Subject Zero: Faceless

Marrow told him the reason an hour before the transport was due, in the command tent, with the liaison in the chair he’d said she could have when he said so.

”Major Ferro is releasing Third Squad to this operation at Corps’s request. They arrive at noon. They’ll be attached to your element — you, them, the reconnaissance section as needed — under Lieutenant Osei’s tactical command and my operational one.” He turned from the map. ”Ferro’s transfer order reads that the unit has documented experience operating alongside the asset. That’s true, and it’s what the lieutenant has been told, and it isn’t why I asked for them.”

Then why.

”Because they’ve watched you do it three times and written it down each time in a form a review board has accepted.” Marrow didn’t soften it. ”Osei’s report from the crest is the first clean documented manifestation of Static in years — Technical Division’s words, not mine. Her Corvale report and Hollis’s statement and Wren’s statement are the load-bearing pages of a case study every intake program in the Accord is about to receive. Whatever happens in that valley, I want it seen by people whose accounts Corps has already decided to believe. I want witnesses, and I want good ones. You’d have read that off the roster inside a day and thought I’d hidden it.”

The liaison’s face didn’t move.

They’ll think they were asked for because they’re good.

”They are good. Both things are true.” Marrow straightened a stack that didn’t need it. ”I’m not telling them the second one. You can, if you judge it serves something. I’d ask you to consider what it serves.”

* * *

The transport came in at noon with the netting on and the tailgate dropping before the truck had stopped rolling, and Lieutenant Osei was the first off, and the first thing she did on the ground was turn and count.

”Four.” A hand went out as each one came down. Ilsen, unhurried. Cade, who stepped off as if the truck had merely paused near him. Wren, who was looking past Osei’s shoulder before her boots hit and found the mask and didn’t look away from it. Hollis last, shouldering a pack with the arm that hadn’t been shot through at Corvale. ”Five, with me.” Osei’s hand stayed out a half-second past Hollis, open, over nothing, and then closed. ”Six,” she said, and looked at Rook, and that was the greeting.

Lieutenant.

”Ashfall-Zero.” She read the slate without ceremony. ”Ferro says we’re yours. Corps says you’re Marrow’s. I’ve been told two things about the chain of command in one morning and I’ve stopped expecting a third that reconciles them. Same procedures as the Ninth Front. Hand signals stand. You know them.” She turned to the squad. ”Kit down, tents are the row behind the motor pool, we’re on the wall at dusk with the reconnaissance section. Hollis, you’ve got the strap check.”

She walked off toward the command tent without waiting for acknowledgment, because she had never once needed to wait for it.

Wren came straight across the churned ground and stopped a pace short and looked at the mask squarely, the flinch she’d once carried worn off her somewhere she’d stopped being able to point to. ”Hollis said you’d be here. Hollis also said Corps asked for us because we’re the best they’ve got, which is the first time I’ve heard him repeat anything Corps said as if it were true. I don’t believe it and I came anyway.” She shifted the pack on her shoulder. ”You look the same. I don’t know why I expected otherwise.”

I don’t change much.

”No. That’s the restful thing about you.” She said it plainly and moved on before it could become anything else, hauling her pack toward the tent row, and Ilsen took her place with an ease nobody had assigned him.

”The map,” Ilsen said. ”Did it reach you.”

It reached me. I carry it.

”Good. I had a private draw the fountain twice and neither time was right, so I did it myself on the back of a menu, which is why it looks like a menu.” Ilsen studied the mask. ”Wren says the town has a game where children hide their faces on purpose. I’ve been saving a remark about that for a season. I’m going to keep saving it until I’ve seen the game.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

It’s a good remark, then.

”It’s a fair one. I’m not wasting it on a motor pool.” He nodded once and went after Wren, and Cade, passing, put a hand briefly on the mask’s shoulder — the strap, the shoulder under it — and said nothing whatsoever, and kept walking, and it was the first time Cade had touched him.

Hollis had waited. He stood where he’d come off the truck with his pack still on, and when the others had gone he crossed the ground and stopped in front of the mask and held his hand out — palm up, open, the gesture he had offered instead of a handshake on a road out of the Ninth Front. The shoulder above it moved less freely than it had the last time. He didn’t comment on that either.

Rook looked at the palm. Then he took the stylus from his belt, reversed it so the blunt end led, and wrote into Hollis’s hand, slowly.

R. O. O. K.

Hollis’s hand didn’t close. He read it with his palm, and his face did something Rook had not seen it do since a corridor outside a records wing, when the thing that had gotten to him wasn’t the questions.

”Four letters,” Hollis said finally. ”Easier on the hand than the last one.” He closed his fingers over it, then opened them, then looked at the mask. ”When.”

After you and Wren left the Directorate. A woman in the town asked me whether the word I had was the word I wanted. It wasn’t.

”So you built one.” Hollis nodded slowly. ”Wren’s going to want to know why it’s got her name in it.”

Part of her name. A bird, a board game, a game with children, and her.

”She’ll be insufferable.” Hollis let his pack drop off the good shoulder at last. ”If she works it out on a wall at dusk she’ll make a noise about it. I’ll tell her first.” He picked the pack up again by its strap. ”Rook.”

He said it once, to the mask, in the same register he’d used to say a designation twice at a landing zone with a field dressing coming through his fingers, and then he went to find his tent.

* * *

Dusk put Third Squad on the camp wall with the reconnaissance section, and Bram’s men and Osei’s took each other’s measure sector by sector, in silence, until somebody’s private offered somebody else’s private a canteen and the thing was settled. Osei stopped beside Rook long enough to say, ”Hollis says it’s Rook. The order agrees with him. I’ll use it in the field; Corps can use what it likes,” and moved on down the wall before he could raise the slate.

Rook took the interval before the watch to lay his kit out on the cot in the tent they’d given him, because Osei had said kit down and he had never heard her say a thing she didn’t mean literally. The combat mask’s spare clasp. The slate and its stylus. The lighter garrison mask, which had no use here and which he’d brought anyway. Ilsen’s map on the back of a menu, gone soft at the folds. Renner’s note, initialed and otherwise unsigned, folded along her crease. A sheaf of good letter paper, heavier than anything Corps issued, and two pencils sharpened past the point anyone else would have kept them, from a woman who had said same day next month at a gate and meant it as a ledger entry.

He hadn’t written on the paper. He took one sheet out now and looked at it and put it back.

And the bird. It had ridden in a desk drawer at the Directorate for a season, beside a printed line about a classification tier, and he had taken both out of the drawer the night before the transport and put them in the kit pocket that had once carried the bird alone, and he had not asked himself why he wanted them together. It sat in his palm now, worn smooth along one wing, a dead man’s daughter’s, the cold behind his ribs no different for holding it than for not.

”Strap check.” Hollis, at the tent flap, not waiting to be asked in, because Osei had given him the strap check and Hollis treated an order as a finished thing. He came in and looked at the kit laid out and didn’t ask about any of it — his attention passed over the bird once and stopped nowhere — and then he took the kit harness off the cot’s end and ran the straps through his hands. On a crest once he had tightened a loose one on Rook’s shoulder without a word; he did the same now, at the shoulder, and his hands stopped at the charge.

He knew what it was. Every soldier on the Ninth Front had known what it was, clipped to the strap of the one man on the roster who wore one. He turned it a quarter, so the recessed contact caught the tent’s lamp, and set it back.

”You weren’t wearing this at the Directorate. Wren would’ve said.”

No active front. It rode in the kit.

”And now it’s on the strap.” Hollis kept his voice level. ”Who’s holding it.”

Marrow. As of two days ago. Ferro’s authorization lapsed when I left the Ninth Front and nobody took it up. Marrow has.

Hollis stood with the harness in his hands for a moment longer than the check needed. ”Better than nobody,” he said. ”I watched it ride on your chest at that landing zone, keyed to a man in another valley, while you did the thing that put you on a stretcher. Nobody was the wrong answer.” He cinched the strap a notch and hung the harness back on the cot. ”Marrow’s a different wrong answer. I’ll take it over the first one and I won’t pretend I like it.”

Neither will I.

”Good. Then we’re agreed on something, which Wren will say is a first.” He stopped at the flap. ”Osei knows why Corps asked for us. She hasn’t said so. She won’t, unless somebody makes her. I’m telling you so you don’t spend a week deciding whether to.”

He was gone before the slate was raised. Rook put the bird back in the pocket with the printed line, and the paper and the pencils in with them, and clipped the harness on, the charge over his sternum, and went out to the wall.