Two days later, Brint was bent over his desk, back arched in a lazy slump while his eyes scanned the dense wording of a report compiled by his pair of intelligence sergeants. His fingers fanned across his forehead, dipping shallow into his sun-kissed brunet hair. Command was still intent on having their most efficient ODA get a head start on overtaking Lasandet, but word was the revolution there was sputtering—diffusing into smaller cities scattered nearby. Unsure if these whispers were flung under the false flags of distraction, the lieutenant charged the brains of his operation to do some digging. Those good little hounds, in return, brought him buckets full of dirt.
He sighed, glancing up to the window, watching a single prop observation plane streak upward into the sky on the airfield across the base. Maybe he could requisition an airlift further north for his group, approach from a new angle, steal humvees from a different platoon—change up the scenery, throw off the trail of those cunning rebels ever after their tail.
Kasse Sejan entered without a knock or a sound or even so much as a curious glance at his mentor. In the days since their catastrophic experiment with Glow, the sergeant had been laid up in their bunk with Eoran on guard, that biting thing so protective of the boy he thought had fallen so drastically ill. Kasse himself had ceased to experience physical discomfort within hours of finding his place at Eoran’s side—he’d simply remained in his lover’s arms, basking limp in the power of his temporary high.
What followed, however, was emptiness; absolute black.
Brint’s half-coerced offering to his favorite boy had left him with a vacuum on the inside, a hollow place that potential had left in the negative. This space would always remain: Eoran couldn’t fill the void, not with love or sex; Kasse couldn’t feed it, couldn’t simply patch the walls with violence, stave his howling gut with his meager pool of energy.
There was only one way to make his hunger fade and Kasse hated that he couldn’t simply bear the pain, couldn’t simply hold onto the memory of what limitless was and continue on,
weakened
meandering
powerless.
He shut the door and dropped himself heavy in the wingback chair across from Brint, unwilling to look the older man in the face.
Brint moved his eyes aside to stare at Kasse, pronounced brows harshly knit because he was having a hard time shifting from the particulars of meticulous movement and military formalities to the looseness of social interaction. His high, contrarily, was rather pleasant—but, then again, he didn’t have to manage all the variables that Kasse did; he was plain and simple humanity, not complicated like a wright.
“Are you just going to scowl at the wall, or is there a reason for your visit?” The older man corrected his posture slightly. He shifted to rest his right cheek on the curled fingers of a closed fist and began to relax. “Everyone says you’ve been under the weather. Are you feeling better?”
Kasse inclined his head slightly but didn’t look up, grey eyes skirting the edge of the older man’s desk.
“Clear your afternoon,” he said. Some small part of that pit viper boy would always be angry with Brint for what he’d done—but the larger part of the whole, in all honesty, loved that man too much for it to make much of a difference. Kasse Sejan was always ready to forgive Emrys Brint, no matter what wrong he’d done. “We’re going out to the desert. Tell the squad we’re doing overtime.”
“Oh, sorry? I guess I missed the General’s memo where he says that sergeants are now ranked above lieutenants.” Brint’s head tilted in an exaggeration of confusion, but a grin quickly belied his scolding. He was toothless, a knave apologetic before the grand culmination of a puissance that had briefly shunned him. Pen subsequently dashing across a half-sheet of paper, Brint was in the midst of scrawling out the memo to leave with the low-ranked admin working the front desk of the officers’ building.
“And for what reason are we going into the desert?” He glanced up, hand finishing his signature with a crisp line that both dotted his I and crossed his T.
Kasse met him there, arcing electric from grey to green.
“You know why…” The words both crossed his heart and hoped to die. With a sigh, the wright leaned into the armrest, cheek resting on his knuckles clenched in resistance to the body’s resignation. “If we use… it—if we use it, if you want me to have it for emergencies, I have to get used to it. I threw up a bunch, lost control of my… situation.”
Kasse squinted back at Brint.
“I fell through the stairs on the way back to the bunk, I’m kinda lucky St Croix was there. I guess he didn’t really think of it as lucky, though.” Finally, the ghost laughed—a small pip of a thing, but a laugh no less.
“Ah, that’s why he looked beat up. Be careful with him, it’s imperative that he return to Port Haven in one piece, no dings or dents.” Between the general ease of his command-style, Brint treated all his men with subtle differences. He treated Kasse better than any of them, talked to the young sergeant more like he was an equal; made it seem like he was special enough to partake in details that were usually only meant for his silver-bar chest—and he was, to Brint, he was.
“I’ll take you into the desert, but you can’t walk off out there, Kasse, understand? Promise me that you’ll stay nearby and not stomp off.” He averted his gaze to fetch the offending atomizer formerly stowed away. “Then we’re going to go get drinks and food on our way out because I’m hungry, and you need to stay hydrated on this.”
“Aiight, babysitter,” Kasse replied, falling back at ease with Brint with a whiplash quickness he hadn’t expected to hear from his mouth. He’d come prepared to be stoic, distant, yet here he was: falling into step alongside his commanding officer, ready to grab some food and hit the road—after he let Eo know he’d be gone for a bit, of course.
Where he entered the room morose, he rose with an enthusiastic bounce in his gait.
“I gotta let Eo know—then we can get out of here.”
“Alright.” Brint dropped the note with the private at the desk as he walked out with the weapons sergeant. A satchel hung off his shoulder, soiled canvas and scratched up leather. Inside, the vaporizer was buried beneath his reports. “Go tell mother you’ll be out past curfew and meet me at the commissary in twenty. I’ll get the truck keys from the mechanics in the meantime.”
“Yeah,” Kasse replied, jogging off with a wave. “Twenty minutes.”
×××
Eoran had not been pleased.
Kasse had rushed into their bunk on a whirlwind kiss, swirling around Eo in some decoy deference before he let his lover know he’d be gone past curfew. For how long those boys had been together, he knew Eoran would thrash against his insistence that it had to be done alone—but the boy didn’t budge. Couldn’t.
“It’s nothing big,” Kasse assured him, distracted hands crossed in trespass of his engineer’s back pockets, fingers digging into his flesh with a playful air. “Target practice.”
Now, Kasse was a febrile catastrophe curled up half conscious in the passenger seat, two THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU bags of vomit tied off and stowed in a larger paper bag standing on the truck’s floor. He was, again, a seafoam illusion of smoke and mirrors. He was, again, a violent response to an energy surplus he didn’t yet know how to control.
The humvee was at rest at the bottom of a dune, fifty miles out from their occasional homestead of Camp Losi. Lurking just on the other side stood a small township where a resurgence of activity had been reported by word of mouth games relayed on aging telephone lines.
“Well, this is definitely not a viable solution if it makes you sick like this.” Hands hanging out the open window, Brint upended a bottle of water onto a handful of napkins, then wrung them out, water beading in the sand below. He fixed the thin sheets into some semblance of flat and brought it to Kasse’s forehead. His other hand pushed the flopped tuft of the boy’s hair aside—outright displays of affection were rare for that commander who always tried to keep his emotions buttoned up behind a shrewd facade.
And yet, the touch was somewhat cautious. Brint watched the wright billow in wisps, like pieces of him were dithering through their shared airspace. His eyebrows knit in concern. “How long did you say this lasted for the other night?”
Kasse almost didn’t hear the voice, almost didn’t recognize word. He was adrift until Brint’s touch cut through the locust scream his hive of a head had become, thousandfold vespine wings beating unison war drums in his diaphragm rafters, his cloudy throat.
“I’ll—I’ll g-get better,” the boy whined, leaning delirious into his CO’s affection, imagined his hands were the stressed tendons of Eoran’s inner wrist on his forehead just two days prior. “I nngh—just need to get used to it…”
Fumbling with a bottle of water, the boy lost his grip, relinquishing it to the center console with a long, frustrated groan. His every sigh creaked through the truck’s frame, vibrating painful in the lining of his lungs.
“Fifteen minutes—gimme fifteen minutes, Em, I’ll come around.”
“Take whatever time you need, Kasse. You’re top priority here, not anything else.” Brint’s heart was bisected by the two things that were most important to him: one, that uncertain shape of a human being struggling to maintain his corporeality in a world of atomic monstrosity, and two, success in the field, this war he’d dedicated his adult life to, spurned all prospects of respectable career paths or healthy relationships with people who hadn’t traipsed through the exact same fields of mutilation he had. Brint’s self-awareness was floundering under abstract wants, shirking in the intensity of lustrous prospects so much grander than the luminance of gunfire and grenades. A better man would have started the truck and took them back home.
Brint was not a better man.
Kasse’s assurance was misconstrued somewhere along the way. Brint heard need and read it like want. He just needed to get used to it. The boy just needed to get used to it.
“Here—” The lieutenant picked up the bottle and tilted it before Kasse in an offer to help him drink.
And Kasse, incapable of seeing the wrong written all over his superior’s face, infused into his posture and soaked through his rationale, drank from his hand like a dog.
Brint couldn’t see beneath Kasse’s surface, couldn’t feel what he felt, didn’t know that every time his body flared and he snapped himself back together was a five move equivalent, a touch and go practice session where a failure to hold was a failure to survive. Already the sergeant had blown past the limits of their calorie counting past. Every rolling blackout his body stuttered was a rehearsal for a frenzy Emrys Brint could not yet comprehend, a bloodlust he would never see clear to the bottom.
“T-thanks,” he mewled when he sat back, rapid lash flutter settling his head to see past his emptied guts, to simply look to the horizon where his proving ground laid.
Kasse yearned to be unadulterated,
wanted to be power
needed to be the
terminus.
When he blinked himself clear of his sick all that remained was an urban legend: a cruel ghost that wandered the red wastes of Ossa’s dessicated terrain.
“I’ll be okay,” he said, bloodsighted, bloodmouthed. “I’m okay.”
“Okay.” Brint recapped the bottle and pushed it into a large pocket on his outer thigh. He receded back into the driver’s seat, pulled the keys from the ignition and opened the humvee’s door in full. “Ready, then?”
Kasse glanced at the other man, sidelong with the iron taste of some youthless arrogance the past three days had imbued into his bones. He’d been enchanted with a glimpse beyond the scope of his twenty-one years, a vision of a world where no one survived unless he allowed them escape, however brief that may have been. Before, Kasse had been a good soldier: effective and obedient. Now, Brint was in the crosshairs of a predator, autonomous and vengeful, perfected.
With a dampened nod, the boy so fundamentally altered by Brint’s own hand stepped out the door without opening it at all.
There was a chill in the night. That’s why Brint shivered—it was the chill.