by Rachel Aaron
Lord Dumarque’s smug smile slipped, leaving him scowling as Rosalie turned and marched out of his office. The moment she was alone in the hall, she took off running, yelling for the maids to help her pack.
* * *
None of her five siblings had travel plans that day, so Rosalie was able to procure the fastest horses in the stable and the most capable driver. The moment her trunks were packed, she had half the household loading them into the carriage before bounding in herself. Only when the doors were shut and the horses were racing down the estate’s manicured lanes did the tension finally start to leave her body.
“I did it,” she whispered, slumping back against the carriage’s velvet padded seat. “I won.”
“What was that, ma’am?” the driver yelled back through the curtained window.
“Nothing,” Rosalie said, lifting her voice so he could hear her over the clatter of the horses. Then her face split into a grin. “Go faster.”
The man tipped his cap and whipped the horses, increasing their speed as they careened off the Dumarque’s private lane onto the cobbled road that led toward Wall Sina. As they got closer, the street grew crowded with traffic. The gate especially had a massive queue of carriages and wagons waiting for inspection, but the Dumarque seal on the carriage door got them past all that. The moment the guards saw that a noble was coming, they ordered everyone to the side so that Rosalie’s carriage could pass straight through.
Smiling at the hour delay she’d just avoided, Rosalie opened the carriage shutter and stuck out her head as they passed under the mountainlike shadow of Wall Sina for her first look at the world beyond.
The gate by the Dumarque estate opened into the walled city of Ehrmich, which looked disappointingly like the cities inside Sina. It had the same elegant brick houses, wide streets, manicured gardens, and well-dressed townsfolk. Everything was slightly shabbier than the interior cities she was used to, but Rosalie saw nothing truly remarkable until they passed through the second gate on the other side of town, riding out of the walled border city into the rolling countryside of the true Rose Zone.
The moment they left the wall, everything changed. The tall buildings and neatly trimmed hedges gave way to more modest homes of fieldstone and wood. Working farms and golden fields full of wheat surrounded the road, which was now dirt instead of cobblestone. The sudden change caused the speeding carriage to bounce wildly, almost sending Rosalie spilling out the window. Laughing, she gripped the frame and leaned out even further, eyes wide as she watched the countryside she’d only seen from her roof fly by.
The countryside out here was lovely and rugged, dotted with charming villages and farms. Rosalie especially liked the forests, which grew wild and huge, their trees’ gnarled branches exploding with fall color—nothing like the carefully managed arbors back in Sina. Another day, she would have been telling the driver to stop every few feet so she could explore. But the sun was already worryingly high, and Rosalie’s eyes were locked on the horizon ahead, where the smooth white stone of Wall Rose had already grown larger than she’d ever seen it. Rosalie could make out the massive gate, its dark shape like a pockmark in the endless wall.
Even at top speed, changing horses twice along the way, it still took three hours for the carriage to reach Wall Rose. By the time they entered its shadow, the towns had stopped being charming, or even true towns. These were the refugee camps, squalid clusters of connected hovels built by the people who’d fled the breach of Wall Maria when the titans came through. According to the proclamations of King Fritz, they were supposed to be temporary, but the shanties didn’t look like they were going anytime soon. They were also still surprisingly full. Rosalie couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to remain in such terrible conditions.
As they started maneuvering through the traffic in front of the gate that would take them into Trost, Rosalie sat back down on the velvet seat and pulled out her map. It was a simplified diagram showing the three walls as perfect circles rather than the meandering ovals they actually were, but Rosalie liked the clarity. It was the driver’s job to worry about specific roads; she just wanted to estimate how far they’d come. Rosalie traced her finger across the heavy line that marked Wall Rose, and found the city that jutted off it.
Each of the three great walls had four gates, one for each cardinal direction. And each gate city, Trost included, was protected by its own rampart, a semicircle of wall that jutted off of Maria, Rose, or Sina. On the map, the gate cities appeared as half-moon-shaped bumps, like flower petals. But small as they appeared on paper, each petal was enormous, packed with buildings and surrounded on all sides by a half-circle of fortifications just as tall as the main walls they were attached to.
Ostensibly, the fortified towns were there to protect the gates. But the truth, as Rosalie had learned from her instructors, was far more sinister. The border towns existed because titans were drawn to people. By concentrating large populations in heavily fortified cities, the designers of the walls had ensured the titans would attack there instead of spreading out along the entire length of the wall, which would be impossible to defend.
The effectiveness of this strategy had been proven five years ago at the southern Maria gate town of Shiganshina. The titans had indeed been drawn to the city, exactly as planned.
Only the walls hadn’t held.
Scowling, Rosalie put her map away and looked up at the white expanse of stone that now dominated her forward view. This was the closest she’d ever been to Wall Rose. Unsurprisingly, it looked exactly like Wall Sina. All the walls were made of the same material: enormous, fifty-meter-tall monoliths of gray-white stone joined together by even taller vertical ribs. Details of their construction were a royal secret, but they were said to be stronger than any other material humans could produce. They didn’t look breakable to her, but then, the titans hadn’t come through the walls. According to the survivors of Shiganshina, the monsters had broken through the gate, let inside the city by an attack from a new titan so huge, it was known only by its size.
The Colossal Titan’s appearance had been a game changer. For a hundred years, titans had been little more than boogeymen who lurked beyond the walls, out of sight. Rosalie’s nurse had even claimed they didn’t exist anymore, except when they snuck in to gobble up naughty children who wouldn’t go to bed. All through her childhood, Rosalie had believed that, and then word came that Shiganshina was overrun.
Caught unprepared, the walled city had fallen in a matter of hours. The unstoppable horde of monsters had poured through the broken gate in Wall Maria, turning the entire ring of land between Maria and Rose into their killing ground.
With all the farmland in Maria lost and so many homeless people to feed, the kingdom’s resources had been stretched past their limits. Safe inside Sina, Rosalie hadn’t seen the famines, but her father had hardly come home at all that first year. He’d been too busy putting down riots with the Military Police. He never talked about those fights, but from her rooftop perch Rosalie had seen the plumes of smoke rising in the distance. She’d joined the academy the very next spring, and now, four years later, she was here, at the edge of everything.
Just as at the Sina gate, the Dumarque seal on Rosalie’s carriage was all it took to bypass most of the traffic and ride through into Trost. Throwing open her window again, Rosalie stuck her head out for her first look at a real frontline city. Given where they were located, she’d always assumed the outer cities were like the refugee camps that surrounded them—savage pits full of desperate people stabbing each other over bread—but aside from being more crowded, Trost didn’t look that different from Ehrmich.
Like other cities inside Rose, the wide streets here were well paved and lined with multistory brick and half-timber buildings. There was a market square bustling with vendors selling everything from live chickens to dresses and a massive military building that took up an entire block at the town center. According to the map, ther
e was a river as well, but though Rosalie could smell the water, she couldn’t see anything through the tightly packed buildings. She was wondering how much longer it would take when the racing carriage suddenly lurched to a stop right in front of the sealed outer Trost Gate.
Despite her hurry, Rosalie could only stare. She’d never seen a closed gate before. Like all the others, it was a huge slab of brick decorated with a giant white stone carving of a woman’s face, the Rose of Wall Rose. But where the other gates were always raised to let traffic through, this one was lowered all the way to the ground, and the street leading up to it was blocked off by a ring of permanent cannon emplacements, their giant iron barrels pointed at the lowered gate. It was the clearest sign yet that she was actually at the front. There were titans just on the other side of that gate, and next to it was the base she’d been assigned to.
The closed gate was bracketed by two brick towers, the left of which was connected to a fortified square of long, rectangular stone buildings squeezed right up against the massive Trost wall. A flag bearing the Rose Garrison insignia hung limply above the fortress’s squat wooden guard house where two soldiers in tan Garrison uniforms were leaning against the raised portcullis, trying not to get caught playing cards.
Target finally in sight, Rosalie leaped from the carriage and raced across the empty street, calling for her driver to bring in her things as she shoved her father’s letter into the hands of the first soldier she reached. The startled guard seemed confused by her hurry, and by her white Academy uniform. The moment he saw Lord Dumarque’s signature, however, all questions were forgotten. He let her in at once, pointing her to the stone-paved training yard where several other nervous young soldiers were already waiting. Rosalie had barely joined them when a sergeant came out and yelled for everyone new to fall in line and get up the tower stairs.
They were going to the Wall.
* * *
Rosalie had been on top of Wall Sina several times during her training. But Sina just looked down on the tame fields and genteel towns of the inner Rose Zone. This wall looked out over a world she’d never seen.
She was standing at parade rest with a dozen or so other recruits atop Wall Rose. The wall was wide enough for two of her family’s carriages to drive side by side with room to spare. But even standing on the Trost side, behind the cannon emplacements, Rosalie could see acres and acres of open fields stretching out in front of her. The terrain was wildly overgrown from five years of neglect, but she could make out the remains of a road running from the sealed gate below them to what had once been a town. Crushed and abandoned now, there had clearly been houses and shops down there. The brisk wind carried scents she’d never experienced before: musky, earthy odors with a hint of decay.
She just wished her fellow recruits had been half as impressive. Given the famous brutality of the Training Corps, she’d expected crack soldiers, but the men and women standing around her looked scrawny and underfed, their eyes lowered meekly. The sight was enormously disappointing, but Rosalie had hopes she could change things by setting a good example. She’d killed thousands of practice targets with her cannon during training, knew all the best strategies and tactics. She only had six months before her marriage, but if she worked at it, Rosalie was sure she could spread her Academy knowledge to the soldiers here. Once they had the benefit of the same training she’d gotten, they’d win Maria back in no time.
She was already making plans when a line of Garrison officers marched out onto the wall in front of them. Unlike the recruits, they all wore full vertical maneuvering gear. The complicated system of leather straps crisscrossed their uniforms from their necks to the tops of their high boots. The trigger grips were holstered tight under their shoulders, and the long, boxy, rectangular sheaths that held their spare sword blades hung from their thighs where the extra weight wouldn’t throw them off-balance.
Seeing the full gear gave Rosalie a pang of excitement. It had been weeks since she’d suited up and used her own gear. She was wondering when she’d be assigned a set of her own gear when a shout cut through the air like a cannon blast.
“Soldiers!”
Everyone jumped, the recruits pulling themselves into tight formation as a sour-faced man with wiry brown hair, small deep-set eyes, and a captain’s insignia on his jacket stepped forward.
“I am Captain Woermann,” he bellowed. “Commanding officer of the Trost Garrison. I don’t care why you came to my division, but from this moment forward, you are my burden to bear.”
He walked along the line of recruits as he spoke, staring down his nose like they’d already disappointed him.
“For various reasons, all of you have been allowed to join our ranks outside the normal training schedule,” the captain went on, his nasal voice rising high and hard over the cold wind. “But don’t expect any special treatment! As winter recruits, you’ll have to work twice as hard to catch up with those who’ve been here since the spring. Our charge is the defense of Trost, a city vital to the security of the Rose Zone. This wall—” he stomped his foot on the stone “—is all that stands between the titans and humanity. As soldiers of the Garrison, you will defend it at any cost, including your life and your equipment, in that order.”
Someone at the end of the formation snickered, and Woermann whirled around. “You think I’m joking?” he roared, stomping down the line until he was nose to nose with the soldier who’d laughed, a rail-thin, freckle-faced recruit who looked more like a boy than a man. “Answer the question!”
“No, Captain,” the solider said, his whole body shaking.
Woermann leaned in until he was breathing down the boy’s throat. “Let me make this perfectly clear. You are the least valuable thing on this wall. If I want more hungry mouths to feed, there are plenty down in Trost. You could all die today and be replaced tomorrow, but this—” he slapped his hand against the gleaming metal flywheels at his waist that held the coiled wires for his vertical maneuvering gear “—is another matter.”
The captain straightened up and resumed walking down the line, glaring at each solider in turn. “When you go on duty, you will all be issued equipment, including your own set of vertical maneuvering gear. The metal and engineering that goes into that gear is more valuable than your lives. If a single screw goes over that wall, I expect you to dive after it. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Captain!” the soldiers answered.
Rosalie had to force the words out. No one at the Academy had ever spoken to her like this. They’d yelled at her, of course—it was the military—but even at their angriest, her instructors never implied that the soldiers were worthless. But Woermann wasn’t finished.
“You are the Garrison!” he cried, marching back to the front of the formation. “The human shield that protects humanity! Each and every one of you is expected to give up your life without hesitation. If I learn that one of you has been a coward or has endangered equipment to save your own hide, I will shoot you myself. Is that clear?”
The wall was silent.
“Is that clear?”
“Yes, Captain,” the soldiers answered quietly.
Satisfied, Woermann walked away, his aides falling in behind him. As they marched down the tower stairs, another officer—a short woman with steel-gray hair, a weathered face, and a wiry body as taut as her maneuver gear cables—stepped briskly forward to take the captain’s place at the front.
“Greetings, recruits,” she said in a confident voice loud enough to be heard from the ground. “I’m Gate Lieutenant Brigitte Morris, and I’m in charge of the Trost Gate, its base, and the daily patrol of all surrounding walls. In few moments, I’ll be dividing you into your units, but first, we have some business to take care of.”
The recruits began to shuffle nervously. Confused, Rosalie watched as Lieutenant Morris walked to the edge of the wall. The Maria edge, the one that dropped into the lands where the titans roamed. For a moment, it look
ed like she was going to walk right off, but she stopped just short, planting her boots on a red mark someone had painted between cannon emplacements. She stood barely an arm’s length away from the edge of the wall.
“This is the Red Line,” Brigitte announced. “It marks the place on the wall from which you can first see the enemy.”
She paused to let that sink in, but she didn’t need to. The recruits were already frozen in place, their eyes locked on the scuffed red paint beneath the lieutenant’s feet. Rosalie’s eyes were there as well. She’d wondered why she hadn’t seen any titans while she was scanning the countryside. Now, though, she realized why. There were no monsters in the fields because they were already here. Now that no one was yelling, Rosalie could actually hear a scraping noise coming from somewhere below. She realized this was the sound of giant fingers rasping across the brick of the gate. The noise seemed to go straight through her.
Brigitte wasn’t finished yet. “No other gate commander does this,” the lieutenant went on. “But I’m different. Five years ago, I was an officer at Shiganshina. I was there when the Colossal and Armored Titans broke through the gate. There were many tragedies that day, but the worst for me were the hundreds of soldiers who died unnecessarily because, due to the Garrison’s old practice of keeping soldiers off the walls, none of us had ever seen a titan before. We didn’t know what we were fighting, and when we confronted them for the first time, too many soldiers panicked, forgot their training, and became titan food.”
She said this matter-of-factly, but the recruits around Rosalie were already backing away. One girl actually looked a little green.
“To keep that mistake from ever happening again,” Brigitte continued, “I require that all new recruits see a titan face-to-face before they begin active duty. There’s no shame in being afraid, but panic is another matter. I need to know you can handle yourselves when the time comes, so when I give the order, you will step up to the line and look the enemy in the eye. If you panic or otherwise fail to keep control, you will be sent back to Supply HQ and given a job off the wall with a commensurate drop in pay. Ready?”