I didn’t move. Rita didn’t move. The sun hung high in the sky, showering its rays over us, slowly roasting our skin. A drop of sweat formed in my armpit, then traced its way slowly to the ground. Sweat had started to bead on Rita’s skin too. Fuck! I felt like a chicken crammed into the same oven as the Christmas turkey.

Rita’s lips made the subtlest of movements. A low voice only I could hear.

“Do I have something on my face?”

“What?”

“You’ve been staring at me for a while now.”

“Me? No.”

“I thought maybe there was a laser bead on my forehead.”

“Sorry. There wasn’t-it’s nothing.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Shit-for-brains Kiriya! You’re slipping!” the lieutenant barked. I quickly extended my arm back into position. Beside me, Rita Vrataski, with the disinterested expression of someone who’d never had a need for human contact her entire life, continued her iso push-up.

PT ended less than an hour later. The general, the taste of bile in his mouth forgotten, returned to the barracks without further instructions. The 17th Company had spent a productive pre-battle afternoon.

It hadn’t played out the way I remembered it. In my dream, I never made eye contact with Rita, and she hadn’t joined in the PT. Maybe I was reading too much into things, but I’d say she did it just to piss the general off. It took a Valkyrie reborn to throw a monkey wrench into a disciplinary training session planned with military precision and get away with it. Then again, her antenna may just have picked up something that made her want to see what this weird iso push-up thing was all about. Maybe she had just been curious.

One thing was for sure, though. Rita Vrataski wasn’t the bitch everyone made her out to be.

4