. So, it must have required some other power source to keep me going.”
Said the blonde cornflower-eyed half-princess, whose speechifying sent a current of warmth through Ymir as it went on. If Ymir closed her eyes, she could feel— The hot ghost of her breath. The dusty smell that clung to cloth and skin. Static in the near-white corona of thin hair. She could pick out, with a predator's ears, the dreaming gait of Christa's heart.
Surrender. “Is that what this is about?” Ymir said, hooking a finger under Christa's first chest strap. She yanked hard on the shining clasp.
Christa took an uneven step toward her, like a dancer missing a cue; her arms flew up for balance, and stopped, and continued their arc, until she was cupping Ymir's face in her palms. Not a plausible accident. She had to extend them almost straight ahead of her to reach. And yet she stared up, surprised, from the frame of her limited body, elbows level with white throat, face narrowly flanked by the line of each wrist—her eyes, the eyes of an unknowing prisoner, colorless or crystalline. Walls that could only be seen through: never seen. She kissed Ymir a little crudely on the neck, and then, dragging her down, the cheek and mouth. Slipping across a humid plane of skin like a viper through tall grass. When she reached the bitten lips, she wrapped an arm around Ymir's shoulders. That was Ymir's cue to fold and pick her up.
Ymir disentangled herself, gently.
“Look,” she said—unable to keep from touching her mouth as she spoke, feeling the gloss of resensitized nerves; feeling her lips twist cruelly up without her wishing it. “Look, you can't fool me. I might have gotten—hah—a little overexcited. During the mission. But I know Private Lenz, that perfect soldier, wouldn't be so stupid as to take my words to heart.” She hauled in a deep, rasping breath through her nose, so that her voice grew resonant without her features giving more than a twitch. “You know I'm not going to tell anyone. It's between us, this small secret. So stop making shit up about going away to the camps, all right?”
Christa backed away and made a face as if about to speak.
“Christa?”
She bit her lip, expression thoughtful, and fired one grappling hook at a higher, intact branch.
“Christa!”
She crossed the platform at a run and engaged the gas mechanism just before stepping off it. Ymir didn't really believe she was doing it until she had already reeled herself out over the void—the branch aspired-to was a quarter of the way round the trunk, and perhaps a further three or four full meters up. Christa didn't cover the distance in a smooth arc, but rather slammed sideways into a budded knot on the trunk, and from there pushed the gas so hard that she seemed to rise diagonally. Ymir, furious, took the longer route, sinking both hooks into the far end of the bough and almost shaking Christa off by her clockwise ascent. Once there, she scrambled toward the smaller girl on all fours; but Christa had cast another line and was propelling herself shakily skyward, out of Ymir's irritable grasp.
They repeated the process. Ymir came closer with each successive landing, because Christa, plagued by unexorcisable qualms, had to hit the next mark before leaping, and seemed to rely always on the tautness of the lines. Still, she was tricky. The uncut branches had been left to grow in a wide spiral; it was like chasing a child up a staircase, but for the heartstopping chasm beneath each step. A staircase—if the emptiness of the world were more tangible, and every castle built in slats and bars. If anyone, knocking on humanity's walls, could have heard that they were hollow.
Ymir caught up with her quarry on the second-to-last designated “safe branch,” where the bulk of the tree was so slender as to respond to their least pronounced movements. She had to set her feet on either side of Christa's for room. Christa had gone limp the moment Ymir grabbed her: fair head turned compliantly upward, pupils blown-black oubliettes. She was, yes, getting off on this, pulse fluttering in her armpit against Ymir's fingertips. The reek of arousal like the thin gray smoke-plume which betrays covert transformation. Imagine it—being Christa, and never distinguishing between retreat and lust. Not burdened by the squeamishness of people who lived for their own sakes, and who therefore, of necessity, sifted true desire from what they'd learned to want. Sometimes Ymir almost admired her. In her determined ignorance, she was as simple as a weapon, unconscious of the blood that had gone into its tempering, or of the fact that its fine blade could be uncoupled from the hilt.
She began to laugh. Ymir, who had been on the point of bending down to catch their interrupted kiss point-first, and never mind the lesson, stopped and frowned. “Care to share the joke?”
“Oh,” said Christa, “oh, Ymir, I don't"; and she leaned her forehead against Ymir's chest, shaking with happiness. Ymir, frustrated, nearly set out to shake her with totally serious hands—but then some last tumbler in the eye's stiff lock gave way, and she saw as though from outside either of them the picture they must have made, maneuvering wildly up a training-tree: misusing their equipment, wasting time, squandering even their questionable talents on a course meant as a beginner exercise... because Christa hadn't wanted to have another conversation about names and promises. She snorted. Christa sank to press her face almost against Ymir's stomach, hiccuping, and Ymir let out a real belly laugh, so loud it flushed the tree's small store of nesting birds. “Come on,” she said, pulling Christa up hand-under-arm, “c'mon, look at me.” She was still thinking in the back of her mind about the sympathetic echo of Christa in flight. Christa navigating a matrix of gold, rays no brighter than the oiled steel cables; her body warmly cradled by harness, foliage, and world. In all that urgent motion, one curl of irrelevance: first at the base of her spine, then expanding forward, edge blurring between her thighs. The sweat etched in grime on the webbing of each hand; the press of hot leather, which quartered her back; the air set in motion by her pensile motion; the trees, the heat, the dust, and that.
Rather than pick Christa up, Ymir would have gotten on her knees. But there was still no room. Christa said, in tones of sincere condolence, “I'm almost out of gas.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, I should have planned my route more carefully.”
Without enough gas to land multiple anchors, there would be no controlled descent. She might have to trust to a simpler mechanism.
“Well,” said Ymir, “here's your chance.” She released Christa's shoulders, catching her hand on the bole instead, and stepped primly around Christa's feet until she was backed up into the rough L of the branch. Nothing stood between Christa and the drop.
Christa said, “Push me.”
“What?”
“I can't do it. I already—I'm not hooked in. Please,” said Christa, “for god's sake, hurry up. Or I'll stand here forever.”
“Like a treed cat,” Ymir murmured, but her imagination was caught by the jeweler's work of rotating this paradox: hurry up, for we have all the time in the world. Hurry up, or I will finally be still. “You're thinking of Dazz. But I can't always be shoving you off something, Christa, that's really not the purpose of the exercise...”
“You can't?” said Christa. “Why? Where are you going?” She was smiling, suddenly, like she'd solved a problem. Fifth in Theory, with a particular knack for resource allocation. It was a kind smile. “I'm asking you to save my career, you know? It's not about jumping blind. I just need to do it once, and then I'll remember that it's easy.”
“It's not about hard or easy.” Ymir bent her head, raised an arm to guard her nape, imagined an invisible ceiling forming from tongues of air above her head. There was a lump in her throat. “If you never learn to make your own choices, oh our lady of fresh meat...”
“Then what,” said Christa, flat again. She had her hands folded behind her back and her feet set parallel with her hips, a toy scout at attention. Kick Me Men, new recruits were called in the inner city, because of the stiff triangle of their legs; nut me, fix me, schtup me for the human race. “Do I have to choose? Will you compel me to become really strong-minded?”
It was funny, but her voice betrayed no hint of sarcasm. The question might have been hatched and nurtured in a dank underground cave, but it was only ferried to the sunlit uplands with the help of her second nature, itself as aberrant as a river flowing uphill. The mean, genuine joy she took in imitating a heroine, whose goodness and generosity would not extend to hearing a monster's ultimatum; the strange physical perfection of her mask at those moments when it came closest to dissolution. Here, the outcast's anger served the paragon's ingenuity. The eyes glowed: the smile cut. Christa Lenz was almost whole.
“Obviously not,” said Ymir, straightening. She folded her legs at the knee, resting most of her standing weight on the uncomfortably fullered surface of the bark. “I'll let you do that.”
“Don't be—” Christa snatched Ymir's lowered hand before Ymir could pull it out of her reach, and laid it on her own shoulder. “Trite,” she said, unconvincingly. It was also a function of her powers that she could not bear lasting success. Envious of her creation's lifelike freedom, she tore it to pieces; trod on the rags.
Ymir said, “You're sounding like me.” She gripped a fistful of the child-sized jacket, crumpling the crossed swords, and added, “The day I push you—”
Christa pushed her.
So quick. The forces involved should have taken them both over the side. She was heavy enough, and Christa was nothing, a doll, a husk of wishes. But in the last moment she could have, Ymir let go; thrust Christa back.
It didn't hurt. She would eventually remember that. Letting go never hurt until later, when the choice was made and sealed. And afterwards, she must have seen Christa jump; seen Christa shoot from the literal hip, swing down, and fly, wire screaming off the axles. She must have tasted her own brand of unsustainable triumph, before Christa caught her. But that wasn't the crux of the anecdote. What Ymir's mind came back to, as she lay awake in her cell—what it circled like the old limestone steps round a newel, or the cartwheel tilting on its rutted country road—it was an up-down line. A single stroke. The fall, untethered, which did not end.
Sasha, of all people, was the first of their former cohorts to visit.
She wore a modified version of the scouts' greens, harness on but jacket missing, cloak folded across her arm with funereal stiffness. Dark brown breeches of some fine, loose-hanging, woolly material, nowhere close to regulation. Her ponytail had been looped into a hollow ovoid bun, like an eye or a buttonhole, bobbing and winking as she raised her chin.
She was not one of the callers Ymir would have counted on receiving. They'd been friends, of a kind, or rather Ymir had found her alternately pliable and tiresome, and Sasha had never felt the need to give any of her resentments voice—even to look at bitterness, with a hunter's steady eye, was beyond the rural potato-eater with the selective accent. But, equally, her blindness was unsentimental. In the dungeon that (day, night, how long since we—?) she carried a longbow slung across her back. Ymir registered its presence when Sasha pivoted on the spot, shoulders angling for some safe distance between a vulnerable underbelly and the cell's unaired wet depths. A quiver too, sweetly blue-fletched arrows. Someone had tried to dye one vane of one shaft freedom-white. If Ymir had had to bet on a first visitor she would have fixed on Connie. Connie would have called her a bitch and a deserter, but he would probably have brought her a gift basket: less out of any exceptional goodness than an ingrained idea of his dues. What passed for duty, when you were the pride of your village, and wanted above all to leave it behind.
Seconds of mottled hush. Ymir reconsidered the need for scorn, watching Sasha pace as though she were alone. Connie's village was gone. And so, perhaps, a kid's countrified manners had taken on a subtle sheen—as some things did, barely surviving, useless but stubborn behind new walls.
Or maybe the good manners hadn't made it to start with. Three years since the parents who tutored him changed irreparably; why should their lessons in courtesy linger? Maybe that was why he wasn't here in the dungeon—his Ps and Qs a casualty of sorrow's unstopped breach. Wave after wave of blind grief come to swallow... The very cheapest of graces. Little matchstick towns raised in plain rings around the heart.
Sasha, inviolate, had brought her bow.
“Has the Corps become a hunting society?” Ymir asked idly, running a finger up one perspiration-slick bar. “Maybe Titans are secretly allergic to goosefeathers?”
It was not true that she had no idea of time's passage in the cell. There were the guard changes to tally, and the torches lit and left to gutter out, and the waxy glaucous light-spots that seemed to penetrate from nowhere, blue on black flagstones and ashy on the bars. The moon, she guessed, at the top of the stairs to the entrance, slipping in a poor cold liquid extract of itself; like the murder victim who, unable to cry out for help, feels his blood spill beneath the door to receive his last rites for him. In the past, Ymir had wondered just how much of her body was required to regenerate. How did opportunistic cells decide which half to side with? She had seen Titans with skulls destroyed grow back the odd, specific, gentle features, and she thought—but then the scouts told stories about torsos consumed in a snap, and the head bouncing away eyes-open, fit to speak. Say she had face and brain ripped off, her two jaws cruelly parted. Would she see, in the last seconds of awareness before a final, unmourned death, the gory neck-stump clench and steam—hot air bulge to replace her?
What goes around comes around. Think of the girl that you were.
The moon was with them now, however halved. Sasha looked blank. She had come to a stop as soon as Ymir spoke, and tilted her head very sharply. A dog listening for the fall of a bird. After the gunshot; the master snarling. Fetch, beast! “Sorry,” she said, after another moment. “I thought you were asleep.”
“...”
She put the toe of her boot on the bench that someone had, with curious thoughtfulness, supplied for visitors. A plain wooden thing like a pew. The bow came off, and then the quiver, lifted cleanly over her head. “It was Armin's idea,” she said, plucking out one arrow. Not the Wings of Freedom-tailed first attempt. “Propaganda, you know. The story of how I escaped this 3-meter in the mountains got around... and the girl's still alive. Sometimes I go and see her.”
Ah. That rarest of commodities: lasting deliverance. Ymir didn't fully understand what Sasha was talking about, but she knew that any life the Survey Corps could point to as having been lengthily spared through their members' quick action, rather than snuffed in fruitless bravery, was a weapon Armin would never disdain. The Survey Corps, forever fighting on two fronts. Against Titans, they could sacrifice anything—but humans, miserly, suspicious and smallminded, would swiftly put a price to their future, and haggle till the wares went off like meat laid in the sun. Still, the gold that you could spin from sheaves of straw—a child saved, an incomplete thing, given remit to finish itself. Like a slap, Ymir remembered Armin goading Bertholdt on Reiner's back. We have Annie. We will never let her die.
“And you go along with that, huh?” she said, mainly to herself. “Well, sure. Nice to see you again, Sasha. What is it you wanted to say?”
“Um...” Sasha made a face as if of unaccustomed concentration. Then she relaxed, abruptly, and for a second time turned away. There was no one there. Ymir would know. But in the molded calm of Sasha's cheek and ear she saw the shadow of an imagined third party, their far-off assertive hand. “Mikasa asked me to check on you. Actually, she wanted me to find out how Historia was doing, but right now that means...”
“Oh, really?” Ymir tried to smile, or sneer. She had her manacled hands in front of her, bracing her jaw, and her wrists ached from something approximating cold. A shiver ran through her. “So, is it a fact that I've got the key to her heart?”
“Ymir,” said Sasha sympathetically, “we're worried. You think this is easy for her?”
“I don't know anything I'd tell you.”
“That tells me something,” Sasha pointed out, and frowned. “Ugh, I'm getting confused. I was just the one of us in the area, you know? But I'm not really—”
“—her what, her friend? Not trained for this? Come on, mountain hero.” Ymir knocked the first two fingers of a fist on her kneecap. “My turn for a question. Do you guys still have Leonhardt?”
“Sure,” said Sasha. “Underground somewhere. We've pretty much given up on getting her out.”
“'Scuse me?”
“Oh, right,” Sasha said, now using a different tone. “You left before anyone could tell you. They caught her in Stohess, but she encased herself in some kind of rock to avoid questioning. I haven't seen her for myself, though, I don't know what-all that entailed. She's been there ever since. Why?”
Entailed: an ammonite, curled in on itself, until it set as stone. She had for her answer a flicker of knowledge from the malign past, and she saw out of the corner of one eye that improvised campfire, that darkening wood; Bertholdt telling her, through tears of rage, about Annie's iron ring. The barb that sprang. She'd designed and forged it as a trainee, given access to the foundry as part of their instructors' efforts to ensure they could maintain their own equipment. See Annie, in a sleeveless gray top, protective goggles and gloves, smelting the band from a coin. She could have stolen the metal from somewhere—broken off the tip of an enemy blade—but in the end, she chose to use just what she had been paid.
“Just something you said.” Ymir turned her palm up to air, cupping an invisible stone—a crystal ball! “Solidarity among prisoners, right?”
She kept waiting for Sasha to make an accusation. You've never felt solidarity for anyone. Is this why you're here? Did they send you back to find her? If the question was posed aloud, maybe Ymir would locate an answer to it. Sasha hugged herself with crossed arms and looked unhappy.
“Well,” she said. “If you don't want to talk to me, I get it. I gotta get going soon anyway, they'll be wondering if you're suborning me, haha.” Marlowe and the closed bedroom door. Yes, they probably would.
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
“What happened to her?” said Ymir, leaning forward, hands draped down her knees. “This kingship thing—and the Corps—”
“You left,” said Sasha, picking up her bow. She spun it and held it out horizontally like a crossbow: not a weapon which depended on a lifetime's training, but rather a thing half-mechanized, handed out to infantry who used it to kill without understanding its workings. The bridge nearly covered her brown eyes. “What did you think was going to happen, huh? She was so different when you weren't around. Even I could tell. And sometimes,” she added, lowering the unstrung piece, “it's still like you're not around.”
What was that supposed that mean? Ymir closed her eyes and thought of a continuity of touches: Historia in the lamplight, and Historia in the tree. There was a silence that lay beyond any attempt to circumscribe its parts, like the land outside the walls at night, rolling outward from hills and mountains; once, it had fallen into discreet nations, but how could a rider alone know anything but that turf and sky were an endless sea? What could they do but speed forward, beneath the unnamed stars. It had been a long time since she felt small. “I need more than that,” she said, low: trying to bring to bear every ounce of terror Sasha had once felt toward her. Such a stingy, penny-pinching world, for all that it was vast; a place where volleys made in boredom, drawing water from a well—no one to fight, no life to save, just a cloudless day and a nicely-spoken victim—came around to mattering. The scattered deals, chaff, minor transactions, ephemera of a bygone age: churned up again by fortune's wheel, they rose to build a strange new yarn. That thread might bind together more than former members of the 104th. “I know she's unhappy. I'm not going to spy on her for you. But if you think our goals are in line, why don't you give me a little useful information? Just what went down when she took the throne?”
Sasha looked at her in wordless evaluation for a long time. “Sorry,” she said. “I can't answer that. Not for the reason you're thinking. We don't know.”
“You—what?”
“It was her father who crowned her,” said Sasha. “We were planning to, sure, but there was this dust-up with the MP... She only called us back to court after he died.”