He laughed. “Does fresh air really smell like fresh cookies?”
“My little brother used to say whenever he went outside that it’s what green smells like.”
“That’s an excellent way to put it,” Billings said.
“Some newcomers find their first summer here difficult because the sun never really sets. They say it messes with their internal clock.”
“I’m not worried. I can buy an eye mask.”
“And your first winter here might be a bit of a shock.” Eva would bring up every negative about Alaska she could if it got him to leave.
“I love snow.”
“Well, that’s good, but unless you likea lotof it, for half the year, you might be singing a different tune come January. Not to mention that twenty-four-hour days in summer mean twenty-four-hour nights in winter.”
“Okay, well, thanks for the warning.” A few strides later, he added, “Is there anything else I should be warned about?”
“There is one other thing, actually. You made it pretty clear when I met you earlier today that you think you’re a shoo-in to be the next sergeant major.” She paused for dramatic effect and then added, “I’d like to invite you to reconsider that assumption.”
“Is that so?”
Eva could see the way the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly.
“It is,” she said. “We’ll see in time who the last man standing is. But I can give you a hint — it won’t be you.”
“I guess it won’t be you, either, since you’re not a man.”
“I was just using the turn of phrase. You can bet your bottom dollar it’ll be me.”
With those words, Eva sprinted ahead, sincerely hoping that Sergeant Billings was eating her dust.
CHAPTER 4
EVA
Eva woke up with a smile on her face. It was boot camp day, one of her favorite events with any new squad. She never failed to feel a rush of excitement when she saw a squad working together to figure out challenges she’d set for them, which pitched teams against each other in feats that were as much about problem-solving as they were about brute strength.
The brute strength aspect of boot camp was what she’d been most afraid of after she’d decided to join the army years before. As a teenager she was tall and willowy, and not known for her physical strength. In fact, her arms were so thin that her older brothers used to make jokes about her noodle arms. Soon after the teasing started, she’d started to lift light weights, determined that the noodles-for-arms jokes would stop when her brothers noticed that she was developing muscles.
Instead, they’d teased her about the paltry weights she was using, comparing them to the ones they lifted in the gym. Eva learned to hide her efforts to transform her physical strength from that point on, lifting heavier and heavier items in thehouse when her brothers weren’t around. Seeing the change in her body was nothing short of thrilling for Eva, and she’d taken pride in her hard-earned physical strength and endurance.
Nonetheless, she’d imagined the military was full of brawny men and women who could lift her up using only one arm. She worried that she would be far and away the weakest new recruit, forced out of basic training on the first day. It was that mental image of walking away from the military, head hanging in disgrace, that propelled her more than anything else through the actual first day of training.
It was grueling and physically punishing, by far the toughest day of her life. But, as exhausting as it was, she’d loved it. At the end of the day, she had stood in the shower under a stream of hot water and had known beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was in the right place. She’d found her true home, the place she belonged.
Eva knew that not all of the new recruits felt that way about their decision to join the military. Not yet. Some would never feel like this was home, but others would experience that feeling of belonging soon enough. Some, like Eva, had felt it on their first day. She knew because she’d seen it in them, that rush of pure adrenaline and joy.
The morning air was fresh, and although she hated to admit it, it smelled just as Sergeant Billings had described. Eva cast her eye over the obstacle course, really just to make sure that there were no obvious problems with any of the equipment. The hell wall — the tall wooden wall that was the first obstacle every recruit had to overcome — was the one thing Eva knew she was ready for on her first day of boot camp because she had practiced by throwing herself at and over all of the tall wooden fences she could find in her home town.
And it had worked. She’d scaled the wall in record time.
Not all of her recruits were so adept, or so lucky. But with her encouragement and some solid teamwork, she vowed that everyone would get over the wall in decent time today.
Next, Eva dragged equipment out of one of the storage rooms and arranged the various items — boxes, sandbags and a medical stretcher — into different configurations to test the recruits’ mental agility. They had to disassemble the objects and carry them to a remote area on the base, where they would engage in a range of different team tasks before then working together to assemble the configurations as they originally were.
“It smells like green today.”
Eva turned to see Sergeant Billings striding towards her. Her heart sank as she wondered what he was doing there so early in the morning. “Good morning, sergeant.”
