Chapter 129 — "Low Ground"

Low ground turned out to be a shallow depression about the size of a courtyard, ringed by nothing in particular, and Kell called it good, which told her everything about the last three days.

They put the tents up again somewhere past third bell. Nobody spoke while they did it. At some point Ost’s boot got properly laced, quietly, without ceremony, and nobody mentioned that either — which Seraphina thought might have been the kindest thing the group had managed so far.

Then four hours of sleep that felt like eleven minutes.

Then Kell said, "Up," and it was the fourth day.

The fourth day was worse than the third.

Not colder. The cold had levelled off into a flat permanent condition, like a debt. It was worse in the way that repetition is worse. The same land. The same grey. The same wind arriving from the same direction with undiminished enthusiasm, hour after hour, until the mind gave up on finding anything outside itself to look at and started eating itself instead.

Seraphina discovered she was thinking about breakfast at the academy.

Not fondly. Persistently. The porridge specifically. The unambitious porridge that wanted nothing, offered nothing, and sat in a bowl being warm.

She would have paid an unreasonable sum for it.

"You’re thinking about food."

"I’m not."

"You’ve slowed by a step every hundred. That’s a food slow."

"There’s a food slow."

"There’s a food slow, a cold slow, and a thinking-about-something-you-won’t-say slow. They’re different lengths."

"Which one am I doing."

"Food." A pause. "Mostly."

She did not ask what the rest of it was.

Ost hadn’t spoken since the previous afternoon.

He walked with his head down and his shoulders set, and did not narrate anything, and Seraphina found she disliked the silence considerably more than she had ever disliked the talking.

"Ost."

Nothing.

"Ost."

"What."

"Month two."

Eight steps of nothing.

"What about it."

"You never finished. Halvard cut you off on the first day and you never got back to it."

Another eight steps.

"It’s not that good a story."

"Tell it badly, then."

And after a while, he did.

It was not a good story. It involved a miscounted requisition, a stubborn quartermaster, and a conclusion in which Ost had been technically correct in a way that had helped precisely nobody. He told it flatly, with no embellishment at all, which meant it was — she suspected — the first true version anyone had heard.

At the end he said: "Nobody actually called me promising. The instructor said I was thorough. I’ve been upgrading it for two years."

"I know."

"You knew—"

"It went up every time. By the third telling you were the most promising student of your year."

"...That’s humiliating."

"Yes."

He walked in silence a while.

"Thanks," he said eventually.

It wasn’t sarcastic. That surprised both of them.

Ahead, Halvard said nothing, and kept walking, and had heard all of it.

Kell called the halt at a marker stone that afternoon.

"Two hours. Sleep if you can."

Nobody could.

Halvard sat with his back against a rock, closed his eyes, and was asleep inside a minute, which Seraphina found personally offensive.

Ost lay down. Got up. Lay down again. Finally sat holding his knees and staring at the horizon as though it had insulted his family.

Eren produced a small tin from somewhere and put it in her hands without comment.

She looked at it.

"No."

"You haven’t opened it."

"Where do these come from."

"Places."

"You’ve had that for four days in a pack I watched you fill."

"I fill packs efficiently."

"You fill packs suspiciously—"

"Those are adjacent words. They’re not the same word."

She opened it. Something dark and dense and sweet, wrapped in wax paper, from the stall two streets over from the market that opened at strange hours and shut at stranger ones.

She ate half.

Held the other half out.

He looked at it. Then at her.

"That’s mine now?"

"That’s yours now."

He took it. Ate it. Made no joke about it whatsoever.

She thought about that for longer than she meant to.

The fifth morning began with nothing in it.

That was the part she’d remember afterward — how completely ordinary it was, right up until it wasn’t.

They came around the eastern edge of a low rise and Kell stopped walking.

He didn’t raise a hand. He didn’t speak. He simply stopped, and Halvard stopped half a second later, and then everyone stopped, and the wind went on past all of them without noticing.

Down in the shallow below the rise there were tracks.

Not one set.

Many.

Crossing the border line and continuing north-west in a straight untroubled line, into land that was not theirs.

Kell crouched. Looked. Put two fingers into the frozen edge of a print.

"How old," Halvard said.

"Last night."

"How many."

Kell counted without appearing to count.

"Thirty. Give or take."

"Thirty what—" Ost started.

"Quiet."

The wind kept going past.

Seraphina looked at the tracks. Then — because she had been noticing things for two years and had never once managed to stop — she looked at Eren.

He was looking at the tracks.

His face was doing nothing.

Which was not unusual.

What was unusual was that his face had been doing nothing for about four seconds before Kell stopped walking

Kell stood up slowly.

"Back from the edge. All of you. Now."

They backed off the rise. Not fast — Kell set the pace and the pace was unhurried, which Seraphina understood after about three steps was deliberate, because fast movement on high ground is visible from a long way off and unhurried movement is not.

Behind the rise, out of the sightline, Kell crouched again and put his pack down and did not open it.

"Right," he said. "This is the part where I tell you what’s happening, once, and then you do what I say without a conversation about it."

Ost opened his mouth.

"Without a conversation about it," Kell repeated.

Ost closed his mouth.

"Thirty on foot, crossing north-west, sometime after dark last night. That’s not smuggling — smugglers go in fours and fives and they go where the ground hides them. That’s not military either, or we’d have had word, and the prints would be tighter. That’s a group that doesn’t care much who sees the tracks because they don’t expect anyone to be here to see them."

"Why wouldn’t they expect—" Ost began, and then answered it himself, and Seraphina watched him do it. "...Because rotation’s every nine days. And rotation was three days ago."

"Rotation was three days ago," Kell agreed. "We’re early. Somebody’s information is a little out of date."

"Somebody’s," Halvard said.

"Somebody’s."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"So what do we do," said Seraphina.

"We do nothing. We record it and we walk it back and we hand it to people whose job it is." Kell looked at each of them in turn, and it was not unkind, but it was extremely clear. "You are the fourth thing. The fourth thing does not investigate. The fourth thing does not follow tracks. The fourth thing goes home and says what it saw accurately."

"That’s it?" said Ost.

"That’s the entire job."

"That seems—"

"Say it."

Ost hesitated.

"...Cowardly."

Kell nodded, as though this were a reasonable thing to have said, which Seraphina thought was the most alarming reaction available.

"Thirty," he said. "Five of us. Four of you have never seen a person do this for real. You want to walk down and count them properly so the report’s tidy." He looked at Ost. "You’d get a very tidy report. It’d be the last document with your name on it."

Ost went a colour.

"That’s not an insult," Kell said. "Every officer I’ve ever respected wanted to go down that slope the first time. The ones I respect most are the ones who didn’t."

They marked the position. Kell did it himself, on a folded chart, with three small pencil notations and a time — and Seraphina, watching over his shoulder, noticed he wrote the time twice, once in the standard form and once in something she didn’t recognise.

"What’s the second one."

"Insurance."

"Against what."

"Against the first one being changed."

She looked at him.

"That happens?"

"Once," Kell said. "It only has to happen once."

They turned south at midmorning and walked without stopping until the light started going, which put roughly eleven hours between them and the rise, and made the fifth day the longest walking day of the rotation by a wide margin.

Nobody complained.

Ost, notably, did not complain — and Seraphina realised somewhere in the eighth hour that he had positioned himself at the back of the group without being told, which is where the slowest person goes, which meant he had decided he was the slowest and had arranged the group so that nobody would have to say it.

She thought better of him for that than for anything else he’d done in five days.

Eren walked beside her the whole way and said almost nothing, which was so far outside normal operating conditions that by hour six she genuinely couldn’t stand it.

"Say something."

"Something."

"Something else."

"You’re doing a cold slow now. It’s a different length."

"I’m doing an eleven hours slow."

"That’s a subcategory."

"Of what."

"Of the cold slow." A pause. "There’s also a worried slow, but you’re not doing that one."

"How can you tell."

"You’d be walking faster."

She turned that over for about a hundred steps.

"That’s backwards."

"It’s not."

"Worried people slow down."

"Worried people who don’t know what to do slow down," said Eren. "You speed up. You’ve always sped up. When you don’t know what’s happening you move toward it faster, which is a terrible instinct that you have somehow survived for two years."

"That’s not—"

"Day one, this rotation. The wind changed and Kell shouted and you were packed in three minutes. Nine seconds faster than me."

"That’s because I was ready."

"That’s because you were interested," he said. "There’s a difference, and I’ve been keeping notes on it, and one day I’ll write them up and you’ll be furious."

She walked another fifty steps.

"Four pages?" she said.

"Considerably more than four pages."

Camp on the fifth night was in flat open ground with no shelter of any kind, which Kell said was preferable.

"Why," said Ost.

"Because I can see in every direction."

"That means they can see us."

"They’re going north-west. We’re going south. If they’re looking behind them, we have a different problem than the one we’re solving." Kell dropped his pack. "Two on, two off. Halvard and Ost first. Valois and Sennick second."

Halvard nodded.

Ost said, "Sir — what am I looking for."

Kell considered him.

"Anything that’s different from a minute ago," he said. "You’ll know. People always know. The trouble is they talk themselves out of it."

She got maybe two hours before Halvard’s hand on the tent line woke her.

The night was clear. That was the first thing. Five nights of low cloud and grey and now the sky had opened up and there were more stars over Varen than she had ever seen anywhere, which she had not expected and had no idea what to do with.

She sat with her back to the packs and looked at them.

"You’re staring."

"There’s a lot of them."

"There’s the same number as always."

"Not where I’m from."

Eren settled beside her — close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching, not close enough to comment on — and looked up.

"Where you’re from," he said.

"Mm."

"You never say much about it."

"There isn’t much."

"There’s the entire place."

"There’s the entire place and none of it’s interesting."

He let that sit for a moment.

Then: "Kestral has four hundred and six students and I’ve asked exactly one of them about home."

She kept looking at the sky.

"That’s not a question."

"No," he agreed. "It’s the shape of one. You can leave it there."

She left it there.

They watched for a while — the flat dark land, the enormous sky, the wind that had finally, for the first time in five days, dropped to something you could ignore.

"Sennick."

"Mm."

"Before Kell stopped walking."

She felt him go still beside her. Not dramatically. A very small adjustment, the kind you’d miss if you hadn’t spent two years looking.

"You’d stopped first," she said.

A long pause.

"I have good eyes," said Eren.

"That’s not an answer."

"No," he said. "It isn’t."

And that was all he said, and the stars went on, and somewhere north-west of them thirty people were walking through the dark toward something nobody had a name for yet.