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The committee decides they’ll leave the decision to him. He knows them best, after all— the titans, that is, not the candidates. He’s always chosen well, all these years, and he’s done it again this time around. Five of the six have adapted perfectly according to Magath’s recommendations. The committee was only there to agree. The general must approve, but Magath is the one who calls the shots when it comes to the Warriors. What’s one more choice at the end of the day?
It’s dark by the time Magath returns to his office, and his head is pounding as he burns a cigarette in the dim room, the only light a crack of flickering yellow that blinks in from the space beneath the door, where brand new electric bulbs have been hung in the hall, buzzing over the head of every wary soldier bedeviled by thoughts of witchcraft as they duck out of the way. He would laugh, but he’s seen far stranger things than electricity. Far stranger things lie on the pages of the folders before him, and in the faces of the two photographs he peers at in the dark as he smokes to the blunt tip of his cigarette, savoring every ounce of strength it will give him as the little hopefuls stare back.
Galliard or Braun. Galliard, or Braun. Only one of them can inherit the Armored Titan. The other one’s going to pitch a fit.
Magath sighs. He needs another cigarette.
It’s not like it’s hard.
In some ways it’s like fate, like the spinning wheel where he used to watch his mother work in the front room of their house, her foot on the pedal as the wool wove into yarn. There was an architecture to the design, guided by her practiced hand and the hours she had spent working there, but he couldn’t see it then. It feels that way as he lets the titans fall into place, like they’re searching for the ones they want, have always wanted. Their predecessors have some say in it, or rather, they talk and sometimes Magath listens. He gets his own input, of course, but he hardly has to try at all to match them up the way they want. It’s like it is meant to be.
Hoover goes first. That’s usually the way it is with the Colossal. There is a special balance there, a bent that only one in a million can possess. That is not a titan just anyone can handle, and in this class, the rest of them would smother the world flat with its flames. But Hoover has a gentleness that draws out the humility needed to control such a creature. Ironic that the most destructive always finds the softest heart. But that’s the way it seems to work.
Jaeger’s not long after that, and by all accounts, he should have been first, only Magath was too stubborn to let him have Ksaver’s namesake so outright. There are rules to these things, and he’s turned a blind eye too long to their bond. God only knows what they get up to. Still, it makes sense for the Beast to go to Zeke. He’s a decent fighter, but more than anything else, he has a cunning wisdom that will win them wars. He can call the shots from the rear— and it doesn’t hurt he’s got a hell of an arm.
The rest took more time. Not because Magath didn’t know where they belonged, but because— well, they’re still children, and though they’re growing up, they’re about as likely to start a war as they are to end the ones they’re supposed to. They’ve got twice as much attitude one minute as they do the next, and no amount of meals stolen from their plates or miles run in the rain seems to temper their proclivity to meltdowns. Teenagers, he has to grudgingly admit, that’s what they’re becoming. And then it makes no sense to keep holding out on them. If this is what they’re going to be for the short end of the rest of their lives, he might as well let them be it.
The Female goes to Leonhart. That’s always been a strange one, and her predecessor was so unlike her in so many ways— loud, brassy, and the life of every party she wasn’t invited to, pealing with laughter at every turn. But they are the same in the ways that matter, with a battle-hardened determination that leaves them gnashing their teeth until the bitter end. Leonhart’s a good one to have on their side. She will be key to the infiltration.
So the Cart will go to Pieck, and the Jaw to Marcel. One for endurance, thoughtfulness, and temperance; and one for wit, with a mind that moves like lightning, like the electricity that buzzes through the walls of the military compound and has all the kids on edge when they’re summoned to his office.
Galliard or Braun, Magath thinks, as meek Bertholdt Hoover salutes in his doorway. If he can’t decide, maybe they will.
Magath hasn’t given much thought to the installation of the electric until Hoover creeps into his office like he could set the place off at any moment, and then he wonders if he should be worried, being stuffed in a box with a fidgeting lit fuse. Hoover moves as if he’s afraid of everything he touches, and for once, Magath’s not going to insist that a soldier sit at attention when they talk to him.
“How are you adjusting?” he asks first.
A bad move on his part. Hoover stares back with eyes as wide as dinner plates.
“Fine, sir,” is all he says.
Magath averts his gaze to the files on his desk as he flips through them meaninglessly. “As you know, the Cart and Jaw titans will be inherited in the coming days. The Armored will be after that. I expect there’s some anticipation as to who will be getting that one.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Of course not. But tell me who you think should get it.”
He didn’t think it was possible for the boy’s eyes to widen even more.
“I know I’m not in the business of asking for opinions,” Magath says, lest the stress of their conversation inadvertently blow the whole town away. “But the decision has come down to Galliard or Braun. Each of them have their own advantages and disadvantages—”
What those are, he does not say, because at the heart of it, it’s one angry little boy over another, and he’s still unsure if either of them have the sheer grit it takes to wield the Armored the way it’s meant to be wielded. None of this is ideal. But Ksaver’s Beast spent most of his term on the sidelines, and the empire sailed through to the other end intact. Perhaps they can manage without the shield they’ve come to know. They may not have much choice. Just this one.
“I’m interested in hearing from the frontlines,” is how he finally poses his position. “I know there are things that go on between all of you that I’m not privy to the details of. Now’s your chance to give your honest assessment.”
The boy sitting before him is at the tender precipice of adulthood where his loyalties no longer always lie with his friends. Magath remembers being that age: growing up and realizing he had surrounded himself with idiots whose developmental lethargy sent him searching for something more on the horizon. He supposes he found it eventually, and he’s one of the lucky ones for that. The rest of his peers never did. Half the friends he went to school with are dead by now, from an accident on the factory line or a drunken escapade by the river. Sometimes from a bullet in the head, whether on the battlefield or alone in an empty house.
Bertholdt Hoover’s not quite there yet.
“I couldn’t say, sir,” he squeaks.
Magath’s lips twitch. Will the Colossal flip and end it all here if he lights a cigarette?
“If you had to choose,” he prompts.
He’s not surprised by the thoughtfulness of the response. That is why Hoover was chosen, after all.
“They’re both quick tempered,” he says eventually. His gaze lies fixed on the desk between them. “In some ways, that can be a strength. The Armored Titan doesn’t back down from a fight. But that would leave either of them at a disadvantage, because as strong as the Armored is, it’s not the most reliable. It doesn’t have the endurance of the Cart of the Jaw. Whoever wields it should know when to preserve their strength, no matter how much they want to keep fighting.”
His wide eyes wander up. Not enough to meet Magath’s gaze, but enough to ask if it’s enough.
It’s not, so Magath reaches for a cigarette.
“Dismissed,” he grunts, and Hoover goes running.
Picking the candidates— that’s the hard part.
It starts with every child in Liberio. Some come from the zones abroad, if someone in their family is lucky enough to overhear about the trials. Those come next. The medical test wipes out half the applicants. Parents will send any kid to the field, no matter how hideous their cough or how crooked their legs. Magath would tell them it doesn’t matter, but they’ll do it anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Marley does not care how healthy a child might be one day after they inherit the healing powers of the titans. They only care if they can hold a gun right now.
That is when Magath’s work starts in earnest. He has done this three times now, and they only seem to get more desperate with each round. The first trial of candidates he ever worked, back in his green days as a young captain, the selection comprised twelve hardy boys under twenty, handpicked by the Eldian Affairs Office, each more or less the same in stock. That had not worked for long, and somewhere down the road, they ended up with a mismatch in years, a Beast who found he could blow his head off, and an eager researcher with an ambiguous past willing to take his place.
Marley learns from some of its mistakes, and since then, the trials have diversified their range. So it starts with every child in Liberio. The ones who pass the medical exam are deflead, dressed, and rigged with equipment until their knees give out from under them. The ones who don’t get up are no longer tossed out. It turns out, it helps to have a runt in the litter.
Magath had always been under the impression that was Braun. He was decent enough at the written exams. He stumbled through history and sometimes seemed to read upside down, but he muddled through, even on the physical side of things, which always seemed to outweigh him. Sometimes literally, skin and bones as he was when he first came. Still, Magath kept him around, even over some of the others who proved to be better with a rifle. Braun had a determination to prove himself, which manifested in the kind of down-on-his-knees loyalty that empires dream about. He could have been the Beast, if only there hadn’t been Zeke. Maybe he had the strength for the Cart, if that hadn’t already been given to Pieck.
But the Armored—
He’s not quite sure it fits. He doesn’t know if Braun knows when to call it quits.
So he asks the runt of a different litter.
“Sir,” Jaeger exclaims, his voice breathless as if he’d sprinted across the base to answer Magath’s summons, which he probably did, because Magath only summoned him five minutes ago, “that’s a very high level decision, far above my status.”
If Hoover’s on one side of adolescence, then Jaeger is on the other. All arms and legs with bones sticking out of him, and the round flushed cheeks of childhood that he can’t seem to lose, even as the rest of him grows disproportionately to his body and his voice drips with an awful squeak that seems to go anywhere except where he wants it. Growing up is a hideous feeling Magath remembers from that age, when he was one in a platoon of a hundred jejune recruits worshiping the rank and haze of the imperial navy. Somehow, Jaeger does not seem to notice or care.
Magath steels his face and stares back at him. He has to admit, he’s never cared for Zeke.
"I’m not asking for your blessing, Jaeger, I just want—” Dare he open these floodgates? “—an opinion.”
He knows Jaeger would be all too happy to provide an opinion. He also knows Ksaver drilled into him the regimen for survival in this job, which includes keeping his damn mouth shut, and since they’re already handed all of those memories and instincts to the kid, that’s not going to change any time soon. Sometimes Magath thinks he would be less annoyed if there had been something perverted going on between those two than the pretentious drivel of self-aggrandizing pseudoscience they were prone to spew at each other.
“Well, they both have their strengths,” Jaeger says.
Magath rubs his temples. “So I’ve been told.”
“Porco is a strong fighter. He’s quick on his feet and he can follow orders, but sometimes he’s brash, verging on insubordinate. Reiner’s the same in many ways, but he goes to the other extreme sometimes. He wouldn’t question any order you gave him. That makes for a good soldier, but does it make a good Warrior?”
“You’ve thought about this before,” Magath mutters.
He sits slouched over in his chair, an idle swivel back and forth with his chin in his hand as he watches the wheels of Jaeger’s mind turn behind the mirrored reflection of his own face that shines back at him.
“If we’re going to fight together, it’s worth thinking about.”
His chair turns back and forth. “Have the others put much thought into this?”
He’ll give Zeke one advantage— he’s older, and if Magath had it his way, all of the candidates would be when they inherit their titans. Train them young, give them the power later. Hoover’s mature enough to handle the Colossal, but he does wonder about some of the others. Marley wants to maintain at least an image of civility about the Warrior program, and that means they can’t entirely beat the childhood out of these kids. That leaves them scared, but not hopeless. They can’t be encouraged to think too much. They’ll realize what a shit deal this is.
“We all have our opinions,” Jaeger says.
Magath narrows his eyes. “Fine, then tell me yours. Galliard or Braun, if you had to choose.”
“Are you asking me who would be a better Armored Titan, or who I would want on my side?”
“It’s the same question, Jaeger. Stop pissing about.”
He will realize later, much later, that those are two very different questions.
“Ah, well, then,” Jaeger says dismissively, in the inane cheerful way that annoys Magath every time. “I suppose it’s only fair for it to go to Galliard. He’s done as well as anyone else. His only failure is that you don’t like him that much.”
Magath’s jaw clenches. “Get out, Jaeger. And take off those damn glasses.”
“Galliard,” Leonhart says.
Magath meets her eyes. “Why?”
“He has instincts,” she explains. “Braun has none.”
He appreciates a straight shooter.
The slumped spine of the Cart Titan’s shifter slips through his office door and sinks down into the seat across from his desk, the toes of her boots just scraping the floor beneath her. She insists on seeing the photos of the two candidates in Magath’s files before she can pass judgment on their aptitude for the Armored. Magath lets her have a look, and minutes pass before he realizes she’s actually thumbing through his notes.
“They’re both good Warriors,” Pieck says breezily after Magath rips the file out of her hands. She sits with her head lolling over the back of the chair and her arms splayed out to the sides, flopping about like an aspic going untouched at the dinner table.
He sets the folder aside. “Which one of them would you rather see as the Armored?”
“Hmm.” Her eyes roll to the ceiling as she thinks. Magath follows her gaze. God, no wonder he’s had allergies lately. The ceiling is buried beneath a sea of cobwebs. “Reiner might be more suited to the fighting techniques used by the Armored. But he can’t keep up with the rest of us. If we’re invading Paradis—”
“We’re infiltrating,” Magath corrects. “Surveying. Liberating, even.”
Her boots swing back and forth. “Well, it might be better for him to take some more time to train. He could inherit Zeke.”
He doesn’t like this strange colloquialism the children have adopted in their singsong voices, all this talk of succeeding each other as if to usurp their very existence. He supposes it’s not that far from the truth. They’ll be twenty-five when they die, maybe a bit older.
“So you’d choose Galliard,” he says.
Pieck nods. “Will he and Marcel go together?”
Go together, she says. She means, will they be blindfolded and marched underground together to stand side by side with needles in their arms as the rest of their miserable lives reach the beginning of the end? She means, will they die together?
Magath makes another mark in his notes. “That remains to be seen.”
He goes for a drink after work. The streets of the city glimmer with reflections in the slick gutters filled with leftover rain, and bar after bar stack around the corners, all shiny young places where the well-to-do men and women rub elbows and swap cocktails. Magath goes for a whiskey at the same pub he frequents a few times a year, infrequently enough to not be frequent, and he sits at the bar resisting the urge to slam his drink (the heartburn alone might kill him) as he watches the men in the corner play dice.
“S’not against the law if no money ain’t changing hands,” one of the old men barks at him. His mate hands him a wad of bills, and he takes his time pocketing it, staring Magath’s uniform up and down.
“You have room for one more,” Magath says. He raises his hand to the bartender, and the men gladly scoot over. They have room if someone else is buying. “Let’s raise the stakes.”
The end of a war is on the horizon. Marley is always at war with someone, but one of those is finally coming to an end, and Magath predicts he has until the end of the month before they’re ordered to move out. The last frontline is the perfect training ground for a new generation of Warriors. There is something raw about them in the first few months, something wide-eyed and feral that has time and time again crushed cities in a matter of hours.
So the Jaw’s turn is moved up; and as she struggles against the restraints that she shouts have come too soon, miles above the cave Magath meets with the boy who is due down below.
“It’s a difficult question,” the other Galliard tells him.
He squints up at Magath from beneath the hard lights beaming into his face. There’s a thermometer sticking from his mouth, the glass clinking between his teeth, and a nurse stands on the other side of the bed, counting her pocket watch against the beats of his heart.
Magath crosses his arms. “Don’t dwell on it too much.”
“Well, I don’t want to be biased, sir.”
“Your concern is noted.”
“But I think the Armored should go to Reiner.”
“You do?”
Marcel nods. The mercury in the thermometer bobs with his head.
Magath furrows his brow. “You’re the only one who does.”
The pallor of his face flushes. “If I may, sir—”
“Yes, spit it out topside while you’re still yourself.”
“I don’t think my brother’s ready for the battlefield,” Marcel explains, mumbling through lips clenched around glass. “He rushes into everything, and his mistakes would put the whole team in danger. I know Reiner hasn’t always scored well, but he’s worked harder than anyone else to get here. If you give him the chance, I think he might exceed your expectations.”
Magath tunnels a thumb into a pounding in his temple. “You might overestimate my expectations for Braun.”
“I think he’s sort of starstruck, sir.” The thermometer clatters as the nurse plucks it from between his teeth. “He wanted to be a Warrior more than anyone else. He views it as the ultimate honor. If you let him have the Armored and train with the rest of us, working in unison to maximize our strength, I think he could shine.”
The nurse is counting under her breath. Magath purses his lips.
“And what about your brother?” he asks. “Won’t he have something to say if we choose Braun over him?”
“I’m sure he will, sir, but it might be good for him. I think he would understand.”
Magath is not so sure about that. Why the hell didn’t he cut one of them sooner?
“His condition is not ideal for a controlled transformation, Commander,” the nurse states. “The recommended course involves a warm bath supplemented by a small dose of phenobarbital. Should I let them know there’ll be a delay?”
Magath glances back to Marcel.
“Are you nervous, Galliard?” he asks.
His little throat bobs as he swallows. “Yes.”
“Smart,” Magath mutters. “You should be.”
It’s a good day for a race. Blue skies with drifting clouds, and breezy temperatures that cool the sunlight on their skin. The stadium lies inland in the abandoned fields of an imperial heyday where horses once carried chariots, but they’re not far from the sea. Marley never is.
“He’s fast but he’s got short legs.” Pieck’s hair drips over her shoulders as she leans towards the field, her boots propped up on the railing to make herself taller. “Do you think I could beat him in a race?”
“Have you ever been to a real race?” Hoover asks, the only one paying enough attention to heed the reality of anyone’s words.
“We race each other all the time.”
“Those aren’t real races,” Leonhart mutters from her solitary crouch a few rows above the others. “They bet at real races.”
Hoover is the only one who hears that too.
“I bet you could beat him,” he says, turning back to Pieck. “You’re more experienced.”
“No way," comes one voice. “He’s way too fast.”
“It’s not all about speed,” comes another. “It’s about endurance too.”
Magath has been to the races. His father took him to the tracks when he was a boy, old enough to keep the books with the little pen and pencil from his father’s breast pocket, and young enough to cry when they shot the thoroughbred with the broken leg in the dirt in front of him. He was close enough to watch the light leave its eyes.
The Jaw is coming around again. It barrels across the field, faster than the snipers at the top of the stadium can track it. Its claws dig deep into the soil with every touch of its feet upon the ground, and when it thunders by for another lap, the little Warriors in the first row cheer for their comrade. Magath watches them. He catches Braun staring back.
“He does have one advantage,” Jaeger says.
He approaches without permission. But he knows when he doesn’t have to ask for it, and Magath has been standing with a cigarette dangling from his lips for five minutes as he mindlessly pads the pockets of his jacket for a lighter while his mind is transfixed on the titan trampling around the track. Jaeger prances down the stadium steps from behind and stands to attention with a lighter outstretched.
“What’s that?” Magath grumbles.
He holds out his cigarette, and the flame clicks to life. Ash ignites the air.
“Galliard,” Jaeger says.
Magath waits for something more. He stares at the kid, but before he can grab him by the scruff of his neck and send him bowling down the stands, Jaeger clarifies.
“Galliard,” he explains. “He has a brother.”
Soil sprinkles across the stands as the Jaw whips by again. Magath shakes it from his shoulders.
“I don’t put much stock in this family line theory,” he mutters with the cigarette between his lips. “Titan science isn’t exactly science.”
He doesn’t know how much Ksaver studied this sort of thing, and if Zeke is trying to tell him something that he doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know where this kid gets off thinking he has any right to withhold information from the military or to tell his commanding officer what to do. He doesn’t know for certain that Zeke didn’t swipe the light from his jacket earlier to get a sweeter angle at this encounter.
“Maybe,” Jaeger says. “But if you had to choose.”
For once, he plays his cards right. His dice, rather, though that’s all luck in the end. Some players swear it’s not. There’s a trick to the roll, they say, and it’s in the wrist or the elbow or the breath depending on who you ask. It depends on the phase of the moon and how many birds you saw yesterday, or if your girl kissed your dice the last time you saw her. Magath doesn’t think that’s a euphemism, but with these things, he never quite knows.
Maybe it’s fate too, like the way the turn of the world seems to work and the titans become themselves for another generation. Maybe it’s all chaos in the end and thirteen is a number that means nothing but half the age they’ll be when they die, and even less than what they should have gotten. In this world, maybe that’s all luck is.
His wallet is tragically thin when he finally spots the Armored’s aging face in the mirror above the bar.
“Lose much?” he asks Magath.
They share a cigarette in the alleyway. People go to prison for less than this.
“Don’t start with me,” Magath grumbles. He flicks the ash into the gutter. It sizzles and burns like a dying star before it crackles apart and sinks to the bottom of the puddle. “I’m still your superior.”
“Not for much longer.” He takes a drag. “Have you picked the bastard yet?”
“No. I thought I might ask you to do it for me.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“I’m your commanding officer.”
The Armored crushes the cigarette under his heel. “So you think it’s up to you?”
Marley is never far from the sea. And the sea, never far from the island.
He has been there before. Years ago, when the last restorationists were taken off the streets and their transport fleet never returned, he was on the survey ship sent to retrieve them. Or as it turned out, what was left of them. They docked offshore and rowed through the wreckage of the steamships turned stern to bow in the water. He stepped onto the cracked stone docks and climbed a hundred steps to the top of the wall, a hand held over his eyes to shield the light thrown back by the shifting sands that swept inland. He never touched the shore.
But years before that, it wasn’t uncommon for rookie sailors to try to reach the island. At that age, they were too stupid to realize they were being baited, that the tales their officers told them about seeing the walls firsthand were nothing but bullshit lies concocted by sober tongues seven months at sea with nothing but shivering new recruits for entertainment. They were too dazzled by thoughts of glory to realize that the fleet was too far from the island to get there and back before dawn. Some were stupid enough to believe they could swim. Some drowned.
Some calculated the distance with the stars and realized the southernmost tip of the island curved into a cape that was much closer than it appeared in the dark. Some commandeered a lifeboat with their bunkmates and sailed away at a breakneck pace that would ferry them to an untouched shore beneath the conspicuous searchlights of the passing ships. Some set foot on the island and stood beneath a towering cliff, watching shearwaters dip into the milky midnight, wondering if the world looked the same from inside the walls.
“For god’s sakes,” Magath shouts at the next private who wobbles under the lightbulb outside his door, “it’s not going to attack you. It doesn’t even know you’re there.”
The bulb spits and flickers before it goes out. The rest of the electric follows, sparking flares down the halls in a historic event that will breed a new generation of technologically suspicious soldiers.
It’s grim in his office when he sits down to sign the official order in the dark. The cobwebs are still clamoring on the ceiling, and his head is still aspiring to find every possible way it can ache. So far, it’s winning.
That still leaves the choice. Galliard, or Braun.
If he lights a cigarette now, maybe this whole place will go up in flames.
“Alright,” Magath finally sighs. His pen bleeds as it scribbles across the page. “Why the hell not?”