Chapter 74: The Night Before

Osei gave the squad its orders at the tent row an hour after first light, with her book open on a ration crate and the five of them standing where she'd put them, and she gave Wren hers last.

"You carry the relay and the glass. You stay a pace behind me and you keep the count. You don't carry a rifle because you can't fire one, and I'm not having a rifle on that picket that can't be fired." She closed the book. "I've got a night. You're six. You've been six on a cot for a week and I've written it every night, and tonight you're six on your feet."

Wren had her arm strapped across her chest under her coat and her face set for an argument she had been preparing since the aid tent, and the argument didn't come. "Yes, ma'am."

"Ilsen, you're feeding Bram's heavy rifle, as at the picket. Cade, Hollis, the lane. Rook, the north edge." Osei looked at the mask. "The colonel's told you what you're doing up there. I'll say what I'm doing. I'm standing next to you. That's the order I've had since the crest, and I've never yet needed a colonel to give it to me."

She went to find Bram. Ilsen watched her go. "She's said more before noon than she said all of last month," he observed, and went to find the heavy rifle.

Cade stayed a moment. He looked at the mask, and at the charge on the strap, and put a hand on Rook's shoulder as he had at a motor pool and took it away, and went after Ilsen.

* * *

The letter paper was heavier than anything Corps issued and had ridden in the kit pocket since a gate above Halstead, against a bird and a printed line and, lately, three relay prints, and it had picked up the crease of all of them. He took one sheet out at midday, in his tent with the flap down, and one of the two pencils, and sat on the cot's end with the sheet on the slate for a hard surface.

He had never written a letter.

He had written on slates for months, and into a palm twice, and on a requisition slip and a signals pad; he had never put words on paper that was going to be carried somewhere and opened by somebody who wasn't in the room. The pencil sat in his hand differently from the stylus. Pressed too hard, it went through.

Nell —

He looked at that for a while. Then he wrote the rest without stopping, because Reyes had taught him that a thing done in order was a thing you could do scared, and he had never had a drill for this and so did it in the only order he had, which was the order it came.

You said same day next month. I am somewhere the day may not reach, so I am writing it down instead, on your paper. It has been north with me and it rode against a bird that was a dead man's daughter's, and a line of print, and some other paper since. It is creased. I am sorry for that.

This is the first letter I have written. I would have paid your rate to have it done properly. You told me the rate changes when it needs to. I think it would have changed for this one and I would have paid the full one anyway.

The seventh entry is still the true one. I have used it in front of a colonel. A lieutenant uses it in the field. A corporal took it into his hand, four letters, and said it was easier on the hand than the last one. Nobody has asked me what is under the mask and I have stopped waiting for them to.

There is a man here who has never seen the ghosts game and has been saving a remark about it for a season. He will not spend it until he has seen the game. If you see a soldier standing at the edge of the square watching the children, with a whetstone, that is him. Let him watch. It is a fair remark and he should get to make it.

If you have this, the day got missed. Leave the entry as it is. Do not cross it out and do not write anything under it. It is the one I chose.

Rook.

He read it through once. He did not change anything, because the changes he could see were all ones that would have made it sound like a slate, and it was not a slate. He folded it along the crease it already had, and wrote her name on the outside and the letter stall, the market's edge, Halstead under it, and put it inside his coat, and sat for a moment with his hand flat over it, on the outside of the cloth, where the charge sat on the strap above it.

A pirate site took this chapter from its author's official page. The writer, not the site, deserves your attention.

* * *

She had known he was coming; her lamp was lit at noon with the flap down.

He didn't sit. He took the letter out and put it on the table beside the notebook, name up.

Unsent. If I come back through that gate, give it back to me and I'll carry it to her myself, same day next month or the one after. If I don't come back, send it. Not through Corps — by the Halstead road. Anyone at the market can point to the stall.

She read the slate, and then she read the outside of the letter, and then she put two fingers on it and drew it across the table to her side and did not pick it up.

"You've written her."

The first one I've written.

"I'd have — " She stopped. "No. I'd have offered to look at it, and you'd have let me, and that's why I'm not going to. It's yours. It's the first thing you've ever made that goes somewhere I'm not." She opened her coat and put the letter into the inside pocket, behind the notebook and the three prints, and buttoned the coat over all of it. "I'm carrying a great deal of your paper. I've noticed."

You asked to be on the list.

"I asked to be on it. I didn't know it came with a pocket." She sat down, at last, and looked at the mask across the table, and he saw her decide to say the next part in the plainest voice she had. "I'm going to be in that chair tonight, with Marrow, with the relay, and I'm going to hear Osei count you off that picket and count you through the gate, and I will not be able to do one thing about any of it except write down what I thought at the time. That's what I'm for. I've made my peace with it. There'll be one line in that book with tonight's date on it that was written while you were on the other side of a wall, and I'll have written it as it happened and not after."

I know what you're for.

"Tell me."

The version that keeps a case open.

She laughed. One short breath of it, the first he had heard from her on this front, and it went as fast as it came. "That's the one. That's the one I told you about in my office, the day you first saw the book, and it's the only thing I've ever been good at." She put her hand on the buttoned coat, over the pocket. Outside, somebody scratched the canvas and then did not come in. "That's Hollis," she said. "He's been out there a quarter of an hour pretending he isn't. He'll want your straps."

* * *

Hollis came into Rook's tent behind him and looked at the kit laid out on the cot as he had the first night on this front. The harness, the slate, the rifle, the spare clasp. His attention stopped at the mask lying on the blanket beside the clasp, and then came up to the one on Rook's face, and stayed there.

On the blanket: the combat mask, dark-plated, double clasp, blunter at the jaw, issued on a rehearsal slope by a captain who had said it would not slip if his body decided to flinch. On his face: the lighter garrison mask, single hook, pale, that a private had brought to a room with a window that opened six inches, and that a market town had learned to look at without looking twice, and that Nell had asked whether it still chafed. It had ridden north in the kit with no use here. He had made the change alone, with the flap down, an hour ago.

"That's the garrison one," Hollis said.

Yes.

"It's got one hook. Dray issued you the other one for a reason and I watched the reason at that landing zone. Your body decided, and the mask stayed on." He didn't pick either up. "You're going up on a picket tonight to be looked at by two hundred people who've measured you, and the colonel wants you to stand like you always stand. That one's what you stand in for a fight."

That one's what the asset stands in. He held the slate up. This one is what I wear when somebody asks me the word I want. Tonight the person goes up that hill, and the thing on their inventory stays in the kit.

Hollis read it, and went on looking at it after he had finished, and then he looked at the pale mask for a while and let his breath out through his nose.

"It'll slip if you flinch."

Then I won't flinch.

"You say that." He picked up the harness and ran the straps through his hands, and cinched the shoulder, and stopped at the charge and turned it a quarter so the contact caught the lamp, and set it back, and did not ask who was holding it, because he had watched the man hold it. "Sten wore his own boots to Calder's Ridge. Regulation ones hurt his feet and he'd decided that if he was going to die on a ridge he'd do it in boots that fit. I gave him grief about it for a month." He hung the harness on the cot's end. "He was right. I've never said that to anyone."

You've said it now.

"I've said it to a mask. Wren can rule on whether that counts." He stood. "Hold still. I'm checking the hook myself, and if it's loose I'll say so, and you'll fix it, and then we'll go and stand where the colonel wants us and let two hundred people read whatever they can off it."

Rook held still. The garrison mask weighed what it had always weighed, which was less than the other, and it sat where Nell had asked about, at the jaw, and it did not chafe. Hollis looked at it — at the mask, squarely, as he had learned to on a crest — and reached out and tested the hook with two fingers, and it held.

"Right," he said. "That'll do. The other one goes in the kit."