Page 4 of My Tiny Human Wife

Mila considers him with the fearless nosiness of someone too young to have been issued the correct enemies yet. “You're not what the posters made you,” she informs him. Jonah says nothing, but he lets go of his belt.

The girl appoints herself my shadow inside the hour, trailing me from the console to the cot and back with a running commentary and a hundred questions I have no time to answer. I don't have the heart to peel her loose. She's fourteen, she's alone, and she has decided for reasons of her own that I'm safe to stand near, and something in me that I'd shut down a long time ago aches to actually be that for her.

And I stand in my freezing tower full of strangers and understand that everything I was raised to believe about his kind would have let that door fail and taken all nine of us with it. Every broadcast. Every warning. Every careful line somebody drew between us and them. None of it raised a finger to save us just now. He did. I tuck that away somewhere it can't be conveniently forgotten, and I get back to work, because there are seven new mouths, one stubborn bleeding enemy, and the day has hardly begun.

CHAPTER 6

TORVAK

By the second day I grasp the true shape of this place, and it unsettles me more deeply than any battlefield has in years.

Beacon Station Seventeen is held together by improvisation and refusal. Every system in it has been repaired far beyond what its makers intended, wired around, coaxed, bullied into running another week. There is no garrison. There is no relief force waiting out the storm. There is one woman, a failing power core, a stockpile that will not feed nine mouths for long, and a signal she keeps breathing with her own two hands because no one else remains to do it. I have held fortresses with less courage in their walls than this one tower carries in its bones.

I watch Avery move through her hours and I cannot find the floor of her. She sleeps in fragments, never far from the equipment, always with part of her attention angled toward it. She splints a wrist, coaxes a terrified child into eating, scales the iced array to chip a frozen coupling clear, and climbs down to do the whole circuit again, and not once does she pause to ask whether any of them have earned it. My people teach that strength is the capacity to endure. I am starting to suspect we drew the definition far too small.

The refugees stop fearing me sooner than I expect. Hunger and cold are poor ground for hatred, and by the second night they begin, warily, to speak where I can hear them. An old man lost both sons to a Coalition bombardment outside the southern mines. A young mother fled a Vakutan advance that leveled her settlement, and her daughter's eyes go wide and watchful every time I cross the room. Both of them sit under this same roof. Both of them are hollowed out. The identical war did it from opposite directions, and the snow outside does not trouble itself over which banner sent them running.

It is the girl, Mila, who breaks the line first. She plants herself in front of me on the second evening, fists set on her hips, and demands to know whether it is true my people breathe fire. When I tell her no, she looks personally cheated, then asks, without waiting for it to land, how tall I stand, how many battles I have seen, and whether the scales hurt. I answer what I am able to. Somewhere in the interrogation the young mother's daughter creeps near enough to listen, and by the end of it she has stopped flinching when I shift my weight. I have spent a career being feared by grown soldiers. I have no idea what to do with the trust of children, and I discover I have no wish to disappoint it.

For nineteen years I held two beliefs side by side: that the suffering on my side was the price of necessity, and the suffering on theirs the cost of their own stubbornness. Folded into this cramped and frozen room, listening to a Coalition child weep in the exact register a Vakutan child weeps, I find I can no longer keep those beliefs apart. They were always one grief wearing two flags. I had simply never been made to sit in a single room with both of them at once.

Each of these understandings is a small treason. A commander is not meant to weigh his orders against the faces of the enemy's civilians; that road ends in hesitation, and hesitation buries soldiers. Yet I cannot unsee what this tower has shown me in two short days. Whatever staged that wreck back in the valley, whatever has kept this war burning long past the reach of any sane objective, it was not the old man by the heater or the child who has stopped flinching at my shadow. They are settling a debt that someone else keeps running up in their names. I do not yet know whose ledger it is. I am beginning to want, very badly, to find out.

So I make myself useful, because a body in motion loses blood slower than a mind left idle to circle. My side objects to every lift, so I lift with care. I brace the failing door the right way, reinforce the southern shutters, carry the heaviest of the crates the others cannot manage. Jonah labors beside me, silent at first, then trading the short grudging words of two men who have each privately concluded the other is competent. It is not trust. It is something that might, given time and no new reasons to hate, grow up alongside it.

But it is Avery I keep circling back toward. Late on that second night I find her asleep at the console, brow resting against the inside of her wrist, the beacon pulsing its patient measure above her like a second heart. I settle my torn outer coat across her shoulders, because there is nothing else to offer and she has begun to shiver. She does not stir. I stand over her one breath longer than any duty of mine requires, this fierce and depleted human who hauled her enemy up out of the snow, and that nameless pull from the valley sinks its roots a little deeper, quiet and certain and wholly unwelcome. I am a long way from home. I am no longer certain I wish to return to the male I was before that door shut behind us.

CHAPTER 7

AVERY

The perimeter sensors start shrieking at three in the morning, and this time it isn't the wind.

I'm up before I'm awake, already reading the board. Not one or two contacts. A dozen, maybe more, spreading across the southern approach in a loose crescent. These aren't desperate scavengers chancing a lone wreck. This is organized. Somebody out there has heard there's a working station with full crates and a warm core, and they have come to take it from us.

Fear wants to lock my hands. I don't let it. Fear I can use. I key the internal channel and make my voice the steadiest thing in the building. “Everyone up. This is the drill we ran. Children and wounded to the core room, right now. Jonah, you have the inner door. Move like it's dull and ordinary, and we all live to be bored again tomorrow.”

The refugees move. Weeks of running for their lives has made them quick and quiet, and inside ninety seconds the soft and the slow are sealed into the station's reinforced heart, Mila clutching the youngest and pretending she isn't frightened for the sake of the smaller ones. That part is my work, and it's done. I'm a communications engineer. I evacuate, I coordinate, I keep frightened people breathing slow. I have never once been a soldier, and I'm not going to insult the real one in the room by pretending otherwise tonight.

Torvak is already the real one.

He doesn't ask who commands the defense. He simply becomes it, the way water becomes the shape of whatever holds it. He sets Jonah at the inner door with the only true rifle we own. He plants me at the console where I can read the sensors and call positions. He takes the exposed northern catwalk himself, the worst and most dangerous post on the tower, because of course he does. “They will press from the south to drive us north,” he says, as calm as a man remarking on the weather. “Tell me where they stand. I will make the north a place they regret arriving.”

Then it begins.

I call them as the sensors paint them. “Two at the fuel store. Three more on the west fence, moving for the generator.” My voice does the work my hands can't. Jonah drops the first man through the door gap, and the sound of it is nothing like the broadcasts ever made it sound, just glass and metal and someone screaming for his mother. Somebody has a cutting torch on the south shutter; I watch the steel begin to glow, and I call it, and Torvak reaches it before I finish the sentence.

I have seen him fight once, half-dead, in a blizzard. Whole, on ground he has chosen for himself, he is another thing entirely. He wastes no motion. He doesn't roar. He turns the narrow catwalk into a throat that admits attackers in single file, and single file is an arithmetic even a wounded commander can win. The raiders expected a lone operator and a handful of starving civilians. They did not account for him. Very few people ever would.

Not all of them throw themselves at the catwalk. One comes through a side vent I flagged for repair a week ago and never reached, and all at once there's a stranger inside my control room with a blade and bad intentions, and no chance to call for help. I do the one thing my hands truly know how to do under pressure. I yank the main bus coupling and drop the whole room into blackness, and in the half second he spends blind and startled, I bring the heavy wrench around with everything I've got. He folds. I stand there shaking in the blackout, the wrench still raised, and decide I'll come apart about it later, once there's time to spare for falling apart.

It ends faster than it has any right to. The ones who can still run, run. The torch gutters out. The board clears, one contact at a time, until the southern approach holds nothing but cooling shapes and churned snow and the particular hush that means we've held.

The core room opens and the whole station breathes out at once. Somebody laughs, shaky and amazed to still be alive. Jonah claps Torvak on a shoulder he has to stretch to reach and says, “Remind me to quit aiming guns at you.” Mila runs a victory lap around the cramped control room. The young mother weeps, and for once it isn't grief doing it. We held. Eight of us and one borrowed enemy held this tower against three times our number, and every last one of us is, impossibly, still here.

I find Torvak at the console when it's over, somebody else's blood drying along his forearms, scanning the feed for stragglers with the same flat focus he'd give a star chart. I should be afraid of him. A handful of days ago the mere sight of him would have sent me lunging for the alarm. Instead I stand beside seven and a half feet of enemy commander in the small ruined hours after a battle, and what rises in me, absurdly, is safety. I haven't felt this safe since before two officers knocked on my mother's door and rearranged my whole life. I don't say any of that to him. But I stop pretending, even inside my own head, that it isn't true.

CHAPTER 8