Chapter 5

Anya had hated Dallas.

In the beginning, anyway. For about three weeks. The sun was too hot, the air too dry, every sound and color foreign. She had found peace in the Library on the Farm, though, where everyone else was silent too.

No peace now.

Inside the cool stone building Anya turned automatically towards Owen’s workshop. But Victor steered her left, through the atrium and toward the little back offices, then down a hallway guarded by two bored soldiers. He knocked on the frame of a half-open door.

“Enter.”

A chasm three decades wide separated 0874 and 1074, time driving an axe into the trunk of their identical genetics. They had the same DNA, but were not the same man. Thank fuck.

Michael would age kindly, though, if Owen Montgomery was any judge. He was straight-backed and clear-eyed, could still fill out a uniform. He hadn’t put that uniform on in years, but he wore it now with a frown to match. It fit perfectly. The fatigues did too.

His eyes slid past Anya, waiting for someone else to walk in behind her. A tic appeared next to his eye when Aiden did not materialize. He shuffled the papers on his desk and said, “I need him to translate, Victor. You were supposed to bring them both.”

After more than a decade in service of New Columbia, Victor had lost none of his Operative coldness. “Aiden is dead.”

It had been two-thirds of a lifetime for Owen, and he’d lost all of it. It took him three tries to get a word out. “How?”

Anya held out her hands and shook her head, and Owen pressed his clenched fists gently against the top of his desk.

“Get Inez,” he said, calmly. Dully. “Short woman, curly brown hair, stocks the shelves. She reads lips.”

Victor made a smart about-face and left. In a few years he’d be completely deaf, but even then he probably wouldn’t learn a single sign.

A clock ticked.

It felt like Owen stared down at his hands in silence for a solid, cold eternity, but according to that clock it was only thirteen minutes.

Anya stood at parade rest because she didn’t know what else to do.

This was the room where she’d joined the NCA, right here on the carpet with its moth-eaten eagle. Aiden claimed that it and the Coalition’s were actually the exact same bird. Fitting too that this would be the room where it all ended.

Footsteps. Two sets. The door opened. Still Owen did not look up.

Inez shot little terrified glances over her shoulder as Victor herded her efficiently into the dusty office, but her sweet, round face brightened when she saw Anya.

Hi, when did you get back? She signed quickly, nervously.

“I need you to translate,” Owen interrupted. He didn’t raise his voice, or his gaze. “Nothing you see can leave this room. Understand?”

“Of course, sir.” Inez’s voice was softly accented — El Paso, childhood hearing loss, and five years of university in Houston. “Doesn’t Aiden usually do this?”

“He’s dead.” Owen took a moment to readjust his uniform. “Anya’s going to tell me why.”

It didn’t take long: deep in the bowels of Alpha Base, Aiden had chosen to become a martyr for a world that died two centuries before his birth.

“Did you see it,” Owen asked, finally making eye contact.

Not really. Neither had Lily, who said she’d seen him alive but heard a single gunshot as she and Michael fled to a cargo lift. Anya had been long gone by then.

She debated telling Owen the specifics. She debated telling him what else Aiden had done. Inez shouldn’t have to know about that, though. She probably couldn’t know, didn’t have the clearance.

It was quick, she signed instead. Inez translated dutifully.

Owen looked profoundly uninterested in doing anything after that, but he asked one more question anyway. “Did that girl…what was her name? Did she find 1074? Or was it all for nothing.”

Yes, Anya signed. What are you going to do with them?

As the words were translated Owen looked at Victor, who looked back in silence.

“Temporary holding,” Owen said, not to Anya. “Until I get a chance to talk to him.”

He was doing it on purpose. Talking around her. To calm herself Anya counted eight things she could use to kill or incapacitate Owen and Victor both, and ranked them in order of most to least amusing.

Then she nudged Inez and signed, I also have some Coalition intel. Aiden got it from their computer.

As the words were translated she set the drive carefully on Owen’s desk and unwrapped it. It was the size of a deck of cards, glossy white and stamped with a serial number. A single bloody thumbprint stained the corner.

Owen didn’t spare a single glance at the drive. “Dismissed.”

Anya wanted to demand whether Aiden had been acting on Owen’s orders, if he’d lied about going AWOL too to follow her, but then Inez would have to know about the tanks. So she signed something else.

“Sir,” Inez translated, watching Anya’s hands. That wasn’t the word Anya had used, but perhaps that was for the best. “If I could just—”

“I said you were dismissed.” Owen opened a drawer and dropped the drive in. It thumped against the wood with a sound like a door closing. Or a coffin lid.

What will you do with them, Anya demanded.

Owen wasn’t looking. He waved his hand as Inez began to relay the question, cutting her off. “Go.”

New Columbia was allergic to change. Tradition was everything.

The Farm was still The Farm, even though nothing but soldiers had been cultivated there for generations. Labels endured long after the fields of corn and potatoes were plowed under and replanted with a barracks, a stable, and training grounds. White tents sprouted like geometric fruit where orchards once stood.

Anya’s quarters were in a post-Collapse brick building designated for unmarried officers. Their single narrow room on the second story broiled in the summer and froze in the winter, but it was home. It had been home.

She’d left her key under a bush, under a brick. As she was retrieving it Anya heard almost silent footsteps, approaching from behind and to the right—

A teenage boy in a cadet’s uniform slouched a few paces away, hands in his pockets, unaware how close he’d come to dying.

“Do you got the thing?” His uniform was oversized and badly creased, sleeves swallowing his hands.

Anya shooed him away. Elin would skin him alive for loitering, and again for how badly he wore the uniform.

“Do you got it,” the boy repeated, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “I can show you the bird if’n you want.”

Upon further inspection he was maybe twelve. Anya looked around for some sign of mischief, but the child was alone. How had he gotten onto the base? What the fuck was he talking about?

How about I show you the bird, Anya signed, and then proceeded to do so.

The boy narrowed his eyes at her with almost comical malice.

“You’re s’posed to have it,” he muttered.

Anya booted a clod of dirt at him in case he hadn’t gotten the hint, and he slunk away with his hands in his pockets, shoulders curved forwards like he was melting.

Disregard for good posture; Elin would have another mile out of him for that. Except he wasn’t a cadet, not so young. And what the fuck had he been babbling about?

Anya blew out a long sigh. The key sat heavy in her hand as she thumbed away bits of clinging dirt.

What if everything had been cleared out after they went AWOL? In a way it would be a mercy, but at the same time if she opened the door and found it empty, walls bare and the mattress tied into a roll at the foot of the bed, she would bury herself alive.

Oh shit, Rocket. She still had to get out to the stables. Surely Owen wouldn’t have broken decades of tradition and crossed the threshold to fuck with her horse, not even out of spite.

She let out a long, unsteady breath. Then she took herself home.

It was as she left it. As they had left it. Dusty sunlight bathed the accumulated detritus of a life she’d paused and only distantly hoped to restart.

As she hung her coat, Anya’s eye went to the cloudy mirror on the wall, then to the straight razor propped up in a cracked blue mug on the sink beneath it.

She ignored it. It could sit there until it rusted into crumbs.

All around the room were other reminders: two cots shoved together, a uniform jacket, a pair of boots, a small bronze medal on a faded ribbon hanging off the knob of a cabinet — for Courage Under Fire at the Battle of Red River (Presented On This Day by President Hugo Reyes).

Tacked up next to it was a grainy photo, a triumph of modern science. It was a portrait of ghosts: Owen, with a terrible haircut and an easiness in his face, the spitting image of Michael. Miles standing up straight and smiling ear to ear. Neither one of them a day over twenty-five.

Between them stood Molly Montgomery, looking just like her portrait in the Library: curly hair, luminous copper skin, already a legend in her Captain’s bars. She had one arm around Owen’s waist and the other hand on the shoulder of a gap-toothed boy with a blurred face. Aiden, five years old.

None of these people existed any more. Time and loss and bullets had killed them.

Anya replaced the picture and sank onto the bed. She took the extra pillow and flung it across the room.

It was strange to be still, to be alone; the silence pressed down on her like a rag soaked in chloroform.

She collapsed relentlessly inward, laying on her side and pulling her knees up to her chest like a child. Then she buried her face in the crook of her arm and let herself mourn.

The artifacts of Aiden’s life fit easily into his battered metal footlocker. Every single thing. The medal. The uniform. A sealed bottle of top-shelf bourbon he’d been saving for the day the line numbers were posted for Major; he’d been that sure.

Anya hesitated a minute over the photograph, studying the smiling, slightly blurry faces. Then she took it back out and closed the lid.

Miles didn’t look surprised to see her standing in the stable yard with the chest. Then again, Miles rarely looked like anything. He leaned on his cane and stared at the name A. MONTGOMERY stenciled on the side of the metal box until she gave him the photograph.

He swallowed, then cleared his throat and tucked the thin sheet into his shirt pocket, over his heart. He looked suddenly a hundred years old instead of fifty-something.

Then he limped into the stable and came back with a shovel.

“Not your fault.” He did not release the handle until she nodded.

Aiden had been his son too, but she doubted Owen would include him in any sort of memorial. Anya lingered, waiting to see if he’d invite himself to hers.

He didn’t, so she went alone.

The military cemetery on the Farm was shady and quiet. A small river ran through it and spotted deer roamed wild, grazing among the headstones.

All the Red River veterans were buried together.

The Coalition’s greatest defeat: that was how the historians put it. Once Aiden had taken Anya there, shown her the trenches still scarring the soft earth on either side of the river. Less than five hundred miles from Houston. That’s how close the enemy had gotten.

The New Columbian army had been trapped against the bluffs on the western bank, horrifically exposed, while the Coalition dug fortifications to the east. They’d shelled each other for four months, and by the end the river had been so thick with corpses you could walk across it. So much blood in the water that the place had been renamed afterwards.

“I was ready to die here to stop them taking another step south,” Aiden had said, standing among the rushes and cattails. His eyes had been distant; he’d looked at the present and saw the past. “I almost did.”

Only the eleventh hour arrival of fresh troops from the Union – and independent Nola – had prevented a black and grey flag from flying over Houston. Miles had taken his injuries there. Owen never spoke of it.

That part of the cemetery in Dallas was easy to find; it was the largest. Rows of markers erupted from the ground like jagged teeth, mossy and leaning.

Anya chose a willow in the cool shadows near the riverbank. The digging was harder than she’d expected. Roots fouled the shovel. The earth resisted. Sweat gathered between her shoulder blades and migrated south.

Finally it was done, the locker lowered in without ceremony. What had the Coalition done with his body? Don’t think about it.

She filled the hole slowly, tamping the soil flat with the back of the shovel. From the river’s edge she chose one smooth, gray stone and placed it in the fresh earth. Temporary. Owen would surely order a proper headstone and put it up next to Molly’s.

Maybe it really has been quick. Anya hoped so.

A voice, low and indistinct, jarred her from her private mourning. Though the drooping branches Anya saw Owen on the other side of the river, leaning against a headstone with bottle in his lap and a cup in his hand.

When she stepped out into the open he fixed her with a level stare, then beckoned her over with a drunken flap of his hand. Anya advanced cautiously, minding the wet black stepping stones.

A second cup nestled in the grass near the grave marker, which bore the usual simple inscription: Col. Molly Montgomery. AC 143 - AC 187. Soldier, mother, friend.

Tarnished coins left rusty streaks across the granite, but it was otherwise clean and free of greenery. Lovingly maintained.

She was shot dead as she tried to reach Miles, who’d been trapped under his dying horse with a shattered leg and a fractured spine, suffocating slowly in the mud. Rumor had it Owen had told Miles, at the funeral, to his face, that it had been a poor trade. That was why Miles lived in the stables now and only talked to Owen on Republic Day.

The bottle was half empty. Owen was more than half drunk. His eyes were bleary, unfocused.

“You following me?” He frowned at the shovel in her hands. “Put that down. There’s nothing for you here. There’s nothing left.”

Anya sat down cross-legged near two markers with death dates a week apart. Instead of full names they just read Thomas and Sparrow. A few graves were like that, she noticed. River, Scott, Calla, Marcus, Adam. Small flat headstones, all in a row. Regimental mascots? Perhaps they’d buried the dogs.

Sorry, she signed at Owen. She still saw a little of Michael in him, like holding two sheets of paper up to a lamp and watching their contents overlap.

He stared at her hands, uncomprehending even that simple sign; Aiden had always translated. He topped off the tin mug by the headstone, then his own.

“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Owen said. “Maybe you were one of them, but he loved you. There should be consequences, Anya, but I won’t. I can’t. Do you understand?”

She shook her head, dumbfounded.

“Honorable discharge,” he explained. “I took care of it. Stay in Dallas, go, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what you do so long as I never see you again.”

The air felt too thin to breathe. Nothing was going to happen? Nothing? She was just…cut loose, like she was nothing?

Owen looked up from the bottle and frowned. “Why are you still here?”

Anya considered asking him the same thing. Instead she picked up her shovel and retreated, leaving the cemetery to the dead and the ghosts.