Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(36)

“Nineteen! Twenty!”

Jenou collapses, facedown on the matted grass.

Sergeant Mackie joins the noncom who is leading calisthenics. Rio catches a sweat-blurred view of her and feels Mackie’s eye on her. Mackie takes over the count.

“Twenty-one!”

Impossible. Just lie down.

“Twenty-five!”

The women were all either facedown or climbing stiffly to their feet. The last male is done. Rio is on twenty-two.

“Give up, Richlin!” Tilo heckles.

Twenty-three. Two more.

It’s as if she’s trying to push up with a tractor on her back. Rio’s muscles just do not want to obey. Just . . . do . . . not.

Twenty-four! A shaky, sloppy twenty-four, but a twenty-four just the same.

Down. Collapsed. Finished. Done in.

No.

The twenty-fifth push-up takes what feels like five full minutes. Rio’s teeth grit. Her face is beet red. She makes a sound like an animal in distress.

Twenty-five!

Applause breaks out from some of the men and some of the women.

“Twenty-five,” Rio says as she rises to her feet.

“Congratulations, you can count,” Tilo mutters.

From Mackie there is just the very slightest nod of acknowledgment. More than enough to cause Rio’s heart to swell. She almost staggers from dizziness, but she manages to maintain her place in the line.

Rio Richlin is someone now, someone in Sergeant Mackie’s eyes, at least. She is the girl who’s done all twenty-five. The only female so far. The first.

That’s right: Rio Richlin. Twenty-five!

“Chow in thirty minutes. Atten-HUT. Dismissed.”

Rio walks to the barracks with the half-crippled gait of an exceedingly sore back. She grabs her towel and ditty bag from her foot locker, hurrying because even if you get there early hot water is never a certainty, and if you’re last in line it’s guaranteed to be freezing. Jenou falls in beside her, but already other women have gotten a lead on them.

“Great work,” Jenou teases. “Now Mackie’s going to expect us all to do that.”

“I doubt I’ll ever manage it again,” Rio says, but she’s confident that she will. “It was Suarez that motivated me. I had to show that little . . .”

“That’s you all over, honey. Any time someone tells you you can’t do something it excites your inner mule.”

“My inner mule?”

“Hey, sweetie, why don’t you come shower with me? You could scrub my back.”

Rio freezes. The voice is male and familiar: Luther Geer. She doesn’t want to turn and face him, and now she feels foolish and conspicuous just freezing like this, with her towel and her shower bag in her hand.

She starts walking again, and now the voice is even more suggestive.

“Or you could scrub something else,” Luther says with an unabashed leer in his voice. “Right, boys?”

“Feeling threatened, boys?” Jenou snaps.

Rio, her face reddening, feels tears begin to fill her eyes. She is humiliated by the suggestion, and even more humiliated that Jenou feels the need to defend her. She knows she should spin around and give this rude young man a piece of her mind, but the right words do not come quickly and that hesitation becomes yet another cause of embarrassment.

She walks away on stiff legs, pursued by more than one wolf whistle and derisive chuckles.

“Scrub a dub, baby, scrub a dub,” Luther calls after her and makes a loud kissing sound. “I got something dirty that needs cleaning.”

In the crowded, hectic women’s latrine Jenou says, “We should tell Sergeant Mackie.”

“No,” Rio snaps.

“But she’s the—”

Rio turns a face now gone white with rage on Jenou. “No.”

Jenou sighs. “No, you’re right. We’ll have to find a way to—”

“We don’t have to do anything, Jen. I have to deal with Private Geer.” She looks at herself in the mirror and consciously changes her expression until she achieves a look of resolve rather than rage. “It has to be me.”

“Boys will be boys,” said Carlita Swan, an older woman of twenty-nine who is wasting her limited time plucking her eyebrows over the sink. “Don’t let it get to you, kid.”

“I won’t,” Rio mutters.

But it has already gotten to her. Weren’t they all in this together, the males and the females? Weren’t they all soldiers?

She feels furious and cowardly and even more furious for being cowardly, the one feeding on the other. Her moment of triumph has been turned into resentment.

Enough.

The rage is gone. All emotion in Rio Richlin has gone cold, and something else, something grimly practical, has taken hold.

“Rio? What are you thinking?” Jenou asks, nervous at the expression on her friend’s face. This is a different look, unfamiliar to Jenou in a lifetime of gauging Rio’s inner feelings. There is something almost . . . predatory.

“Let it go, kid,” Carlita says.

“I’ve let it go and let it go and I’m done with it,” Rio says. She sets her shower bag down carefully and does an about-face. She marches out of the women’s latrine, past Mackie’s closed door, and along the hundred feet of polished tile to the other end of the barracks.