The sky was open and calm, the night clear and star-bright, moonless.
The squad was circled up and asleep within a natural defilade, surrounded on three sides by a sandstone canyon. Its mouth emptied to the east, wide enough for three vehicles to pass but currently it was occupied by two boys, their CO, and a single clay-streaked truck.
Kasse, some parts mongrel all parts teacher, leaned onto the hood, chin resting languid in an upturned hand. He bumped a shoulder absently against Eoran’s knee before he looked up at him. That impermanent boy was always happy to look up at his lover like some monarch on his windshield throne, even here poised, hiding in plain sight. The group looked like strategists hovering over a battle plan except, this time, there were no maps, just a packet of highly coveted raspberry lemonade energy chews lined up on the hood.
“So if each of these is half of an energy bar, and I can get down six energy bars without puking, then you get twenty-four moves before I’m empty. That’s two moves per chew.” Kasse looked up at Brint, stark yet energized by the weaponized game they played. “Give or take.”
Brint nodded and turned his eyes to his engineer.
“The building is five stories. Target on the roof, sniper across the street.” As Eoran spoke, his hands illustrated the scene setting in vague sweepings of his palms. Long fingers pointed in directions irrelevant for hypothetical constructions, drafting geometrical blueprints in the air. “It’s a busted up apartment building. The interior stairwell is accessible from each hallway but locked from the outside. A fire escape scales the south outer wall and the metal looks weather-worn, kinda rickety. There are windows everywhere. Many are broken, glass sits in chaos-strewn piles.” His eyes fell from the dappled sky and joined Kasse in observation of their commanding officer. Legs neatly folded atop the truck’s hood, 18C’s looming position of power gave the appearance that those caffeine-laced morsels had a destiny that took them anywhere other than through the lips of that wright he adored, but each man there knew that was not true.
The lieutenant intently listened. Index finger curled upon his bottom lip, his studious visage turned malformed by the weight of his calculations. This was Do-or-Die Monopoly (Unconventional Warfare Edition); he was eyeing those energy chews like they were the keys to the plasticine real estate of success.
“What’s one full move again?” He asked, green eyes on the boys. “One wall permeable, one person gone? What’s your recharge rate—once you eat one are you good to go again, or is there a delay?”
“Depends on how it’s accomplished. If I’m in a superior offensive position, I’ve got enough time to figure out how to conserve, to execute using what I know. If I’m on the defense, I will respond instinctively. That can be the difference between dissolving a whole person, which can take two moves, dissolving a vital piece of a person, one, dropping a person through the floor, one, and reaching into someone and killing them that way, maybe a half.” Kasse tilted his head this way and that, considering the other parameters, looking up like he could see what his brain was calculating. “I tend to feed pretty steady over the course of a mission so there’s usually something in reserve, but I’d say I start feeling it in ten, fifteen minutes?”
Brint nodded. “Okay.” His gaze shifted: level on his weapons sergeant then up to his engineering sergeant. “What’s the street situation like?”
“Quiet,” Eoran replied, tilting his head. “No activity for hours. But there’s a light shining on the third floor.”
“Color?”
“Warm. Orange-ish.”
“Hmm, okay. Hold on—let me think.” Brint retrieved a small notebook from a pocket on his bicep, fussing with the flap of a velcro enclosure sewn just beneath their unit’s patch. The older man turned his back on the pair and stepped a yard away. He clicked on his flashlight, red glow spilling onto the hand-held workspace over which he hovered, pen quickly scratching out notes.
With the lieutenant occupied, Eo focused down on Kasse, hand coming to rest on the boy’s forearm. The affection in his touch was always apparent but his look intimated that he had something to say.
Kasse was simultaneously fascinated and amused by how seriously Brint was taking this exercise. It always seemed like every moment was a life or death scenario. He treated their training games like they were real, like the whole squad was at risk in his wright-in-a-warzone dry run built of candy, theoretical physics, and Eoran’s past life of bootleg fantasy RPGs and bargain bin platformers.
With the older man distracted, Kasse glanced up at Eoran quizzically. With the tilt of his head, he acquiesced: he was always so willing to let the other boy in.
It’s almost kinda cute how much he’s puzzling over this. Speaking into their merging, Eo glanced up with a grin. Do you think he’s getting it?
I don’t think I get it most of the time, 18B quipped in return. So long as he gets what I can and can’t do, that’s good enough, right?
Good enough. The look Eoran shot his lover dithered somewhere between an insolent ‘oh, come on’ and an incredulous ‘you’re soft on him.’ Sure, whatever.
Even though his tone of thought was flippant, the boy meant no lasting harm—at least not in Kasse’s direction. It wasn’t 18B’s fault their CO had ideas. It wasn’t his fault he possessed the ability to be a weapons collector’s wettest dream.
This whole exercise was very much life or death to both of the men in Kasse’s company and Eoran wanted all of this to weigh heavy on the lieutenant’s shoulders—he was a despot about to walk this white man through every level of whatever hell he believed in. Something in his face said that he was going to play unfair, but maybe his position in society—Ossan, bloodwright—had long since stripped him of his understanding of what that word meant, his ability to draw contrasts between fair and unfair.
A shadow of confidence dawdled at the corners of 18C’s lips. If fair was the difference between him and Kasse being separated from their squad to engage in missions unmentioned in their unit’s constant radio relay, then Eoran was going to be super fair about this. He laid his hand back in his lap when Brint clicked off his torch.
“So… one last thing. Can you eat all of them? What happens if you just eat all of them in one go rather than conserve and space them out?” The green-eyed man asked leaning back on the hood. “Which is better, which do you prefer?”
“If I eat all of them, then I have a dying star for a stomach and you’re gonna have to get me medical attention before I can shit again,” Kasse replied with a laugh that veered sharply into more serious territory. “It’ll make me heavy, tired. Won’t be as fast as you want me to be. May take longer to get the energy with a concrete block of cardboard paper mache holding court in my tum-tum. Man, you eat six of those fuckers in one go, you’ll die.”
By the end of his brief speech, Kasse was back to laughing, all half breed smirks and changeling eyes. He trained himself expectantly on Brint’s pensive frame, cigarette finding its way to his lips like second nature. He threw the pack on the hood toward the older man before he straightened, striking the flint of his lighter two, three times before it cooperated.
“I’ll advise you on what can and can’t be done as we move through the exercise but just remember: it’s not just being a ghost, it’s electromagnetic.” Kasse took a deep drag, unwavering in delivering Brint’s life or death lesson in utility deployment. “I can sense things out without burning a move, unless it’s super far away. Think of it like echolocation, I guess.”
Brint chewed on the inside of his cheek, dismayed at the content of Kasse’s answer. Eoran, however, appeared delighted. Apparently some piece of verbiage filled the barely younger boy’s eyes with joy, made his heart swell with an emotion like adoration, unguarded and silent.
“Alright,” Brint began, “Let me start two down, twenty minutes ago. What side is the sniper on?”
“South,” Eoran replied, felicity slowly waning.
“Approach from the north,” their CO continued. “What’s the door situation like?”
“Barred from the inside.”
“Okay. What’s the inside feel like?”
“Strangely dense. There are pockets of clarity, small hollows of emptiness. Mass like concrete and iron. Things are also kinda… wet.” Eoran looked down his nose at the lieutenant who was poised like a student at a desk. His knuckles supported a pronounced cheekbone and he was scratching down an assortment of tallies and half-legible thoughts as notes in his book. After a moment, Eo added, “There’s a tinny noise from behind.”
“Tinny noi—fuck, for real?” Brint’s eyes darted up to a nodding Eo. “What kind of noise exactly?”
“Rustling,” was the engineering sergeant’s answer.
Brint looked to Kasse. The older man’s instincts as a soldier were good but there was something about being subject to the judgment of two subordinates that had him wanting to do this right.
“Think man—echolocation. Map the area. Also, fuck doors. Doors have guards. Walls don’t.” Kasse took a deep drag as his gaze meandered across his favorite things, his favorite people: Eoran, high calorie sweets, and Brint. In that order. “Takes less energy to ambush from the side than to go through the front where they’re watching.”
Nodding, Brint looked back to Eo expectantly.
“The whole space beyond the north wall is thicker than it should be,” the boy divulged, “Feels like there’s a bunch of shit stacked up against it. Wood jutting in every direction. Glass and furniture and appliances too big to be relocated by a single person. Lots of electric avenues and circuitry leading to dead ends, for the most part, except for a sputtering electric panel at the back of the room, somewhat muddied by a layer of thick concrete and iron rebar. The space is cut diagonally down the center, sloping up toward the rear of the building… Which is kinda weird for a first floor, right?”
“Oh, the floor fell?” Brint asked.
“Yes,” Eo confirmed.
“Alright, so slip in from the northeast—but that noise. What can I tell about it?”
“It’s a kid. Frenetic heartbeat. Meat and blood and bones bent to accommodate a more quadrupedal style of movement. They’re not advancing but they’re not leaving either. Rustling has stopped, no movement. Seems like they’re watching.”
“So, just leave it right now?” Brint asked Kasse. “How do you handle possible external threats under no time constraint?”
“Approach silently, root the target, then neutralize manually.” It seemed obvious to the boy-weapon, but he understood his second nature impossibilities could be difficult to fathom: reality was oftentimes more laughable than fiction. “You wanna check the second floor for vitals. I track a floor above and below like clockwork for bodies. It’s kind of just augmented sight. It’s weird. Keep electronics in mind too—I don’t do it much cause it can be unpredictable, but we can make a mad diversion out of that electrical panel.”
Kasse was alight. Talking about his utility was exhilarating, teaching someone how it worked was unthinkable and yet here he was: deep in both. How lucky was he? How fortunate? For once in his life, outside the circle of Eoran’s arms, Kasse felt valuable. Maybe the military really was the best thing that ever befell that ghost of a boy.
“How far away is the kid?” Brint asked Eoran.
“Across the street,” was the boy’s response.
“Hmm, fuck it. I’ll get ‘im later, if needed. So, inside. Up the incline—any signs of life?”
“None here, but a floor above—third floor—there are four people.” Eoran shifted, leaning back, elbows supporting his upper body on the truck’s filthy windscreen. “Interior stairwell is still intact, it’s just that the floor’s kinda separated from it. Bit of a jump.”
“Three moves, four guys…” Brint contemplated.
“Don’t forget: stairwell is locked on that side,” Eoran chimed as a reminder.
“Right. Could I just go to the top and take care of the one guy I’m after then deal with the consequences on the way back down.” To Kasse again. “Worth it? Or draw them out with the electrical panel?”
“Depends—are you worried about the aftermath? Is anyone checking the work?”
Kasse asked himself this question more than any other. It looped through his head like a mantra:
Will anyone bear witness to what is left in my wake?
“Orders are that the target is priority,” Eoran reminded the pair of the rules he’d earlier established, looking to both, sweetly lingering on Kasse for a few seconds longer than was necessary. “Any other incidental casualties in our favor is extra credit.”
“I’m a little worried about the kid,” Brint said, too absorbed in their make believe to notice real world nuances. “If they alert someone in there, I feel like I’m going to have twenty guys and a sniper trying to block my descent.”
Eoran wouldn’t outright confirm it—and Brint wasn’t really asking him to—but that was the plan.
“No no—” Kasse righted himself, shaking his cigarette in place of his head. “I mean is Amstead coming to check the work. Is there a second team coming in? Do we need to spend extra moves to stay undercover? When we did Biko, I couldn’t let you guys know. I interred one man in the stairwell when he split off from the group, I dissolved parts of the second one’s heart and, in the chaos, did the third by hand. Three moves total: open the stairs, close the stairs, dissolve the heart. Until you knew, did you suspect?”
Palms on the hood, Kasse’s gaze lingered on Eoran’s knee as he considered the scene.
“Regardless, you can go either way on the kid, I’d be 50/50 in the moment.”
Considering Kasse’s words, Brint looked up to Eoran. He was hopeful for a hint, which was dashed in an instant.
“Whether or not Amstead is following up is not relevant to your current situation,” Eoran said, meeting the man’s eyes. “You’re one card in a whole deck—it’s not for you to know what the rest of the cards around you are doing or are going to be doing. Besides, shouldn’t you always assume somebody’s watching? The reality of the situation is that you’re out here, operating with an ability that is easily taken advantage of. If you don’t want to risk being found out and exposing yourself to people who would try to exploit you, then maybe a certain amount of care should be considered.”
Brint tilted his head, exhaling a gentle sigh. “So I guess letting everything fall through all the floors is not really all that great of an idea?”
“That could get messy.” Kasse looked thoughtful, though his brow slowly knit as he imagined the aftermath in more detail. “Like… real messy. Dudes all chopped in half and shit. Guts everywhere. And the smell, all that blood—it’ll change you, for real. Also, flattering, but I’m not a fucking god, Em.”
“Well, debatable,” Brint shot back with a wry grin and slipped back into his more serious demeanor.