Not everything, of course, because there were a lot of things I had to do for myself, and they were still hard, but some things, small things, were taken care of while I was busy fumbling with something else. And most people stopped looking so openly disappointed when I was assigned to their drill. All that was left to survive was two weeks of training with the group that would make up the members of Owen’s support crew. I’d done this in high school, on unicorn stationery, no less. I was pretty sure I could handle it again. Every support squad had eight firefighters; a pair of engineers—one sapper and one smith—two medics, one of whom could double as a cook if you were on patrol; and in Owen’s case alone, one bard. All of them were older than Owen and I were. The Combat Engineer, Courtney Speed, was twenty-four and had a master’s in engineering from the Royal Military College. This was unusual, as most people in the Oil Watch, including our smith, Aarons, had at most only an undergraduate degree.
