Subject Zero: Faceless

Nobody called what happened next a decision. It simply started, Osei’s voice, low and businesslike, ordering a perimeter check before anyone had visibly agreed to stop standing still. The crest was theirs. Somebody had to hold it, and holding it took hands, and hands were what everyone still had, whatever else the last thirty seconds had cost them.

Ilsen and Cade swept the enemy’s half-built position for anything usable and anyone still breathing. They found neither in any quantity worth reporting — a scattering of abandoned kit, one wounded prisoner too far gone to question, dead by the time Cade reached him.

Cade stayed crouched beside the dead prisoner longer than confirming it required. When he stood, he’d turned the man’s collar closed and set his fallen helmet over his face — small, unhurried motions, done with an economy that suggested practice nobody had ever asked him about. Wren watched him do it from across the position.

”You didn’t have to do that,” she said. Not an objection. A question wearing better manners.

”No.” Cade picked his rifle back up and settled it, and for a moment looked as though the word was the whole of it. Then, from somewhere well below the surface of a week’s worth of silence: ”Somebody’s counting him too. Wherever he’s from. Doesn’t matter that they’re wrong about what happened yet — they’re counting.” He moved off toward the next section of cover, done, the most anyone in Third Squad had heard him say in one place since the listening post. Nobody asked him a follow-up question. You didn’t knock twice on a door like that.

Wren finished the dressing on Hollis’s side properly this time, hands steady again now that they had a job narrow enough to fit inside.

Ashfall-Zero stood watch at the crest’s northern edge, alone, because Osei had put him there. He understood it without being told, the simplest arrangement of six people and one job that needed doing at a distance from the others. He kept the wooden bird in his closed fist rather than his pocket, for reasons he didn’t examine, and watched the valley for movement that didn’t come.

* * *

It was Ilsen who found the relay, half-buried under a collapsed section of the enemy’s unfinished cover, a boxier unit than Meridian’s own handheld model, its dial ringed in the same Core-lit glass, dented along one side but humming faintly when he turned it over.

”Still warm,” he said, holding it up for Osei rather than commenting on it further. First words anyone had spoken above a working volume since the crest went quiet.

Osei took it, turned the dial through frequencies that meant nothing to Ashfall-Zero, and found, on the fourth try, a band that carried something recognizable underneath its foreign cadence. A live signal, useless in itself, but proof the thing worked at all. She switched it, after a long moment of trying, to the frequency stamped on her own dead relay’s housing, more hope than method.

Static, and under the static, half a syllable.

”Ninth Actual, this is Third Squad,” she said, patient, as she’d said it a dozen times into a relay that had never answered. ”Do you copy.”

The reply came thin, and delayed, and entirely real. ”Third Squad, Ninth Actual copies. Say status.”

Something in Osei’s shoulders came down half an inch that hadn’t moved once since the shelf.

Before she keyed the report she ran the dial back once, checking her ground, and it snagged where it had snagged on the way up. A band below the marked frequencies, unlabeled, that the dial kept wanting to settle into, live, by the faint attention of the glass ring, but carrying nothing she could raise a voice out of. She frowned at it, and let it go. A question for a signals section; the crest needed a working channel more than it needed a mystery. Ashfall-Zero marked the band’s position from where he stood, out of a habit older than any of his training. Count what’s in front of you, assume the real number is larger.

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* * *

Her report was short, procedural, and left nothing out. The crest secured. One wounded, ambulatory. The reinforcing detachment broken and scattered rather than destroyed outright. And then, in the same steady cadence she’d used for everything else, without softening it and without dwelling on it: one confirmed use of Calibration in defense of a squad member, effects atypical, one enemy combatant killed, report to follow in full on return.

She didn’t look at Ashfall-Zero while she said it. She didn’t need to; he was standing close enough to hear every word land.

The reply took longer coming back this time. When it did, it wasn’t Ferro’s voice relaying it, a different cadence entirely, someone reading from a message rather than speaking off the cuff. ”Ninth Actual copies. Extraction inbound your position, forty minutes. Ashfall-Zero is to report directly to command on return — not standard debrief. Copy.”

”Copy,” Osei said, and set the captured relay down against her knee, in almost the same spot where she’d set the dead one down two hours ago, in a different world that had somehow only been this morning.

* * *

Nobody asked Osei what not standard meant.

Wren sat with her back against the low stone, not looking at anything in particular, the dressing kit open beside her though there was nothing left to use it on. Hollis lay where he’d been moved, awake, quiet, his eyes finding Ashfall-Zero every few minutes and sliding away again before either of them had to decide what the look meant. Ilsen cleaned his rifle with the same care he’d have given it any other day, and said nothing dry about any of it — a silence that had gone on long enough now to count as an answer in itself.

Osei spent the forty minutes as she spent everything, walking the perimeter twice, redistributing water nobody wanted, stopping at each of them in turn for a half-minute of business that was visibly also a headcount of a different kind. When she got to Ashfall-Zero she checked his position’s sightlines, told him the extraction order of march, and left without once mentioning the report she’d just made or the summons riding behind it. He understood the omission as she meant it. There was nothing to say about it yet, and she wasn’t going to spend a minute pretending otherwise.

Ashfall-Zero sat apart from all of them, at the crest’s edge, the wooden bird closed in his fist.

Wren came and sat near him anyway — close enough to mean something, careful not to make it into more than that.

”She put you on the north edge,” she said, after a while, to the valley rather than to him.

I know why.

”I don’t think you do.” She didn’t look over. ”North’s the only edge with a sightline down the trail they’d come back up. She put the one of us nobody’s going to sneak past where it counts. That’s not distance. That’s the opposite.”

He didn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure which reading was true, and suspected Osei wasn’t either, and that both could be. Neither of them spoke again. They stayed there together, her arms around her knees, his fist closed around the bird, until the transports came into sight below, and rose together when they did.

Someone made this, he thought, turning the shape of it over without opening his hand to look at it again. And I am the reason it doesn’t go home.

There was no slate message that would have fit that thought, so he kept it to himself, and let it sit exactly where the flash had left it, close to his heart in a way that had nothing to do with anatomy and everything to do with what he now knew he was capable of taking, uninvited, from anyone who stood close enough and lost.

The transports found them almost on schedule, a pair of them grinding up the shelf road below, escorted by a platoon. Fresh, unbloodied, testing their footing on ground that hadn’t tried to kill anyone yet. Their sergeant took one look at the crest, at the six of them, at Hollis walking under his own power with a hand pressed to his side, and didn’t ask the obvious questions. Word had clearly reached him too, in whatever shape it had traveled in, because he kept his own squad’s eyes moving and their mouths shut the entire time it took to load out.

Wren claimed the seat beside him on the transport without appearing to claim anything. Hollis was loaded across from them, propped against folded stretcher canvas, and spent the ride watching the canvas ceiling with the fixed attention of a man rebuilding an argument from its foundations. The fresh platoon’s escort rode with their weapons pointed courteously at the floor and their curiosity pointed everywhere else.