Chapter 4: Reporting to Dagger Eyes

Wednesday, Oct 22 7:00am

The next morning I’m up with the Sun. My head and arm are still bothering me some, but I slept surprisingly deep through the night, which I’m thankful for. I give an apple to Angeles before we go and eat one myself while riding along.

The rest of the journey passes without incident. I don’t see anything or hear anything threatening. Of course, the part of me that isn’t still emotionally checked out can’t help but be a little paranoid. After all, the Hopper that attacked me came out of nowhere, and the two I didn’t kill disappeared without my noticing. I had always laughed in training when a veteran or trainer claimed that Hoppers can teleport. I had arrogantly assumed they just weren’t being observant enough. I guess I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. 

7:15 pm

I’m finally in view of Awmutto Outpost! It’s off to my far left. I’ve gone slightly too far east, but not enough to miss the Outpost.

As I stroll into the Outpost, the locals all stare. They don’t exactly get a lot of visitors, and by now the smell of my Hopper heads is probably about as noticeable as the heads themselves. I lock eyes with an old woman resting on a rock and ask her where the troupes are staying. I head in the direction she points and it’s not long before I spot a friend of mine from training. I flag him down and we chat. As he’s giving me the low down on the troupes here, a woman walks by with what can only be interpreted as a “don’t even try to talk to me” face. My friend, Iven, explains that she’s a troupe chief…and not a very friendly one. Great. Glad I’m being thrown into such a happy environment.

But there are two separate troupes here and my troupe chief is a different person anyway. I’ll be meeting him tomorrow morning at seven. Then we’ll all mount up and go look for signs of recent Mud Hopper activity in the Outskirts and Outlands of the East.

8:00pm

After asking around in the troupe camp I finally locate my new roommate, Keisha Green, sitting outside of our hut. She’s a few inches taller than me, a few years older than me, and more than a few shades darker than me. I have a bad feeling that it won’t be easy to win her admiration.

She looks up at me from under the brim of a dusty brown hat. She doesn’t look impressed, even though I’m purposely standing beside my Hopper heads so as not to block them from view.

“You the new girl?”

“Yeah.”

“I was usin’ the second cot in there to put my things. Ain’t a lot of space in there, but you can just put them on the floor.”

I can tell I’m not going to convince her to do it herself, but I don’t want to let her feel like she can walk over me, so I throw it all in a messy pile on her cot. I hang my head bag from the bit of the roof that hangs out outside and take Angeles to the camp stable. She’s still outside when I get back, smoking with a couple of troupemates. I don’t feel like socializing yet. Besides, my head still hurts. I go in, change, and fall asleep within minutes.

Thursday, Oct 23, 7:15am

Pounding on the outside of the hut rouses me from a deep, comfortable sleep. I stumble my way out of bed thinking it must be the middle of the night and pull back the door rug to see Iven standing there.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s time to go.”

“What?” At first I assume that he’s kidding, but I look out at the sky and realize that he must be right. “Oh no! Are they waiting for me? Are they mad?”

“No, it’s fine…just get ready and get out there asap.”

7:30am

I power walk through the camp with my bag of heads in one hand and my official orders in the other. I head straight to Iven’s troupe, which I had been told would also be mine. Self-conscious and flustered, I hand my orders to a man with an authoritative-looking clip board before making sure he’s the man I had been instructed to report to.

He isn’t.

However, as he tells me with a smirk under his grizzly beard, the other guy was killed in action only a matter of days ago and he’s the replacement. BUT….I won’t be on his troupe anyway. They’re troupe seven and they’ve decided to put myself and another new woman on troupe six. Mixing things around to fill in gaps left by recent…losses. He hands back my orders and points me to the dagger-eyes lady from yesterday.

Well, what a great start.

I march over to troupe six. I may be late, but I see everyone’s eyes at least glancing at my bag. After taking my orders, Dagger Eyes acknowledges the bag with a nod and, “Those from the way here?”

“Yes ma’am.” I offer them to her with a slight bow, as is customary.

“Good. Maybe you’ll be of some use, unlike the rest of these f***ers.”

She walks off to store them in the ice box in the official’s hut, and I get the chance to introduce myself to my new troupe before we all mount up.

There’s a girl named Brenna who can’t be more than 18, is also starting today, and looks about as miserable as I feel. The assignment’s official psychologist/councilor is also on our troupe. He’s a man in his mid-twenties named Leo with glasses sandwiched between a messy fro and a long beard, which he seems to unconsciously stroke when analyzing someone or something. There’s a social butterfly named Jeni, one of the only other light skins in the group. And there’s about a dozen others…all who seem young and relatively inexperienced. I don’t think anyone other than our troupe leader is even above thirty. 

And of course there’s Keisha, smirking at me from under her hat, knowing she got one point ahead of me by not waking me up when it was time to go.

I stare back at her from under my own hat, but with a frown. We lock eyes long enough to seal an agreement that our being roommates will not entail our being friends.