Subject Zero: Faceless

The cold behind his ribs didn’t fade in stages the way the shelf’s cost had. It simply stayed, patient, already at home.

He was aware of his own body as a man is aware of a room he’s walked into and found rearranged, everything present, everything slightly wrong. His knees held his weight. His hands were open. The ringing that had followed the shelf’s cost was there too, somewhere, but distant, crowded out by the newer thing, which didn’t ring and didn’t burn and didn’t hurt in any language his body spoke. It was simply cold, and it was simply there, and it had not been there ninety seconds ago.

He didn’t decide to move. His right hand did, reaching past his own knee, past the dead man’s slack arm, to the breast pocket of a uniform that wasn’t his to touch, and closing around something small and hard through the fabric before any part of him had agreed to want it.

Don’t, he thought, a full second too late to matter, watching his own fingers work the pocket’s flap, certain in advance of what waited there, though nothing about the last thirty seconds should have made him certain of anything at all.

Wren made a small, wordless sound and didn’t seem to notice she’d made it.

He drew it out into the light. A carved wooden bird, small enough to close a fist around entirely, worn smooth along one wing where a thumb had clearly rubbed it for years without meaning to. Rough work, a father’s work, or a friend’s, not a craftsman’s, kept, plainly, for the one reason anything like it ever gets kept, because someone who mattered had made it.

He hadn’t known it was there. He hadn’t known to look. And yet his hand had gone to that pocket knowing the route, certain of it before any part of him had walked it once.

That was the fact he kept coming back to, kneeling there, not the bird, the route. His hand had known. Something had come across in the pull with enough of the man still organized inside it to know which pocket, which flap, which small hard shape. He didn’t have a word for what that made him now. He suspected other people would find one faster than he did.

Around them the fight had finished deciding itself without needing anyone’s attention. The enemy detachment’s retreat had turned into a rout somewhere in the last minute, Cade and Osei’s earlier fire doing the rest of the work on its own. Wren had a dressing half-applied to Hollis’s side, her hands gone still on the fabric, caught between the wound in front of her and the six feet of ground she couldn’t stop watching instead.

* * *

The flash came the same way the pull had, inward, uninvited, finished by the time he understood it had started.

A woman’s hands, not the woman he carried, a stranger’s entirely, working a knife along a scrap of pale wood at a kitchen table he had never stood in. A child’s voice, too young for words that held together, saying a sound that might have been bird or might have been nothing at all. A name, spoken once, from somewhere behind and to the left, in the unhurried patience of someone who says a name a hundred times a day and never once tires of the sound of it.

Someone else’s hands, someone else’s taking. He let the thought stand and go without shaping it further.

The fragments didn’t behave like memory. Memory, as he knew it, kept its distance, a thing seen from where you stood now. These sat inside the first person, unasked. The weight of the knife in a hand that wasn’t his, the smell of shavings, pale curls of wood on a table’s grain he could have drawn from any angle. He tested, carefully, whether he could set any of it down, and learned the answer in the trying. There was no down. There was only him, and what was in him now, and the six feet of morning between his knees and the man it had been taken from.

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He had a daughter. He wrote it on the slate because there was nothing else that fit there, and no other way his voice could reach the six feet of ground he was kneeling in. He held it up as he’d held up every true thing this squad had needed from him since the shelf, and did not look at any of their faces while he did it — he did not yet trust what his own would have shown them, if it could show anything at all.

Ocular Bypass sat unused, close enough to reach that he could feel the shape of it waiting. He could have turned it on any one of them, Wren, Hollis, Osei, and known exactly what they were carrying behind their own faces instead of guessing at it from posture and silence. He didn’t reach for it. Whatever it would have shown him about the last thirty seconds, he wasn’t ready to have it confirmed instead of merely feared.

He tried, once, to put the bird back. His hand carried it as far as the dead man’s pocket and stopped there, hovering over the flap, and would not finish, not grief and not greed, something with no name yet standing between his fingers and the letting go. As though the taking had made it his in some ledger deeper than the one that said it wasn’t. He closed his fist around it instead and set the fist against his knee, and that was the arrangement they settled on, he and whatever was keeping the accounts now.

* * *

Wren backed off her knees and onto her feet in one motion, rifle forgotten at her side, staring at the wooden bird in his open palm like it might do something else on its own. She didn’t ask what it was. Asking would have made an answer true.

Hollis, still down, bleeding into a dressing nobody had finished tying, went rigid in a way that had nothing to do with the wound. His hand found the ground beside him and gripped it, knuckles white. He had spent two years telling himself this could never happen twice, and every part of him not currently holding onto the rock was in the process of losing that argument.

”Is it finished.” Hollis said it to the sky, not to anyone, his voice come apart at the edges in a manner the wound alone couldn’t account for. ”Somebody tell me if it’s finished or if it’s still — if he’s still—”

”It’s finished,” Wren said, too fast to have checked.

Ashfall-Zero turned the slate so the man on the ground could read it, and found he had nothing true to put there. I don’t know was true. It was also the one sentence in the world Hollis could not afford to be handed right now. He wrote nothing, and held the empty slate up anyway, and Hollis looked at the blank of it for a long second and then closed his eyes, which was an answer of its own.

Ilsen said nothing at all. That, more than anything else on the crest in the last thirty seconds, was the detail that told Ashfall-Zero how bad this looked from outside his own skin — Ilsen, who had a line ready for everything, who had found something dry to say after the shelf inside a minute of the ground going quiet, standing with his rifle slack in both hands and nothing in his mouth at all.

Cade had come back within sight somewhere in the last minute, rifle low, and stood at the edge of the half-built position without crossing into the six feet of ground everyone else was orbiting. He looked at the dead man longer than anyone else had let themselves — not at Ashfall-Zero, at the man — and then turned back to the slope he was supposed to be watching, and watched it. Of all of them, he was the only one who had chosen a direction to face that had nothing in it.

Osei didn’t step back. She was the only one who didn’t. But her hand had drifted, without her seeming to notice it had, to the strap across her own chest, holding on to something solid while the ground underneath the last thirty seconds finished deciding whether it was going to hold.

Below the crest, the sounds of the rout were thinning toward nothing — running boots, one shout cut off by distance, the ordinary noise of a fight that had ended without anyone up here noticing the ending. The war had moved on. It did that, apparently, whether or not the people holding the ground it left behind were finished with what it had done to them.