Rita reattached the hilt to her blade before pulling it from the sheath. She thrust it deep in between a couple of slats above the window. The jolt was enough to numb her arm a little. For the second time, she disconnected the hilt from the blade. Coming down into a crouch, she scanned the street and took careful aim. The man was almost directly below her now, just a little off to the right. She calibrated the angle of the mechanism and fired her anchor a meter ahead of him. He jumped and came to a full stop, almost keeling forwards. He craned his neck to see her, his face twitching in surprise.
It was the moment she’d been waiting for.
Now!
Rita fired again, this time using the anchor that had pulled her up to the building. The man’s eyes opened even wider. He was frozen to the spot, his reactions lacking the necessary speed to get out of the way.
The anchor impaled his right thigh.
The man let out an ear-piercing scream. He threw the leather bag away and fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
“Sorry! But I need you…”
Rita triggered the wire to reel in, letting the compressed gas shoot out at full clip. She took the same wire and looped it over the blade she’d stuck in the wall near her feet, then jumped down on the opposite side from the man. The blade became a pivot, suspending the man to the right of the window, and Rita to the left. While she was still a little higher up, Rita depressed the trigger on the hilt of the blade to stop the wire reeling in.
She drew her second blade and pointed it towards the airborne man.
“Damn you! Argh… This bloody hurts!” Suspended with his head beneath him, red trickling down his thigh, the man thrashed around like a fish on a rod. He yelled and moaned, tears and nose running together.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the crowd was by now looking up and watching them. Entranced by what was taking place, even the looters stood still.
“Hear me…” The words caught in Rita’s throat. Hanging in midair, she sucked in a deep breath and tried again. “Hear me out. Everyone! I am…”
Right. There was no turning back now she’d come this far. She couldn’t skirt around the issue any longer.
“I am Rita Iglehaut, acting commander of the Garrison. The Military Police Brigade has left to guard and escort the evacuees to safety, leaving the maintenance of law and order under the jurisdiction of the Garrison and the Training Corps!”
The reality was that the only Garrison troops left to carry out their duties were Rita herself, Amanda, and a few others from their own year and the next. The rest were all trainees with next to no experience. Rita, of course, saw no reason to volunteer that information.
“W-We! Will respond, with zero tolerance, to theft in all forms! Disband, and go home. Please go on as though everything were…”
Half of Quinta had been evacuated. The majority of its able-bodied soldiers were gone. No one could act as though nothing had happened.
Rita took a deep breath and reprised, “Inasmuch as you are able, as though everything were normal. I guarantee help is on its way. To enable us to make a new start in a new environment, please respect the law, and help one another!”
It struck her then that this was probably the first time she’d had to speak in front of so many people. She waited nervously for the crowd to respond.
What if they just ignore me? Dismiss me as some bubble-headed girl spouting nonsense?
There was only silence.
Then, a series of explosive bangs sounded from somewhere down the street.
Gunfire.
The people below turned in chorus. Chatter spread like a tidal wave.
Over twenty trainees were racing to the scene. They were firing repeatedly into the air to intimidate the crowd. Clouds of gunpowder smoke puffed upwards, giving the impression of greater numbers.
“Thank you…”
The looting wouldn’t spread any further, at least not from here. Rita felt her tension drain away. If she weren’t suspended in midair, she might have crumpled to the ground.
“You, commander? Really? I can hardly believe it.” Doris made a show of rolling her eyes.
“Not commander. Acting commander. And you’re not the only one who can’t believe it.”
That night, Rita sat with her parents at the dining table. Having failed to find a single surviving officer, she and her Garrison colleagues had held talks, and her capacity as acting commander had become official.
“It won’t be too much of a burden?”
“It will. A heavy one… Way too heavy.”
Rita was the first to agree that it felt beyond her, but without anyone to organize the soldiers, more rioting was sure to break out. That had to be avoided at any cost.
“Could you do it instead, Mom?”
“Maybe you banged your head, darling.” Doris, unsurprisingly, failed to take her plea seriously.
“I give up.” Rita folded her arms over the table and slumped her chin into them. “I hope the reinforcements hurry up and get here.”
“I hear you.”
“Still, it’s hard to believe,” Henning said, sipping some after-dinner tea before replacing the cup to the table. “For all the officials to just flee like that.”
“Absolutely. And to think of how they always acted so important.” Doris sipped her tea too and peered at Rita over the rim. “And you’re doing their work, too? What does that entail?”
“I don’t know yet. What do you think, Dad?” Her head was spinning from just considering it.
“Right. First, I suppose, is to make sure we know who’s here. Then there’s organizing a militia…as it does appear we have fewer soldiers now. Also, households with injured persons will be wanting medical attention.”
“How about the stockpiles─money, supplies? Do you know how much we have left?”
Rita shook her head in response to Doris’ question. “The district hall was empty. It’s hard to accept, but I think─”
“The officials took them. Cretins!”
“We’re lucky though, we’ve got the supplies the military had stored. They should be enough to last us a while.”
“What about horses?” Henning asked.
“Less than twenty now.”
“Could we use them to evacuate? In smaller groups?” Doris asked, clearly assuming she’d come up with a good idea.
“We thought of that but decided against it, because we’d have a hard time choosing who would go.”
“Mmm, yes, I suppose.”
“And…this doesn’t bear thinking, but as someone pointed out, we don’t really know whether the people who left actually made it through.”
It wasn’t impossible that they’d been wiped out. If they’d run into a group of “aberrant” Titans, some that were fast on their feet, it wasn’t even all that unthinkable. Rita’s mind traveled back to the innumerable dead bodies she’d had to see earlier that day, to those clumps of meat, no longer human in form, that had been chewed on and spat out by the Titans. Again, it was something that didn’t bear thinking about, but no one could say Mathias and Jörg hadn’t been out there among them.
“We thought it best, for now, to wait for reinforcements from Fuerth.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.” Henning glanced at the window. The world outside was already shrouded in dark.
“I do hope the Kramers are okay,” Doris muttered to herself. Her thoughts seemed to be moving in the same direction as Rita’s.
“Th-They have to be. Mathias is surprisingly bullheaded, and Jörg’s the shrewdest man alive!” Rita knew she wouldn’t be able to stay on top of her work if she didn’t keep telling herself this.
Henning floated an amused smile. “Probably best you don’t say that to their faces.”
“You think so?”
“I do.” Henning drank up the remainder of his tea.
“Anyhow!” Doris stood and gathered their empty cups. “You need sleep if you’re to have any energy for this. You are going to have the hardest job in the whole of Quinta.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Even as she sat there, slumped over the table, Rita felt in her heart a powerful sense of gratitude to her parents. She could hear Doris’ footsteps as she moved off to the kitchen.
“I’m sure their merchant association will commit a small fortune, buy up every last horse there is in Fuerth, and send help as soon as they can.”
“Right.”
Until then, she would do everything in her power to keep Quinta safe.
So that she could hold her head high when she saw Mathias again.