Chương 30: Cats Can't Talk

At four-thirty sharp, I am woken up by the cacophonous sound of our drill sergeants screaming "lights, lights, lights!" I guess alarm clocks are out of season.

"What the hell is all of this!?" one of them yells beside my bed.

"Did you shit all over your mattress overnight, recruit?" I suppose I am sort of a brown blobby mess right now. Lately I've been spreading out across the surface of my bed while I sleep, hugging the mattress like an extra blanket. Even I can't tell what exactly I'm emulating when I do it. Maybe I'm not emulating anything at all, and my dreaming mind is trying to form entirely new templates from scratch but can't figure out how skeletons are supposed to work.

One way or the other, it's easy enough to pull my body back into a human form. I'm even lucky enough to have grown around my clothes rather than through them, so I don't end up in the buff.

"I asked you a question, Recruit Angelface, are you going to answer it!?" Right.

"Sir yes sir!"

"You did shit the bed, then!? Am I going to have to call your momma to wipe your ass for you!?" I mean, I was obviously answering the most recent question, but there are no right answers here. If I had specified, I would just be yelled at for something else.

"Sir no sir!"

"Well if that wasn't shit on your bed then what the hell was it!?"

"Sir! This recruit possesses abilities that remain active while she is unconscious, sir!"

"So that was you!? You were the piece of shit sullying this fucking rack!?" I mean what am I gonna say here? Whatever.

"Sir yes sir!"

"Then you had better clean up this bunk in the next two minutes until there's not a single blemish, a single wrinkle, a single fucking hair from your freakish alien head left on top of it! I want these sheets tighter than a drum! I wanna drop a quarter on your bed and watch it fucking bounce! And if any of you sorry bitches mess it up then the whole lot of you are running laps until you puke! Get to it!" We run laps that day. A lot of people puke.

When we aren't running laps or doing other intensive training punishments, we are learning how to march. It's a lot of ceremony stuff, focused more around perfect synchronization than anything we will actually be doing on a battlefield. That obviously doesn't make it useless; the Army does sometimes do formal parades and marches and crap in order to keep up civilian morale, but more importantly this is about ensuring perfect, immediate obedience. The third day shows that even more clearly.

"Right sock! Three, two, one, left sock! I see Recruit Bolton wants to be slow! Left sock off three two one, you are—""Ready, sir!"

"Back on, three two one! Pants on, right leg! Three, two, one, left leg!" Because of our 'clear need for coddling' they shout us through our morning routine step by patronizing step. The girls who put their hair in a bun are not given a step to do so and then yelled at for breaking regulation. This continues to happen for the next few days, and a lot fewer girls keep their hair into the second week.

Anastasia adapts by just resecuring her braid as part of our free time at night and relying on exhaustion to ensure she doesn't move enough in her sleep to undo it. We start hand-to-hand combat training in the second week, and that certainly feels a little pointless. I wonder if it's just an artifact from back before I was born when humans went to war with each other. I suppose it could be useful when subduing supervillains, but normal soldiers generally don't do that.

It seems smarter to keep it as a specialized skill, but I keep my thoughts on what is or isn't smarter to myself. Still though, as someone very familiar with alien anatomy, the only advice I can give someone who wants to fight them unarmed is 'don't'. Aliens are intelligently designed and don't really have most of the surface weaknesses a human suffers from. Even if you jab your thumb into a Raptor's eye, it's just going to gut you for it. It won't actually hurt the Raptor all that much.

And if you're thinking about fistfighting a Behemoth or a Wasp or something… well, no. One of the drill sergeants usually partners up with Anastasia for these parts of training. I guess having random people beat up children is a bad look even by boot camp standards, but more practically I imagine that Anastasia's size requires a slightly different curriculum than the rest of us. We are being taught a lot about how to attack the face, and she physically can't do that. Well, not with her fists anyway.

Still, as pointless as it is, I kind of like learning to fight this way. A lot of it is learning about anatomy, seeing what happens to the human body when the drill sergeant demonstrates an arm lock. Watching so many people get pushed to their physical limits and taught to exploit those limits in others really helps connect a few dots that I didn't realize were there.

I'm not entirely sure how helpful it all is, but it's enlightening and cool and that helps me maintain a fully human form during the spars, which I would almost certainly get yelled at for not doing. I catch the arm of my sparring partner and throw her onto the mat, thinking about all the little ways I could optimize the human body without having it appear outwardly different. She groans, not getting back to her feet immediately, which means we are probably going to be yelled at.

I reach my arm down, offering to help her up, and she scowls at me.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to learn anything sparring with a fucking superhuman," she grumbles, and I wince because one of the sergeants definitely heard that.

"If you have enough breath to complain about it then maybe you just aren't working hard enough, recruit!" one of them snaps at us.

"Do you expect to get everything handed to you? Do you expect life to be fucking fair? It doesn't matter if Recruit Angelface is stronger than you! A pussy bitch like you is going to encounter nothing but people stronger than you! Faster than you! And certainly a hell of a lot fucking smarter than you! What are you going to do about it, recruit? Are you gonna lie on your back and whine about it until someone spoonfeeds you baby formula to shut you up, or are you going to get up off your ass and fight!?"

Geez, I can't even be mad about that one. I just kind of agree with all of that. If anything, I'm surprised she didn't get blasted harder. I guess the drill sergeants are too busy instructing to want to waste time punishing her. Lucky.

"I'll show you how I did that," I offer to my partner as she finally takes my hand.

"... Yeah, okay," she agrees. Boot camp never lets up for a second. When we're done with hand-to-hand combat training, we move on to an obstacle course. When we're done with the obstacle course, we 'rest' by taking classes on first aid. Our power training courses were a resort retreat by comparison.

We are yelled at, belittled, and gaslit into compliance, and though this doesn't really impact me all that much—I'm used to acting out immediate obedience—it starts taking a visible toll on Anastasia and especially Christine. The former, I can do something about. Anastasia and I can spend our free hour chatting, and I do my best to help her direct her anger somewhere more productive than at our drill sergeants.

Explaining to her why they're doing what they're doing works well to calm her down, but the resentment underneath her immediate desire to act out remains. I can't really blame her for that. These might be desperate times, but this is still child abuse. And regular abuse, I suppose, but how are you supposed to prepare someone for war without getting them used to horrific moral violations? The whole goal is to turn people into weapons.

There is no just way to do it, not without sacrificing effectiveness, and after thirty straight years of martial-law-led war military policy has firmly shifted towards effectiveness over morality. Christine, though. Even during our free periods, we are very much not allowed to visit other platoons.

I'm not really sure why that rule exists; I recognize that they are trying to foster a bit of camaraderie and competition—there's even going to be a hand-to-hand combat event between the top performers of every platoon—but we're still in the same company. Shouldn't it be all of us against the aliens rather than each platoon against the other? It's painful to watch her struggle on the obstacle course and get screamed at over and over.

It's even more painful to watch her have a panic attack, curl up into a ball, and get three different drill instructors surrounding her and all trying to yell her out of it. I am very, very tempted to walk over there and try to stop them, but I doubt that ends well for any of us. I instead focus my efforts on distracting Anastasia so she doesn't see. The day after that, Christine isn't with the rest of her platoon.

They come out to the company area to do exercises like everyone else, but they all seem completely exhausted before they even get there. I guess they can't make her train, but they can make her watch the entire rest of her platoon get punished because she isn't. After a few days of that, I can't hold back my growing need to do something about it.

"Sir! This recruit wishes to speak to the drill sergeant about Recruit Baker, sir!" The drill sergeants have something equivalent to office hours, though we aren't actually allowed anywhere near their office. They don't seem to particularly like it when we use them, but needs must.

"What, is that sack of shit a friend of yours? Focus on your own platoon, Recruit Angelface," she answers.

"Sir! This recruit has experience working Recruit Baker through high-stress situations. This recruit may be able to—""Did I ask you to fucking elaborate?" the drill sergeant cuts me off.

"Well, did I!?"

"Sir no sir!" I answer, trying not to grit my teeth.

"Then that means I don't want to fucking hear it, doesn't it?" Yeah, that could have gone better. But it probably wasn't going to. Still, Christine is a little too brittle for them to push on her this hard. She's not going to bend, she's going to break. I have to do something about it. When my next night watch comes around, I wait for the people who woke us to fall asleep before turning and looking at my partner dead in the eye. I'm lucky enough to have been partnered with Jazz tonight.

"Will you cover for me?" I whisper at her.

"What?" she hisses back.

"Cover what for you?"

"I have to stop one of the other powered girls from snapping and probably killing a drill sergeant," I tell her bluntly.

"Will you cover for me?"

"Wait, like you're sneaking out? Are you crazy? They'll set our asses on fire. There's no way you can make it there without being spotted. If I let you go, you'll just get caught by someone else's night watch." I stare at her.

"Jazz," I say, "I'm a shapeshifter." She mouths 'oh' to herself.

"…Well, there's no way you can pull off the drill sergeant look without the hat," she points out.

"I was planning on a stealthier approach," I say.

"Like a cat or a mouse or something." Or some kind of freaky hairless cat-octopus hybrid, but she doesn't need to know the details. Planning out my 'stealth form' was pretty fun, honestly, but I don't really need anything more complicated than small, fast, quiet, and hard to see.

"What do I get out of this?" Jazz asks, narrowing her eyes at me.

"It's on my ass if they find out you're missing and I didn't report it."

"I don't know, the debt and gratitude of a future superhero?" I ask.

"Is that worth anything?"

"No," she says.

"I probably won't even see you again after boot camp."

"I'll owe you a favor during boot camp, then," I sigh.

"Like I can… I don't know, let you nap on our next night watch."

"I think that's even less likely to work, but fuck it, whatever. Go do your thing."

"Thanks," I nod, pulling my clothes off and tossing them onto my bed.

"Woah, hey!" Jazz hisses, but then I shrink down into a freaky little creature and run for the exit. My skin writhes and my chromatophores bloom, matching my color perfectly with the walls as I slink alongside one to where the other platoons sleep. I don't actually know which sleeping quarters is Christine's, but there aren't all that many and it's easy enough to find the other one with women in it.

I watch the pair of girls guarding the place carefully as I sneak past them, reaching out with my domain to try and feel around for the edges of Christine's. The moment I find it, someone jolts in one of the beds, Christine waking up in a panic from the sudden domain contact. Well, that makes it easy enough to find her, I suppose. Unfortunately, since Christine doesn't feel domain qualia, she can't really tell that it's me.

I hide for a bit, the fire watch glancing in Christine's direction because of the movement, but they scowl and dutifully ignore her shortly after, giving me a chance to creep up to her bed and whisper at her.

"Hey, it's me," I say quietly.

"You okay?"

"…Jul…Lia?" she whispers back.

"Probably one of those," I joke.

"How are you holding up?"

"Bad, obviously," she groans.

"I can't do this."

"You can," I insist.

"It's going to hurt, but you can."

"Has it never occurred to you that maybe life shouldn't have to hurt?" she asks me.

"The way life should be is always a nice goal to have, but you have to deal with the way life is before you can get there," I tell her.

"You always have an answer," Christine grumbles.

"So what, you're just here to tell me to suck it up like everyone else?"

"I guess kind of," I admit.

"But I hope you'll take it a little more favorably when it comes from me rather than one of those screaming assholes." A small huff of air comes out of her nose, almost close to a laugh.

"Have you seen my shoes?" she asks.

"Um. No? Is there something weird about them?"

"They took my shoelaces and put duct tape on them instead," Christine says.

"So I don't hang myself."

"Holy shit," I say, not really knowing how else to respond. I guess I don't always have an answer.

"I can't really blame them," Christine admits.

"I do sometimes wish I had never gotten powers, even though that would mean… you know." That she would have died in the incursion.

"Yeah, I know," I say.

"I'm definitely glad you did, though. I'm glad we all made it out together."

"Did we make it out?" she asks.

"Or are we just going to have to keep going back in for the rest of our lives? If the goal is to make boot camp so bad that it kind of sounds appealing, they might actually be succeeding." I hesitate, trying to decide how to handle this. With a quick glance over to the girls on fire watch, I step out of my hiding spot and hop up onto the bed, replacing my octopus skin with normal cat fur. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Ack! Lia?" Christine sputters.

"Shh," I quiet her.

"Look, I don't know if there's anything I can say that'll make this better, but I'm here for you. We got through the incursion zone, we got through power training, and we'll get through this. Maria is in your platoon too, right?"

"I guess," Christine shrugs.

"I mean, I like Maria, but we're not really friends."

"I see," I say. Slowly, carefully, making sure to give her plenty of time to object, I curl up next to her, snuggling her shoulder.

"Well if there's anything you need, I'm here for you. I'll help you through this however I can."

"Yeah," Christine says softly, slowly rotating on her side and wrapping her arms around me.

"I know you will." We stay like that for a few minutes, me doing my best to just be a comforting presence. I wish I knew something better to say, but this might be one of those times that there isn't anything good to say at all. Those are always the worst, but I'll do my best in spite of them.

"…This is weird," Christine mumbles.

"You're basically in my bed naked right now."

"Look, I'm a cat right now," I sigh.

"Just don't think about it."

"Cats can't talk," Christine points out.

"Okay, I'm an objectively better cat right now." She chuckles, squeezing me a little tighter.

"You should get back to your squad bay," she tells me.

"Thanks, though. I'll try to do better."

"You've got this, Christine," I encourage her, and then I slink back to my post, popping into human form and quickly putting my clothes back on while Jazz covers her mouth to hold back a swearing fit.

"You scared the shit out of me!" she hisses.

"Sorry," I tell her.

"Did anyone notice me gone?"

"Somehow, no," she says.

"You owe me big."

"I pay my debts," I nod. The next day, Christine joins us in the company area, her shoes still taped shut. Unfortunately, today is the day we get introduced to the gas chamber. I guess one of the nice things about the Geneva Conventions is that the aliens never signed it. The gas chamber is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a room for pumping in various horrible gasses so as to expose us to them in a controlled environment.

A lot of Queens can disperse or otherwise mitigate the effects of gas attacks inside their domains, but not all of them, and some of humanity's greatest victories have been because of that weakness. Angels attacking us outside of the protection of their Queens often also have a vulnerability to gas attacks. After all, the aliens fight naked.

They are organic beings that need to breathe, and while their respiratory systems are robust enough to filter out a lot of potential contaminants, poison is a different matter entirely. While I wouldn't be surprised if deadlier concoctions have been used on the enemy, even without knowing too much about it I suspect from my understanding of alien biology that tear gas would be very effective on them.

And since tear gas is usually survivable by humans, they want to train us to withstand exposure to it without panicking. We'll usually have gas masks, presumably, and we'll train with those too, but I guess they don't want us to leave here without a facefull of riot suppression. I suppose it's only fair? I mean, just because we're at war doesn't mean we don't have plenty of opportunities to gas our own people. It's not super common, since the propaganda does its job I guess, but it happens.

I'm not sure it makes me feel better knowing that the people shooting gas canisters know exactly what they're doing to other human beings, but it's certainly a thing to know. We get drilled through the protocols, practice putting on and taking off our masks, and generally get exposed to the entire safety spiel before we get exposed to the tear gas.

We go in, we do all the mask protocol stuff, they fill the whole chamber with gas so we can see what it's like with our masks on, and then before they let us out of the chamber they make us take the masks off and scream the answers to a few questions while our eyes feel like they're boiling out of our heads. Overall, I have to say that Wasp acid feels worse. The gas is still horrible, don't get me wrong, but I think I might be able to at least lessen its effects with the right body.

After every platoon has had their turn in the pain box, I request permission from my drill sergeant to go back in with authorization to use my power. I don't even get yelled at for the request; they seem quite happy to send me back in. I experiment with a few variations on nictitating membranes for my eyes to protect them, but the only real solution I have to the whole breathing problem is not breathing.

I have a good chunk of ways to hold my breath for a very long time, but what should I do if I inhale the gas by accident? And there has to be a limit to how long I can hold my breath, right? Wait. Does there? I can replace parts of my body with past versions of themselves. There should be no reason I can't shapeshift away suffocating cells and replace them with oxygenated cells. That's how my body handles muscle fatigue already! Although now I'm curious about where I get the oxygen from.

Normally my power gets all of its material from stuff I eat, and there's definitely going to be a lot of oxygen in that, but what… huh. Have I never burped since getting my powers? Am I just swallowing a ton of air and not noticing? What the heck? On a whim, I take a breath of tear gas on purpose (do not recommend) and then, with it inside my body, shapeshift it away, replacing it with normal air. Jesus Christmas Christ. Even the pain is gone. Does this even count as shapeshifting anymore?

It's just like when I shapeshifted away the bullets that were lodged inside my body, I suppose. How does that work? What is my power, really? I stand in there with my mask off thinking about it until the drill sergeant in there with me yells at me to walk back out. I do so, wiping my eyes with my membranes as I try to work through the implications. Hypothetically, I could shapeshift away anything as long as it was inside my body. Is there a way to get it back, though?

My power doesn't really let me mess with nonorganic concepts. I don't think there's any chance of being able to eat a bunch of raw materials and then shapeshift myself a gun. So what happens if I eat a gun? (Hypothetically, of course.) Does the gun just stop existing?

"Satisfied, Recruit Angelface?" one of the sergeants suddenly snaps at me.

"Sir yes sir!" I shout on instinct.

"Great! Because I think you've brought up a fantastic point! All you future superheroes, line back up! You're going in for round two!" Whoops. I mean, it could be interesting to know if their powers can protect them from gas attacks, but… oh boy. Christine looks mad at me. She's already got snot and tears running down her face, and they're clearly expecting us to go back in maskless to see what our powers can do.

I feel the worst for making Anastasia go back in, of course, since I can't see any way for her powers to prevent her from getting gassed. Peter clearly doesn't care, so I guess his bullshit ability does something, but Maria and Christine are not happy about all of this, and neither are most of the other supers in our group. Yet when we all head inside together and they start to release the gas… nothing happens. It never touches us. Christine is sorting the air.

My immediate reaction to this realization is to check and see if I'm suffocating or getting oxygen poisoning. If Christine sorts the air too much and separates the chemicals in the normal atmosphere from each other rather than just relocating the tear gas, everyone in here could die. But we don't. The tear gas hovers at the edges of the room and around the drill sergeant supervising us, but it avoids us entirely.

We all seem to silently decide not to point this out to anyone, and a few of us do a couple fake coughs as we exit to act like it didn't happen. Most of us still have faces dripping with tears and snot from our first go in the gas chamber, so it's not too hard to sell the exit.

"Nice job," I whisper to Christine when I see an opportunity. She pulled it off. She used her power under pressure! Christine just shrugs, though. Soon we're sorted back into our platoons and I lose sight of her. Here's hoping things keep going well. The next day, they hand out guns to everyone. No bullets yet, thankfully, but we have our guns and we will apparently be keeping hold of them for quite some time.

Outside of our continued physical training every morning—which everyone but me is starting to noticeably benefit from—we pretty much have the gun at all times. We march with it, we spend every class learning to disassemble and clean it, and we practice what using it will be like if it did have bullets. The drill sergeants balance small objects on the end of the gun barrels and tell us to pull the trigger without letting it fall.

Hopefully this is a no-ammo-only exercise, because I can't imagine it would be possible with the recoil from actually firing. Not that I would put it past the drill sergeants to find yet another impossible task to make us fail at so they can punish us. Watching Anastasia learn to use a gun has been equal parts entertaining and terrifying. The gun is enormous compared to her body, but she has the strength to carry it around just like the rest of us.

The entire company seems to get a little more somber watching her do the drills, marching alongside us despite her legs barely being able to manage a sedate pace for adults. Everyone already knew that we were sending this child to war, but there's something about seeing her work a gun that makes it all the more real. The instructors only react to the decreased morale the way they react to everything: even more yelling. Throughout it all, though, Anastasia doesn't complain.

Just like always, she is devoted to fighting. A few of the low-performing recruits, Christine included, get pulled aside by a separate group of drill instructors during company training to accelerate their physical fitness needs. It looks hellish. I keep an eye on the group as often as I'm able to do so without getting screamed at, and everyone in it seems to be having a bad time.

It's not uncommon to see one of the boys or girls in the group broken down crying on the ground as one of the drill sergeants screams in their face. In retrospect, I should have been a lot more prepared when, during the middle of one of our exercises, Anastasia suddenly turns around, cuts open a gash in her arm, and beelines it towards the intensive training group.

"Wh—Ana, no!" I shout, ignoring my drill sergeant screaming at us as I turn to follow her. Anastasia is fast, though, with her blood out and wrapped around her waist, she can keep her domain at maximum power close to her body as her blood pulls her along, which in turn keeps that blood inside her domain as it moves along with her.

"Christine!" Anastasia shouts, and I'm surprised to hear not anger in her voice, but panic. I tear my focus away from her to look at where she's going, and I see Christine on the ground with the drill sergeant screaming directly into her face. And just like how I was surprised to see Anastasia afraid, I'm very surprised to see Christine angry. Stretching my domain ahead of me, I brush against Christine's and find it wrapped not just around her own body, but also around the drill sergeant. Oh shit. I take it back.

Anastasia has never done anything wrong and this is no exception. I try to stop Christine from activating her power, but she shoves me aside with barely any effort. I'm still too far away to have much density behind me, but more than that Christine is powerful. She's always been powerful. My domain doesn't require much penetration to copy someone's body, so I pick up forms from other supers all the time, but Christine's domain has always been a wall to me.

She probably has a better RD score than anyone else in our entire power class. I can't stop her. Fortunately, I don't have to try alone. Anastasia fires a glob of blood forward, outside the range of her domain, where it smacks into the drill sergeant and makes him tumble over. Christine's domain expands to keep him inside, but the move earns Anastasia and I just enough time for us to reach her and dogpile her with both of our powers. Combined, we barely have enough density to protect the drill sergeant.

"Christine!" Anastasia repeats.

"Christine, don't, please don't."

"This fucker—" she starts, but the drill sergeant who was screaming at her demonstrates the same survival skills he has shown thus far and interrupts her.

"What the hell do you two shitstains think you're doing!? Did you just hit me!? You're going to be—" I interrupt him this time.

"Sir! This recruit is here to save your life, sir!"

"I wasn't going to kill him," Christine growls.

"I can put things back together again." The drill sergeant opens his mouth to presumably try and commit suicide again, but a different drill sergeant cuts him off and takes charge again.

"The three of you! With me! Now!" he snaps, briskly walking away from the training area. I gently pull Christine to her feet and tug on her a bit to get her to follow him with us. She's not happy about it, but she complies.

"Fucker was calling me slurs all goddamned day," she hisses. What kind of slurs are there for white women? Actually, on second thought, I don't want to know.

"Quiet!" the drill sergeant leading us barks, and we shut up. He actually takes us on quite the long walk, well off the training field and past the usual set of buildings we use for boot camp. This is probably not a good sign. We eventually walk all the way into a large, administrative-looking building, heading down a boring hallway before the drill sergeant finally knocks on one of the doors.

"Come in," a clipped voice calls from the other side. Our drill sergeant steps in and salutes, so we take the cue to do the same. Inside is a Hispanic man in an officer's uniform—a Major, by the looks of it—sitting behind a large desk. He has three different monitors in front of his face and four enormous stacks of papers covering the areas that aren't relegated to his keyboard and mouse.

His hands fly across the desk, constantly in motion, and the man barely gives us a glance before looking back at one of his monitors. A domain briefly flows out from him and brushes against us, though it immediately retreats after feeling us out. It reminds me more of Commander's aura than anyone else's, though it doesn't have anything like her level of creepiness. Where Commander's domain is almost desperate to get you to drink its poison and lose yourself in its pleasure, the Major's domain is much more… content.

Happy with itself, and though it would be happy to share that with us, too, it doesn't demand anything the way Commander's did.

"Thank you Sergeant, you are dismissed," he says, and our drill sergeant turns and walks out of the room without another word. Not being sergeants, the three of us stay exactly where we are. For the next ten or so minutes, we continue standing at attention, even Christine not being annoyed enough to speak first with someone who has that much stuff on his lapel. Eventually, though, the man finishes whatever it was that he was doing and looks up from his desk to acknowledge us directly.

"Hello," he greets blandly.

"I am Major Luis Espinoza. I have been called and briefed on the situation. Superpowered discipline falls under my jurisdiction mostly due to a lack of staffing, so I don't appreciate the interruption." He didn't ask us a question, so none of us say anything when he pauses. After a moment, he nods like we passed a test and continues speaking.

"I have, however, budgeted my time under the assumption that something like this would occur. Chicago causing an influx of new powers made it excessively likely that someone would need to end up in my office, but I didn't expect three of you at once. One at a time, describe to me in your own words what happened." I go first, to give an example to Anastasia and give Christine a little more time to collect her thoughts. There's not much for me to tell, of course.

I just saw Anastasia suddenly bolt towards Christine and followed her on instinct, justifying the decision by saying I felt it would be my duty as someone with powers to defend others against powers when needed. Anastasia says something similar, though of course she also talks about how she noticed Christine getting angry and managed to figure out that she was about to attack by stretching her domain super thin all the way over to Christine. Which, wow. That's very impressive.

I doubt I could do that, my domain has always been fairly stubborn when it comes to range. Then it's Christine's turn. She manages to keep her words professional, but the undertone of anger is plainly audible. She stays pretty vague about the kinds of things the drill sergeant said to her, but she effectively accuses him of discriminatory behavior and abuse in clear excess of what would be productive for training.

Throughout all three of us giving our case, Major Espinoza barely even looks at us, instead doing more work at his desk.

"I see," he says when we're all finished.

"Well, my primary piece of advice to you, Recruit Baker, would be to get over it—" Christine's face twitches in fury.

"—but I can see that summarizing it so bluntly is not helpful, so allow me to elaborate. There is one thing and one thing alone that a soldier is supposed to do when they are angry with their superior officer: obey. Attempting to assault a superior officer with a supernatural ability is very much not one of the orders you were given.

It is the sort of thing that could, if I decided it was needed, get you removed from boot camp and transferred somewhere that your ability to be willingly trained would matter quite a bit less. But frankly, Recruit Baker, you are very powerful and I would like you to be in control of that power if at all possible. And what being in control means is that you do not use your power on humans no matter how angry they make you."

He pauses, the sound of fingers clattering rapidly against a keyboard filling the lull in conversation.

"Generously, it could be reasoned that Drill Sergeant Compton was pushing these limits on purpose. If someone is likely to break, it is better that they do it here than on the field. The best training, after all, is noticeably more stressful and difficult than whatever it is you are training for. While that is impractical, it is still the hope that when you graduate our program, you will be above whatever revenge you were imagining for those who wronged you.

Knowing Drill Sergeant Compton, however, leads me to be willing to believe he was motivated more by malice than professional dedication. I assure you that he will be reprimanded, and that he will find his duties rarely taking him near you." The sound of a printer buzzes beneath his desk, and a moment later he reaches down, grabs whatever just came out of the printer, and hands it to Christine along with a pen.

"This incident will still be in your permanent record, of course. Recruits Morgan and Patrova, I have negative counseling statements for the both of you to fill out." He hands us our own paperwork next, and the three of us sit down and awkwardly fill it all out while he continues to work. If we didn't have superpowers, there's no way we would be doing this with a bigwig like him, and that makes it all the more uncomfortable.

Christine is still clearly pissed about the injustice of it all, but she signs her papers (which look a lot nastier than Anastasia's and mine) and hands them back to the Major without a word.

"Thank you," he says.

"Your file mentions you've seen combat already, Recruit Baker. What was that like for you?"

"…Awful? I didn't really 'see combat' so much as get saved by the two of them," Christine answers, indicating us.

"Just like today, I guess." He nods.

"We would be having a much different conversation if your power did actually get used. But even if you didn't fight, you remember what it was like out there, don't you?"

"Yeah, I guess," Christine says, and I wince, expecting her to get torn a new one. But instead, the words that follow are calm and measured.

"By all accounts, your ability is one of the most powerful we have seen in a long time," Major Espinoza says.

"Even discounting its effect, your RD score is enormous for someone who has had their power as little time as you have, and your growth rates are similarly noteworthy. You're capable of making a big difference in this war. Bigger than I think you know. Please, don't forget that." Christine blinks, seeming quite surprised.

"I… really?" she asks.

"I do not waste time with idle words," Major Espinoza answers.

"I know it feels daunting, terrifying. You can't see it in yourself because you lack the context and experience to know. But I promise you, Recruit Baker, the next time you step within the domain of a Queen, you will be a very, very different woman. And they will have more to fear than you will. Dismissed, the three of you. Report back to your platoons." We exit his office and find a soldier already waiting for us to escort us back.

Christine still seems a little shocked by the whole affair, clearly struggling to believe any of the things she was just told. So I put an arm around her shoulder and give her a light squeeze.

"How are you doing?" I ask.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about," Christine mumbles.

"No matter how good my power is, it still has the problem of being used by me."

"Does it?" I ask.

"He kind of has a point. The whole reason we're here is to be reforged into weapons, and all that. I think he's right. I think you can change."

"Easy for the shapeshifter to say," Christine mutters, but just like how she couldn't hide her anger, she can't hide the tiny spark of hope in her tone.