Chapter 12: Danger Close

Chapter 12: Chapter 12: Danger Close

Marcus Sinclair had been counting since dawn.

Rounds left: two magazines and change. People left: eleven. Minutes until the Directorate crested Ridge Seventeen: six, maybe seven, if their tanks kept bogging down in the mud of the logging road.

He lay in a shell crater near the top of the ridge with his cheek against the rifle stock and the Tamsk valley burning beneath him like a map someone had set on fire. Smoke rolled up the slope in black sheets. Through it he could see grey helmets climbing the switchbacks, and behind them, the square silhouettes of three armored columns where Intelligence had promised one.

"Sarge." Reyes dropped into the crater beside him. She’d lost her helmet somewhere, and the dressing on her forearm was soaked through. "Doc says Kowalski can’t walk. Hart’s gone. We’ve got eleven, four of them carrying."

"Back slope still clear?"

"For now."

Marcus nodded slowly. He’d known the answer before he asked. He’d been doing the math for an hour, and it only ever came out one way.

"Take them down the back," he said. "Into the tree line. Rally at the creek."

Reyes didn’t move. "They’ll crest before we’re halfway down. We’ll be in the open with our backs to them."

"Not if they’ve got something else to look at."

It took her a second. Then her face changed.

"No," she said. "Marcus, no. We all go, or—"

"Corporal Reyes." He turned his head and looked at her, really looked, because he wanted her to remember this part right. "Eleven people. That’s the job. Get my people off this hill."

She stared at him for three long seconds. Then she grabbed the front of his vest and pressed her forehead hard against his. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Then she was gone, shouting names, hauling Kowalski up between two privates. Marcus watched the last of them vanish down the back slope into the smoke.

He keyed his radio.

"Hammer, this is Sentinel Two-One. Fire mission. Grid four-four-seven, nine-one-two." He’d memorized his own coordinates an hour ago, just in case. "Armor and infantry cresting in five. Danger close."

Static. Then a young voice, very careful: "Two-One, Hammer. That grid is your position."

"Copy, Hammer. Danger close. I say again, danger close."

The pause lasted a lifetime. "Hammer inbound. Ninety seconds."

He spent them well. Single shots, every helmet that rose over the lip of the ridge going back down. When a turret swung toward his crater, he rolled into the next one and kept firing.

Then the scream came out of the sun: two jets, low and fast. Marcus rolled onto his back and watched the bombs drop away from their wings, black and tumbling.

Eleven, he thought. Good.

The light that took him was whiter than any bomb.

His boots hit gravel, and his rifle was up before his eyes caught up.

Crouch. Scan. Threat. The air was cold and wet. The sky was black instead of orange. There was no ridge, only a flat roof, a rusted water tank, and a city stretching in every direction, a grid of orange lights he had never seen in his life.

Two people stood on the roof with him.

He put his sights on the closer one: a young man in his early twenties, in a scorched jacket, blood dripping from one palm onto the gravel. Both of the kid’s hands were up and open. Beside him stood a woman in full plate armor with a sword and a kite shield, like someone had dragged her out of a museum.

Drizzle struck Marcus’s rifle barrel and hissed into steam.

"Nobody moves," he said.

Nobody moved. The knight’s eyes narrowed, and that was all.

"Where am I? Who are you? Talk fast."

Before anyone could answer, a pane of light opened in the corner of his vision, crisp as a targeting display.

[Class awakened: Tactical Gunner.]

[Origin Skill awakened: Kill Zone Link.]

The world redrew itself.

Thin white lines traced every edge of the roof. The water tank was tagged as cover, the stairwell door as an entry point, and the rooftops across the street as firing positions, with distances stamped beside them. Over the two strangers, markers bloomed. The knight got a blue diamond, a health bar, and three small red points at the gaps in her armor.

The kid was blue too. Health at sixty percent, mana nearly empty. The tag beside him read SUMMONER — LINKED.

Marcus kept his rifle exactly where it was.

"Why," he said, "does my HUD say you’re friendly?"

"Because I called you," the kid said. His voice was hoarse but steady. "My name’s Elias Pierce. You were dying. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who would come through."

"Dying." Marcus kept his finger along the trigger guard. "I was on Ridge Seventeen."

"I know. I saw it through the light. Smoke, fire, jets coming in. You were alone at the top, on the radio."

"Then you saw my people."

Elias hesitated, and Marcus felt something cold slide down his spine. But the kid was only choosing his words.

"I saw people going down the back of the hill," Elias said carefully. "Carrying someone between them. They were past the trees when the light opened."

Past the trees. Into the tree line. Toward the creek.

"How many?"

"I didn’t count. Ten, maybe. More."

Marcus closed his eyes for exactly one second. When he opened them, his hands were steady again.

"They made it," he said quietly.

"I think so."

The knight lowered her sword an inch. "He speaks the truth. I came through the same way, dying at a mountain pass when the light took me." She inclined her head. "Aveline Rosier, of Carrow."

"Sinclair. Sergeant." He glanced out at the city. "If this is the afterlife, somebody screwed up the paperwork."

"It’s not the afterlife," Elias said. "It’s Merridan, a different world from yours. Fifteen years ago, gates started opening here, doors into dungeons full of monsters, and people got powers to fight them. I’m a summoner. I can call people from other worlds at the moment they die." He took a breath. "I don’t know how to send you back. I’m not sure there’s anything to send you back to."

Marcus let that sit. He looked past the kid at the lines Kill Zone Link was drawing across rooftops he’d never seen. There were no red marks on this roof. But far off, at the edges of the city, faint red glows pulsed like fires on a horizon.

"Monsters," he said.

"Monsters. Guilds that use people as bait." Elias’s jaw tightened. "A man who knows which hospital bed my sister sleeps in. Aveline can hold a line better than anyone alive, but I need someone who sees the whole field. Someone who can hit what’s coming before it reaches us."

Marcus thought about Ridge Seventeen. About Reyes’s forehead pressed to his. About eleven people running into the trees, and ninety seconds, and how he’d made every one of them count.

He’d done his job. He’d held the hill. His war was over.

And this kid was standing on a roof with a bleeding hand, asking for help with another one.

Marcus lowered the rifle and thumbed the safety on.

"You’ve got a war here?" he said.

"Something like one."

"Then I’m not done yet."