Roric’s mind forgot to think upon gazing at her.

Silver hair, layered to the shoulders. A pale blue dress that had clearly been chosen by a mother who had wanted her daughter to look more than presentable on her registration day.

The girl was looking up at the hexagon above her head with an expression of mild, polite curiosity, as if the slowly rotating monument to her own classification weren’t anything special to her.

Then her attention drifted, and her eyes wandered across the room.

They found him.

Roric had braced himself, on the long ride home, for the moment he would meet the girl. He had rehearsed the face he would wear.

Polite. Distant enough to be honest. Warm enough to be acceptable to Sarah. He had practiced the lines he would say.

He had thought, more than once, about what he would let his face do and what he would not let his face do.

None of the rehearsal survived. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Her eyes were gold. Not the ordinary gold of jewelry, but a deeper, older color, with something patient folded into it.

She looked at him, and the dissatisfaction he had carried for days dissolved in a single breath.

He could not have explained, afterward, how it left him. It simply was no longer there.

Everything he wanted to ask the girl about—the questions which his daughter and her idiot husband might never have answered—reorganized into a single answer, as if the questions never existed in the first place.

This small shape standing on a scanner with a monument rotating above her, looking at him with the patient gold of her eyes, was his granddaughter.

His feet moved on their own until they reached her.

"Grandfather," Kenji called out.

’Don’t disturb me, stinky boy. I am meeting with my little baby.’

Roric Vale, Diamond rank, General of the Eastern Front, veteran of forty campaigns, found that he had to clear his throat before he could speak.

"I am your grandpa. Call me grandpa."

"Grandpa?" the girl opened her mouth awkwardly.

Roric felt his body reaching cloud nine in excitement.

"Yes, child."

A small smile lifted the corner of her mouth. Two dimples appeared, one in each cheek.

Behind him, his soldiers had finally caught up. Hael, Maren, and the rest of the unit all stopped in the doorway and saw the chamber for what it was.

They saw the hexagon, and they saw the small figure on the platform at whom the General was staring, petrified.

Hael, very quietly, leaned toward Maren. "Do you think the General’s granddaughter is single?"

"Shut up." Maren stepped on his foot, making him grunt in pain.

Maren went silent.

She was watching the General of the Eastern Front cross a chamber full of senior officers without seeing any of them and kneel down, in his field uniform that still smelled of the Pale and the blood of his men, in front of a girl with silver hair and gold eyes and a Bronze hexagon turning slowly above her head, and place his rough hand very gently on the top of her head.

"Why are you so thin?"

"Am I?" she tilted her head, and the dimples on her face deepened.

*

* *

The corridors of the barracks complex were wider than the corridors of the Hayashi estate, and the people who passed them through the corridors were taller and louder and carried weapons openly on their hips.

Ayla noted each one without turning her head. Her grandfather had taken her hand on the way out of the testing chamber. His palm was rough. It made her forearms itch.

Ayla looked down at her own hand inside his and then looked down at the rest of herself. A pale blue dress. Thin wrists.

The hem of the dress sat at the line her tailor had picked, which was the line Sarah had picked because she had wanted the dress to make Ayla look like she had been fed properly for years.

Was she thin? She tried to compare the wrist she could see to the wrists of the soldiers walking past them.

The soldiers’ wrists were thicker. Their shoulders were wider. Their necks were broader. They were bigger than her.

But they were all men, so it was expected.

She tried to compare her wrist to the wrist of the registration colonel, who was a woman about Sarah’s height.

The colonel had passed them in the corridor a moment ago with a salute. The colonel’s wrist had also been thicker. Ayla bit her lower lip.

"Are you walking too fast for her?" Kenji’s voice came from behind them. He had been trailing two paces back since they had left the chamber.

He had been trying, for the last full minute, to find a sentence that would bring his grandfather’s attention back across his shoulder.

"She is keeping up," Roric said without looking back.

Ayla glanced over her shoulder at Kenji and offered him a small, deliberate smile. The smile contained a single dimple.

The dimple was the one she had decided, two days ago, was her best one for irritating him. Kenji’s jaw tightened. She turned back to the front and kept walking.

"Grandpa," she said.

"Yes, baby."

"Am I really thin?"

Roric stopped walking. The unit behind him did not stop in time. Hael nearly walked into Maren. Maren elbowed him in the ribs without breaking her stride, and the two of them peeled around the General on either side and continued forward, pretending to have somewhere urgent to be at the next corner.

Roric crouched. He was a tall man, and the crouch brought his face level with Ayla’s. His field uniform creaked at the knees.

The smell of the Pale on him was strong at this distance, all iron and ash, but Ayla’s expression did not change.

"Did anyone bully you by calling you thin?" His voice cooled down.

"You did."

He blinked.

"In the chamber," she added helpfully.

"I did not mean it like that, baby. I meant it as a problem to be solved."

"Oh."

He studied her face for another moment. His thumb passed over the back of her small hand once, then again, as if confirming the size of the bones underneath the skin.

Behind them, Kenji had finally caught up. He stood three paces back with his hands in his pockets and his expression carefully empty.

Roric stood up. "My quarters are at the end of this wing. We will eat there. Then we will discuss the rest of the week."

"The rest of the week?"

"You will not enter the Spire alone. My squad enters in seven days for a rotation. The two of you will enter with us. Until then, you will stay in my quarters. My squadmates will teach you what you need to know about the inside. They have all walked it. Some of them have walked it more than once."

Ayla’s eyes brightened. She had not expected the change of plan. The plan that had been arranged through Salma had placed her inside the Spire’s general intake, where she would have been one face among three hundred.

The new plan placed her inside a Diamond General’s personal squad rotation. The new plan was significantly better.

"Thank you, Grandpa."

The word landed inside Roric’s chest the way the first version of it had landed in the chamber. He did not let it show on his face.

The corners of his mouth lifted by a fraction anyway. Behind him, Kenji’s expression remained empty.

Roric resumed walking. Ayla resumed walking with him. The quarters at the end of the wing were bigger.

Two long windows looked across the eastern training yards. A wide table in dark wood sat at the center, already set for what was clearly supposed to have been a private meal for one returning General.

Within minutes, the table had been reset for three. Within minutes after that, the table had been reset again, because Roric had decided that three settings did not contain enough food to address the problem of his granddaughter’s wrists.

"Bring more," he told the orderly at the door.

"More of which dish, sir?"

"All of them."

"Sir."

"And a pitcher of the bone broth. The one from the eastern kitchen. Not the western. The western tastes like dishwater."

"Yes, sir."

Ayla sat in the chair Roric had pulled out for her. The chair was high-backed and wide. Her feet did not entirely reach the floor. She did not point this out.

The food began to arrive. A dark stew with thick cuts of meat she did not recognize. A platter of roasted root vegetables glazed in something sweet.

A second platter of small fried fish stacked in a pyramid. A third platter of flatbreads kept warm under a cloth. A bowl of soft white grains in a creamy broth. The bone broth was in its own pitcher, steaming.

Roric ladled the stew onto her plate himself. "Eat."

"There is a lot."

"Yes."

"I cannot eat all of this, Grandpa."

"You will eat what you can. What you do not eat, I will eat. I have not eaten properly in five days."

Ayla picked up her spoon. Roric watched her take the first bite. His face did not move while she chewed, but his mind, behind the face, was doing something Ayla did not need the Twin Lens to read. He was counting her bites.

She finished the first spoonful. He nodded once and began to eat his own portion. After three of her bites, he reached across the table without comment and added another piece of meat to her plate.

After six, another. After ten, he placed two of the small fried fish onto the side of her plate and split a flatbread in half and laid the half across the top.

"Grandpa."

"Eat."

"There is no room on the plate."

"Then we will get a larger plate."

"Grandpa."

"Orderly."

"Sir."

"Larger plate."

"Yes, sir."

Across the table, Kenji had been served his own portion. Kenji’s portion sat on a plate of normal size. Their two plates were vastly different, and Kenji doubted his grandpa had abandoned him, yet he felt the disparity.

Ayla, while chewing a piece of meat, glanced across the table at him. She did not smile this time. She let her eyes do the work of the smile.

Two pupils inside each iris caught the light and held it for one second longer than was natural. Kenji exhaled slowly through his nose. He understood with absolute certainty that he had become the second favorite for his grandfather.

And the General of the Eastern Front, veteran of forty campaigns, holder of eighteen confirmed kills above Platinum, leaned across his own dining table to peel a fried fish for the small girl with silver hair, who had decided, somewhere between the third bite and the fourth, that she rather liked having a grandfather.