Subject Zero: Faceless

The radio crackled once more and went quiet, and Jost clipped it back to his shoulder like it hadn’t said anything.

”Load him,” he said. ”Same truck as me. Voss, Bram, you’re with me too.”

Nobody argued. Bram’s jaw tightened around whatever he’d wanted to say, and he fell in anyway, rifle slung now instead of raised.

They didn’t put restraints back on him. That, at least, didn’t happen. But Voss no longer touched his arm to steady it on the walk to the truck, and when she checked his pulse this time she did it fast, professional, from as far away as the reading would allow.

The truck idled at the head of the convoy, a squat armored thing with a canvas hood and a hum under its floor that didn’t sound like any engine he remembered from before. A low Core-cycled thrum he felt more in his teeth than his ears. Two benches faced each other along the truck bed. A crate of field rations sat lashed against the cab wall, unopened, and stayed that way the whole ride. Nobody offered him any of it.

He climbed in when Jost gestured for him to. Voss sat across from him. Bram sat by the tailgate, rifle across his knees, watching the road behind them instead of the man he was supposed to be watching.

Jost sat beside him.

”You didn’t have to do that,” Voss said, before the tailgate had come up. ”The room. Whatever that was.”

«He would have opened you instead of me.»

She flinched, a half-inch of the shoulders, but she let him see it. ”Don’t.” One hand came up, palm out, the gesture people used on dogs and drunks. ”I know what he would have done. I’d have rather you asked me first about the other thing. The voice. Before you just — put it there. That’s twice.”

He had no other way to answer her, and she had just closed the one he had. After a moment he tried a nod: slow, deliberate, the only shape he could give I didn’t know I could ask. She read it, or read something, and looked away first.

Bram, across from them, said nothing.

”Command’s going to want a full report before we’re an hour out,” Jost said, mostly to Voss, in the tone of a man narrating a decision he’d already made. ”I’m not putting the subject spoke without a mouth and disarmed a man before any of us saw him in a field log and letting some desk three hundred miles from here decide what that means on its own. They’ll get it from me, in person, or they’ll wait.”

”They won’t wait,” Voss said.

”They can wait until the wire.”

The truck lurched into motion. Outside the canvas flap, the Foundry compound fell away behind them in pieces. A collapsed tower, a scorched wall, the pale ghost-shapes where flags had burned off stone. Then it was gone, and there was only road, and hills he didn’t recognize because he had never once been shown them.

* * *

The road narrowed maybe twenty minutes out, cutting between two low rock faces that hadn’t been leveled so much as blasted, old scoring visible in the stone where something Core-fed had done the work faster than any drill. Two other trucks led theirs into the cut. He felt the change before he understood it. The same wrongness he’d felt through a closed door back at the compound, a pressure against the dull sense that had never once needed a name to be trusted.

The lead truck’s front wheel found something in the road that answered back.

The blast came up through the ground before the sound of it reached him, a percussion he felt in his back teeth like the truck’s own engine-thrum, except violent, except wrong. The lead truck slewed sideways and stopped being a vehicle in any useful sense. Then the rock faces on both sides of the cutting opened up.

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Rifle fire from an elevated position doesn’t sound like anything else. It found the canvas hood above them in a ragged line, punching through in small bright holes that let daylight in like a second, worse kind of pain.

”Contact left! Contact right!” Jost was moving, shoving him flat against the truck bed’s floor with one hand and drawing with the other. ”Voss, down—”

Bram had his rifle up and firing before Jost finished the sentence, three rounds into the rock face without needing to be told where to aim. The tailgate took a hit that sent splinters of composite across the truck bed, and somewhere ahead a man was screaming in a language he half-recognized from years of hearing it through a table’s restraints.

He got a hand on Voss’s shoulder and put her flat before her own instinct caught up to the noise. She didn’t fight it. Bram’s second burst answered a muzzle flash from the near slope and it went quiet, at least on that side.

It wasn’t quiet on the other side.

Three of them came down off the far rock face at a dead run, and he understood, in the half-second it took to see them clearly, that something about this was wrong in a way the noise alone hadn’t told him. They weren’t firing. Two carried rifles slung rather than raised, and the one in front carried something else entirely. A coiled restraint line and a short black baton that hummed at a pitch he felt in the roots of his teeth, built for a body like his and nobody else’s.

Somebody had sent people who knew exactly what he was worth, with orders to bring him back intact rather than end him where he stood.

He was moving before he’d finished deciding to, same as the service room, same as always, out from under Bram’s covering fire and into the gap between the truck and the rock, closing distance the way distance had never once been allowed to close on his own table.

The first one swung the humming baton in a short arc meant to end things quickly and cleanly, and he took the joint instead of the blow, breaking the grip the same way he’d broken a wrist over a length of broken glass that morning. The baton clattered against rock. The man who’d carried it did not get up in time to matter.

The second came in low, trying for his legs, trying to make this a wrestling match rather than a fight, and found out in the space of one bad decision that a body strapped to a table for eleven years had learned things about ending a struggle quickly that had nothing to do with size. He didn’t enjoy the sound it made. He noted it anyway, and moved on to the third before the second had finished falling.

The third had a knife instead of a baton, drawn late, held wrong, a man improvising past whatever the plan had actually specified for this moment. It opened a line along his ribs before he got the wrist turned and the blade redirected into the ground instead of into him. A clean, deep cut, the sort a body kept quiet about for hours before it finally sent the bill due. There wasn’t room for it to matter yet.

The shooting on the rock faces above stopped, Bram’s rifle empty and reloading, Jost’s own weapon tracking a slope that had nothing left on it worth tracking. All three were down and staying down, and the ravine had gone the particular kind of quiet that comes after violence rather than before it.

He stood in the middle of it with a torn line of red soaking through his side and understood, distantly, that his hands had stopped shaking before the rest of him had.

Voss reached him first, kit open, hands moving before her voice caught up to them. ”Hold still — hold still, let me see it—”

«It will keep.»

”It will keep after I look at it.” She said it without any of the earlier distance, forgetting, for the length of one wound, to be careful about how close she stood.

Bram came down off the rock’s edge slower, rifle up, eyes moving across the three men on the ground with the particular care of someone doing arithmetic he didn’t like the answer to. He crouched by the one who’d carried the baton and turned back a torn shoulder seam with two fingers, careful not to touch more of the man than he had to.

A mark was stitched there, small and unglamorous. A quartered black diamond, thread gone stiff with old sweat rather than fresh blood. Not a uniform he recognized from the war. Something purpose-made, worn by men who’d expected to need it recognized by someone.

”That’s not a looter’s mark,” Bram said, to no one in particular, in the same flat register he’d used over a length of broken glass that morning. ”That’s a unit patch.” He looked up, past the body, to the man standing with Voss’s hands pressed hard against his side. ”They weren’t here for the convoy. They were here for him. And they brought rope instead of rifles to do it.”

He looked where Bram was looking, at the patch, worn by men who had carried rope across a burned country for him specifically. Eleven days, Jost had said, since anyone alive had answered for this compound. Somebody had. Somebody, somewhere off any map he’d been shown, kept a ledger with his number in it, and had opened it, and written retrieve.