Mustang stalks with me through the woods during the next weeks. I move stiffly through the thick snow but my strength is returning. She credits medicine she found lying conspicuously under a bush. A friendly Proctor placed it there. We pause when we spot the deer. I draw the bow, but I can’t get the string to my ear. My wound aches. Mustang watches me. I try again. Pain deep inside. I let the arrow fly. We eat leftover rabbit that night. It tastes funny and gives me cramps. I always have cramps now. It’s the water too. We have nothing to boil it in. No iodine. Just snow and a little creek to drink from. Sometimes we can’t have fire.
“You should have killed Cassius or sent him away,” Mustang tells me.
“Would have thought you nobler than that,” I say as I skin the rabbit we caught.
“I like to win. Family trait. And sometimes cheating is in the rulebook.” She smiles. “You get a merit bar every time you recapture your standard. So I arranged for it to be lost to House Diana by someone else several times. Then rode out to capture it. Got to Primus in a week.”
“Tricky. Yet your army liked you,” I say.
“Everyone likes me. Now eat your damn rabbit. You’re skinny as a cadaver.”
The winter grows colder. We live in the deep north woods, far north of Ceres, northwest of my former highlands. I have not yet seen a soldier of Mars. I don’t know what I would do if I did.
“I’ve hidden from everyone but you,” Mustang says. “It keeps me alive and ticking.”
“What’s your plan?” I ask.
She laughs at herself. “To be alive and ticking.”
“You’re better at it than I am.”
“How do you mean?”
“No one in your House would have betrayed you.”
“Because I didn’t rule like you,” she says. “You have to remember, people don’t like being told what to do. You can treat your friends like servants and they’ll love you, but you tell them they’re servants and they’ll kill you. Anyway, you put too much stock in hierarchy and fear.”
“Me?”
“Who else? I could spot it a mile away. All you cared about was your mission, whatever it is. You’re like a driven arrow with a very depressing shadow. First time I met you, I knew you’d cut my throat to get whatever it is you want.” She waits for a moment. “What is it that you want, by the way?”
“To win,” I say.
“Oh, please. You’re not that simple.”
“You think you know me?” The rabbit hisses out fat over the fire.
“I know you cry in your sleep for a girl named Eo. Sister? Or a girl you loved? It is a very offColor name. Like yours.”
“I’m a farplanet hayseed. Didn’t they tell you?”
“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t get out much.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that no one trusts you because it’s obvious you care more about your goal than you do about them.”
“And you’re something different?”
“Oh, very much so, Sir Reaper. I like people more than you do. You are the wolf that howls and bites. I am the mustang that nuzzles the hand. People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.”
She’s right.
When I had a tribe, I did it right. I made every boy and every girl love me. Made them earn their keep. I taught them how to kill a goat as if I knew how. I gave them fire as if I had created the matches. I shared a secret with them—that we had food and Titus didn’t. They saw me as their father. I remember it in their eyes. When Titus was alive, I was a symbol of goodness and hope. Then when he died … I became him.
“Sometimes I forget that the Institute is meant to teach me things,” I say to Mustang.
I must learn better than them, not simply beat them. That is how I will help Reds. I am a boy. I am foolish. But if I learn to become a leader, I can be more than an agent of the Sons of Ares. I can give my people a future. That is what Eo wanted.
The wolves are hungry now. They howl in the night. When Mustang and I make a kill, we sometimes have to scare them off. But when we kill a caribou at dusk, a pack descends from the northlands. They come from the trees like dark specters. Shadows. The biggest of them is my size. His fur is white. The fur of the others is gray, no longer black. These wolves change with the season. I watch how they surround us. Each moves with individual cunning. Yet each moves as part of a pack.
“This is how we should fight,” I whisper to Mustang as we watch the wolves approach.
“Could we talk about this later?”
We take down the pack leader with three arrows. The rest flee. Mustang and I set to skinning the big white brute. As she slips her knife along beneath the fur, she looks up, nose red from the cold.
“Slaves aren’t part of the pack, so we can’t fight like them. Not that it matters. The wolves don’t have it right either. They take too much from their pack leader. Cut off the head, the body retreats.”
“So the answer is autonomy,” I say.
“Maybe.” She bites her lip.
Later that night, she elaborates. “It’s like a hand.” She sits close and cozy, leg touching mine. Close enough for guilt to crawl along my spine. The caribou roasts, filling the cave with a fine, thick aroma. A blizzard rages outside and the wolf fur dries over the fire.
“Give me your hand,” she says. “Which is your best finger?”
“They are all better at different things.”
“Don’t be obstinant.”
I tell her my thumb. She has me try to hold a stick with only my thumb. She easily pulls it from my grasp. Then she has me hold it without my thumb and only the other fingers. With a twist, the stick is free.
“Imagine that your thumb is your Housemembers. The fingers are all the slaves you have conquered. The Primus or whoever is the leader is the brain. It all works pretty gory seamlessly. Yeah?”
She can’t pull the stick from my grip. I set it down and ask her the point.
“Now try to do something beyond simply grabbing the standard. Just move your thumb counterclockwise and your fingers clockwise except your middle.”
I do it. She stares at my hands and laughs incredulously. “Ass.” I ruined her demonstration. Helldivers are dexterous. I watch her hands as she tries to do it too. Of course she fails. I understand.