Subject Zero: Faceless

The minute became closer to five, and Renner stood by the door, patient in a way that told him she’d decided she wouldn’t be the one to make this easy, and the prisoner knelt against the dead consoles, rationing his own fear rather than letting it show.

Ashfall-Zero thought about the Foundry, which he rarely let himself do on purpose. He thought about years of being reached into by people who called it necessary, who had their own versions of Renner’s clean, unflinching logic, a result worth the cost, a cost that wasn’t theirs to pay. He thought about the wooden bird, riding in his kit pocket through every mile of tonight, taken from a dead man’s chest by hands that hadn’t asked his permission either. He had spent the weeks since that crest learning, slowly, that the difference between what was done to him and what he chose to do wasn’t a small thing. It was the only thing.

He took the bird out. He hadn’t planned to, his hand went to the kit pocket on its own, an echo of the pocket it had first come out of on Aldern Ridge’s crest, and he stood there with it closed in his fist, in a wrecked room a long way from wherever a woman and a child were still waiting for a man whose name he’d carried for weeks without once being able to set it down. Renner watched him hold it and said nothing at all. She knew what it was. It was in the incident file she’d built this ask on.

If he did this, there would be another one. Not a bird, maybe. A letter, a ring, a photograph gone soft at the corners, whatever this man’s version was of the thing a person keeps because someone who mattered touched it once. It would ride in his kit next to the first, and it would not fade, because none of it faded. And one day there would be a third, and a fourth, and his pockets were so very small.

He put the bird away.

No, he wrote, and held it out for Renner to read before he let himself second-guess the word. I won’t kill him for what it would show you. Not like this. Not on command, not for a result, when he’s already disarmed and no threat to anyone in this room.

Renner read it, and her face did something complicated, less anger than he’d have guessed, less relief than he’d have hoped for her, something closer to a decision landing where she’d expected it to, whatever she’d wanted underneath that.

”I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed in the intelligence we’re leaving on the table,” she said. She glanced at the prisoner. ”So what do you want to do instead, because we still have a war to fight and a signals officer standing three meters away who knows things we need.”

* * *

I can read him with the Sight instead. Ask him questions, and I’ll tell you when he’s lying and when he isn’t. It’s less than Static would give you, but it’s real.

Renner considered it for exactly as long as a decision like that deserved. ”It’s not nothing,” she agreed. ”And it doesn’t require anyone in this room to die who doesn’t have to. Do it.”

It took longer than either of them wanted, twenty careful minutes of Renner’s questions and Ashfall-Zero’s silent, steady reads, the officer’s own composure cracking by degrees as he understood, correctly, that something in the room was catching every lie before it finished leaving his mouth. What came back wasn’t the vivid, involuntary flood Static would have delivered. It was slower, thinner, entirely voluntary on Ashfall-Zero’s part in a way nothing pulled off a kill had ever been, confirmation that Corvale was one of at least four linked coordination points along the front, a partial bearing on a second site, and nothing at all on the mechanism that let them retarget without radio, which the officer either didn’t know or wouldn’t give up even under a Sight that would have caught the lie.

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The reads themselves cost him nothing. The Sight took no toll and left no residue. It only witnessed. What it witnessed was a man assembling courage lie by lie and losing each one the moment it died on the slate, until, somewhere in the eighteenth minute, the officer stopped looking at Renner and started looking at him instead — at the mask, at the stylus moving — with the expression of a man revising what he’d been told to expect from Meridian, and revising it in no direction that resembled relief.

* * *

It cost them the one thing Renner had warned him it would. Time. Twenty minutes standing still in a secured position was twenty minutes an enemy relief force, alerted by whatever unbroken signal still ran somewhere between Corvale’s positions, used to close the distance.

Osei got the shape of what had happened in that room from Renner in six quiet sentences while the column formed up, and gave back nothing anyone could have read at ten paces. She fell in beside Ashfall-Zero at the first bend instead, matched his pace for a dozen strides, and spoke once, forward, to the dark rather than to him.

”So it’s said once. If that slate had come up yes, you and I were going to have a problem that outlasted the war.”

She was gone back up the column before he could reach for a reply. It was, he understood, the closest thing to thanks the night had room for — and the first confirmation that the line he’d refused to cross was one somebody else had been standing on the whole time.

The column was three hundred meters into the withdrawal, prisoners under guard, wounded moving as fast as wounded could move, when the tree line behind them opened up.

Hollis took the covering position without being ordered to — the same reflex that had put him in front of a bayonet on Aldern Ridge’s crest, offered again without hesitation to buy the column the seconds it needed to reach the ridge line and cover. Ashfall-Zero saw it happen in pieces, between his own strides: Hollis dropping behind a stump that barely deserved the name, the muzzle flashes walking toward him, the deliberate, uneconomical choice of a man spending his own margin so nine other people could keep theirs.

He took a round through the meat of his shoulder doing it. It spun him half a turn, and he came back around the stump one-armed and kept firing — four more rounds, spaced, aimed, blood running black in the dark down a sleeve nobody could reach yet — until Ilsen broke cover, swearing in a language of pure velocity, and dragged him bodily out of the kill zone by his drag strap. The third body hauled by one tonight, and the first that could still swear about it.

Everybody carried it the rest of the climb to the ridge line.

* * *

They broke contact with everyone still alive, Hollis’s shoulder packed and bleeding through the field dressing, the four prisoners secured, and a partial bearing on a second Corvale-style position that Renner would carry back up the chain along with a report Ashfall-Zero hadn’t asked to see but knew, without needing to, would include what had happened in that room and whose decision it had been.

”Here is what actually goes in the file,” Renner said, once the column was moving again and the tree line behind them had gone quiet enough to spend words in. Quiet, not finished; the extraction clearing was a full ridge line ahead, and whatever Corvale’s last unbroken signal had called in was somewhere back there in the dark, unspent. ”I’m required to log tonight as a deviation from a lawful directive, on my recommendation and yours both. I won’t soften that in the writeup, because you didn’t ask me to and it wouldn’t be honest if I did. I also won’t pretend I think you were wrong.” She looked out at the dark terrain sliding past. ”Corps doesn’t always agree with me on that distinction. You should know that going in.”

Ashfall-Zero looked down the column at Hollis, pale and upright and alive between Ilsen and Wren, at the prisoners who would walk out of this valley instead of dying on the floor of a building with a timer running inside it, at his own hands, empty of the one thing that would have made all of it simpler and none of it survivable in the way that actually mattered to him.

I know what it cost, he wrote. I’d pay it again.

He believed it. He was fairly sure, watching Hollis’s blood darken the field dressing a shade at a time, that belief and certainty weren’t going to feel the same thing for a long time yet.