Page 3 of My Tiny Human Wife

We are twenty paces from the ruin when the night offers us one more enemy. An engine coughs awake behind the ridge, a straggler from the pack come back for the salvage its dead companions never claimed. Headlights crawl over the white toward us. The woman goes rigid. I have no strength left for a true fight, so I do the next thing a soldier is taught: I raise the price of reaching us above the worth of the prize. I drag a fallen scavenger's weapon from the drift, brace it against my opened side, and put three rounds through the vehicle's engine block. It shudders, slews, and dies. Whoever crews it weighs the kit against the male still upright over the corpses, and chooses to live. The lights reverse into the dark.

The effort takes its toll. Something lets go along the wound, a hot wet loosening I feel far more than I want to, and the edges of the world soften and gray in the same breath.

Every step after that becomes a negotiation. Lift the foot. Find the ground. Trust that the next patch of it exists. The storm erases the distance and hands it back longer than before. Twice my legs quit. Twice she refuses to let me stay down, planting herself beneath me again with a stubbornness that holds no respect whatsoever for physics.

“Leave me,” I tell her somewhere inside the white. It is not despair. It is arithmetic. “You will move faster without the weight. I am already spent.”

“Yeah, well.” She hitches me higher, teeth bared at the cold. “I'm terrible at math.”

She does not leave me.

I have spent my life among people who trade in odds. A wounded enemy is a liability, and a liability is abandoned; among my kind this is not cruelty but arithmetic. Whatever moves this woman does not run on arithmetic. She drives a knee into the drift, gets her legs beneath the weight of us both, and rises yet again, and somewhere in that impossible labor I stop counting her as a problem to be managed and begin, against every wish I have, to admire her.

The shelter resolves out of the murk by degrees, a squat tower crowned with a battered array, its windows glowing faint amber against the night. She fights a frozen latch, throws her weight at the door, and drags the pair of us across the threshold into a wall of sudden, ringing warmth. I have breached fortified positions on nine worlds. I have never in my life been as grateful to stand inside walls as I am when that door seals the wind away behind us.

The signal that drew me across the tundra has a face now, and a name I have not yet been given, and every instinct that has governed my life informs me, coldly, that this complicates everything I am.

She lowers me onto a cot built for someone a third my size and steps clear, and at last I study her with deliberate care. Worn down to wire and will. Soaked curls escaping a ruined braid. Hands that have plainly mended a hundred broken machines and, tonight, one broken enemy. She has pushed herself well past the point most warriors would still be standing, and she watches me the way one watches a fire that has not yet decided whether to spread.

No reinforcement is coming for either of us. I understood that the instant the door sealed; no garrison waits in a tower this remote, no relief column will brave a storm of this size. We are two enemies and one failing shelter clinging to the rim of a war that has forgotten this frozen coast exists. By every rule that has ever governed me, the isolation should make her more dangerous. Instead it makes her the only other living soul within a hundred frozen kilometers who is also, simply, trying to last until morning.

“I know what you are,” she says, quiet. A heavy wrench rests within reach of her right hand. I mark it without resentment; it is precisely what I would do. “You're the thing the broadcasts warn us about.”

“And still you carried it home,” I answer.

“Don't make me sorry I did.”

We hold there, the wounded enemy and the woman who would not let him die, each of us unwilling to be the first to extend trust. Beyond the walls the storm hurls itself at the tower. Within them, something far quieter has already begun, and I am too emptied to name it and far too disciplined to pretend it is nothing at all.

CHAPTER 5

AVERY

Stitching a Vakutan back together is not covered anywhere in the station manual.

So I improvise. The med-kit was packed for human soldiers, which means I use everything in it and half of what isn't, driving a curved needle through hide tougher than any I've worked and easing it around scales I have no chart for. He makes no sound the entire time. That rattles me worse than screaming would. A male who can hold that still through this kind of work is a male who has rehearsed being hurt.

“You're allowed to swear, you know,” I offer, knotting off the ugliest of it. “I won't put it in a report.”

“No one is left for me to report to.” His voice drops low enough that I feel it travel through the cot frame. “You are very alone out here.”

“I get by.” I don't love how little effort it took him to read that off me.

I finish the dressing and sit back on my heels. Up close, his body is the record of a life I can't imagine surviving, old hurts layered over older ones, the sort of map you only earn by being sent into the worst rooms in the galaxy again and again and coming back out. For two years I have hated the uniform he wears. It turns out to be much harder to hate the half-dead person inside it, the one who keeps trying to apologize with his eyes for taking up my only bed.

The pounding starts before first light. Not the wind this time, fists, frantic and human, hammering the outer door. My stomach drops, because there is a seven-foot enemy commander bleeding on my only cot and there are people freezing to death on my step, and I have roughly four seconds to decide what kind of person I really am.

I throw a tarp over him. It is, I'm fully aware, the worst concealment ever attempted by anyone. “Don't move. Don't speak. Don't—” I wave at the entirety of him. “—be that big.” Then I haul the door open.

They spill in on a knife of wind, seven of them, frostbitten and hollow-eyed. A broad man with a gray beard and a ruined leg takes charge of the rest by reflex, counting heads, prying a small child off his hip. “Jonah,” he says, closing a cold hand around mine. “Convoy coordinator. Was, anyway, before the convoy quit existing. You're the operator? We chased your beacon three days to get here.”

A girl of maybe fourteen ducks out from under his arm, swallowed inside a coat sized for a grown man, freckles stark against cold-bleached cheeks. “Mila,” she says, already cataloguing the room like she holds the deed to it. “Is there food? Is that—” Her stare catches on the enormous tarp-shaped problem in the corner. “Why is your blanket breathing?”

A long, dreadful pause follows. The tarp, betraying me utterly, lifts and falls. Jonah's hand drifts toward his belt. I plant myself between them, palms open. “He's hurt. He saved my life last night, he hasn't laid a hand on anyone, and if we shove him back into that storm to die, then we're exactly the people who made all of us into refugees.” I don't realize I believe it until it's out of my mouth.

It's the building, not me, that ends the standoff. A gust finds the split seal on the north door and tears it half off the frame, and the temperature in the room starts sliding toward something that kills. I throw myself at it, Jonah throws himself at it, and we are both too small and too slow by half.

The tarp slides away. He crosses the floor in three strides, sets one huge palm flat against the buckling door, and pins it shut by raw strength while his other hand works the warped hinge back toward true. He asks no one's leave. He doesn't gloat over it. He simply mends the thing that is trying to kill us, the way you'd stamp out an ember, then lowers himself to the floor because the cot won't have him, a fresh bloom of red spreading through my stitches under his hand.