Earth Awakened, page 25
“I wonder what they were hiding.”
She sighed and strode into the room. Though a few overturned chairs lay scattered around the room, she didn’t retrieve any, instead slipping past him to settle on the faded square of varnish where the desk’s computer used to sit. Metal clicked as she took off her gun and stood it so her knees held the barrel.
“They could be hiding war secrets or toilet paper orders. You don’t know how this works, but the soldier who manned this station was good at their job. These bases don’t have big numbers so everyone needs to fight when it comes under attack—but this soldier, the one in this room, is not allowed to pick up a gun until every piece of intelligence, from First Priority to pizza orders, is destroyed. Burning, smashing, slicing, whatever he needs to do, he does it to ensure that everything is gone before people like us get here. So this—” She lifted a forefinger and turned it in a circle. “—is the work of a good soldier. They are all good soldiers, especially their commander.”
A frown deepened the furrow of his eyebrows. “You have spoken to their commander?”
“No.”
He paused, his frown deepening. “Is he refusing to talk?”
“No.”
Er…
He stopped. By the piercing, heated, hurt look in her eyes, he was missing something.
She sighed again. “He’s the one you killed with that car.”
A coldness slid into his skin.
The surrender had not stopped what they’d needed to do, only changed what type of work they had to do. Everything had happened so fast, they hadn’t had the time to feel, to cope.
They’d lost people today. He knew that. And their loss ate a deep hole in his chest.
He knew the Swarzgardians were just soldiers. That, save for an accident of birth, they could just as easily have been Westran.
The commander he’d killed had been a human being.
But Gannon’s loss made the hole in his chest ring red and raw with pain and anger.
God, I am such a fucking hypocrite.
He wasn’t ready to think about Gannon. And he certainly wasn’t ready to think about the man he’d killed.
If he did, it felt like he would fall apart.
“You didn’t think we were going to talk about that?” she asked when he said nothing.
“What is there to talk about?” He turned, kicking some debris and planting himself against the wall. “A battle happened. Both sides lost people. We won. Now, we deal with rebuilding morale.”
Naomi scoffed. “Are you fucking serious?”
“What?”
“You attacked a surrendering enemy. Not only attacked, you killed him in front of his men.”
Javen raised his hand to his mouth, covering the smile that formed—it was a bad, involuntary habit of his, made from irritation rather than glee, and had gotten him into trouble in their past arguments.
“Funny,” he said, still hiding his mouth. “I don’t remember Swarzgard giving any of us a chance to surrender before they blew up our people.”
“Do you think any of these people have anything to do with Terremain?” Her tone darkened, wrinkles forming on the bridge of her nose as she bared her teeth. “When an army establishes a new Red Zone, that usually means that everyone involved has an automatic extended deployment, Javen. That means that the people who conquered Terremain are still there, conquering it. I doubt that anyone from this outpost has even been to Terremain.”
He ticked an eyebrow up. “How do you know that for certain?”
“Because their commander is—was—a First Lieutenant,” she said, standing up from the desk and crunching the debris under her feet. “You don’t understand how any of this works, Javen. You don’t have the slightest inkling of what you just did out there.”
He arched his back and used his shoulders to push himself away from the wall, squaring his frame to mirror hers.
“Explain it to me, then.” His own teeth bared now, tone lowering in volume but raising in intensity. “Explain to me why taking out one guy when they killed seven of our own makes me the bad guy.”
“He was surrendering,” she said, raising her chin. “We don’t kill surrendering enemies.”
“We kill enemies.”
“Javen, you don’t understand.”
“Explain it to me.”
She took a deep breath in, held it for a moment, and exhaled.
“The military is probably the most elitist organization on the planet,” she said, rolling her jaw and huffing. “I am a Master Sergeant, which means I have earned eight ranks since I became a soldier. If it weren’t for a delay in army management, I would have earned my ninth before Terremain’s fall. It takes many years and a lot of work to achieve this. Most don’t make it this far.
“That man,” she continued, pointing in the direction of the front of the building, “—was a second rank officer. He got to go to college, so he gets a higher rank. A completely different set of ranks that grunts like me don’t have access to. Technically, he would outrank me. Civilians look at the technicalities. You are looking at the technicalities. You think that you killed a battle-hardened officer because of his title. People like me, Thorn, Bonnie, Bolo… the Swarzgardian troops? We know that you just killed a man who was probably eighteen months out of officer school—an officer willing to throw away his career to surrender and save his men, because a surrender can end a career in the Swarzgardian army, trust me. While his men took cover—while your men took cover—that officer ran toward you to save his troops, and you slaughtered him.”
Javen was silent. She was pacing again, switching back and forth across the small room, not quite making a circuit. Her movements were stressed, erratic. Conflicted.
This… this had really rattled her.
Gritting his teeth, he thought back to that moment—thought back to what had led to his decision to kill the officer.
Gannon. Gannon had kept his feet when the power made the ground buck and shiver. He’d squared off with a Swarzgardian soldier, and both of them had disappeared under a mountain of concrete.
Anger and grief stabbed his body.
He hadn’t lost control of his magic. He had lost control of himself.
Months of training himself to hide his emotions—to repress his wants and needs under the veneer of leadership—it had all disintegrated the second that tower fell.
And it had happened so quickly, he was still trying to sort through the details.
God, but it had just felt so good to strike back.
That was not an answer Naomi would want to hear.
Naomi had stopped her pacing, standing just to the right of the door. He drifted toward the desk and tapped his knuckles on its top. Light brown rings overlapped each other where countless coffee cups had been placed, so much like his desk in Terremain.
“I don’t want to kill innocent people,” he said. Tap. Tap. Tap. “I know you don’t want to, either, but it is difficult to… restrain oneself when forced against such an enemy. They have taken too much from us.”
He couldn’t see her, but he heard her boots pivot on the broken plastic and felt her eyes on his back.
“Their leaders have,” she corrected. “None of these guys want to be here, Javen. We don’t want to be here. But someone influential fucked up, or got greedy, or whatever is the real reason this is happening. The people that caused this will never fire a gun. We can’t take out our hatred toward their country on their troops.”
“How can you say that?” He swung toward her. “You were on the front line before you came to Birchwood. You have made a career of killing Swarzgardians.”
A small quiver roved across her face before it went back to being firm.
“I did,” she said, starting to close the distance between them again. “We were in battle or patrolling, and I had to take those shots. I did it because I had to. If you have to take someone’s life, I won’t argue with you. This is war. It happens. But you are never to take the life of a surrendering enemy. Never.”
“Even if they deserve it?”
“Especially if they deserve it!” she screamed.
Her free hand gripped the side of her head, tearing some of it from her bun. The energy that radiated from her wasn’t magical, but it still felt deadly. She walked in another semi-circle and kicked out her foot. A piece of the computer hit the wall at an angle and ricocheted across the room.
“I can’t believe we’re having this fucking conversation. There are rules in war. This isn’t some kind of video game where you get kill count ranks. We are humans fighting other humans. When we are out there, we are tapping into every instinct our species has to survive, and it is a fucking scary place to be. There have been times when I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I’ve looked into mirrors and not recognized myself. Fuck.”
She ran a hand over her face and took a deep breath.
“The only things that keep us human are our training and our rules. That’s it. Our training isn’t just to make us killing machines; it’s to keep us human. Our training helps us follow those rules because there are no compromises. If someone has their gun pointed at you—go ahead, blow them away—but if someone drops their gun and raises their hands, game over. They are not an enemy, but a prisoner. It doesn’t matter if they just killed fifteen people. Unless you have veritable reasons to suspect a false surrender, you can’t kill them.” She sighed. “This is important for us, too, Javen. One day, that could be us. We may be captured and, if your enemy knows that you do not accept surrenders, then they won’t either.”
Voices drifted down the hallway. The sound started distant, came closer, and then grew distant again. A group of people passed the intersection of the hallways and headed toward the mess hall.
In a normal world, such a moment should have been cause for excited chatter.
He’d listened for Gannon’s voice before he’d realized it.
The voices died away, leaving silence in their wake.
He sat on the desk in the same place Naomi had used earlier.
“I’m sorry. My anger bettered me. I saw that man and just… I just wanted to end him. I saw his hands, but I didn’t even think of what it meant for me to see them. I saw only the uniform. That’s it.”
She looked at the floor for a few moments before nodding. The debris that had been hit by Naomi’s kicked piece shifted and settled, but neither of them started at the sound.
“I just wish that you would apply the same kind of understanding to the people I am training,” he added.
She stopped. “What?”
He was toeing the edge of a diving board, hovering above a swimming pool filled with fire. He could choose to stay on the board, or he could jump. Choosing to stay could be changed later; jumping could not.
He needed to jump.
“You knew that Rosie was afraid of her Element. Fire is wild and dangerous. She doesn’t have confidence in it, and she is terrified of hurting people. So, she sees another girl, a girl who was kind to her, lose control of her Element, and you decide to not tell me? Even worse, you decide to strong arm Rosie—Rosie!—into not telling me, either. I pushed her, Naomi! I pushed her during her training. I would have never done that if I had known about Mersetzdeitz!”
“Fuck,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes. “I told her we planned on telling you after the move. I can’t believe she fucking told you.”
This time, it was Javen who moved. His leap from the desk to the floor wasn’t graceful, his boot sliding on the debris before he’d gotten his weight under him.
She didn’t even flinch when he got close to her.
“Don’t you blame, Rosie,” he spat. “You will say nothing to her. She was terrified. She had to tell me. Look, I don’t know what is going between you and I. You don’t have to explain it. I accept that distance. I don’t understand it, but I accept it. But you can’t keep distance from me when you are operating as my second-in-command. Every report must be given fully. No exceptions.”
Something he had said offended her. One of her eyebrows lifted, and she huffed as he spoke. When she touched her gun, he half-expected her to use it on him.
Instinct had him reaching for Caleb or Rosie’s power before he even knew what he was doing.
What had Naomi said earlier? About using every instinct available to them to survive.
Well, he had new instinct. His magic was instinctive.
And he wasn’t sure what that said about him.
Luckily, their magic was too far away, and Naomi was only adjusting the weapon on her shoulder.
“When we returned to Terremain and I received my scout report, I knew we were going to leave. Obtaining control of Seola was our first priority. I needed to make sure that was your first priority, so I didn’t tell you.”
“Why?”
She sighed, looked away, and looked back. “Because I was bringing the materials you have been obsessing over for months. Whenever you weren’t performing your duties, you were holed away with Caleb and Rosie, trying to figure out how to use their power. Now, you have been a genius with how you have managed to keep this many people alive for so long, and I appreciate that you don’t throw your balls around when it comes to the decisions I have to make, but… I was worried that you would get distracted if you knew that there were more Terrans Awakening like you. Not just the Firebird.”
He migrated back to the spot on the desk. It was quickly becoming their comfort object for the conversation.
Of course he’d obsessed about his abilities. Who wouldn’t? The moment he’d Awakened, the people of Birchwood were given a chance to choose how they would survive. They hadn’t needed to surrender to an unknown fate with the Swarzgardian army or try to find a way to relocate in Ryarne.
And improving his skills meant improving his community’s ability to endure and progress.
If there were others like him…
I’m not alone. I’m not the only one.
Choosing between his two roles, between being a leader and pursuing magic—that had never been an option. All that mattered was the survival of his home, his people. Learning magic would help them, but he knew he wasn’t trained enough to do more than what he was doing now.
Leaving Terremain would have remained his priority, regardless of what had happened in Mersetzdeitz.
And it hurt she didn’t know this.
“What happened to Gannon—” he started.
“—we don’t need to talk about it,” she blurted.
“It didn’t come from me. I know it looks like that, but I wasn’t drawing that power from Caleb. Something was there with us. I’ve never felt something like that. I lost control with the officer, but Gannon…”
Naomi took off her gun and leaned it against the wall. Her shoulders and her mask fell as she approached him. When she reached him, she took his hands in her own.
“Caleb told me everything,” she said. “He told me how he didn’t know where the power was coming from and that both of you fell to the ground. He told me about the sigils, and how you two couldn’t do much with the power until you learned them. Your skin was blank when that tower fell. I know it wasn’t you.”
A lump closed around his throat. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“I know,” she said, touching his face. “And I know that you have been carrying everything on your own. Please understand that I had to pull away from you. There is so much that you don’t know about how all of this works. When my troops see me next to you, they see their Master Sergeant supporting their leader. When I agree with you, they trust that I am agreeing with you as a person who knows about all of this. That would change if we were together. I wouldn’t be a soldier supporting her leader, I would be a girl supporting her boyfriend. They wouldn’t respect us. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. None of this would have worked if I hadn’t.”
He shivered.
“So you’re not afraid of me?”
“Not at all.”
Chapter 30
Smoke lifted from the end of her cigarette, lifting slowly in the air. Naomi took a short drag from it, squinting her eyes briefly as she stared at the thick fog that shrouded the courtyard and put dense halos around every light.
God, what a day.
The surrender had been good. She hadn’t expected it, and it had been good. Not having to kill people would always be good. And Bonnie and the rest of her squad had returned just before sundown.
Already, the courtyard below was bustling with the flap and clatter of tent canvas and tubing. Someone had even set up tables, and the aroma of some sort of stew drifted to her.
Below her, people joked and mingled. Strode about offloading supplies and setting up.
It wouldn’t take long for the story of Javen murdering a surrendering enemy commander to spread.
She took a long drag of her cigarette, lengthening the draw as the smoke hit her lung, and held it for a moment, watching the activity in the courtyard below.
Newer troops wouldn’t understand the severity of the situation, but the older ones, Bonnie, Bolo, Thorn—they would.
She had to get ahead of it.
Between the two armies present, she held the highest rank. Normally, it was Javen who did these kinds of things. She only stepped in part of the time, on matters of military and safety.
Well, I suppose this falls under ‘military,’ then.
God, she hated it. It left an awful taste on her tongue, much more than the smoke did.
And eventually, the end of the cigarette had burned down to the tips of her fingers, and it was time to go.
She took one last drag, then stubbed it out. Her lips twisted as she strode off, boots rapping down the concrete stairs and down to the courtyard. Broken glass, stone, and metal spread in an uneven mix across the pavement. The mangled mess of one of the heavy artillery guns rose like some ancient ruin on the right, just visible in a light at the end of the building. Closer, the broken pile of concrete that used to be the watchtower lay just beyond the wall of the last tent.
She took a quick left, ducked into the outpost’s supply room, and returned to the courtyard with a whistle.
