u/BrokenOldBastage

Been a bit under the weather. Wrote a few while sick.

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Two days earlier.

The mountain didn’t care who climbed it. That was the first thing Garza had learned about mountains, and the cold up here was reminding him in the patient, indifferent way the cold always did.

Nine thousand feet of switchback under his boots. Snow crust over older snow. Loose shale where the wind had stripped the slope bare and made a man choose between traction and noise. He’d chosen noise twice and traction the third time and his ankle had told him, in a quiet way that wasn’t yet a problem, that he’d chosen wrong.

Sera was behind him at six paces. Polk behind her at six more. He didn’t look back to check. He knew where they were by sound — the small, regular shuffle of crampons biting and lifting, the breath, the occasional metallic tap of a sling buckle against a stock that needed retaping when they got back down.

The sky was wrong.

Not dark the way mountain dark was dark. Dark the way smoke was dark. Three weeks of fires below the ridge had put a ceiling over the world that the cold couldn’t burn off, and somewhere above that ceiling, the alien haze did whatever the alien haze did, and the stars came through it stained. He could see by them. Barely. A man who’d grown up on this kind of slope could find his hands in worse light than this.

He stopped at a fold in the rock, dropped to one knee, and let the team come up.

“Drink,” he said.

Sera unscrewed the cap of the canteen on her belt and took two swallows. Polk took one, swallowed, took another. They didn’t speak. Garza had picked them for that.

He looked down the slope.

Far below, where the valley bent around the mountain’s foot, a slow blue light pulsed in a long arc and faded. A patrol pass. He counted the seconds until the next one. Forty-three. He counted again. Forty-three. Steady rotation. Not searching. Just keeping itself company.

“They aren’t looking up,” Polk said, low.

“No,” Garza said. “They will.”

He stood. The hip joint of his trousers had iced where his sweat had soaked through and frozen against the wool. He cracked the ice off with the flat of his glove and started moving again.

The next pitch was the worst of the lower face. A glazed ledge maybe forty feet across, the kind of ice that had melted in the brief afternoon and refrozen as the sun went, and now sat slick and unforgiving across what should have been a walkable shelf.

He went first. Crampons in. Three steps. The points bit. He shifted weight forward and one of the points skittered sideways on a rib of clean ice he hadn’t seen, and his stomach went cold for the half-second before the other foot held, and he stopped and breathed and went on.

Behind him, Sera’s left crampon slipped.

He heard it before he saw it — the small, dry scrape of metal that didn’t catch, and the in-suck of breath that came after it. He didn’t turn. Turning was how you went over with the person who was going over. He just stopped where he was, planted, and held still until he heard her breathing settle and her boot find the next bite.

“Good,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

“Yeah.”

They cleared the ledge.

Polk was breathing harder now. Garza could hear it. He was a flatlander, originally — somebody had told him that once and it was the kind of thing you remembered. The lungs were doing the work the legs couldn’t, and the cold was thinning what the lungs had to work with. He hadn’t complained. He wouldn’t. Garza filed it anyway. They had another two hours of this, and altitude was a math problem that only worked one direction.

The wind shifted.

It came down off the ridge above them in a long cold wash, and underneath the wind there was a sound that wasn’t the wind. A snap, somewhere off in the trees to their left. A branch. Then a low scrape — wood on wood, or wood on something that wasn’t wood — that stopped too cleanly.

Garza’s fist went up.

Sera and Polk dropped. He heard them more than saw them, the small heavy sound of two bodies going to a knee and the rifles coming off slings into hands. He held his own rifle low and didn’t move and didn’t breathe and listened.

Wind. The settle of snow off a branch somewhere. Nothing else.

He counted to thirty.

Then to sixty.

The trees gave him nothing back.

He lowered the fist. Stood. The team stood with him. They moved on, and nobody said anything about it because there wasn’t anything to say. Either it had been a deer or it had been the kind of patrol that didn’t make a second sound, and if it had been the second thing, they‘d find out soon enough.

Twice more on the climb the hum came — a thin, distant whine that started in the chest before the ear caught it, and meant a drone working a grid somewhere down below. The first time it stayed low and moved away. The second time it climbed, briefly, the pitch sharpening, and Garza put his hand flat on the snow beside him and pressed his cheek into it and waited.

It went away.

He didn’t know if it had seen them. He didn’t know if it had bothered to look. He moved when it had been gone for a full minute and not before.

The last hard pitch was a cut in the rock face where the trail folded into itself and went up almost vertical for thirty feet. In summer it was a scramble. Tonight it was a problem. The snow had packed into the seams and frozen, and the holds Garza knew by feel were under an inch of glaze.

He went up first on the rope. Anchored at the top against a stunted spruce that had grown crooked out of the rock and was probably older than anything else on this slope. Tied off. Belayed Sera up. Then Polk. Polk got halfway and his foot kicked loose a frozen chunk of crust the size of a fist, and the chunk went down the cut and bounced once on the way and made a small dry tap that traveled too far in the cold.

Garza flattened against the spruce and waited.

Nothing answered.

Polk came up the rest of the way without speaking. His mouth was a tight line. There was frost in his beard.

“Good,” Garza said.

They coiled the rope. Polk took it. They moved on.

The trail flattened out past the cut into a long gentle bench that ran along the shoulder of the ridge. The pines here were old and close-set, and the snow under them was thinner because the canopy had taken most of it, and the going was easier than it had been in an hour. Garza let himself breathe a little.

Then the smell hit.

It was faint, half-buried under cold and pine resin, but it was there. Sweet-metal underneath. Something that had been opened and left to freeze.

He raised the fist.

The team stopped.

He went forward alone. Three slow steps. Five. He cleared a low fan of branches with the back of his glove and looked through.

The first one was on its back in the snow about twelve feet off the trail. Long, wrong proportions, the gray of the suit going darker where the cold had worked into the breach. A round hole in the chest plate where something heavy had punched through clean. The blood underneath had gone black and frozen and had stopped looking like blood and started looking like spilled tar.

The second was closer to the cabin. Face down. The skull cratered.

He crouched.

He didn’t touch them. He didn’t need to. He read the field instead — the way a man read a field he hadn’t been in but understood by trade. The first one had dropped where it stood. Hadn’t reached for cover. Hadn’t even known to. Surprise round. The second one had turned and got it through the chest before it had finished turning. He could see the half-pivot in the snow under the boots.

There had been a third. He could see the smear where it had crawled. The smear ended at a flattened place in the snow and then started again, and he recognized that pattern too. The man with the rifle had left it there to get to something that mattered more, and the thing that mattered more was inside the cabin.

He could guess what it had been.

“Two confirmed,” he murmured back over his shoulder. “Third was wounded. Not here.”

Sera came up beside him. She looked at the first body — the round through the chest plate, the half-pivot in the snow — and then she didn't look at the second. She read the trees past it instead, slow sweep, left to right and back. The bodies were Garza's problem. The woods beyond them was hers.

Polk hung back at the trees with the rope, watching the slope behind them.

Garza stood. The cabin was through the next thin run of pines, and he could see it now in the broken silver of starlight that came down through the haze.

It was standing.

That was the first thing.

The wall on the near side had taken a hit — a section of the timber caved inward where something heavy had punched through and the logs had splintered back along the grain. The plasma scoring around the breach had blackened the wood to charcoal in a wide halo. The roof overhang above that section had come down with it, and the shingles lay scattered across the snow in a fan, half-buried.

The door hung on one hinge. The other hinge had pulled out of the frame, and the door tilted across the threshold at an angle that meant a man would have to lift it to close it.

But the structure held. The ridge beam was straight. The rest of the roof had taken nothing. The other walls were sound. Whatever had happened here had happened to one face of the cabin and stopped.

Garza took it in for a long minute.

He looked for patrol sign. Boot prints in the fresh snow that weren’t the ones he’d already mapped. Disturbed crust along the cabin’s far walls. A circle of trampled ground where a watch had been kept. None of it was there. The snow around the cabin was old snow, settled, with the alien bodies and the drag-mark of the crawling third and nothing else. Whatever had come up the mountain had come and gone, and nothing had come back.

He counted to sixty.

A wind moved through the pines and shifted snow off a low branch and the snow fell with a small soft sound that was the only sound for a while.

He counted to sixty again.

Sera was still beside him. Her breath came small and quiet. She’d stopped looking at the bodies and started reading the cabin the way he was reading it.

“Clear,” she said, low.

“Mm.”

He raised his hand and brought Polk up.

Polk came on light feet, the rope coiled across his chest now and the rifle unslung. He looked at the bodies once and his mouth did the same tight thing it had done on the cut. He didn’t say anything.

Garza pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at the cabin, then held up a flat hand. Watch. Hold. He pointed at Sera, then to a position behind a downed pine that gave a clean angle on the door. He pointed at Polk and tipped his head toward the right side of the cabin where the breach was. Polk nodded.

They moved.

Garza took the door himself.

The door gave with the sole of his boot and tilted further off its frame and he stepped through into the dark.

He didn’t move past the threshold for a moment. He let his eyes do the work the cold had been keeping them from. The interior shape filled in piece by piece — beams, ceiling line, the suggestion of furniture, the dull pale rectangle of a window where the starlight came through.

A kitchen chair lay on its side three feet inside the door.

A bookshelf had come down along the far wall. The shelf itself was split where one of the brackets had pulled out, and the books had fanned across the floorboards in a long uneven spread. One was face down with its pages bent under the spine. The cover was cloth. He registered that without looking longer.

Two blood pools.

The first was under the window. Wide. Dark. Old enough to have set into the grain of the wood and gone tacky and then dry. A man had bled there for a while. Not long enough to die. Long enough that it had mattered.

The second was smaller and smeared. Near the door he had just come through. Boot drag in the smear. Whoever had bled there had walked through it on the way out.

He read both pools and put them in order. Bigger one first. Smaller one after. He kept his hand on the rifle.

“Clear inside,” he said, voice low, not turning. “Come.”

Sera came through. Then Polk. They read the room the way he had read it, in the order he had read it, and stopped where their reading was done.

The hearth was cold. He could feel that without putting a hand on it. The smell of an old fire, banked out a long time ago, sat in the room under everything else.

A water bowl sat on the hearthstones beside the cold ash. He stepped to it. The inside had been licked clean to the metal. Whatever had been put there had been used.

A folded blanket lay on a low cot against the far wall. Wool. Heavy. Folded square the way a man folded a blanket who had grown up folding them.

On the floor next to the cot, strips of pale gray cotton.

He went down on one knee beside them. Picked up the nearest strip with his bare hand. Soft. Torn, not cut — the edge frayed where the fabric had been ripped along the grain. Sections from the body of an undershirt. He could see the shape of where a chest had been, where a hem had ended. A man’s shirt, taken off and torn into a roll when whatever wrap had been in the cabin had run out. Some of the strips were stained dark. Some weren’t.

He set the strip down where he had found it.

Then he saw her.

Behind the cot, in the corner where the wall met the floor, a shape that hadn’t resolved when he’d come in. Heavy. Low. White around the muzzle. Her ribs were bound in the same gray cotton, the wrap going twice around her chest and tied off in a knot somebody had done one-handed with his teeth.

She was watching him.

Her muzzle pulled back from her teeth. The growl started low in her chest and didn’t stop. Sustained. The kind of sound a working dog made when she had decided something and was not going to be talked out of it.

Her shoulders trembled.

He saw it and read it correctly. Not fear. Not cold. The trembling of a body holding posture it didn’t have the strength to hold and holding it anyway. Her eyes had sunk back into her skull. Her coat had gone dull where the oil had bled out of it. Her tongue worked against the back of her teeth in slow dry passes. She had been here for hours without a man, and she had been on her feet most of them.

“Hold,” Garza whispered.

Sera and Polk stopped where they stood.

Garza went down. Slow. One knee, then the other. The rifle hung off its sling at his right side. He let it hang. He turned his hands palm-out and brought them down low and kept them there.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. Quiet. The voice he used on horses that hadn’t made up their mind about him. “I know. I know.”

He didn’t go closer.

He didn’t reach.

The growl held. Steady as the fuse block hum in the bunker. Her eyes flicked once past him to the door and came back.

He counted.

Behind him, Polk shifted his weight. Just a fraction. The boards under Polk’s heel creaked once.

She came.

She came short and ugly and faster than a dog her size and her age and her injuries had any business moving. Three feet of distance closed before he saw her clear of the cot, and her teeth went through the jacket sleeve and through the wool underneath into the meat of his forearm, and the pressure was specific and trained and she was not biting to kill, she was biting to move him.

He made a sound through his teeth.

He did not pull.

That was the rule. He had learned it from a working dog forty pounds heavier than this one and a man who had stitched his arm closed afterward and told him so. Pulling tore. Holding still let the animal end the bite on her own terms.

He held still.

Three seconds. He counted them. Her jaws were locked and her shoulders had stopped trembling because the work had given her something to do with the trembling, and her eyes the entire time were not on him at all. Her eyes were on the door.

She let go.

She backed up. One step. Two. Her back leg stumbled on the third and she caught herself against the cot, and the blood on her muzzle was a mix of fresh from him and dried from something older.

The growl came back.

Garza exhaled. Slow. Through the nose.

He looked at his sleeve. The dark stain spread out from four points where the canine teeth had gone in, and a longer smear where the lower jaw had dragged on the way out. Not arterial. Bleeding good. Workable.

He pulled a field dressing from the kit on his belt with the good hand. Got the corner of the wrapper between his teeth. Tore it open. Worked the pad onto the wound through the torn jacket sleeve, one-handed, the way a man learned to do when no one else was coming. He passed the gauze around his forearm three times and pinched the tab in his teeth and tightened it down until the pressure was right.

He thought, briefly, about asking Polk to put her down.

The thought arrived and he watched it arrive and let it pass through and leave again. It didn’t deserve any more than that. He tightened the tab with his teeth and held the bandage in place against his chest and breathed.

He looked at the bowl. Licked clean. He looked at the cotton strips. Torn from a shirt. He looked at the two pools — the big one under the window where a man had bled and stayed, the small smeared one by the door where a man had walked through it on the way out.

The man had walked.

The man had wrapped her ribs first. Filled her water. Folded the blanket. Left the door.

He had not closed the door because he had not been able to. The door had not closed since.

Garza looked at the dog in the corner.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”

Sera was watching him. Not the dog. Him.

He inclined his head toward the corner.

“She’s doing her job.”

Sera glanced at Valka, then at the bowl, then at the door behind them. She nodded once.

Polk said nothing.

Outside, a wind moved through the dead pines along the ridge, and the half-hung door knocked once against the frame and settled.

Valka kept her corner.

He gave it a minute. Then another. Then he tried again.

He went at her the same way he had the first time — knee down, hands low, voice quiet. He got two feet closer than before. She let him. Then her muzzle came up and her teeth went bare and she snapped at the air a hand’s width from his glove, and he did not flinch and he did not advance and he did not pull back.

She retreated. Her back leg trembled on the retreat. She caught herself against the cot again.

He sat back on his heel and exhaled.

Polk fished through his ration pouch and came up with a strip of dried meat in his glove. He held it up. Garza took it. Set it on the floorboards halfway between himself and her, and slid it forward an inch with two fingers.

She looked at it.

She looked at him.

She did not move.

The growl held.

“She’s not going to be bought,” Sera said. Quiet. From the doorway.

“No.”

“Wrap her in the blanket. Carry her out.”

Garza looked at the dog. Looked at the wrap on her ribs and the way her flanks were drawing in too fast and the trembling that wasn’t fear. He thought about the descent. The cut. The glazed ledge. A ninety-pound dog wrapped in wool and held against a man’s chest while that man tried to come down the mountain in the dark.

“Stress’ll kill her,” he said.

Sera didn’t argue.

“She’s halfway there already. We force her, she goes the rest of the way before we hit the tree line.”

Polk was looking at the cotton strips on the floor. At the water bowl. The folded blanket on the cot.

“Elias,” he said.

It came out almost as nothing. Like the word had walked up his throat ahead of his thinking and gone out before he could take it back. He blinked after he said it, like he wasn’t sure why he had.

The dog stopped.

Her growl cut off mid-sound, sheared clean. Her ears, which had been pinned flat against her skull, rotated forward. Her head tilted a degree. Every muscle she had locked.

Garza didn’t move.

“Elias,” he said. Slower. Lower. The way a man said a word he had just learned was a key.

Her tail swept the floor once. Not a wag. A twitch — involuntary, the kind of motion a body made when a name it knew passed through it without asking permission.

She stepped out from behind the cot.

She did not relax. She did not soften. She didn’t trust them. But she stopped fighting.

“Easy,” Garza said. “Easy, sweetheart. We’re going to him.”

He did not know if it was true. He thought it probably was.

He moved forward. Slow. He kept saying the name at intervals — every few breaths, low, even. Her ears tracked it each time. He got a hand’s breadth from her muzzle and stopped. Held the hand still. The wrapped arm, the one she had bitten. He let her smell the blood she had put there.

She sniffed. Twice. Once long.

Her shoulders dropped by a fraction.

He brought his other hand up. Slow. Touched the wrap on her ribs with the back of his glove. She stiffened. Held. Did not snap.

“Good girl.”

He looked over his shoulder.

“Boards. The wall ones — the broken section.”

Polk moved. He pulled two of the intact wall boards out of the splintered section near the breach, where the alien hit had loosened them in their seats. The boards came free with a low groan of old nails. Six feet long. Roughed at the edges where the timber had blown.

Sera unspooled the rope. Garza pulled the spare jacket from his pack and Polk cut it into long strips with the knife from his belt.

It wasn’t pretty. It would carry her.

Getting her onto it was ten minutes of patience he didn’t have time for and spent anyway.

He kept the name going. Soft. Even. Each time she tensed — when Sera came close with one end of the stretcher, when Polk’s boot scraped the floor, when the wind outside moved the door against the frame — he said it again.

“Elias.”

Her ears would track it. The tension would bleed off a fraction.

Sera held the frame steady. Polk kept his hands visible and didn’t come closer than four feet. Garza did the work himself. He slid one arm under her chest, careful of the wrap, and the other under her hindquarters, and she stiffened against him and held it and did not bite. She let him take her weight.

She was lighter than she should have been.

He felt that and filed it and didn’t let it onto his face.

He set her down on the webbing one piece at a time. Front quarters. Hindquarters. A small adjustment when one of the rope lashings caught at her flank and she made a sound he didn’t like. He shifted her two inches to the left and the sound stopped.

She lowered her head onto her front paws and made a long pained grunt and held still.

“Good girl,” he said. He meant it.

He checked her ribs. The wrap had held. He checked her gums with his thumb. They were paler than he wanted. She needed water and warmth and a man she trusted, and he could not give her any of those things on this mountain. He could give her the descent.

He stood.

“Move,” he said.

Polk took the front poles. Garza took the rear. Sera unslung her rifle, took point, and stepped through the broken doorway first.

They came out of the cabin into the cold and the dark and the long slope down. The wind had picked up while they were inside. The pines moved in it. The dead aliens in the snow caught the starlight where the suit plates were broken open, and Sera went past them without looking and Polk went past them with his eyes down and Garza went past them last, and he looked at each of them on the way and did not say anything and did not slow.

The descent was the climb in reverse, with new math.

Two men on the litter. One on point. A wounded dog who weighed less than she should have weighed. A glazed ledge they had climbed up wrong and would have to come down righter. Drone hum somewhere down the valley that hadn’t come yet but would. Three hours before dawn and four hours of trail and the only honest answer to that was to start moving and not stop.

Garza adjusted his grip on the rear poles. The bite on his forearm pulled under the wrap. He let it pull. It would scar. He knew the shape of bites that scarred. Fair payment, he thought, and stopped thinking about it.

Behind him, in the webbing, Valka kept her eyes open.

She watched the trees the whole way down.

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Perfect is the enemy of good. im done rewriting this one. Cheers.

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Reyes came for him an hour later.

She didn't knock. There was nothing to knock on. She stepped into the workshop doorway and stood there long enough for Elias to register her without being told.

"Walk with me."

He set the rifle down. Slow.

The forearm cradle was still strapped to him. The chest bracket sat against his sternum where the ribs had stopped arguing and started keeping score. He pushed off the bench with his right hand and got vertical.

The hip seized.

Released.

Valka was on her feet before he was. She moved to his right side without being asked.

Corin didn't look up from his work.

Good.

The corridor was damp where the rock sweat hadn't been wiped down in days. The air smelled like old concrete, thin starch cooking somewhere far off, and too many bodies that hadn't seen sunlight in three weeks.

Reyes set a pace that accounted for his gait without naming it.

Half a step slower than she would have walked alone.

She didn't look back.

Valka's nails clicked on the floor. The wrap around her ribs showed white through the shaved patches in her coat.

"Rations first," Reyes said.

The shelves were bolted against a stone wall in a widened section of corridor. Three rows, floor to shoulder height. Dented tins. Compressed bricks wrapped in waxed paper. A few jars of something that had once been pickled and was now mostly brine.

Above each row, paper had been tacked to the wood.

Quota numbers.

Tight handwriting. Reyes's.

Crossed out and rewritten so many times the paper had gone gray and soft, the pencil marks layered thick enough that the newest numbers had to be circled to be found.

Elias read the sheets.

Then the shelves.

He counted.

Calories per body. Days against margin. Stress curve. Waste. Spoilage. The point where the math fell apart.

It fell apart fast.

"How many rifles?"

Reyes was already walking again.

"Sixty-three people."

He followed.

She didn't elaborate.

She didn't have to.

The number sat behind him in the corridor and came with him anyway. He tried to fit it against the shelves. Against the math.

The math got worse.

The water condenser was twenty paces on. A natural seep in the rock had been worked over with salvage pipe and a crude filter housing. Gravel. Charcoal. Cloth replaced often enough that the staining showed in rings.

Brackish water dripped into a collection tank.

He watched three drops fall and timed them against his pulse.

Roughly a liter an hour.

Maybe less.

A hand-lettered sign hung above the tank.

BOIL BEFORE USE — ALWAYS.

The ALWAYS was underlined twice.

He didn't say anything.

The rate was the rate. Sixty-three people drinking from a tank that filled at a liter an hour meant the tank was a supplement, not a source. Snowmelt somewhere. Stored water. Maybe runoff.

Whatever it was, it would run out.

Reyes kept moving.

The sleeping alcove was carved into the mountain's shoulder, a narrow room widening sideways into rock. Bunks stacked three high against both walls. Thin mattresses. Old army wool blankets with furred edges. People slept through the middle of the day or pretended to.

A child's shoe sat beside one of the lower bunks.

Just one.

Worn at the toe. Lace retied with a square knot that didn't match the original lacing.

Above another cot, someone had wedged a photograph into a fissure in the rock. Elias didn't look long enough to see who was in it. Long enough only to know it mattered to somebody. Long enough to know the person who had pushed it into that crack had decided this was where it lived now.

He kept moving.

"They sleep in shifts," Reyes said. "We don't have enough bunks for everyone at once."

"Mm."

The generator nook sat at the far end of the passage.

A low-humming turbine rested on a thick rubber pad weighted at the corners with sandbags. Oil stained the concrete beneath it in layered dark halos. Diesel and hot copper. Old heat.

An old man crouched in front of a fuse block, headlamp throwing yellow light across the panel. His hands worked a stripped wire end into a terminal screw with slow, untrembling patience.

He didn't look up.

Reyes didn't acknowledge him.

Whatever the arrangement was, it had been made a long time ago and didn't need refreshing.

The pulse of the bulb in the workshop was this.

The fuse block.

The old man's hands.

Elias filed it.

They came out into a small junction where three corridors met. Reyes stopped. Turned.

Her eyes were tired in the way they had been at the map table. Tired in a deeper way too. The kind sleep might sand down but never finish.

He took the moment.

"How much ammunition?"

She looked at him for a beat.

"Twelve children."

He stopped walking.

It wasn't a flinch.

He didn't flinch.

It was just the body refusing the next step until the head caught up with what had been said.

His good hand dropped to his side.

Valka stopped half a pace ahead and looked back at him.

Reyes didn't stop. She walked three more steps, then turned and waited.

Her face wasn't hard. Wasn't soft either. It was the face of someone who had decided a while ago that this was how the answers were going to come, and she wasn't going to apologize for it.

"You asked the wrong thing," she said. "I'm telling you what I have."

He looked at her.

The shelves. The tank. The shoe. The photograph. The old man's hands.

Sixty-three people.

Twelve children.

Both numbers refusing to be assets.

He thought of Tamsin. The girl on the cot from the first day. The boy asleep against her shoulder. Thought about how many more he hadn't seen. Thought about what twelve children meant against a tether that would be standing in days.

He didn't say anything.

He started walking again.

Reyes waited until he was level with her before she turned and kept going.

Valka pressed against his right thigh.

He followed.

The wound corner came next.

A canvas curtain hung across a partition in the side wall, weighted at the bottom with a length of chain. Reyes pulled it aside without warning and held it.

The smell hit before the light did.

Antiseptic. Wet bandages. Skin not healing fast enough. The undersmell of a body that had been horizontal too long.

Three cots.

Two empty.

The third held a fighter with one leg wrapped from groin to knee in dressings gone yellow at the seep points. He was awake. He looked at Reyes, then Elias, then Valka, then back at the ceiling.

He didn't speak.

His eyes were the eyes Elias had seen in field hospitals all the way back to his first deployment.

The flat, conserving stare of a man rationing what he had left.

Clay pots of medical paste sat on a shelf. Bandage rolls in a cracked plastic bin, sorted by width. Sterilization tongs rested in a metal cup that had been someone's coffee cup before it had been anything else.

Elias's jaw tightened.

He kept moving.

Reyes let the curtain fall behind them.

"Carlos," she said. "Drone strike at the lower road. Three days ago. The leg's not coming back."

"Above or below the knee."

"Below. We're holding. Mostly."

He didn't ask what holding meant.

He had seen what it looked like when holding stopped.

The ammunition room was through a metal door hinged into the rock with bolts that didn't match. Reyes pushed it open with her shoulder.

The space inside was low-ceilinged and colder than the corridor. Drier too. The kind of cold that meant someone had thought about humidity and powder.

Lockers lined the wall, painted gray and labeled in chalk.

MAG 7.62. PLASMA CELL. FRAG. SMOKE.

Some labels had numbers beneath them. Circled. Dated. Updated recently.

Crates were stacked in the center of the floor. Rifle rounds in sealed boxes. Plasma cells in foam-cradled racks, pull-tabs intact on most of them, broken on a few that had been tested and failed.

The rack on the far wall held eight rifles.

Elias walked to it.

Slow.

His good hand came up.

He went down the rack the way he had gone down a hundred racks before. Touch the receiver. Check the stock. Sight along the barrel. Work the action when the action would work for one hand. Set it back. Move to the next.

Two stocks were cracked.

One bound with wire and hope.

The other worse. Hairline through the toe. Almost invisible. The kind of crack that looked like nothing until the rifle fired and then it wasn't nothing anymore.

The third had a bent feed rail.

He saw it when he angled the receiver toward the bulb overhead. Slight curve in the steel. Ugly. Easy to miss. The magazine would seat. Most of the time. Until the tolerance closed and the round didn't strip clean and the rifle jammed at exactly the wrong second.

His hand stopped on it.

"How many fighters?"

Reyes leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed.

"Nine wounded."

He looked over.

"Of the rest," she said, "twenty if I count everyone who can stand up and hold a rifle long enough for it to matter. That includes three over sixty who insist they can shoot, and two who can't, but who I haven't told yet."

She paused.

"I have one woman with a fever I'm pretending not to notice because if I notice it, I have to move her in with Carlos, and I don't have the bunk."

"Twenty."

"Twenty on a generous count. Fifteen on a real one."

"Out of sixty-three."

"Out of sixty-three."

He looked back at the rifle.

The bent rail caught the light wrong.

Workable. Heat it. Press it true against a jig. Test cycle. Corin could do it with the right brace.

He set the rifle back on the rack.

Carefully.

When he turned, Reyes was still watching him.

She hadn't moved.

He didn't say anything.

Neither did she.

After a moment, she pushed off the doorframe and stepped back into the corridor.

The latrine was at the passage's dead end.

He smelled it before they reached the curtain.

Antiseptic and lime.

Working.

Losing.

Reyes pulled the curtain aside. She didn't make him go in.

Just held it long enough for him to see.

The trench cut into the rock. Bags of lime stacked at the head. Wooden plank seats worn smooth. A bucket of ash with a hand-lettered sign above it.

ONE SCOOP.

Then she let the curtain drop.

Valka had stopped at the edge and pressed herself against the back of his right knee.

She didn't want to go through.

He didn't make her.

They walked back the way they'd come, took a branch he hadn't seen before, and stopped in front of a steel bulkhead set into the rock.

Old door. Industrial gray. Riveted seams. Wheel-lock at the center. Chained and padlocked. Extra bolts driven through the frame into the stone.

Across the door, in uneven red letters laid down by a shaking hand, was a single warning.

STRUCTURAL — DO NOT OPEN.

The paint had run in places.

The drips had dried that way.

Elias stopped in front of it.

"What's down there."

"I don't know."

He looked at her.

"I haven't opened it," Reyes said. "Haven't sent anyone past it. Bolts were already there when we found the place. Chain was mine."

"Why."

"Because I don't have the people to deal with what might be on the other side. Empty passage. Collapse. Bad air. Another way out. Another way in. I don't know. And I don't have someone I can spend finding out."

He looked at the door.

The red letters.

The drips.

Ten years ago, he would have argued. Open it. Know the floor plan. Never sleep in a building you didn't own all the way down to the rock.

He didn't argue now.

He didn't have the standing.

"Fair."

Reyes nodded once.

Just once.

Then turned and started back.

He followed.

The wall was at the main junction where three corridors met and the ceiling rose high enough for a man to stand straight.

He had walked past it on the way in.

Hadn't seen it.

He'd been counting fields of fire, sentry spacing, door angles, and possible breach routes.

Everything else had gone under not-now.

Now Reyes stopped in front of it and let him see.

The stone had been smoothed.

Not by tools.

By hands.

People had run palms over it long enough that the rock had taken on a matte sheen around the chalk marks.

The wall ran maybe twelve feet across.

From floor to shoulder height, names.

Some careful block letters, chalk pressed hard by someone who wanted the name to last. Some rounded and leaning forward, cursive shaped at a school desk a long time ago. A few were just initials.

Two were in a child's hand.

Wide. Uneven. Wandering off line where the chalk had run out of pressure.

In the cracks between names, people had wedged things.

A spent brass casing above the third name. Primer dimpled. Pinched sideways into a fissure.

A folded piece of cloth near the floor. Child's handkerchief maybe. Corner embroidered with something too gray to read.

Higher up, a folded paper with softened edges. A drawing. The corner showed colored pencil.

Crayon.

He couldn't tell.

A single bootlace was wound through a protrusion of stone three feet from the floor.

Tied off with a careful double knot.

He read the names.

Started at the top left and worked across. Dropped a row and worked back.

The way he had read every casualty list he had ever been handed.

Top to bottom.

Left to right.

No skipping.

No skimming.

He didn't recognize any names.

He hadn't expected to.

That wasn't why he was reading them.

He counted.

Twenty-three.

Then counted again.

The second pass slowed in the middle, where two names had been written close together and he wasn't sure if they were one entry or two.

They were two.

He kept going.

Twenty-three.

His good hand dropped to his side.

He stood there.

Didn't move.

His breathing slowed in the deliberate way breathing slowed when the body wanted to do something else and the head was holding it still.

Reyes leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed.

Watching.

Not waiting for a reaction.

Just watching, the way a commander watched a man process information she had already finished processing.

He turned to her.

"How many were fighters>"

"Eleven."

He nodded once.

Slow.

"How."

She knew what he meant.

"Top row, first three. Patrol contact at the lower road. Second week. Drone sweep got them on the way back to the door. We saw it from the cameras. Couldn't get out in time."

She tracked the names with one finger, not touching the stone.

"Marisol. Fever. First one. We didn't know what it was yet. Thought it was the water."

Her finger moved.

"Lucas. Shelter at the south draw. Roof came down in a strike. We pulled three out. He wasn't one of the three."

Another.

"Garcia. Walked into the open because he thought he could get to the supply cache before the next sweep."

A pause.

"He was right about the sweep. Wrong about the cover."

She stopped at the next name.

"This one was a bad decision by somebody who outranked me at the time. I don't talk about that one."

She moved on.

Patrol. Strike. Collapse. Fever. Missing. Two who went out and never came back. Nothing left to bury when the others went looking.

Then her finger came down to the bottom of the wall.

The last name.

Lower than the others. Smaller. Written in a hand he couldn't place. Not childlike. Not adult either. Neat letters. Careful spacing. Like someone had thought about how the name would look before writing it.

"He was fourteen," Reyes said. "He wasn't supposed to be outside."

She didn't say more.

Elias looked at the name.

Longer than he had looked at any of the others.

Valka shifted at his boot and pressed the side of her head against his thigh.

Steady pressure.

The way she leaned into him when she had decided he needed her to.

He didn't reach down for her.

Didn't trust the hand right then.

He turned from the wall to Reyes.

She hadn't moved.

Arms still crossed.

Face unchanged.

"You're not soft."

Not a compliment.

Just a statement laid on the concrete between them, the way a man laid down a tool he had been carrying too long.

Reyes held his eyes.

"No."

A beat.

"You wanted assets," she said. "I showed you what I have."

He looked back at the wall.

Names.

Brass casing.

Folded cloth.

A drawing he hadn’t unfolded and wouldn’t.

Bootlace tied in a careful double knot.

He had been counting calories and rounds and bunks the way a man counted when the people inside the numbers didn’t have faces yet.

Reyes had been counting them the other way the whole time.

Without the relief of pretending the numbers were anything other than what they were.

She had been carrying this.

All of it.

Twenty-three names. Twelve children. Nine wounded. The fever she was pretending not to notice. The door she didn’t have the people to open. The rifles that mostly worked. The water that wouldn’t last.

He hadn’t been asked to carry any of it.

Yet.

Reyes pushed off the wall and came to his side.

Not close enough to comfort.

Close enough to share the weight.

He stood there a while longer.

Valka’s weight stayed against his right leg. Warm. Steady. The wrap around her ribs rough through his trousers. Her breathing was slow and even. Wrong in the way old dogs got wrong. Right in the way she had been right his whole adult life.

The bulb at the junction pulsed.

Bright.

Dim.

Bright.

Elias read the names again.

Not counting this time.

Just reading.

Reyes waited beside him.

Elias read the names again.

Not counting this time.

Just reading.

Reyes waited beside him.

She had already done this math.

Now he was doing it too.

He did.

Not all of it.

Enough.

The bunker was not a position.

It was not a hole.

It was not a cache of rifles, calories, bodies, and bad air waiting to be spent against the enemy.

It was sixty-three people hiding inside a mountain, trying to remain alive for one more day.

He let out a slow breath.

Then another.

Valka leaned harder into his leg.

Reyes said nothing.

She didn’t need to.

Neither did he.

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Another day in the life of a broken, drugged, retired space marine.

[First] [Prev] [Next]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He caught himself on the wall before the floor came up.

Right hand flat against cold concrete. Ribs lit up. The stump throbbed in time with his pulse and sent a signal to fingers that weren't there to brace him.

Valka stopped a half-step ahead. Looked back. Waited.

"I know," Elias said. "Working on it."

He pushed off the wall slow. Got vertical. The bootlace had come undone again, ugly knot or not, and the tongue had rolled sideways under his foot.

He was not bending down for it.

Not in a corridor with people who could see.

He shuffled the foot until the lace stopped catching, and walked.

Valka kept the pace. Right side. Hip against his hip. Her ribs were wrapped and her back leg was stiff, but she stayed there anyway, close enough to lean into him if his body tried something stupid.

The corridor curved past the med corner and the generator mesh and opened into a back room that had been storage once.

Now it was something else.

Elias stopped in the doorway.

He read it before he stepped in.

Steel bench. Bolted to the floor. Scarred to hell. One bulb hanging above it on a black cord, pulsing with the generator. Bright. Dim. Bright.

Salvage bins stacked at both ends. Alien composite. Terran steel. Fasteners. Wiring coiled and taped. Stripped rifles laid out along the back edge in rows.

A cracked power cell sat beside a roll of insulating tape.

Pre-cut.

Stuck to the bench edge for one-handed grabbing.

Two clamps were bolted to the bench face. Heavy ones. Adjustable. The heads angled inward toward where a man would stand.

A row of leather straps was fixed flat to the surface, buckles open.

Every tool in reach.

Every tool on the right side.

Elias looked at all of it.

His jaw set.

The kid hadn't built a workshop. He'd built a workshop for a one-armed man and tried to make it look like a workshop.

Somebody had thought about him while he was unconscious.

He didn't know whether to be grateful or put a fist through the wall.

Valka leaned harder against his thigh.

Not concerned.

Just present.

"Yeah," he muttered.

He stepped in.

Corin was already at the bench. Sleeves rolled. Grease up to both elbows. He had a stripped bolt assembly under one of the clamps and a brass cleaning brush in one hand.

He looked up when Elias came in.

Eyes to Valka first.

Then Elias's right hand.

Then Elias's face.

"You're up."

"Mm."

Corin set the brush down. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

"That suit," he said. "The Warden. I cracked the diagnostic plate while you were out. Just to see what was salvageable. The wear patterns on the chest piece, that's Sirius. Not training. My old man said the units that ran Warden-pattern in the back half of that war were the ones they sent when they wanted a town to stop existing. He said…"

"No."

The word landed flat in the middle of the bench.

Corin stopped.

Elias's good hand had found the edge of the steel and gone still there, knuckles white where the bench pressed back against bone.

He let the silence hold.

Then met the kid's eyes.

"Your old man's stories," Elias said. "Whatever he told you. Whoever he said I was. Bury it."

"I didn't…"

"Bury it. I don't talk about it. I'm not going to talk about it. The next time you try, we are done at this bench. Clear?"

Corin's throat worked.

He nodded once.

"Yes."

"Good."

The kid recovered fast.

Elias gave him that.

He didn't fold. Didn't apologize. Didn't fill the air with anything stupid. He put both hands flat on the bench, looked at the rifle parts, and pivoted.

"Reload speed."

Elias glanced at him.

"Terran mag rifle," Corin said. "Right hand only. No second hand to assist. What were you running before?"

"Two and a half. Combat reload. Fresh mag, full cycle, back on target."

"Two-handed."

"Two-handed."

"What do you think you can do now?"

Elias took the question and turned it over.

Clean question. No softening. No pity. No coaxing.

That, he could work with.

"Don't know yet. Six. Eight. Longer if I have to find the magazine."

"Right shoulder torque. Dry firing the bolt one-handed, what can you generate?"

"Enough to run a Terran action. Probably not enough to break alien lockup if it binds. Shoulder's the shoulder. Hip's worse."

"Hip's not in the firing chain."

"Hip's in everything," Elias said. "Hip drops me when I plant wrong. If I plant wrong on a reload, I dump the magazine on the floor."

Corin nodded.

Didn't argue.

Filed it.

"Okay," he said. "Strip first."

"Strip first."

"You break it down. I watch where it fights you. Then we figure out what to brace and what to bolt to your chest."

Elias looked at him.

The kid was younger than Elias's son would have been, if Elias's son had been allowed to keep being anything. Grease on his sleeves. Bruise on his jaw. Hands that had worked long enough to stop being soft.

Not his son.

Not a ghost.

Just the mechanic in front of him.

"Alright."

He stepped up to the bench.

Valka folded herself onto the concrete at his right boot and put her chin on her paws.

Watched.

Elias picked up the rifle.

The rifle came up easy.

That was the lie of it.

Single-handed grip on the receiver. Stock tucked against his ribs. Muzzle right. Action up.

Standard field strip. He had done it ten thousand times. In dark. In mud. In rain. With blood on his hands that wasn't his and wasn't drying fast enough.

The hands knew the way.

Today the hands did not.

His thumb found the takedown pin.

Pressed.

The pin moved a quarter inch and stopped.

On a two-handed strip, the off hand caught the pin from the other side and walked it through.

There was no off hand.

He pressed harder.

The pin slid through.

And kept going.

It bounced once on the steel, hit the rolled tape, ricocheted, and skittered across the bench in a thin metallic line.

His hand moved.

Wrong hand.

Nothing on the other side to stop it.

The pin went off the edge and hit concrete somewhere under the bench with a small dull tap.

Elias stood very still.

"Fine," he said, to no one.

He bent. The ribs bit. He found the pin against the base of the bench leg with two fingers and came up slower than he'd gone down.

Corin did not look up.

Good.

Second attempt.

Receiver braced against his ribs. Grip pinned under his right forearm. He pulled the charging handle. The bolt carrier started to come out.

Without the off hand, the receiver rotated.

Just a few degrees.

Enough.

The carrier bound.

Wrong friction. Wrong place.

He pulled harder out of habit, felt the carrier start to score the inside wall, and stopped.

Set the rifle down.

Breathed out through his nose.

Valka shifted at his boot. Looked at him, then the bench.

No help there.

Third attempt.

He pinned the receiver tighter. Rotated his stance. Watched the angle. Worked the carrier free slow, keeping the geometry right with the only hand he had.

The carrier came out clean.

He set it down where a carrier belonged.

Then the bolt.

He pressed the retainer with his thumbnail.

The small return spring jumped.

It cleared the bolt face, hit the steel, bounced once off a clamp head, and arced into the open mouth of the salvage bin.

The bin held wire, fasteners, broken alien composite, and probably forty pounds of dense, tangled metal.

The spring made one tiny sound on the way in.

Then nothing.

Elias did not move.

His good hand stayed on the bolt body. Knuckles white. Tendons standing up like cable.

He did not look at the bin.

He did not look at Corin.

He looked at the bench.

Across from him, Corin set down the brass brush.

Quiet.

He did not say it's alright.

Did not say we'll find it.

Did not say he had spares.

He reached left, picked up the spare clamp, and slid it across the steel toward Elias's right hand.

Slow.

Like sliding water to a man who had not asked for any.

Then he went back to his work.

Elias looked at the clamp.

Then at Corin.

Corin did not look up.

Elias took the clamp.

Set the bolt body in the jaws. Snugged it down. The clamp held where his off hand would have held.

Steady.

Fixed.

Not going anywhere.

He took a replacement spring from the small parts tin without asking. Corin did not look up. He seated it. Worked the firing pin back in. Reassembled the bolt in the clamp. Released it. Lifted it free.

Slow.

Ugly.

Nothing like muscle memory.

But complete.

He walked the bolt back into the carrier. Walked the carrier back into the receiver. Worked the takedown pin home with thumb pressure and a tilt of the rifle against his ribs that made them scream.

He ignored them.

Set the rifle down.

Then he lined the loose parts beside it.

Right to left.

The way the hands wanted to do it when the hands were working.

He stared at the line.

Said nothing.

Corin set the brush down again.

"Magazine catch," he said. "Standard mag rifle catch is left side. You can't reach it across the body one-handed. Not under load. Not under stress."

"No."

"So we move it."

"Where."

"Off the rifle. Onto your chest. Salvage bracket on the suit plate. Angled so when you drive a fresh mag against your sternum, it indexes itself."

Elias looked at him.

"Show me."

Corin moved.

Alien bracket. Salvage steel. Nylon webbing. Furniture bolts. Friction tape.

"Suit plate's in the back," Corin said. "What's left of it."

"Bring it."

He brought it.

The right side of Elias's chest piece. Breach edges ground smooth. Upper section intact. Old mounting points still usable.

Corin held the bracket near the collarbone line.

"There."

Elias shook his head.

"Lower."

"Higher's faster."

"Higher's faster for someone with two hands. I'm not bringing the magazine to the bracket. I'm bringing my body to the magazine. If it's high, I lift the rifle. With this hip, I lift the rifle and go sideways."

Corin frowned.

Moved it lower.

"Lower binds."

"On what."

"Old comm boss." Corin tapped the raised ridge inside the plate. "Magazine catches there before it catches the bracket. You jam."

Elias set his thumb against the boss.

Pressed.

"Cut it."

"It's structural."

"Not anymore."

Corin held his eyes for a second.

Then nodded.

He braced the plate, took a small reciprocating tool, and ground the boss flat in three passes. Sparks ran across the steel and died on the concrete.

Valka watched them die and did not flinch.

The bracket went on lower.

"Try it."

Elias stood.

Corin held the plate against his chest. Elias brought a spare magazine up with his right hand.

It seated against the bracket.

Indexed.

Held.

"Angle's wrong."

"Where."

"Face is parallel. Needs five degrees down toward the rifle. I drive forward, magazine wants to slide into the receiver. Not sit on my chest."

Corin heated the bracket, bent it by eye, cooled it, brought it back.

Tried again.

Better.

"Belt guide," Elias said.

Corin took a bent rifle rail and hammered it into a crude L-shape. Drilled two holes. Bolted it through an old utility belt at hip height. Wrapped the inside with friction tape where the bolt heads wanted to bite.

Elias buckled it on.

The L sat at his right hip, opening forward.

He brought the rifle into it.

Receiver settled.

Hands free.

"Sling channel," Elias said.

Corin ran nylon through the old suit mount and down to the belt. The hinge squeaked when Elias shifted.

Corin reached for tape.

"Leave it."

"It's noisy."

"It's mine. I want to know when it moves."

Corin set the tape down.

"Forearm cradle."

"For what."

"Stability. I'm running the rifle off the forearm, not the hand. Hand stays on trigger. Receiver needs somewhere to live."

"That changes your sight picture."

"I know."

Corin found a curved piece of alien composite, cut it down, lined it with leather, and strapped it to Elias's right forearm with two nylon loops.

The cradle held the receiver against the inside of his arm.

The grip fell under his palm.

He looked down at himself.

Mismatched metal. Black tape. Furniture bolts. A hinge that squeaked with every breath. Belt rig that didn't match the chest rig. Chest rig that didn't match the cradle.

None of it was pretty.

None of it was what he had walked off the mountain wearing.

But it sat on him.

"Magazine."

Corin handed him one.

Elias seated the rifle into the forearm cradle. Grip under palm. Magazine to chest. Index. Catch. Drive.

The bracket pinched.

Lower edge caught against the bottom of his rib wrap and bit hard. The cracked ribs underneath registered the pressure and lit up.

His breath caught.

He didn't stop.

He brought the rifle forward off the chest. The magazine seated. Receiver took it. Hand back to grip. Charging handle worked one-handed with the L taking weight at the hip.

The bolt rode forward.

The round chambered.

He held the rifle there.

Breathing shallow.

Eyes flat and far.

The kind of flat that meant the body was reporting and the head was filing the report and nothing else was happening on his face.

He ran the cycle once more.

Drop magazine.

New magazine to chest.

Index.

Drive.

Forward.

Charge.

Chamber.

It worked.

He set the rifle down on the bench. Slow. Carefully. Both edges of the receiver landed clean on steel.

He didn'tt look at Corin.

Corin gave one short nod.

He did not say good start.

Didn't say it would get easier.

Didn't say anything.

He picked up the brass brush.

The bulb above the bench dimmed. Held low for a long second. Came back up.

Valka's tail thumped once against the concrete.

That was enough.

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I'm starting to feel bad for this guy.

[First] [Prev] [Next]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He didn't dream. He never did anymore. One second there was nothing, and then there was a ceiling he didn't recognize, and every alarm in his head went off at once.

Wrong room. Wrong light. Wrong smell.

Elias tried to move and his body told him to go to hell. Everything hurt in the specific, heavy way that meant someone had been working on him while he was out. The ribs were wrapped tighter than he remembered. The side wound was dressed clean and packed with something that smelled like antiseptic and burnt plastic. An IV line ran into his right arm, the needle taped down with medical strips that looked newer than anything else in this place.

He was on a cot. Blanket pulled to his chest. No armor. Just the flight suit's base layer, cut open down the left side where they'd needed access. The air hit bare skin and old scars.

No armor.

That hit harder than it should have.

He reached for the suit's collar seal out of reflex and his left arm didn't answer. For a full, ugly second he didn't understand why, and then his brain caught up to where his body was and the memory reassembled itself in cold, clinical pieces. The plasma burn. The gray skin. The bone saw whining once.

He looked down.

There was the bandage, The bloody wrap and a stump where an arm used to be.

He looked at it for a long time. Not surprised. He'd known. He'd known on the climb when the arm stopped answering and didn't start again. He'd known in the ravine when the side plate breached and the cold came in from the wrong direction. He'd known when the sleeve came off in the bunker and nobody said anything for a second. The body had been ahead of him every step of the way, and the part of him that gave the orders had finally caught up.

He flexed muscles that used to control fingers that weren't there anymore.

Nothing answered.

Then something did. A low, deep throb under the wrap that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite anything else. Phantom signal. He'd seen it in other men. The brain still talking to a hand it didn't have, still expecting the report.

It would, he knew, for a long time.

He didn't know how long he'd been out. Hours. A full day. The bunker had no windows, and the lights were the same flat humming white they'd been before.

He had asked her. He remembered that much. The map under his hand. Reyes's voice somewhere above him. Please. He didn't say words like that often. He didn't know if she'd had time to send anyone. He didn't know if there was anything left to send them to.

Then something moved on the floor beside the cot.

A low sound. Thin. Familiar in a way that went past thought and straight into the center of him.

A whine.

Elias turned his head.

Valka was on the floor. Lying on a folded blanket someone had laid out beside the cot, close enough to touch. Her ribs were wrapped in gauze and surgical tape, and she was thinner than she'd been two days ago, the muscle definition sharper under her thinning coat. She looked rough. She looked old.

She looked alive.

Her head came up when he moved. Slow, stiff, hurting. Her dark eyes found him and her ears did that stupid thing — kicked out sideways, wide and crooked, the heavy flaps spreading out like she'd forgotten what breed she was. That dumb, goofy grin splitting the stoic lines of her face.

Same look. Same idiot face she'd been pulling since she was eight weeks old.

Elias reached down with his right hand. His only hand now. His fingers found the thick fur behind her ear and buried in deep, and Valka pressed her head into his palm hard enough to push his arm back.

He didn't say anything for a while.

His jaw was working. The tendons in his neck were tight. His hand was steady in her fur but the rest of him wasn't, and if anyone had been watching they would've seen something crack across his face.

Valka's tail thumped once against the blanket. Weak. Slow. But there.

"Yeah," he managed. His voice was wrecked. "I'm here."

She made that sound again. The groan that was halfway to a moo. Pressed her muzzle against his forearm and exhaled warm air against his skin. Her body settled heavier into the blanket, the tension bleeding out of her now that the math made sense again. He was here. She was here. It was fine.

Elias leaned over the edge of the cot, ignoring what his ribs had to say about it, and pressed his forehead against the broad, warm top of her skull. Closed his eyes. Breathed her in. She smelled like dog and antiseptic and woodsmoke, and underneath all of it, like the cabin. Like home.

He stayed like that until the shaking stopped.

He sat up by inches.

The ribs hated it. The side wound pulled. The stump throbbed under the wrap with that low grinding heat. He swung his legs over the side of the cot. Bare feet on cold concrete. Then he reached for the IV line.

It took him three tries to peel the tape with his teeth. It was tucked into his right forearm.. He had to brace the line against his thigh to get any tension on the strip, and the third try took skin with it. He swore quietly. Pulled the needle. Pressed his chin on the hole to staunch the bleeding.

Valka watched him. Not with concern. Just watching.

"Yeah," he muttered. "I see you seeing it."

There was a metal cup on a stool near the cot, half full. He got it with the right hand, drank, set it down. Easy. The cup was the easy thing.

Boots were going to be the hard thing.

Footsteps in the corridor. Measured. Not rushed.

Elias straightened up before whoever it was rounded the corner. By the time Reyes appeared in the doorway, he was sitting upright on the edge of the cot with his hand resting on Valka's head and a face like a closed door.

She looked at the dog first. Then at him.

"She was in bad shape when they got to her," Reyes said. "Dehydrated, but she had water. Her ribs were a mess. She bit one of mine when he tried to pick her up."

"Good."

"He needed stitches."

"He'll live."

Reyes leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. She looked tired. The kind of tired that sleep didn't fix.

"You've been out fourteen hours."

Fourteen. He filed that away. Bad. Recoverable.

"The tether?"

"Still building. Clock's still running." She watched him for a reaction. Didn't get one. "We have time. Not a lot."

He looked at the stump. Looked at Valka.

"Who went up for her?"

"Three of mine. Garza led. Long climb. Longer with a dog." She paused. "They were going for ridge intel anyway — I needed eyes up there before the next sweep. Bringing her down wasn't on the order. Garza called it himself. Said the cabin was clean and the dog was alive and he wasn't going to walk past her."

"I owe him."

"You owe a lot of people. Get in line."

That pulled a half-smile out of him. The first one in a while. It didn't hold.

Reyes pushed off the doorframe and crossed to the cot. Stood looking down at him.

"How bad do you feel?"

"Bad enough."

"Be specific."

He thought about it. Inventoried. The ribs. The side. The hip that had been older than this whole mess before the whole mess started. The hand he didn't have anymore.

"I can move," he said. "Slow. I can shoot right-handed — I always could. Can't reload a rifle clean, not until I figure something out. Can't seal armor one-handed without a brace point. Can't field-strip anything that wants shoulder torque. Knife work's gone on the left side. The hip won't carry a sprint."

"So half a soldier." Reyes said with a wry grin.

"Three quarters. On a good day."

"Today a good day?"

"Today I'm above ground. So yeah."

She nodded once. Slow.

"There's a workbench in the back. Corin's set it up for you. Whatever you need to figure out, figure it out there."

He looked up at her.

"You think I'm staying."

"I think you said you'd help me kill the tether. And I think the kind of man who comes down a mountain for a dog doesn't go back up it before the work's done."

He didn't answer.

She didn't need him to.

"When you're ready," she said. "Not before. Clock's running, but I'd rather have you in three days and ready, than not ready and buried tonight."

She left.

Valka watched her go, then looked back up at Elias. Her ears did the thing again. Less goofy this time. Just present.

"Yeah," he said. "She's alright."

The boots took him twenty minutes.

The right one went on fast. That was always the easier hand. The left one fought him. He couldn't pinch and pull at the same time, couldn't anchor the tongue and feed the laces through. He tried bracing the boot between his knees and holding the lace with his teeth and got nowhere for a long stretch. Sweat came up across his forehead. The ribs screamed every time he leaned forward. The stump throbbed in time with his pulse.

Valka watched.

He stopped. Sat back. Breathed.

Then he tried it differently.

Boot flat on the floor. Foot inside. Lace one side fully through with the right hand, pulling the slack tight with his teeth. Pin the tightened section under his knee. Lace the other side. Pull. Tie off ugly with his right hand and his teeth working together like he'd seen old men do in shelters, in field hospitals, in the dark.

It would hold.

He sat back. The ribs were on fire. His good hand was shaking with the effort. He looked down at the knot. It was stupid. It looked like a child had done it. It would not come undone until he wanted it to.

That was enough.

He stood up.

The room stayed level.

Valka stood with him. Slower. Her ribs were still wrapped and one of her back legs was stiff, but she got herself upright and shook once — the careful, partial shake of a dog that knew her body wouldn't take a full one — and then planted herself against his right thigh, where his hand could find her without him having to think about it.

She had switched sides.

Ten years on his left. She had walked on his left every time they'd moved together since she was small enough to carry under one arm. And now she was on his right because his left hand wasn't there to drop down to her head anymore, and she had figured that out before he had.

He looked down at her.

She looked back up at him with the same expression she'd been giving him his whole adult life. The one she used every time he came back from a deployment with something new wrong. Not pity. Not worry. Just acknowledgment. You came back. We will figure it out.

He reached down with his good hand and ran his thumb along the bridge of her nose. She closed her eyes and leaned into it.

"Alright, girl," he said quietly. "Just a bit more."

Her tail thumped once against the concrete.

He turned toward the corridor.

The bench would be in the back. Corin would be there. Reyes would be at the map.

He had a lot to figure out one-handed before any of that mattered.

Valka walked with him on the right.

Elias stumbled and looked down. It hadn’t held.

“Fuck.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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