Brint lingered near his office window, watching the way the light clung to the curves of a gold plaque propped on a stand, the way the sun filled the etched letters of ‘accomplishment’ and ‘teamwork’ and outstanding’ and ‘deadly’. He’d seen this plaque so many times before this very moment; he’d stood at this window, in this exact spot—millimeter-fine exactitude known by his proximity to other objects in the room—and it always felt normal until this very moment. The plaque was the problem. It was wrong. Relocated? No—off. Just a few degrees off.
“Sejan, have you been fucking with my bookshelves?” The Lieutenant stepped aside to attend that accoutrement scattered between the physical symbolism of other memories and books brimming with philosophies on various wartime objectives and other assorted militaria. His chin turned at the sound of the door to assume it was the boy he’d summoned.
“…Probably?”
Frozen in the doorway, Kasse Sejan felt somewhat called out, somewhat uncomfortable in Brint’s office with Brint himself present—mostly due to the prior fucking that had indeed happened (but not on the bookshelf). Clearing his throat, the boy entered his CO’s office but was more reserved than usual. Typically he’d be picking the place apart for items of interest: food, books, trinkets meant for him. Instead, the weapons sergeant came to the edge of the desk and fiddled with the edge, eyes down.
Something felt different today
and Kasse couldn’t, for the life
of him, pin down exactly what.
“I mean I’ve been reading your books,” he said, taking a seat in one of the ragged highback chairs he’d stolen from a neighboring office. He distracted himself with his ritual, his grab at normalcy: his cigarettes, his lighter, and the drag that lit it. “Did I mess something up?”
“This thing was out of place.” Brint nudged a paperweight next to the plaque. “Mainly just wanted to be sure the cleaning crew wasn’t playing around.”
The Lieutenant turned and walked back to his desk, taking a seat in the chair that rolled slightly back from his downward momentum. He looked around his desk items—those were perfectly located. He looked up, relaxed, as usual, in the presence of this boy he was so fond of.
“Are you excited to get back out there?”
Kasse was good at covering things up. He was a master. He covered his fear with boisterous pride for years, overcompensated with great precision until he even convinced himself he was unafraid. He covered a soft core with a carapace of bone and braided muscle held together by a vascular net that flexed when he cracked his knuckles, when he shifted to pull his cigarette from his lips between thumb and forefinger.
He covered his hesitation with a laugh, the crooked grin Brint was always so pleased to see on his face.
“Yeah,” he said. In some ways he wasn’t a liar—he was always lingering along the chainlink borders of Losi on his smoke-break walkarounds. He was listless. He was bored. But in other ways, he still longed for the idle paradise he’d left behind the avalanche.
Maybe that’s why he paced Losi’s barbed outline.
“I think I’m mostly recovered, I’ve gotten my energy back. I feel pretty good.”
“That’s good, I’m really glad. You were very thin. I mean, you’ve been very thin for as long as I’ve known you, but… well, you’re looking healthier now.” The lieutenant’s eyes traced cheekbones, the boy’s mouth so smooth in its shifting between scowl and smirk. “Are you hesitant at all? With all the talk about this legendary ghost our enemy has made of you, and now with an actual attempt on your life, do you worry about your continued safety out there? Are you comfortable with things going back the way they were, or do we need to make some adjustments to protect you further?”
Brint glanced aside in thought. “I’d like to move forward. There are some small objectives I’d like to put you on, but I want to know how you feel about things before I work up a mission plan and chart a course with St. Croix and Toriet.”
“They’re scared, aren’t they?” Kasse observed idly. “Do you think they’ll try again after what I did to that raid crew?”
The boy didn’t look up. He swung one leg over the side of the seat, crook of his knee settled over the armrest. Despite the cool of his tone, his foot left on the floor bounced, fidgeted; he drummed out a rhythm like his heartbeat times three, heel never touching the floor.
“I wanna keep doing things,” he said with his eyes on his cigarette’s plume. With you, he left implied on a wisp.
“Hard to say.” Brint leaned forward, resting his arms on the desk. Despite the positions they were in—him in the seat of power, Kasse placed before him as a subordinate—he was always casual with the young sergeant. He was friendly. They were friends. “The raiding crew didn’t seem to mind all the chaos you’ve sown across the desert before they decided to come at you. So, were they just ill-prepared? And if they were ill-prepared, then who’s to say that there aren’t a hundred other dumb assholes that’ll be sent out to nab you, unaware to what they’re walking into? Of course…” The older man paused, considering.
“It would be incredibly stupid for these rebels to keep running through men trying to get you. But you are like them, Kasse, at least in part. Maybe next time it will be with sympathy, maybe next time it won’t even be directly for you—maybe they’ll lure Toriet away to try to get you. They seemed to recognize that you two were a bogo deal this last time.” He shrugged, unknowing.
“I’m not trying to dissuade you, if it sounds like I am. I just want to be prepared. I don’t want this to happen again. You mean too much to me and this unit for us to be careless. I don’t ever want you to be at a disadvantage. We’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past and there isn’t room for anymore. What do you think about the plan that Dev worked up, to overload the internet with false sightings and stories?”
“I think it’ll help? I’m not great at… I don’t know, all of that.” Kasse remained stoic despite his admission of incompetence. The street raised boy was a master of a small set of skills and he would crow about his talent till the sun rose over the mountains—but anything outside his circle of infallible tricks seemed entirely foreign to the boy: he disavowed any knowledge, washed his have of any confidence. “I think Dev knows what will work better than me. All I do is cause the mayhem—I’m not really prepared to clean it up.”
Finally, the grey eyed boy looked up at his elder, the man who’d afforded him so many opportunities, nurtured him till his alleycat mange had given way to a sleek predator worthy of nighttime whispers, urban legends. “It’s why I’m lucky to have you looking out for me. You and the rest of the guys, you’re always looking out for me.”
“Hm. Well, there are a couple other things I want to try too.” Brint’s segue was not without acknowledgement of what his soldier said. His nodding was contemplative, his continuation smooth. “How do you feel about a no survivors sort of approach to our overtime missions? It’ll add some time and effort, but I figure that since we’re typically out to either eliminate a specific target or accomplish a goal, then anyone else hanging around the locations we’re visiting is probably also up to no good.”
“That’s gonna take a lot of energy,” the boy replied, brow knit as he put his cigarette back to his lips for another drag. He looked concerned at Brint’s apparent backward step in his absence. “You know how this works—I’m never gonna have enough moves to successfully accomplish a no witnesses, no survivors scenario.”
“I know. I haven’t forgotten all the lessons. I might have a temporary work around for that.” Brint pushed his chair back from the front drawer of his desk, wheels complaining as they were drug across the uneven timber of his aged floorboards. “I want you to make a conscious effort to use your weapon more, first of all. If we’re clearing an entire area, then we can be strategic about the noise of gunfire. But, if you get overwhelmed, or if shit starts to suddenly go awry, then I want you to consider trying this—“
Looking down, the lieutenant pushed aside an assortment of pens mixed in with old paperwork and pulled out a pocket-sized vaporizer, gleaming silver in the incandescence of the day pouring generously through the window across the room.
“It’s glow. It’s very addictive, but I think it will be a good quick fix for when things start to escape our control since it kicks in near immediately—much faster than an energy bar or chew.”
That—
That—
Kasse’s blood pressure dropped through the floor and took his halfway house grin along for the escape. The color fled from his skin. He was left simple, unmoving, achromatic—grey and pale like the eyes that fell to that slip of silver singing sweet to the death of him.
Kasse couldn’t speak,
he couldn’t—
couldn’t—
couldn’t
look
couldn’t
not look
not at Brint
not at the desk
he couldn’t
stop looking,
frantic for
help.
Brint’s eyes rose from the device on the desk to observe his subordinate. He was quiet, watchful, puzzling in the silence that he allowed to settle in the rift of space between them.
“Kasse…?” Brint asked, soft breeze complementing his spring solstice sight. “Talk to me, Kasse.”
“Where did you get that.” The boy had the words of a question but he was nothing but demanding. So often he spoke this way to strangers; never had he spoken this way to Brint. “Where did that come from.”
“Confiscated it from a private working the admin hall a few days ago,” Brint replied, cautious but forthcoming. “He’s part of a ring.”
Kasse pulled his leg slowly back over the armrest till it was folded in front of him, till he faced forward. He’d been wounded, left in the coil-tight state that flight required when it was required to survive.
How often had he seen them in the alleys, in the streets? The junkies high with that dim shine in the black of their wide open eyes, limbal white and broken veined, their litter bodies spilled from condemned brick walk-ups.
How often had he seen it in a trenchant’s unbridled rage?
How often had he watched the carnage from afar,
watched a wright become a monster—
watched a man turn third person.
Who was it?
Who was primed in that vape tank?
What was their name?
Who were they?
Did he ever hold their hand in the night?
“I’m not asking for us to make this our everyday. I’m asking you to consider this as a last stop before you pass out from overexerting yourself or get killed because you’re overwhelmed and stretched too thin. You can say no. We can talk this out.” The fact of the matter was Brint was asking Kasse to murder more, be more efficient with his hunting, to prolong the catastrophe of his death-slurry, to expand his field of debris. He was grooming the young sergeant—this was a downpayment on a future. It was an investment in parts and labor, an extra sight, an expanded magazine for his favorite weapon. Of course, Brint didn’t see it like that, but perception was key. One man’s trash was another man’s treasure, and Brint’s eyes always shone in the light-rimmed splatter of Kasse’s glitterfield massacres.
Brint made a career out of killing; he was a man of war but he was not inhuman. He knew he was asking a lot of the boy. The lieutenant was aware that those illicit vapors laid between them were the remnants of the dead, those whose abilities had been exhumed of themselves and distilled into highly portable power; a one-hit wonder propelled by the residual energies sucked clean from corpses. The ask, however, was the end goal. Murder was murder. They were fighting for a country that wanted to make life more difficult for people like Kasse’s—he was serving that very same purpose. Amstead always wanted more: more land, more subjection, more work, more blood, blood, blood…
How much blood was on the adjunct’s hands? How stained were his palms with the slick of his half-side? How soaked were his clothes?
Life was a maze of lines blurred to no discernible end. And yet suddenly, in that writhing knot of humanity sandwiched before mortal and ghost, commander and soldier, man and boy, there was a glimpse of definition. Jarring and crisp and nauseating amid the soothing lull of gradient existence. Silence had its own violence. Sharp. Empty.
“Have you never experimented with this stuff before?” Brint reached forward so he could pick up the vaporizer. He turned it over in his open hand.
“No—of course not,” Kasse said like the answer was obvious, eyes following the other man’s hands. He was a fight dog striped with scars, always watching the beatstick that formed him, always aware of the man who shaped him.
He knew Brint. The uneven rhythm of his gait, broken in the middle, ridden through with a proudly enforced foxtrot drift that made him a little too fast, a beat too slow—never on time. He knew his posture, the order and alignment of his every vertebrae, stacked one atop the next until they formed the rigid centerline of that rogue paterfamilias, jaw always so parallel to the ground. He knew the lip of every scar, knew the wounds that made them, traced him out in warrior’s Braille till he knew Brint’s story by rote, could repeat his life in bullet holes and bone shards. He knew him now in the way he turned the vaporizer over in his hand but had no real interest in examining the object, the listless turn of his wrist. He’d already stared at it for hours; his electricity was all over the silver; his cellular record had already been scored.
He knew Brint,
and yet:
“I don’t understand,” Kasse lamented, revenant whisper sighed soft through the cracks in his facade. He couldn’t bear his mentor’s gaze, tried to obscure himself with the last searing drag of his neglected cigarette, deep breath swig singeing the filter in his desperate grab for ataraxy. “What am I to you? I don’t—why would you work so hard to bring me back from the desert just to kill me like this?”
Because he couldn’t say no—
he couldn’t say no, if they
were both honest, he
couldn’t say no.
“That’s a little dramatic,” Brint glanced up through raised eyebrows, chin dipped, stolid stare. “But if you want to put it like that, then let me ask you this: how would you prefer that I kill you, then? Every day we’re not protected by chainlink borders and razor wire, we’re getting shot at. You’re being hunted by a child who shanks people with her bones. Every time you go out on a mission, your life is at risk—at risk to be wasted in the blink of an eye. Is that how you want to die, Kasse? How many bullet holes did you imagine for yourself? How many ivory knives?”
Kasse looked away, unwilling to entertain the older man’s offense-as-defense tactic, arms folded over his chest with his head tilted in petulant posture: a boy scolded by this man auditioning for his daddy issues.
“I don’t care what happens to me,” he finally said, looking up like some somber decision had been made. “As long as Eo gets out of Ossa safe with the money for his family, I don’t care.”
“Stop. That’s a bullshit lie,” Brint replied, “And it’s unacceptable. Even if you did mean it and weren’t locking yourself up behind that dumb barrier of shittiness, it wouldn’t matter because I care about you. What are you to me? You’re a lot of things—you’re a friend, my best soldier, an intelligent human being, an extremely talented wright. You’re a cunning adversary, you’re a kid from the streets that has seen too much of the world before he ever should have.” He brought the atomizer to his lips, thumb fiddling to find the switch blindly.
“I haven’t ever tried this stuff either, but fuck it, we’ve got some time.” The lieutenant pressed the button and took a hit.
Kasse choked on his savvy retort (You’re a dumb barrier of shittiness) as a strangled “No—!” escaped him instead. He only made it halfway across the desk in his scramble to stop the older man’s commitment to his point, and he settled there unmoving when he understood it was for nothing.
This was done—
as soon as Brint
slumped into the
embrace of his
backrest, Kasse
understood:
it was done.