“What…?” I cut off, finally noticing what she’s seen. A dozen armed and white-uniformed Gaian officers are circling the ship, with more still trickling out from behind Fortuna, where they must have been waiting for us to exit. Most of them have their hands on their weapons, and all of them are now staring at me.

I sigh and put my hands up.

CHAPTER FOUR

Soldiers

Corvus

After Ivennie’s rush to find me, I’m not sure what to expect when I walk into the cafeteria, but my steps slow as I find my other three team members casually enjoying breakfast. This room, like the rest of the outpost, is built to fit ten times our number. Despite the many tables and the vastness of the room, my team is nestled close together on the same side of the same bench. Considering how huge Sverre is, they barely fit. Daniil and Magda sit shoulder-to-shoulder beside the heavily tattooed blond, a thick blanket draped over the both of them. Daniil has an arm looped around Magda’s waist, and she leans her head against his shoulder. I suppress a hot spark of envy in my throat. Jealousy is a disease of the soul, I remind myself. But no matter how many times I silently reiterate the Titan saying, the feeling remains.

“Corvus,” Daniil says, noticing me first. The lanky, olive-skinned marksman sits up straighter and removes his arm from Magda’s waist. The blanket falls off one of her shoulders, and she frowns at him. He doesn’t even notice, smiling at me instead. “Good morning.”

Daniil Naran was assigned to my team early on, when I was not yet one of Altair’s most favored sergeants, but merely a new soldier eager to prove myself. At first, I didn’t understand why they had sent an asset like Daniil to someone as unproven as me. He was more experienced than I was, trained in interrogation techniques, and exceptionally talented with a sniper rifle, without a single blemish on his service record.

I initially assumed he was sent by Altair to help keep me safe, as a favor to Momma. But the truth spilled out when he was drunk one night: Daniil was the product of a Titan mother and a visiting Paxian. Not full Titan blood. He’s slimmer and darker-skinned than the majority of Titans, but that wouldn’t have been enough to pull much attention to him if he hadn’t tried to use his mixed planetary heritage to avoid military service. It didn’t work, but merely trying was enough to make him look borderline traitorous. If he had ended up in any team other than mine, he wouldn’t have lasted long.