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  Unnoticed.

  The troll lifted Matthew in its grasp, up to its spreading rows of small teeth. As Matthew thrashed and screamed, he didn’t sound human. A cat with its back on fire.

  “Primed, Cap’n,” Kylie-Nae called, slamming the breach closed.

  Crosshairs settled on the troll’s left eye—thunder—this next attempt went wider than the first. Only trimming some warts from its cauliflower ear, not even drawing blood. But whereas before, their scout had been in its grasp, when the dust cleared . . . Matthew was gone.

  Cheeks swollen, trying to contain its mouthful, the troll worked its jaw.

  A boot holding a stumped leg lay on the ground.

  “Reload,” Anoushka choked. They hadn’t lost anyone in some time. It never got easier.

  Tears streaming, Kylie-Nae hoisted a cannonball from the wall basket. Letting it roll down her arms, it socketed into the chamber. Next, the wadmal sachet of black powder. And after giving both ball and powder a dousing of ignition oil, she clanged the hatch, spun the lock wheel. “Primed.”

  The troll had returned to chasing Peter. It thundered about the trampled field with much more enthusiasm, fancying seconds. Spurring hard, Peter’s exhausted steed barely kept them ahead of the enormous hands. The troll ran hunched, making a wet, sputtering sound, perhaps a giggle—a giant gray toddler after a clockwork duck. Joy on its bloody face. Matthew. It was wearing Matthew.

  As bait, Peter rode back toward them, leading the troll back onto the road, into range. As it neared, its image was so magnified to Anoushka she could count its pores, the red lightning in its dumb eyes. Passing right where she wanted it to, she fired. Anoushka’s seat springs squeaked beneath her as she swung forward and back.

  At the forward viewport, cranking the wipers of dust, Kylie-Nae reported, “Hit.”

  “Kill?”

  Teetee’s barks supplied the answer.

  “Reloading,” Kylie-Nae said.

  As the periscope cleared, Anoushka saw the cannonball had taken the troll’s left hand. Allowing it to pound gallons per pump, anger flared in its jowly face.

  “Approaching, Cap’n,” Kylie-Nae said. “Fast. Really fast.”

  “Reload!”

  Zuther and Russell were pouring powder down the throats of sidearms. Anoushka would’ve normally taken insult at such a show of doubt, but not under these circumstances.

  As the ground beneath the tank shook, the cannonballs in their wall basket settled, clunking together. The radio box hopped off its hook, crashed.

  “Primed.”

  In the periscope: troll eyes—peering right into Anoushka’s. Point-blank. Scant chance of missing now, you ugly cuss.

  “Firing!”

  But no muffled bang beyond her cotton-packed ears. Anoushka peeked under the periscope shaft. Kylie-Nae, hands over her ears, turned. Smoke was clawing out around the hatch—something was burning in there, but it hadn’t fired in the desired fashion. Not good. Could backfire into the tank or banana-peel the barrel.

  “Douse it,” Anoushka shouted. “And reload. Now.”

  With a crash, Joan’s forward armor swelled inward. Another appeared next to it, metal screaming. Snapped rivets rained to the floor. It held. But wouldn’t long.

  Kylie-Nae flipped open a spout on the breach’s top. A crackling sulfuric mist spurted out, spattering against the ceiling. With a rag, the cannon master rolled the breach wheel, swept the smoldering dud to the floor, stomped it out, and began reloading.

  “If I could request we speed it along . . .” Anoushka said, continuing her staring contest with the troll, her finger on the trigger. It remained in front of them, the barrel poking it in the belly as it made good on its species’ Flesh Hammer epithet. Another wallop shrank Joan more, then another—the walls were literally closing in.

  A clatter of hooves. Peter. Metallic double-click, a flat bang.

  The blows continued their steady beat: left, right, left. Teetee barked, interrupting himself with snarls and snaps, echoing Anoushka’s frustration and fear.

  “Kylie! Are we loaded?”

  The armor next to Anoushka jumped in, banging against her knee, something inside crunching. Gasping at the sunspot of pain, she fumbled with her buckles. Staying seated meant getting crushed where she sat. Rattling stubborn buckles, she screamed, “Reload! Now!”

  Rushing to get the powder and oil in, Kylie-Nae had left the ball cage open. She was about to close it—protocol—when the tank was hoisted backward and up.

  Kylie-Nae and Russell grabbed onto straps placed there for just such occasions. Zuther snagged the dwarf’s burly arm.

  The bag of powder sachets tumbled down to Anoushka’s end, now the bottom of the tank, thudding around her. She went saucer-eyed as she saw the cannonball cage hadn’t been closed. When the tank raised on its rear end, Anoushka watched the black spheres . . . shift.

  Tumbling over its lead brethren, one thumped out onto the open cage door, tipped, and fell. As it pinballed down through Joan, Anoushka managed to get herself out of its way—despite the hold her seat straps still had on her. The cannonball sank into the plating to its equator, right next to her. No one could reach the cage, dangling as they were. Praying against a ricochet, Anoushka drew her ’lock, took aim, fired. Hitting the underside of the ball-cage door, it swung up and shut—snap—before another could escape.

  At a weak spot in the floor, the troll began worming in a fingertip. The splitting steel spread, wider.

  Possibly forgetting it was minus a hand, the troll reached in a bloody stump and doused everyone inside. Hot, coppery. Retrieving nothing, the functionless limb withdrew, followed by the one still equipped for the task.

  Drawing legs to her chest, Anoushka shrank herself as much as possible. She tried reloading her ’lock, but her shaking hands only helped to pour powder on herself.

  Shifting about, the fingers began inching near those dangling above. Russell jammed his ’lock’s barrel under the troll’s grimy fingernail. The hubcap-sized nail flew off, bouncing about inside Joan. Roaring, the troll withdrew.

  Silence for a beat.

  As the tank violently rolled, everyone grabbed onto what they could and rode out the spin. Everything loose made its return trip. Anoushka, again, dodged the escaped cannonball.

  In the troll-made gap, she could see gray gut (a navel she could dive headlong into bodily), a bit of its hip. Yanking the cleat lever would throw the barbs out, stabbing into the fat gray belly, but a troll, like berserkers, felt nothing when mad. It continued hugging the tank, belly to belly. Metal moaned. Squeezed so, Joan’s boxy physique was gaining an hourglass figure. Anoushka had another thought. The cannon’s barrel was up, by the troll’s head. Grabbing the fallen sachets, she began throwing them to her compatriots—though most came falling back. Those above caught the tossed sachets but held them, confused.

  “Fill it with everything we have.”

  Kylie-Nae said, “But that’ll—”

  “Load them!”

  Catching what she could with her free hand, Kylie-Nae began flinging them up into the cannon chamber. Russell and Zuther glued them to the scored walls with squirts of oil, working dangling one-handed from a strap or each other.

  After the breach had all been packed to its limit with powder, Kylie-Nae pumped her legs to swing out to shove the heavy hatch up, shut. “Primed!”

  Fingertips grazing the triggers, Anoushka reached . . . hoping the firing mechanism was still connected to everything it needed to be, still ready to spark, still operational . . .

  Her stretched, stretched seat straps pinned her. With a final thrust that threatened to dislocate her shoulder, Anoushka reached—and pulled the trigger.

  The concussive blast rattled eyes and teeth. Anoushka would’ve been more surprised if they hadn’t rent the barrel to a stomped plantain. The tank’s floor became the floor again, all of them slammed to it.

  Being that close to the end of the barrel when it went off with that much powder in it was g
oing to be really loud. And something as squishy as a noggin anywhere near at the time—cannonball or no—would get dashed apart by sheer force alone.

  As the misshapen, blood-splattered side panels were cranked up, Peter charged in, dropped off his steed, and helped drag them out. An odd display: caring.

  Anoushka, despite how much her crushed knee hurt, refused Peter’s hand. She dropped a coin purse into it instead. “Ride ahead. Find a place that sells replacement parts.” Surveying Joan, badly misshapen, she added, “One of everything, looks like.”

  The others goggled, jaws dropped. She regarded the mostly headless beast in the road. The blood spraying from the shattered slush atop its shoulders was less gushy with each successive voiding. And even though he’d already had some unicorn, Teetee was at work on his 6,000-pound second lunch. Having lost Matthew reminded Anoushka this wasn’t a Summerend countryside tour. It wasn’t about sing-alongs, seeing how many casks they could drain in a night. No. This wasn’t simply a job; it was duty. For the Ma’am. For Rammelstaad.

  “I refuse to be late to war because of something as silly as a troll in the road.”

  Harvest 13th

  Year 173, 9th Age

  Wasted Years

  The thrill-rag came with a letter. “Pretty good tale, if a bit tall.” Kylie-Nae Browne’s precise hand.

  The novelette fit in Anoushka Demaine’s palm. Thin, crackly paper; delicate but still wrathful. Into the kitchen hearth it went; kindling for warming the kettle. She kept the letter, though, reading it through again while the book burned. An odd feeling, seeing your own name turning to ash and smoke. She hadn’t spoken to anyone from this Associated Bards. Whoever had spoken to them had a decent memory. Not perfect, though. Like how they’d just—allegedly—shoved off after the troll. Really, they’d returned to Crescentcliff to inform Matthew’s mom. They received a major ass-chewing when they finally arrived at the battlefield, but Anoushka supposed that kind of thing—dealing with the dead—didn’t lend a yarn its rippingness. It had to’ve been one of the squad, given how many details they’d gotten right. Like the heat that day. The song. The flattened ’corn. Most despicable was that the story hadn’t been shared in the pub with a small private audience. It’d been told—nay, sold—to an outfit selling things called thrill-rags. Ugh.

  The rest of the mail. Bill, bill, the paper. Anoushka was about to toss the Delta Tribune’s morning edition in with the thrill-rag when she caught the headline.

  THEY’VE BEGUN TUNNELING!

  BURNED MOUNTAIN NEW BOUNDARY LINE!

  It was speculated that once out from under the Mountain, the orc would tear a bloody stripe across the Ranges with New Delta City squarely in their sights. Crown forces had been dispatched to go up and around Guard’s Isle to put an end to the troublesome shoveling. Problem being they didn’t know how far the orc had already gotten under the Mountain. Therefore, the Committee chose to split their focus: posting soldiers on the Ma’am’s side of the Mountain at the edge of the Scorch and waiting for an orc pick to break through.

  But tunneling greenskins or no, it wasn’t Anoushka’s concern anymore. The fire accepted the Trib too.

  After coffee and toast, she put on her wool coat, trousers, and mud-caked boots. Jetty hair drawn back, she plunked on her scally cap and stepped outside. Hope didn’t stave it off: the cold had roused the ache. Sighing, she returned inside to retrieve her knee brace from the bedside table. She paused, buckling it on, seeing Project of Self: Become the Person You Need to Be peek from under the bed.

  A lot of haunting print around today.

  This one’s ghost circled because she’d bought the book for him. And he’d probably left it because of that. Hard enough, she supposed, going around under Wherever you go, there you are without it being Wherever you go, there I am too. It’d been—huh—a year now, and she was fine with Erik being gone. All right, maybe not fine but content. Passably. She was being “cold” and “quicksandesque” and everything else he’d said too. Dickhead.

  Though she couldn’t spare the time before her shift, she cracked Project of Self.

  Healing is like diamonds; it takes time and a continuous application of something. For diamonds, pressure. But healing necessitates the press of your desire for self-acceptance as well as time. To begin this press, you must look at whatever lies behind and say, “I am done with this.”

  “Good gods, I paid actual money for this?”

  After locking up, she moved down the front walk. Her knee brace’s hinge squeaked a bad note with each stride. She mounted her bicycle and set off down her road, winding Hawkpointe’s brick streets. Still stewing over Erik’s parting insults, Anoushka considered stopping off at the newsstand to see if they had Outstanding Valor, to buy all the copies and burn those too. But she thought better; they could relive her contractor days and get whatever weird enjoyment from reading grisly war stories they desired. For her, those days were over. I am done with them.

  So maybe Project of Self wasn’t total crap.

  She pedaled until the bike’s tension engine sounded. Letting the wound springs propel her, she dodged potholes and puddles, slaloming hither and yon. Done with them.

  Keeping to the shoulder to allow motorists and carts to pass, she let her bicycle’s speed wane. Pedaling again, she heard the twangs of the bike’s springs. As small as they were, the sounds dredged up those of Joan’s springs—the agonized creaks as Russell and Zuther pedaled to stretch them long. Gun smoke filled her nose—sudden, sharp, imaginary. Ghost vibrations tore up her arms as the cannon’s magnificent blast rang in her ears, throttled her heart, shifted her guts like hunger, and hummed pleasantly between her legs. When an oncoming jalopy bleated, Anoushka hooked back onto her side. Going through a puddle was unavoidable. Cold mud leaped up her pant leg. A close enough call that a not-exactly-objectionable tingling burned across her chest.

  Ignoring the wagging fist of the dwarf as his steam truck burbled past, Anoushka decided she didn’t care if she was famous elsewhere. Or if the war had just taken an uptick for something to be genuinely concerned about. She was a logger, and a logger was what she was going to be. I am done with them.

  * * *

  After five years with the mill, she’d grown as familiar with the numbing sensation of swinging an ax as she was with squinting to avoid getting splinters in her eyes. But today, she felt both.

  “Shit.” Kneading with a gloved knuckle, she tried coaxing the chip out of her eye.

  She sent the ax clattering into the woods and stomped to her spring bike. Whether this frustration was from this being in the same general section of woods where she first met and trained Erik, Anoushka didn’t want to consider right now.

  She pedaled hard against dew-damp dead leaves, eating her momentum up the hill. Winding around stacks of piled logs taller than her house, she flew out the lumberyard’s front gate. Every day, she considered almost getting run over on purpose just to get a kick. Eventually, the poor truck driver would find a different route, or men with butterfly nets would be summoned. Besides, she knew the thrill wouldn’t last; tapping the same vein would eventually begin yielding diminishing returns.

  Rarely did she go inside her backyard shed. Never did she let anyone else in there either, on the off chance she and Erik used to host company. Casting the bike down, she approached, hands shaking as she unlocked the shed. She flung open the doors, the morning suns splashing across the hard-packed earth floor. Anoushka’s long shadow stared from within, as if it too had been waiting here.

  What parts peeked out from under the tarpaulin still shone. Mithril never lost its luster. Anoushka palmed the forward armor, Joan’s nose. “Hey, old girl.”

  Inside, it was easy to paint in the squaddies, tending now-empty stations. Anoushka swiped through cobwebs to make her way over to the cannonball cage. Running a finger along the hatch . . . there. A small dent from a ’lock ball. Not what she’d consider it outstanding ingenuity, personally; more like dumb luck. Nevertheless, it’
d saved their lives.

  The shallow wells in the floor, the pedaler pits; the crankshafts worked as the substructure for a spider-silk metropolis. From dry rot, the leather seats had cracked and split, revealing their straw padding.

  She brushed aside grit under the protective glass. The springs, Joan’s heart, were in sorry condition. They’d need replacing. Anoushka’s mental checklist was getting long and expensive.

  Draped over her seat was her old jacket. Olive drab, fur-lined, speckled with stains of oil, dirt, and whatever that was.

  Across the back:

  They’d never officially named themselves as a squad. Maybe together, they were Joan. Thus, squad 166391972139 it was, officially. She never knew if there had been that many squads before hers. It wouldn’t have surprised her. Their vocation wasn’t exactly new.

  The jacket still fit.

  Hanging on the steering yoke was her dented old brain bucket. She put it on, straps dangling, appreciating the familiar weight of it—like it was holding her down, to keep her from being snatched away by the wind.

  Joan’s ceiling was so dented it looked like it was melting. Each swell was a story: musketball, cannonball, dropped rock, troll fist. They never could quite pound those out. Odd, how a metal shell could outstrip the feeling of Erik’s arms around her. But hold metal long enough and it’ll echo your warmth. To be a tank squad ready for assignment, there needed to be not only a squad but also a tank—a working one. After rolling the lock wheel on the cannon breach, Anoushka drew aside the heavy hatch. She ducked to maneuver back to her seat in the rear, her knee barking out a little. She ignored it, had a seat, and took the control yoke in her hands. Its leather grips had dark indentations printed by her fingers. She found the cannon trigger, lens-changer dials, and brake squeezers without needing to look.

  Watching the open hatch door, she squeezed the trigger. Small crackles of blue lightning arced inside the open, empty breach—tik-tik-tik. In a blink, one tiny spark, with some powder and oil, could encourage a seventy-five-pound lead sphere to go from standing still to hurtling 200 miles per hour.