Adrien’s lake blue eyes were muddy in the truck as he looked at the screen, tapped on Eoran’s face and waited as the phone’s AI tried to identify him in the thousands upon thousands of photos the whole ODA had managed to jam into that overworked piece of technology. When he’d found success, he tapped on the first picture—Eoran looking a little pensive at sunrise, lips pressed together, a wisp of someone else’s cigarette smoke trespassing on the left hand side of the frame.
Then, he just swiped left.
“Toriet? Like that Bloodwright in Port Haven who went to the Expressionist school?” Adrien was, perhaps, a little more keyed into the business of wrights than a normal person—his mother and both brothers, after all, had gone to Bourbaki. Adrien, however, couldn’t follow, left out of (or perhaps winning) a genetic lottery that left him without utility, despite his siblings plaguing him with theirs his entire life. He continued to examine that boy’s face, watching him through what he imagined was a lover’s candid lens, learning all about him through the moments whoever snapped these off found most beautiful in the quiet.
“Maybe. I guess,” Brint shrugged, realizing, for the first time, that he knew much more about Kasse than he did Eo. The man paused, thinking back on their down time whenever they got a fresh batch of mail, how Eoran and Kasse would huddle up together and take apart whatever letters and boxes of treats were sent from home. Kasse had no family and a poor friend—most of the mail must’ve came from Eoran’s side. “Yeah, he has a brother, I think. How many Toriets can there be?”
“Not a ton, I don’t know—sucks though, I wonder if he knows?” Adrien was a little restless in the passenger seat as he kept swiping on through. “I had barely enough time for a phone call when we got into Arseiyat, but all my brothers could talk about was that Toriet guy getting arrested. Rough thing to come back to when we find him.” He stopped on a video and let it play, the white noise of the desert nearly drowning out the raucous laughter of a prank at its zenith.
“Hmm.” The sound likely made it seem like Brint didn’t care. He did, slightly, but his priorities were already fixed and he didn’t have any room to make adjustments within their order. “Well, it’s not like we can do anything about that. We’re going to focus on finding them, then when we drag them back to civilization you can slowly crush his world once he’s reacclimated to this shit.” The older man’s eyes, sly, slid quickly to his new 18C.
Adrien looked up, straight ahead into the headlights of impending social doom with his murky blue eyes wide under his knitted dark brows, several shades darker than his sandy brown hair. “Uh, or he can read a newspaper. I’d like to have friends and maybe—I don’t know—survive to blow some stuff up out here. That’s the sort of news that kills messengers, don’t you think?” He was slow recovering from their initial conversation about Brint’s super apparent weapons sergeant dick fixation, but Adrien was warming back up. Grinning, he looked over to meet Brint’s tricky green eyes with a canted glance, jaw tilted after a slow, semi-amused shake of his head. “Besides, I don’t think they’re gonna send you another engineer if I go down, so you should maybe take care of me?”
“Toriet is one of the least murdery boys on the squad, I wouldn’t worry about him.” Brint’s eyes were fixated on the road again. “And yeah, I’ve been told to not ‘lose you like I did the other ones’ so, relax. You’re in good hands—eh,” Cutting himself off, the lieutenant twisted his head in brief reconsideration. “Actually, maybe not good hands. You’re in hands. Guaranteed.”
Weaving them through the streets of that city resurrected in the image of a foreign invader, Brint pulled back up to the admin building where he dropped his other pair of sergeants off earlier. “We need to get on the road. Run in there and get Dev and Locke for me, will you? They’re easy to find—Locke looks like he could strangle someone with his pinky finger and Dev looks like he would stand by and happily let him do it.”
Adrien wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with being handled, but he did as he was told. He was good at that—up to a point, anyways.
Dropping the phone in the cluttered center console, Adrien shoved the door open and stepped out, pulling his pants up to keep them aloft on his slight figure, thin hipped and narrow. Quick as a switch, he was taking strides through the door, looking around for a man who would maybe probably murder him and another man who would apparently definitely let it happen.
Adrien was more nerves than man, now,
more jitter than confidence—but it would pass.
Maybe, it would pass.
“Uh—I’m looking for… Sergeants Locke and Dev?” he announced to a room, unsure of who would answer.
“Yeah, here.” Dev’s voice blandly rang through the cascading taps of his fingers flying over the keyboard he was bent over. He looked up a moment later, quartz eyes a quick glimmer in the Ossan day pouring in through the wide, curtainless windows before him. A small printer on its last legs was straining atop a small table to his left, ink cartridges whimpering as they ceaselessly slid back and forth across a whole ream of paper. “Oh, are you the new guy?”
Locke was hunched over another computer right across the way typing with two fingers and squinting deep into the dying monitor, trying to decode snippets of Ossan on a buried sub-redbit forum. He glanced up, curious, with a smile that creased his eyes—warmer than the murder machine Brint made him out to be.
“We’re glad to have you, man. I’m Locke. That’s Dev.” Clearing his throat, the larger man rose to take the new guy’s hand in an enthusiastic, crushing handshake. “We’ve heard all about you. Or I guess Dev found out everything about you and then told me. Welcome to the squad, Adrien.”
Adrien found his rabbit heart slowing. His shoulders sloped into a less rigid posture, stance more relaxed now that his nerves were assuaged by that bear-paw grip that was currently rattling his whole frame.
“Y-yeah, I’m Adrien—nice to meet you both.” He grinned as he reclaimed his hand, Locke’s eager welcome pulsing pain points through this digits, through his palm, even if the boy managed not to show it. “Can’t wait to blow things up with you!”
“Can’t wait to be lulled by the sweet sounds of explosives again.” Dev laughed, then joined the pair, dumping a stack of papers into the thin boy’s arms in lieu of a more proper greeting. “Guess it’s time to hit the road, right? Can you carry these? I have more to get.”
The intelligence sergeant moved back to the printer and picked up a second sheaf of info bound in neon rubber bands. He tucked it under an arm. “How’s your Ossan, Adrien?”
“Seireserevariet,” the bomber offered smoothly, suddenly bogged down by Dev’s fat stack of intelligence. “Iruvayon? Meanta.”
Respectable in theory. In actuality? Less so.
It fell easy enough from his mouth: he’d taken years of it in highschool with a long line of native speaking private tutors. His father had planned for him to be out here, after all—he’d been given every tool he’d needed to succeed in Amstead’s terrible war.
“Muameai seya, karanpros?” Good enough, other-brother?
Locke looked between Dev and Adrien, eyes wide with some abstract excitement: all he could think was that there was someone else available now to help him translate Ara me Va when Eoran was too busy to humor him.
“Geez, almost sound fluent, don’t you?” The big man laughed, picking up another huge stack of papers. Without much else to add, Locke was heading out the door to Brint’s idling truck.
Dev caught up to Locke in an extended stride, passing Adrien with a smirk. He’d asked for practicality’s sake, but the secondary purpose that echoed in his boyfriend’s joy was never lost on the sergeant who observed too much. “Hope you like Ara Me Va.”
×××
A fortnight later Brint sat his boys around the fading embers of a fire made for dinner. The desert was dark and open, quiet and finally cooling in the afterglow of the receding sun lining the horizon in a strip of crimson. He looked up to the splash of stars filtering through last light, shy crystals hanging high, then back down at the map he’d asked his team to compile from all the intel gathered in the library.
In the past few days, command pulled some strings and threw in a few extra observation planes to survey the strip of land they’d determined their pair of missing soldiers would most likely be. Results from those runs came in blips over the lieutenant’s radio, coordinates of various outposts and interesting shapes pock-marking the otherwise bare sea of sand.
Brint picked up a tin cup and began to make coffee from powder and the last of their steaming water.
“I think we should raid this outpost.” He pointed to a circled area over the barren topography.
Adrien was a frazzled cartographer on a proving ground, nervous blue eyes trailing every possible path. He focused on places where there might be water—after all, it had been more than two weeks. If their queries hadn’t been captured, they’d have to be near some sort of water.
There was no other way.
“You really think they’ve been captured, Brint?” Locke asked, draining his own tin cup of coffee. He seemed too large for the low stone he used as a seat, elbows uncomfortably resting on knees angled up and splayed. He looked more like a folded statuette from some Ossan archaeological dig than a living soldier. The man wedged his cup into the sand. “Kasse would’ve broken out by now, you know that boy can’t stay behind something dumb like a door.”
Brint shook his head. “No, not captured, I just think they’re really clever. Kasse can’t speak Ossan for shit, but Eoran’s practically native. These kids are running scams all the fucking time—I can’t even begin to tell you how many packs of candy Kasse has schemed away from me. Don’t you think they’d at least stop and try to get some provisions, even if they didn’t stay? There’s not much out here, they’re going to starve.” He glanced up to Locke, then Adrien, and finally Dev. “Our scope is so big right now, if we can cross some places off, then we’ll narrow in on them eventually, right?”
“Begging you for food cause he knows you’ll give it to him and runnin’ scams is two different things though,” Locke insisted. Regardless, he acquiesced to the train of thought. At every step of their rescue mission, Locke had taken a position contrary to every little thing Brint had said as a means of exploring every option—he hoped by now that Brint understood he performed this thankless task in order to help, to precisely target the handful of moves they were capable of making before it was too late to salvage their friends. “Okay okay if this is the outpost you think they’re hitting for supplies, where is the camp.”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Brint learned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “If someone saw them head in any direction, then that’s a lead we can check against our other predictions.”
“Intel has been scarce since they were nabbed,” Dev spoke up. “They’re definitely not being obvious. We know they were on the way to Pritya, immediately west of Lasandet, and surveillance hasn’t come across any calls for help scrawled in the sand. Other than following the trail of water St. Croix has been tracking or interacting with the locals, I’m coming up empty on what else we can do right now, and I’m not sure what’s more of a waste of time.”
“Do you have a better idea, Locke?” Brint turned on his newest sergeant. “St. Croix?”
Regarding the map, Adrien leaned forward with his chin in his hand. With a deep breath, he leaned forward and stuck a pin in the map, toward the end of the trail of groundwater he’d been obsessed with tracking for the prior week.
“I think they’re here,” Adrien announced, looking up to observe his companion’s faces, to gauge their responses to his outlier claim. It was nowhere near the outpost Brint was pushing as an option. It was not in the direction of Losi or Lasandet or even near Pritya—it was a quiet spot in the cliffs, triangulated near a small grove of date palms, an hour north of an old mining cave-in, fifteen minutes from the edge of a more green sprawl, likely more hospitable to animal life than the barren red sand. “I don’t really know them but from what I understand, I don’t think they’d risk the outpost. You guys said Kasse was a street kid hiding from Trenchants, right? Eo’s gonna be the same way—Trenchants target Ossan communities at a higher rate than other neighborhoods. So they’re both going to be disproportionately wary of anything hunting them, even without a Trenchant in the equation. I don’t think they’ve gone near an outpost or a city at all. I think they’ll be somewhere they can sit and scrape by and stockpile whatever they can get until they find an opportunity to head home.”
“What’s the mileage between here—” Brint’s index finger nudged the trailhead, “And here?” He drew a straight line across the desert, ending at the outpost.
“A hundred miles, hundred twenty tops,” Adrien replied, analyzing the line Brint had drawn. “We’d have to go around these rocky hills here, and there’s an ambush zone around… here. We could take this road South to shave some time off too.”
Brint’s green eyes were like a pendulum, moving back and forth between the two points. If the boys had been at the outpost, then this would be a good opportunity to track them further; if they were camping with a stockpile of fruits and readily available water, then they were hopefully in a good enough position to wait a few extra days. “We’ll check both, then. Outpost is closer to our current position so we’ll hit it first, then head to the tributary if nothing comes of it.” He looked up. “Anyone else want to argue, or are we good?”
Locke remained quiet in silent approval of Brint’s plan, now reinforced by the questions of a group.
Similarly, Adrien seemed to accept the directives—though his blue eyes lingered on that line Brint had drawn, tripwire caught on every what-if, ankles tangled in every unforeseen could-be.
“Yeah,” Adrien replied, pensive. “Let’s bring them home.”