Page 2 of My Tiny Human Wife

I crouch beside the ruined frame, and the lie sharpens under my hands. The marking burned into the door is Coalition refugee transit, the symbol that is meant to read as protected, untouchable, off the board. The fragments seeded through the drift around it carry Vakutan ordnance stamps. My own people's stamps. Someone wanted this hauler discovered exactly as it lies, so that whoever stumbled across it would carry a single story back over the line: that we butcher families in their transports and abandon them to freeze. We do not. Whatever was done here, no soldier of mine raised a hand to it. Yet kneeling over the careful staging of the thing, I feel the first cold finger of a suspicion I have spent years refusing to give a name.

I raise a fist. My squad halts in the snow. “Hesk. Sweep the ridge,” I say, low. “This ground has been arranged for us.”

He opens his mouth to answer me.

The sky answers first. A shriek of incoming, far too fast to be anything but a precision strike, and the world goes white. The first round takes the transport whole. The blast lifts me off my feet, and the cold and the roar and the light all fold down into one crushing blow at the back of my skull.

Pain. Snow packed into my mouth. The flat taste of copper. A high, thin tone fills my ears and drowns everything underneath it.

I do not know how long I lie there. When the world returns, it returns in fragments. The transport is a black skeleton venting smoke. My soldiers are gone, scattered or worse, their markers dark on the readout strapped to my forearm. I key my comm and get only static for an answer. I try to rise, and my body refuses, and when I force my gaze down I understand the refusal.

A length of hull plating has laid my side open from hip to lowest rib. The blood is mine, and there is a great deal of it, steaming where it meets the snow. I have seen this wound kill stronger men than the one I am right now.

A Vakutan commander does not die on his back. I press a scaled hand flat against the tear in me, drag the breath back into my lungs by force, and make myself think past the white edge of the pain.

Five soldiers walked into this valley under my word. I will not insult their memory by surrendering to the same snow that swallowed them.

That is when I catch it. Not a sound, precisely. A pulse, steady and unhurried, threading up through the static on the emergency band. An automated beacon, civilian, somewhere to the north. Shelter, or a trap, or merely a place to die out of the wind. Every instinct trained into me says a lone signal on an open frontier is bait laid for the desperate.

And still. Something beneath the discipline leans toward that pulse before my mind agrees to follow it. I have no name for the feeling and no time to interrogate it. The cold is already crawling into the wound, patient as the signal, and far less kind. I get one knee under me, then the other, and I begin to walk north, toward a sound that should mean nothing to me and somehow refuses to.

CHAPTER 3

AVERY

The cold out here has teeth, and it goes for the soft parts first.

I've made this crossing a hundred times in daylight, hauling cable and parts between the tower and the old relay shed. I have never made it inside a storm, walking toward a column of smoke, a med-kit dragging at my shoulders and my pulse trying to climb out through my ears. The drifts grab at my boots. The wind shoves me sideways like it has strong opinions about where I belong. Twice I almost turn back. Twice the picture of someone bleeding out alone in the dark, the way my brother might have, pushes me another hundred meters forward.

The wreck reveals itself one piece at a time. A scorched ration crate. A single boot with no owner. Then the transport, or what the strike left standing of it, ribs of blackened metal jutting from the white like something dead and half-eaten. I make myself look. Looking is the job. If anyone in that ruin is still drawing breath, every second I waste being sick about it is a second they will never get back.

We never got Eli back. No body, no grave, nothing to lower into the ground but a folded flag and a citation I couldn't read past the opening line. I think of that every time I stand over somebody else's dead, of how there is always a sister or a mother out there who will spend years not knowing, exactly the way I spent years not knowing. It has become the closest thing to faith I have left, the belief that every last person deserves to be found.

There is no one to pull out. I move from shape to shape and each one tells the same story in a slightly different posture, and not a single one of them will ever answer a beacon again. I am turning to go, throat aching, when one of the shapes shifts.

He's vast. Even folded against the snow, bleeding, half-conscious, he is larger than any man I have ever stood beside. Bronze scales catch the thin light along one forearm. When his eyes crack open they are molten gold, fixed on me with a soldier's flat measuring weight, and a chill the wind didn't put there slides straight through me. Vakutan. Special forces, by the markings cut into his gear. The enemy. The thing two years of Coalition broadcasts have trained me to dread.

My hand finds the comm at my collar. One transmission. That is all it would take. Wounded enemy combatant, grid reference attached, and the Coalition sends a team and makes him their problem instead of mine. It is the rule. It is the smart, sanctioned, self-protective choice, and my thumb hovers over the switch and simply will not press down. Because he is watching me like a male who already knows the snow will take him, and has decided not to spend his last breath begging for anything. And because some stubborn, inconvenient corner of me has spent two years refusing to rank the dying by which flag happened to kill them.

I don't get to win the argument with myself. Engines. Low and snarling, climbing the slope from the south. Not Coalition, not Vakutan, but the third thing this war breeds along its ragged edges: scavengers, the sort who strip the fallen and don't lose sleep over making a few more. Headlights rake across the snow. I drop flat behind a slab of hull, blood pounding, and the truth lands on me cold and complete: they will gut me for the kit on my back without ever once asking my name.

A shape unfolds beside me. The Vakutan is on his feet, swaying, one hand clamped over his ruined side, and how he is upright at all I cannot begin to explain. He doesn't spare me a glance. He fixes on the headlights, and the whole shape of him changes, the way a drawn blade is a different object than a sheathed one. “Stay low,” he says, and the words are gravel and command poured together. Then he moves.

I have never watched anything that size move that fast. The scavengers haven't either, which is the final error two of them ever make. It ends in a handful of seconds I will spend a long while not replaying in my head. When the snow stops falling he is on his knees again, emptied out, hauling air in ragged pulls, and the headlights have quit their sweeping. He turns that gold stare back on me, and for one strange suspended moment neither of us belongs to anyone's side. Just two people who aren't dead yet, in a place that would very much prefer otherwise.

So I make the choice that cracks two years of careful distance clean down the middle. “Can you walk?” I ask.

The corner of his mouth almost moves. “No.”

“Then lean on me,” I tell him, getting a shoulder under an arm that weighs more than I do. “And don't you dare die before I get you inside.”

CHAPTER 4

TORVAK

The human woman is stronger than she appears, and a great deal more foolish.

She has wedged her shoulder beneath my arm, this small creature who barely reaches the center of my chest, and she is hauling a body several times her weight through a storm that would happily bury us both. By every calculation I trust, she should have left me to empty into the drift and run for her walls. She has not. I cannot yet decide whether that makes her brave or simply unwise.