Even with my steel stomach, her file had been hard to read. I had to skim some of the details about the barracks in New Mexico, the only place she ever called home. About the General, her father, and what he did to build his army of God. Her childhood had nothing of the usual variety: no sleepovers, no team sports, no school. Every day was spent with a rotating cast of stolen or susceptible boys, training for combat, for survival, for the Almighty End. Her old man watched every fight from the sidelines, fingers steepled. He never moved, never grinned or grimaced. Never reached for her, in victory or the bloody otherwise.

As I watched her eat, I thought of the time she crawled on hands and knees to pluck her teeth from the dirt of the arena. She tossed the two front ones over the barrack’s barbed-wire fence— their permanent replacements would grow in soon enough. But she kept the molar, burying it deep in the pocket of her coveralls. For the next week, she spent hours after lights out jamming that molar back into place, rolled-up slivers of grip tape refusing the wet socket of her jaw, until she gave up and began swallowing her stewed meat whole.

“I’m glad one of us is excited.”

Cal crushed her plastic sandwich wrapper into a ball, trapping crumbs and stringy edges of sliced ham, and launched it into the trash.

“Pey, you need to get the fuck over yourself. This whole wound-licking routine is boring. We’re going to be working together; that much is clear. And I want to learn. So can we please just make the best of it?”

I sighed.

She was right. I was being pathetic, holding my hurt feelings like baby field mice, blind and velvet soft. If working with Cal could get me to the Sixth Floor, to the Looking Glass, it was worth it. I didn’t have to like her, and I certainly didn’t have to trust her, but I did have to get the fuck over myself. Calamity Ganon belonged in Hell. That wasn’t debatable. But at one time, she had her own feelings, her own field mice, exposed and thumbtack-small. And when she held them out, they were crushed in her palms.

“Yeah, okay. You’re right. Let’s do this. But we’re just working together. No beers or hanging out or anything.”

“You’re such a prude.”

“First lesson: don’t talk shit to your teacher.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Not to mention, now I had the upper hand. I had information on her. Even worse than that, I had pity.

That, I knew, would crush her.

“So, tell me about your marks. Who are you looking at?” I asked, pulling out my pencil case. She opened her notebook.