Most of the company had already gathered by the time Miroslav, Ryder, and Safa arrived. Ryder warily peered through the crowd of foot soldiers, squires, and knights murmuring to each other. Safa was busy trying to put on the second of his greaves while hopping on one foot before they were in sight of the Commander. Miroslav, meanwhile, was on the alert. His large brown eyes skittered over the company, his frown deepening when he realized he couldn’t spot who he was looking for.

Right when he was about to assume it was safe, a towering mass of gray stones held together by machinery and magic lumbered up next to him.

“What do you think, Kyrylenko? You think you’re gonna make it out of this one?” the golem said, slapping Miroslav on the back not so gently.

Miroslav’s jaw clenched. The last time he’d tried picking a fight with Henry he’d ended up with a broken jaw and a flag that lasted almost two weeks. As much as he wanted to cut through the wires and metal holding the brutish heap of rocks together with his sword, he knew he wouldn’t even be able to try without getting another painful reminder that he was both much smaller than the golem in size, and the Commander and Captain in rank.

“I think I have a good chance,” Miroslav said as evenly as he could, staring straight ahead.

Henry laughed, a deep, booming sound befitting only a cartoon villain drowning out the sound of the other soldiers’ chatter. Miroslav tried not to wince. “Something funny about that?”

“I will say you’ve been getting better during drills,” Henry said once he’d regained some of his composure. “You actually had something resembling proper form last time. Sure hope you’re wrong, though. I have a bet on. If you don’t buy the farm, I lose twenty stars.”

Great. Now his so-called comrades were betting money on his death. That was uplifting. Why did he agree to join the Dawn Rush of all the troops in the Allied Army again?

“Leave it, Henry,” Safa said from Miroslav’s other side. “Actually, go raise the bet.”

Miroslav glanced at his friend with a bewildered glare.

Safa smiled, first at him and then at Henry. “It’ll be fun to watch you not have shit to spend on the next tavern we manage to find.”

Ryder stifled a snort from behind Safa. Henry didn’t find it nearly as amusing.

“You better hope that metal in your face keeps it from getting cut off, Kyrylenko,” he sneered. “Not every Tiroan soldier is kind enough to spare women – or girls.”

And there it was, Henry’s favorite double blow. Miroslav wasn’t entirely made of natural tissue, so he wasn’t really alive; and he was transgender, so he wasn’t really a man. The fact that Henry was part machine too didn’t matter. Golems, though admittedly they weren’t treated much better than constructs, needed machinery as part of their bodies to live a full life. They would quite literally fall apart without it. But Miroslav? He was just a siren, an organic being, who had gotten himself into a bad accident as a child and needed all the parts of his fleshy body – including part of his face – that had been destroyed to be replaced with robotics. He only had his stupidity and his family’s incompetence to blame for him being perceived as a construct.

The commander was a real construct, and although Henry answered to it with what seemed like loyalty, Miroslav could tell by the way the golem interacted with it that if he were in El-Haddad’s place and it in his, Henry would dole out just as much abuse to it as Miroslav himself had to endure.

For the amount of times Henry had hit him, either with a string of unkind words or a fist, Miroslav was always disappointed to find it never hurt any less.

Silently staring at the back of the soldier in front of him, Miroslav ignored Henry; but it wasn’t hard to notice the clenching of his jaw, or the way his hands, folded behind his back, gripped each other so tight that his fingers started to turn white. Even if the golem hadn’t gotten any words of retaliation out of the siren, Henry was satisfied with this response, and he turned back ahead with a cruel chuckle.

Safa nudged Miroslav’s side reassuringly, giving him a sympathetic look. Miroslav was still tense, but he did relax a little bit. He gave Safa a tiny, grateful nod.

And then his vision went black.