Every student knows what’s coming. I clench and unclench my fists. I don’t want to watch this. Like all Blackcliff students, I came to the school at the age of six, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve witnessed punishments thousands of times. My own back is a map of the school’s brutality. But deserters are always the worst.
My body is tight as a spring, but I flatten my gaze and keep my expression emotionless. Blackcliff’s subject masters, the Centurions, will be watching.
Drawing their ire when I’m so close to escaping would be unforgivably stupid.
Helene and I walk past the youngest students, four classes of maskless Yearlings, who will have the clearest view of the carnage. The smallest are barely seven. The biggest, nearly eleven.
The Yearlings look down as we pass; we are upperclassmen, and they are forbidden from even addressing us. They stand poker-straight, scims hanging at precise 45-degree angles on their backs, boots spit-shined, faces blank as stone. By now, even the youngest Yearlings have learned Blackcliff’s most essential lessons: Obey, conform, and keep your mouth shut.
Behind the Yearlings sits an empty space in honor of Blackcliff’s second tier of students, called Fivers because so many die in their fifth year. At age eleven, the Centurions throw us out of Blackcliff and into the wilds of the AnEmberintheAshes_INT.indd 24
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Empire without clothes, food, or weaponry, to survive as best as we can for four years. The remaining Fivers return to Blackcliff, receive their masks, and spend another four years as Cadets and then two more years as Skulls. Hel and I are Senior Skulls—just completing our last year of training.
The Centurions monitor us from beneath the arches that line the courtyard, hands on their whips as they await the arrival of Blackcliff’s comman-dant. They stand as still as statues, their masks long since melded to their features, any semblance of emotion a distant memory.
I put a hand to my own mask, wishing I could rip it off, even for a minute. Like my classmates, I received the mask on my first day as a Cadet, when I was fourteen. Unlike the rest of the students—and much to Helene’s concern—the smooth liquid silver hasn’t dissolved into my skin like it’s supposed to. Probably because I take the damned thing off whenever I’m alone.
I’ve hated the mask since the day an Augur—an Empire holy man—
handed it to me in a velvet-lined box. I hate the way it gloms on to me like some kind of parasite. I hate the way it presses into my face, molding itself to my skin.
I’m the only student whose mask hasn’t melded to him yet—something my enemies enjoy pointing out. But lately, the mask has started fighting back, forcing the melding process by digging tiny filaments into the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl, makes me feel like I’m not myself anymore.
Like I’ll never be myself again.
“Veturius.” Hel’s lanky, sandy-haired platoon lieutenant, Demetrius, calls out to me as we take our spots with the other Senior Skulls. “Who is it? Who’s the deserter?”
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“I don’t know. Dex and the auxes brought him in.” I look around for my lieutenant, but he hasn’t arrived yet.
“I hear it’s a Yearling.” Demetrius stares at a hunk of wood poking out of the blood-browned cobbles at the base of the belltower. The whipping post.
“An older one. A fourth-year.”
Helene and I exchange a look. Demetrius’s little brother also tried to desert in his fourth year at Blackcliff, when he was only ten. He lasted three hours outside the gates before the legionnaires brought him in to face the Commandant—longer than most.
“Maybe it was a Skull.” Helene scans the ranks of older students, trying to see if anyone is missing.
“Maybe it was Marcus,” Faris, a member of my battle platoon who towers over the rest of us, says, grinning, his blond hair popping up in an unruly cowlick. “Or Zak.”
No such luck. Marcus, dark-skinned and yellow-eyed, stands at the front of our ranks with his twin, Zak: second-born, shorter and lighter, but just as evil. The Snake and the Toad, Hel calls them.
Zak’s mask has yet to attach fully around his eyes, but Marcus’s clings tightly, having joined with him so completely that all of his features—even the thick slant of his eyebrows—are clearly visible beneath it. If Marcus tried to remove his mask now, he’d take off half his face with it. Which would be an improvement.
As if he senses her glance, Marcus turns and looks Helene over with a predatory gaze of ownership that makes my hands itch to strangle him.
Nothing out of the ordinary, I remind myself. Nothing to make you stand out.
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I force myself to look away. Attacking Marcus in front of the entire school would definitely qualify as out of the ordinary.
Helene notices Marcus’s leer. Her hands ball into fists at her sides, but before she can teach the Snake a lesson, the sergeant-at-arms marches into the courtyard.
“ATTENTION.”
Three thousand bodies swing forward, three thousand pairs of boots snap together, three thousand backs jerk as if yanked straight by a puppeteer’s hand. In the ensuing silence, you could hear a tear drop.
But we don’t hear the Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy approach; we feel her, the way you feel a storm coming. She moves silently, emerging from the arches like a fair-haired jungle cat from the underbrush.
She wears all black, from her tight-fitting uniform jacket to her steel-toed boots. Her blonde hair is pulled, as always, into a stiff knot at her neck.
She’s the only living female Mask—or will be until Helene graduates tomorrow. But unlike Helene, the Commandant exudes a deathly chill, as if her gray eyes and cut-glass features were carved from the underbelly of a glacier.
“Bring the accused,” she says.
A pair of legionnaires march out from behind the belltower, dragging a small, limp form. Beside me, Demetrius tenses. The rumors were right—the deserter’s a Fourth-Yearling, no older than ten. Blood drips down his face, blending into the collar of his black fatigues. When the soldiers dump him before the Commandant, he doesn’t move.
The Commandant’s silver face reveals nothing as she looks down at the Yearling. But her hand strays toward the spiked riding crop at her belt, fashioned out of bruise-black ironwood. She doesn’t remove it. Not yet.
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“Fourth-Yearling Falconius Barrius.” Her voice carries, though it’s soft, almost gentle. “You abandoned your post at Blackcliff with no intention of returning. Explain yourself.”
“No explanation, Commandant, sir.” He mouths the words we’ve all said to the Commandant a hundred times, the only words you can say at Blackcliff when you’ve screwed up utterly.
It’s a trial to keep my face blank, to drive emotion from my eyes. Barrius is about to be punished for the crime I’ll be committing in less than thirty-six hours. It could be me up there in two days. Bloodied. Broken.
“Let us ask your peers their opinion.” The Commandant turns her gaze on us, and it’s like being blasted by a frigid mountain wind. “Is Yearling Barrius guilty of treason?”