365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 05

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 05 – The Oath

Nobody applauded.

Thirty-four people sat very still while a five-foot-five eighteen-year-old walked to the front of a room to be

handed command of them.

“They’ll hate you by lunch,” Instructor Emmett said, pressing a tablet into my hands. “Files on all of them! Scores, psych profiles, family. Build your teams by morning.”

“They can hate me,” I said. “They just have to survive me.”

He almost smiled.

Our quarters are the east wing of a stone building we share with a unit that’s been in service ten years –

Commander Jaylen Marek’s unit, which everyone here talks about the way people talk about weather and wa

I read files until three in the morning.

Here’s what a year of being invisible teaches you: how to watch. I didn’t need psych profiles. I’d spent fourteen days learning who flinched, who lied, who covered for someone else’s mistake, who ate alone.

At 0800 I stood in front of them in the common.room.

“Flora, you’ve already chosen your team,” I said. “Say it out loud and I’ll break you back down to junior.”

Flora shut her mouth.

“You’re not picking friends. You’re building something that keeps you alive.” I looked around the room. “Every one of you has a flaw. I built your teams around the person who covers it. If you want to argue, argue after I’m

done.”

Nobody argued. Not after they heard the reasoning. There’s nothing that shuts people up faster than being

seen accurately for the first time in their lives.

Flora’s team got the ground floor – five light sleepers, a wall between our wing and whatever walks in at night. She looked stunned when I explained it.

“You put us on the door because you trust us?”

“I put you on the door because you’re the only ones who’d wake up.”

She stood a little straighter after that. Then she said, quietly, “We won’t disappoint you, Commander.”

I keep that sentence in my pocket on bad days.

The oath happened at noon, in the library, with eight instructors circling us to catch anyone who mouthed the

words without saying them.

you swear your loyalty to the Crown of the Houses?

“Yes, I do.”

Do you swear to serve the truth even when it costs your own House?

“Yes, I do.”

Thirty-five voices, perfectly in sync – until the last line.

“Do you swear to abstain from sexual relationships within your unit and across units – excepting only a lawful engagement?”

Five voices didn’t answer.

I knew all five before Emmett called the names, because I could hear their heartbeats jump.

“We didn’t know that was in there,” one of them mumbled.

“It’s in there,” Emmett said, “because two hundred years of history says a bad breakup between armed people

ends with a body.”

They swore it the second time. I made sure they understood what happens if they break it.

That’s the day I heard my first real stranger-thought inside the Vanguard.

We were walking back through the courtyard when a woman from Marek’s unit passed us, and it landed in

my head like a coin dropped on a table:

Let’s see how fast I can get Commander Marek into my bed.

Then a male voice, sourly: Hope the new lot brought some willing girls.

Neither of them had spoken.

“Am I losing my mind?” I whispered.

“No,” said Echo. “You’re just finally hearing what people are actually saying.”

Six months went by like a thrown knife.

We trained. We studied. We ate on our own floor because our kitchen was better and because I wanted my

people bonded to each other, not scattered across a dining hall. We graduated three weeks early – the entre unit, together, which had never happened.

old my people about my hearing. All of them. I had to; secrets rot a unit from the inside.

They swore they’d never tell a soul, and Mara – Mara, who reads old House genealogies for fun went pale and said, “Rowan. There are only two bloodlines on record that ever produced that. And what people used to. do to the women who had it-”

“Don’t,” I said.

“You need to know.”

“Not yet.”

I wasn’t ready. I’d spent a year deciding my family didn’t love me. I wasn’t ready to consider that they’d been

afraid of something.

Four days of leave before we went operational. We spent them cooking, arguing about films, and letting Mara plan her wedding to Beck out loud, because Beck had turned nineteen and formally proposed the second he

was allowed to.

On the last afternoon I heard her coming up the stairs.

Mara doesn’t stomp. Mara doesn’t raise her voice. Mara is the calmest person in my unit.

She came through the door shaking so hard she dropped the takeaway box.

Beck was up in half a second. He got his arms around her and I heard him growl something into her hair, and between her breathing and her swearing I got the story in pieces.

Commander Cade Fenwick. Third son of House Fenwick. Eight years in service.

He’d blocked her in a corridor with two of his men behind him. He’d told her exactly what he wanted, exactly

what position, exactly which room, exactly what hour.

And when she said no, he’d smiled and said: “Then I’ll file a fitness report on Monday and your little girl

commander won’t be able to save you.”

The room went very, very quiet.

I set down my coffee and stood up.

“Monday,” I said. “Monday’s my first meeting with the King.”