There was a chill in the night. That’s why Brint shivered—it was the chill.
The sky above them spread like royal midnight, lacquer thick and glistening in a moonglow sheen, an infinite sheet spread thin with milky clouds cresting in shapes unknown to man. Those intangible puffs moved in a somber laze, brief glimpses of horrors and abstract hardships tumbling to the time of a quotidian turning and steered by the breath of a beastly breeze. The pair’s trudging led them up to the top of the mound behind which they hid and before them spread a collection of tight-knit city blocks; a maze of packed dirt streets snaking between buildings whose outer facades were crumbling—a town shamed once, soon twice.
Despite everything, energy thrived in this small settlement. Ragged lines delivering power were strung from post to crooked post. They were affixed to the sides of concrete walk-ups, they were scattered every which way, piles of sparking coils and messes of stringy black entanglements draping hither and yon. This town thrived in unsuspecting solitude, windows—of those structures still partially whole or habitable—flickering with the icy glow of cable bootlegged from building top to building top. A goat bleated from the shadows of crumbling foyer, interrupting the night’s silence. A dog, nearby, barked a terse response.
Brint turned his chin, watching a man walk down a lonely alleyway littered with the remains of three burned out cars. He had the posture of latter age, but it didn’t make sense that the elderly would ever come back to revisit the prolonged suffering of this place. His spine was likely just ruined from sitting in front of a computer all day. Brint and his adroit team of heathens had come across it time and time again. When these low-rank foot soldiers of Ossa’s resistance weren’t wiring up improvised devices meant to catch Amstead’s oppression off-guard, they were keeping track of them via the internet. They were keeping track of Kasse, that ghost manifest, Varakaiso.
“Over the last few months, the opposition has reclaimed this place,” the lieutenant began his usual quick briefing before action, voice low in the whistling of the open air. “Everything is to be considered a target.”
When Kasse laid eyes on the limping township, he did not see what Brint saw. No: he saw electric contours, an architect’s leylines scrawled in his utility mind, magnetic eye. He saw a lightning arc from breaker to breaker housed in the reflection of EMF boundaries.
Maybe this is what made it easier, what made the killing less real. When he registered people, rendered them into something like sight, all he saw was armature wire, ruses draped in blankets of grid skin, livewire pinpoints at every center, bowing joints and synapse collision,
all he saw were parts.
“No witnesses,” Kasse said on the night’s chill when he stepped forward. He was an inhumane thing rendering all life around him inhuman, other. “No survivors.”
Nothing registered on that fae face when it all went dark.
Brint was a tag along, a limping remnant who had already first hand felt the great power of a wright’s ability to destroy, and still, he didn’t know what he had done. He didn’t know that he was slowly losing recognition of this boy he glorified to the inherent tethers of the physics surrounding them. The lieutenant followed behind, steps out of time and staggered at a distance. Silence weighed heavy in a look that only met the back of the adjunct’s head.
He didn’t know what he’d done,
he couldn’t see what he created.
He lingered, waiting for the usual.
He breathed in the quiet before
the storm.
There was a moment in the stillness where dismay hadn’t yet registered. It almost felt like that township was abandoned again, like there was no life in this doomed place for that demon to destroy today.
“Vaya!” a man shouted off his makeshift balcony across the narrow street. His voice wove between the criss-cross of electric wires and laundry lines, sharp in his annoyance. “Draha vohaie—“
With a raised hand, Kasse halted Brint as a wet slap hit the dirt road some ten yards before them in two distinct strikes. The first man to speak had been poured from a bucket off his balcony, entails hot when he hit the ground screaming.
“Varakaiso,” the body wheezed before his lungs gave way, before his chest could no longer rise, before his eyes no longer blinked in surprise that he was so suddenly painted and scattered along the road to Orin.
Brint watched in a horror yet to be physically expressed, from the purview a knot in his stomach now forming. He was hit by sounds distinctly inhuman, noises and foley-work not meant for the realm of the living. The vision of flesh pouring its bountiful keep registered as wrong, even more wrong than that slurry of iron-soured gore smacked against the ground in a nonsensical pattern of splatters, spigot body spilling forth in disregard, a waterfall of wasted life. To him, Kasse appeared to be quicker than time itself—only under his grim manipulation did dead men spread his gruesome tale, only under his command did voices persist when they should have been naught. He’d seen all kinds of men in pieces and parts, but Emrys Brint had never before seen the life of a man crest in a wave, gummy bits thrown to the ground like last week’s flesh-bagged trash.
Kasse turned at the shore of first blood, turned back to look at Brint with those pale grey eyes flashing in the flicker of their starry night, lidded and heady.
“Say it,” the executioner demanded. To their left, the crunch of bodies was dampened by the walls but the sickening crack of collision carried through broken windows, open doors. They fell in stacks through rafters made in the shape of suggestion. Kasse pulled every floor out from under those sleeping fighters, curled with their rifles under their burlap pillows. Now they flooded a fractured threshold, black blood running a river to the sidewalk. “Confirm my order, Em.”
Brint tilted his head to the left, to the disjointed rhythm of sackcloth bodies thumping in a dead drop crescendo, looking as though he could see, as though he actually wanted to see. All he saw was the township bleeding out its life through the death of all these bodies, these men, women. All kills were confirmed in the slow advancement of ichor glazing the dirt, making a hellish mirror for the dark sky suspended above.
“Everyone is a target.” When the lieutenant returned to the boy, his chin was dipped, eyes shadowed. Brint stared his charge in his eyes, crawling skin flecked with goose pimples—his words need not say the name of this specter when the streets were so slick with it. “Kill everyone.”
Kasse couldn’t see what Brint saw,
couldn’t see the bodies as bodies,
couldn’t see the blood for blood—
not in the moonlight so obscured
by the clinical schematic othering the
glow induced, so clean and succinct.
He couldn’t see his own face, pale eyes set in two dark red rimmed halos like he’d been crying in his sleep for weeks. His pupils reflected back in some temporary retroreflection, junkie tapetum lucidum alight in unholy blue-teal-gold refraction, aurora borealis in his eyes when he reached for Brint’s hand.
“I want you close,” he said sweet above the sound of a runner, bones collapsing beneath his weight as he melted into the sand, became a mudslick scream abbreviated by Kasse’s quick work. “I can’t see.” This was a confession; a truth: Kasse was so far gone, he’d lost touch with the world Brint observed collapsing around them.
All he could see were heartbeats,
all he knew were perimeters,
all he understood was
stillness,
sfz
Brint clutched Kasse’s wrist. He softened, then, slipping to his palm. Softer still, and the older man was twisting his fingers up in that boy’s digits, holding him tight to keep from falling away. He didn’t want to be left behind, he didn’t want Kasse to rush forward into the zenith of death’s lucid silence and leave him stranded in the gorge between their planar existences.
Brint would never know exactly what Kasse was going through, his body was not made to understand, his mind too simple to really make sense of it, but when he looked at his soldier and he saw the shimmering husk of what used to be so exuberant and full of life, his heart cracked. Brint felt so much guilt for bisecting that life from limb. He was now beginning to understand the boy’s newfound subservience, he was beginning to understand the havoc his heavy hand had wrought.
When the lieutenant held onto Kasse and walked at his side, his grip was all manner of tight and tender. The adjunct was an atomic catastrophe of blink-fast fission, the career soldier was a clot of consternated cells. Kasse was following orders, Brint had given them twice. The boy was a massacre in the palm of the man’s hand—he was holding on for the life of him, the death of him.
Brint feared Kasse.
Brint adored Kasse.
“I’ve got you,” he said, voice a mortal frequency in the cords of his throat. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”
The boy tilted his head, chin-tucked trinket so coy, so warmed by the implication in his elder’s thrumming comfort, the pitter patter of a heart cinched in terror or worship or lust. He smiled:
Kasse, above all things, loved being adored.
He was a shroud. He covered Brint’s flank in a funereal melancholy turned to fragments, a wraith made of superior redactions, elder conceits. Kasse squeezed his mentor’s hand and pulled him along—like the road he walked wasn’t already covered in bodies, like the road they left behind wasn’t graced with the swirling eddy of his molecules in smoke wisp orbit, always seeking the center of his event horizon.
“Do you want to go up?” There was a fire escape to their left that Kasse didn’t once look at. Instead, his hollow eyes were focused up on Brint as though this man was the only thing he saw, the only thing worth saving in this town growing soggy with the scent of human suffering. He wrinkled his nose. “It’s too dense down here.”
“Yeah. If that’s what you need,” Brint said like the trust he gave this boy was a byproduct of some newfangled implication. The foundations were certainly solid—it was his walk that was unsteady. He was the keeper of rewards, held the key to cabinet stuffed full of treats. Even now, he was bogged down. Held Kasse’s water on him like a date scraping by on a bare minimum amount of chivalry, pocketed petite pastilles tucked into the shadows of his pockets for an entire future of jobs-well-done. “If that’ll help you.”
Kasse wasn’t interested in candy. Not anymore. Those days were long past, innocence lost to a greater machine. Perhaps the motions were the same. An energy bar, a carton of cigarettes, a hit of Glow—they were the same transactions escalating pentatonic, the same chiding trainer tongue, the same grooming motions:
Brint held out his hand and Kasse lapped at his palm.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not for me,” the boy replied, curt words curling around his blank expression, all reflections as he lead the way. “I’m doing this for you.”
“Carry on how you need to carry on.” These were the words of men who wished they knew wisdom, men who wished three-fold kismet was a myth. Brint looked at the building in his uneven stride, then back to the boy. “Do it for me the way you want it done and tell me when it’s over.”
“You’ll know when it’s over,” the lamb told his shepherd as he mounted the first stair. His footsteps were silent on the creaking turquoise and iron tinged rust, slathered by the screams of a woman just on the other side of the brick. “I won’t need to tell you. You’ll know.”
They ascended in that pattern: every step was a trigger to someone’s dying. When they passed windows, the wet noise of waste grew loud, the plaintive drip of bodies through the ceiling inescapable when that boy made every floor give way in milliseconds, in quick flashes that didn’t take enough of the body to kill it.
“When I lived in Port Haven, I was always finding my way onto rooftops,” he said over the wall of wailing curdling at his side. His volume was low, but Brint was close. If he couldn’t hear, he would find a way. It was strange how even in a warzone, one could find a way to hear a whisper if they wanted it bad enough. “I loved watching the stars. I would go to the library to figure out when the skies would be clearest and I would lay out, even in the winter, to watch the sky.”
“Do you enjoy being in Ossa then, where one of the only things it has to offer is the sky, clear and unburdened by things like light pollution?” Brint has never asked Kasse this before—it was always about the cause, if he liked what he was doing in Amstead’s terrible war, if he took satisfaction in his immaculate success. It never crossed Brint’s mind to ask: Do you like this land that half-claims you? Do you like to swim through the suffering of your own heritage?
It was the prolonged conduction of the killing that shook Brint’s spine, the way death approached each of these people’s doorsteps and snatched them—at least partially—through the unopened threshold. The litany of the dying played around them like a requiem meant to be unfinished. Brint didn’t understand the words, didn’t find any beauty in the distraught harmonies echoing between these people’s pivotal states, however he heard them in song. He had no choice but to listen.
“I did,” the boy replied when they breached the top of the building, some five or six stories. It was one of the taller buildings still standing and from it, Brint could see the lay of this land Kasse had taken in his young hand and turned into a warning shot, a long format cease and desist coagulated under three inches of standing blood.
Kasse breathed in. The stillness of this township was like ice water in the humid night. The sky was clear, the stars bright on their obsidian backdrop, and still he held Brint’s hand.
“I can’t see them now.” His comment was neither bleak nor disappointed, not mad, not negative. It was simply an observation. The sky was a grid of white bands stark against a horizon in perpetual sunrise. It was almost difficult to comprehend the quiet—not until it was broken by weary clusters of screams, short bursts of rapid fire dying all ratatat ricochet off the brickwork. “I can’t see the stars anymore.”
They stood atop the center of a city less than a mile wide and Kasse fell quiet, staring off into the distance with his eyes barely open.
Brint had to realize what was happening: this was high ground and Kasse was picking off the stragglers.
Now the lieutenant simply listened, taken by the swell of his own pulse hammering in his head against the growing absence of noise. Occasionally, the wind whispered in its omen-tongue, carrying away the scent of blood and expiration like a portent meant for the rest of this vast expanse of land over which they loomed. In the north, superstitions often centered around sailors, in colors of the sky and tidings pulled from the water. Out here in the middle of the desert, there was only Varonian’s Ghost and when one woke to the smell of iron in the scarlet morning’s air, they knew peril was not far behind.
He was a sentry at the side of this ghost that needed no protection. Brint looked down, eyes catching the muzzle flash of a rifle quickly muted by its operators inability to continue firing it.
Letting Brint go, the young sergeant pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, flipped the top and placed one between his lips. He held a second out for his CO.
Complicit fingers took the offering. Brint waited for the successive spark of Kasse’s lighter, complacent gaze tame in the flame passed from hand to hand.
×××
The humvee rolled back into Losi’s silver gates when the morning sky was just starting to fade into first light, a smooth blend marrying the bleak blues of astronomical twilight into the flush of a fresh day’s glow. The pair passed the checkpoint without issue, and Brint flexed his rank enough to score them a parking spot in front of the officer’s quarters—old city hall—the building in which he and the rest of the base’s higher-ranked officials were housed. It was an out of place monolith of decadence in a former city mostly lacking. It was an echo lingering from another era, a golden reminder of a more prosperous and peaceful Ossa fallen into the arms of Amstead.
Engine cut, Brint turned to his passenger and gave his shoulder a gentle rustle.
“Kasse, we’re back.”
The young executioner was a serene thing, exhaustion worn pretty on his mudblood face. He’d barely stirred the entire drive back, barely stirred now when he cracked an eye open, wincing at the threat of daylight.
“Fuck,” he croaked, turning away from the window and folding his arms on the center console, burying his face in the darkness he made. “Already?”
“Yeah, already.” The older man was getting out of the truck. He turned back in the open door when his boots were on the ground. “I’m going to put you up in here so you can get uninterrupted rest, okay?”
“I should go back to the bunk,” Kasse advised weakly. “What are the guys going to think?”
What was Eo going to think?
“They’re going to think that you need to rest, and Locke is going to give me shit for not giving you the proper opportunity to do so after making you work all night. What else would they think?” Brint’s eyebrows creased like any possibility outside of that which he offered up was insane. He walked around the truck, headed to the building long, fancy doors. “Come on, let’s go.”
Brint’s favorite boy nodded, too numb, too exhausted, too wasted to do anything but slowly follow orders. He was a dragging step, stumbling graceless out of the truck because there was too much light in his eyes. All he could see was that Eo wasn’t there
and he hated that he still walked toward that building.