Chapter 27: After

The operation had a shape now, if not yet a name. Three more days, Ferro said, maybe four, while Corps finished arguing with itself over exactly how hard "harder" was allowed to be. Third Squad drilled through the waiting the same way it drilled through everything else, and Ashfall-Zero drilled with them, the cold behind his ribs no lighter than it had been the morning after the crest.

Rifle maintenance, formation drills, a night watch nobody expected to matter and that didn't. Ordinary hours, stacked one on top of another until they started to feel like a kind of proof that the crest had been a single, isolated thing, not a permanent shift in what every day was going to cost him from now on. He didn't fully believe it. He drilled anyway, because believing it wasn't a requirement for doing the work.

Ilsen got his voice back by degrees over those days, one dry observation at a time, each pitched a little further from the crest than the last — the coffee, the weather, the fresh platoon's parade-ground salutes — until the squad's silences started belonging to fatigue again instead of to what nobody was saying. It was deliberate, and it was work, and Ashfall-Zero understood by the third day that Ilsen was doing it on purpose, for all of them, by the only means he had. Cade contributed nothing to it and undermined none of it, which from Cade counted as participation.

Hollis found him at the rifle range after the others had racked their weapons and gone, standing at the firing line with his own rifle slung, not raised.

Ashfall-Zero set his own weapon down and waited. He'd learned since the crest not to reach for the slate first.

"I wasn't going to say anything," Hollis said. "Kept telling myself there wasn't anything that needed saying that Osei's report hadn't already covered." He looked out at the target line rather than at Ashfall-Zero directly — an old habit, from before the crest, that hadn't fully broken yet. "Then I got moved to light duty and had three days with nothing to do but think about it, which is its own kind of problem."

Ashfall-Zero reached for the slate. Hollis lifted one hand, palm out — a plain request for room.

"Let me get through it first. I don't say things twice as well the second time."

He let the slate sit unlit in his hand.

"Sten died because something wearing a friendly uniform stopped being anything I recognized, mid-fight, with no warning anybody could point to afterward. I spent two years telling people — telling myself, mostly — that it couldn't happen twice, because Meridian had learned something from Calder's Ridge. Tighter controls. Better vetting. I believed that right up until I watched you kill a man in about the time it takes to blink, with no order, no warning, no warm-up. Same shape. Same speed."

I know, Ashfall-Zero wrote, because it was true and because Hollis hadn't told him to stop yet.

Hollis finally looked at him. "Here's the part that actually matters, though. It wasn't the same. What came apart at Calder's Ridge turned on us. What you did turned on the man about to put a bayonet through me." His jaw worked once. "I've spent three days trying to find the seam where those two things are actually the same thing wearing different clothes, and I can't find it. I looked. That's not me being generous. That's me checking my own math and getting an answer I didn't expect."

* * *

For a while neither of them said anything. The range held the quiet of a place built for noise that currently had none. No shots, no wind worth mentioning, just two men and a line of paper targets neither of them was looking at anymore.

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"Sten collected bad maps," Hollis said, out of nowhere, in the voice of a man paying a debt to the dead by getting a detail right. "Misprinted ones, obsolete ones, captured ones with the towns renamed. Had a footlocker half full. Said a wrong map tells you more about the people who made it than a right one ever does." He turned his rifle over without looking at it. "I don't know why I'm telling you that. Maybe because everybody who talks about Calder's Ridge talks about how he died, and I've had two years of nobody asking me what he was like."

What was he like.

Hollis breathed out something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Slower than me at everything except being right. He'd have hated you on principle for about a month. Then he'd have wanted your file, your measurements, and your opinion on his maps." He looked at the kit pocket where Ashfall-Zero's hand had gone without his noticing. "You still carrying it. The bird."

Yes.

"Sten's sister got the maps. Took her a year to open the locker." He shouldered the rifle. "Somebody carries the thing. That's not the same as it being yours."

Does it get lighter.

"The locker? No. She got stronger." He said it without checking how it landed, which was how Hollis said the things he meant.

You don't have to decide today, Ashfall-Zero wrote finally. I'm not going to hold it against you if it takes longer than three days.

"I know I don't." Hollis's mouth did something that wasn't a smile — brief, gone before it finished forming. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to."

Decide, or tell me.

"Both. Neither. I don't know yet." He shifted the rifle sling on his shoulder, a small, restless motion. "What I know is what I said. What I don't know is what to do with knowing it. Sten's still dead. Whatever you did on that crest doesn't put him back, and it doesn't make what I've spent two years being afraid of stop being a real thing to be afraid of. It just means you, specifically, might not be the shape of it."

That's more than you owed me.

"Maybe." Hollis picked his rifle up off the line, checked it out of pure habit rather than need. "I'm not going to sit next to you at mess and pretend the last two years didn't happen. I'm also not going to look for a reason to keep them going, now that I've actually looked and didn't find one." He paused at the edge of the range, not quite leaving yet. "You saved my life doing something that scares me more than the thing that killed Sten ever did. I don't have a clean way to hold both of those. I don't think I'm supposed to."

* * *

He left without waiting for a written answer, which Ashfall-Zero understood as its own kind of mercy — nothing on the slate would have improved on what had been said, and Hollis, of all people, seemed to know that better than anyone else on the front.

Ashfall-Zero stood at the firing line a while longer, the wooden bird a small, familiar weight in his kit pocket. Whatever Hollis had actually decided — trust, or a truce that would hold right up until the next thing tested it, or nothing decided, just an honest accounting given because it was owed — he hadn't said, and for the first time since the crest, Ashfall-Zero didn't feel a pressing need to make him.

Wren was waiting by the armory when he finally walked back, close enough to have watched at least part of it from a distance without pretending she hadn't. She didn't ask what Hollis had said. She fell into step beside him instead, matching his pace without comment.

Their route home ran past the command post, where the lamps were burning long past the hour the rest of the base had gone dark — the late light of officers arguing with a distant headquarters through a slow channel. Wren tipped her head at it as they passed.

"That's about you. The hours they're keeping." She said it without drama, one professional observation among others. "Ilsen has a pool going on how many more days Corps takes to make up its mind. I'm not supposed to tell you the current spread."

What did you bet?

"Two more days." She shrugged. "I bet short. You've never once made anybody around here wait as long as they expected to."

Who bet long.

"Cade. A week. Cade always bets long; it's the only opinion he'll put money on." She glanced sideways at him, gauging whether to say the next part, and said it. "Hollis bet first. Before I did. Three days. Put in double the stake, and nobody asked him why."

It surprised something in him that had no working machinery for laughing. Somewhere behind that canvas, Corps was deciding how hard the thing built to break him would be allowed to hit. Out here, in the dark, a private from Third Squad had turned the wait into pocket change. A thing you can bet on is a thing you can live next to.