I did have one grand ambition, a dream so fragile and tenuous I never spoke it aloud, not even to Thom, for fear it would break at its first taste of open air. It was this: that Naomi and Adam would never know Death on the same close, personal terms I did, would never require expertise in bloodshed, never make violence their profession. I nurtured this fantasy secretly, planning and plotting but never letting myself believe it might truly come to pass. When Naomi accepted a place in the Legion, I resigned myself to giving it up completely, at least where she was concerned.
And then we had won. The battle was over, our enemy put to flight. The danger had not passed, it was true, but whatever happened now, for a while this war would leave Earth behind. And it would leave Naomi, too. Lunar Veil would close her in, and she might not see war again for years and years and years. Maybe ever. She could have a real life.
That was the headiest of the fantasies I’d entertained, but it wasn’t the only one. For all the grim prospects I’d foreseen as a scout, my scouting days were over. It seemed now as never before there might be more I could give than my last breath. I had an idea or two about where I’d go making offers, too.
I think of Vinneas more than I would care to say. In idle moments, he often appears unbidden, strolling from a crowd of unconnected thoughts. I have convinced myself, too, that it would not be overly vain or confident to imagine he regards me differently than your average soldier of the Legion. When I stop and consider the matter, I feel sure there has always been something between us beyond what the circumstances called for, something unique to us. I thought I might like to find out what that was. But not anymore. I see now that to attempt any such thing would be unwise at best. At worst it would be horribly cruel to everyone involved.
For this reckless wishing of mine, I received a pair of solid knocks, blows I might have withstood were I better prepared. When I saw Naomi in that infirmary, it seemed the entire world had broken in two. I knew well the thrill running through her, the sense of invincibility after a brush with Death. It was how I felt after my first battle. My sister was a soldier now, and all the things I’d wanted for her were so many ashes. And then later Vinneas came and tried to revive that old hope, with all the hope I had for him bound up in it. It was more than I could stand.
It wasn’t Vinneas I hated; it was the world. I hated it for being a place where hope was something dangerous and cruel, where anything sweet and bright and good lasts only for a beguiling flash, just long enough to make you want more.
These are not happy thoughts, but now I’ve had them, at least I can patch myself up and avoid wandering into further danger. I can’t stop loving Naomi, or dodge the pain of seeing her grow up too fast, but I can cast off my fantasies of coming home one long-distant day to find her the head of some great household, a grandmother several times over. I can stop wanting things I’ll never have and chasing things I’ll never get to keep. I can try to forget I ever met anyone like Vinneas.
It all turns out to be easier than I would have thought, for a while anyway. IMEC-1 remains in dire condition, and there is little time to spare for self-pity. Alongside my fellow equites, I work twenty and thirty hours at a stretch. Our island’s faculty for altering the laws of nature has been employed to provide a constant supply of daylight, and in that insomniac blur, I can scarcely tell one hour from the next, let alone recall any notions I’d once held out for the future—until one day after a long shift I return to my bunk and find a letter waiting, addressed to me.
I share a room with three other equites of the 126th, but all are so fixed on sleep that the thick envelope sitting atop my pillow goes largely unnoticed. I take it outside to read, prying the seal open with my fingers. It is from Mama. Communication over legionary channels is still restricted to official wartime functions, but somehow she has found a way to get this message to me, sending her love and news from all our friends, written out cleanly in her careful hand.
Much has transpired since I last had word of my coda. Jenny Sullivan has had her baby, a boy she named for his grandfather. The decision raised some eyebrows, as Marcus Sullivan was a lifelong reprobate and in the opinion of many should not be leaving namesakes. Meanwhile, Chloe Hollis, cousin to Naomi and me, has finally decided to marry and brought a hefty slice of her new husband’s family with him into our coda, which has required adjustment in certain quarters. I am assured any brawls that have broken out were civil, restricted to fisticuffs only, with guns and knives never coming into play. Most significant of all, we have left the township of Granite Shore and are presently engaged in establishing a permanent settlement of our own. The site is none other than the Valley of Endless Summer. As yet we have hardly more than a few foundations, but Mama reports swift progress, as well as sightings of wild horses in the countryside that could provide us a new riding stock. The letter concludes with an invitation to come and visit, once I and the other Walkers of the Legion are allowed enough leave from our duties to make the journey.
I read the letter twice through, then stand there, holding it and thinking of all these people I used to know, off in their new home. I try to picture myself among those young families and fresh houses, or out chasing mustangs through the valley. What comes instead is a view of the Great Ridge and the spine of snow-covered mountains, and one thought: A coda that has ceased wandering has no need for scouts. I shut my eyes and try again, bearing down hard on my imagination, and suddenly I hear a burst of air and look to see the letter has caught fire in my hands.
In half a second all that remains is a shower of ashes and a single scrap of paper pinched between my fingers, which likewise vanishes in a puff of flame as soon as I let it loose. The bits of ash float away, borne off by a small current of air, and I watch them, thinking, Good. That’s the end of that. I wipe my smudged hands on my uniform and go to get ready for bed.
The incineration of Mama’s letter seems to me a definitive conclusion of the matter, and I put it out of my mind. It does not occur to me that this might be premature until some days later, and by then, Reaper Thom Mancebo is at my door.
He comes knocking in what, for me at least, amounts to the middle of the night. I am awakened by a startled shriek to find Haiyalaiya, who usually occupies the bunk above mine, standing at our open door with the sinister apparition of Thom before her. Though the room is dark, and it seems impossible Thom could see anything inside from his place in the hallway, I have the impression he has already picked me out.
Haiyalaiya has gotten over the shock of Thom’s arrival and begun demanding his name and rank and intentions banging on the doors of tired legionaries attempting to get some much-needed shut-eye.
“It’s all right, Endie,” I say, joining Haiyalaiya at the door and using her equus-derived nickname as a gesture of informality. “He’s a friend.”
Haiyalaiya appears dubious but doesn’t argue, preferring to get back to the business of sleeping. I join Thom in the hall, which is busy with groggy-eyed legionaries on the way to and from long, laborious shifts. “What is it, Thom?” I ask tiredly.
As an answer, Thom fixes me with his steady marksman’s stare. Thom and I do not need to speak to make ourselves understood, and I know right then he’s found out about the letter; what I can’t puzzle out is how. I get my answer, or part of it, a moment later, when Thom produces the letter itself, the ashes reassembled and held together by some manner of artifice. It looks like a reverse of itself, the paper ash-black and the written words white, but it’s Mama’s letter all right.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask. Thom only goes on watching me, not accusing, but full of reproof. “Look,” I say irritably, “it was an accident. I didn’t mean to torch the damn thing. It just happened.”
Thom does nothing to indicate he believes or disbelieves, or has even heard what I’ve said. His gaze doesn’t waver, and its steadiness keeps pulling words out of me. “No, I wasn’t going to tell you about it,” I grumble. Now that
I’ve been caught, I’m turning cranky and sullen. “I’m sorry I burned it, all right? But it’s done, and Mama would have sent another eventually.” And then I add, “Anyway, I’m not going.”
At this Thom folds the magically reconstituted letter and places it in his jacket, then returns to staring, still manifestly unsatisfied with my accounting of things.
“You do what you want,” I snap. “I won’t be flying all the way to that valley just to see a few half-built houses.”
Again no answer from Thom. It seems I am speaking to a statue set in a pose of eternal questioning. I’ve had about enough of it. “Because, Thom,” I say hotly, “it’d be a great big waste of time. Mama and Baby and everyone will want to see this place, too, right? So let them all come here if they want to say good-bye. I don’t need to get settled in with everyone, then just turn around and leave again. There’s no goddamn point.”
My voice breaks then, and I have to shut myself up. The last time Reaper Thom saw me cry, he was pulling a bullet from my gut with a pair of pliers, and I don’t want to soil my record.
Thom, for his part, seems finally to have heard me. He frowns and slowly nods, like he’s been listening to a story he already knows by heart and only needed to remind himself of the last few details. “Follow me,” he says, and sets off down the hall without further explanation.
I would much rather go back to bed, but I feel now I need to prove something, to myself if not Thom, who is generally immune to rhetorical displays. So I follow. It turns out we don’t have far to go.
The place Thom has in mind is the School of Rhetoric, a short walk from my quarters, since like most cadets newly enlisted in the Legion, I have been billeted in the Academy itself. I make an unusual sight traversing the halls in my standard-issue sleeping gear, however, and soon the odd looks begin to wear on me. I am on the verge of mutiny, of demanding to know why we’re here and what could be so important that it was worth depriving me of sleep, when Thom stops in his tracks, a hand raised for silence. At first all I hear is the babble of voices and shuffle of footsteps, but then something else comes lacing toward me. Music.
Music is perhaps a generous description; more accurately it is a feral screeching fit to wake the dead. But it is also a sound I will forever associate with melody: the sound of a fiddle. Thom waits until he is sure I’ve heard, then continues onward. I go with him, curious to learn the player’s identity, but also drawn by something deeper and older.
The perpetrator of this particular racket is Fontanus Jaxten, as I discover when the noise ceases with a screech, and from a classroom up ahead, his voice emerges. “I suck at this,” Jax declares. “I totally, completely suck.”
The next voice kicks my heart into a clumsy lurch. Naomi. “You’ve barely even tried,” she says.
“Well, it’s obvious how much I suck,” Jax insists. “You heard it, too, right?”
“You were the one who wanted to learn.” Naomi’s tones are heavy with exasperation. “And first you’ve got to hold it right. Give it here. I’ll show you.”
The tune that begins then is one I’ve heard a thousand times, and I can truthfully say I have never known anything so beautiful. Thom has halted a little past the classroom door, the light from inside falling just short of his face. He motions for me to join him, the way he would out in the woods if he’d spotted some spectacular bird and wanted me to see without startling it off.
I peer inside. There is Jax, sitting atop a desk and frowning in concentration, and beside him Naomi, Papa’s fiddle on her arm.
“She’s good,” Thom says, low enough that even I can hardly hear him. “You were, too.”
“No I wasn’t,” I say.
He laughs softly. “No, not so good. But you liked it. You shouldn’t have stopped.”
That last part is true enough. I never had talent the way Naomi does, but I have loved the sound of the fiddle ever since I was young, and when I played, I put my heart into it. But after I began scouting, there was never any time—I was either riding or too tired from it to play. Nearly two years went by before I decided I was in desperate need of practice, but when I finally got hold of a fiddle, somehow playing didn’t seem worthwhile anymore.
I suppose that was about the time I had my first good long look at the road ahead of me. What I saw was no place for fiddling. I thought it would be the same for Naomi, that going to war would cut her off from the girl she was before. But seeing her now, hearing her play, I know that isn’t so. She’s still Naomi, still my solemn, thorny, wonderful little sister. And she’s stronger than I am, strong enough to become a warrior without losing herself to it.
“You may get rusty,” Thom says, “but you never forget.”
Our eyes meet just long enough for me to understand why it was Thom brought me here: to show me that, despite everything I feared for her, Naomi would be all right. Naomi, and maybe me as well.
Suddenly, the music breaks off, strings squeaking. “Who’s there?” Naomi calls. “Rae?”
“Hey there!” I say, sidling to the doorway, guilt written all over me.
My sister takes me in, eyes narrowing. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, just out for a walk.”
“You are wearing your pajamas.” Naomi’s tone indicates she considers such behavior improper but not out of character for me.
“I was with Thom,” I begin, only to discover the subject of my half-formed excuse has become a distant figure fast disappearing into the Academy’s crowded labyrinths.
“Is something wrong?” Naomi asks, eyeing me more carefully now. “Did something happen?” An odd look has come over her, familiar and disorienting at once. It takes me a second to recognize it as the same fear I feel whenever Naomi herself is in danger. She has added up my abrupt arrival, my disheveled appearance, my overall state of confusion, and assumed terrible things have befallen people she loves.
“No, no,” I say. “No, Sunshine, nothing like that. It’s all good news. We’ve had a letter from Mama.”
SIXTY-THREE
VINNEAS
I’m only an hour or so late to the party—well in time for the official send-off of our expeditionary force—even if from my perspective it’s been more than three days since the whole celebration began. IMEC-1 was fully restored and furbished for its mission well before the Consulate and the Legion’s upper echelons had attended to all the crucial executive decision-making necessary for that mission to begin, and so they decided to just go forward with the launch and catch up with everyone later. Boredom is a great enemy of armies, deadly as any salivating alien horde, and there seemed no point in making the whole expeditionary force—nearly half our remaining military, along with certain academics and other specialized passengers—wait around while a few stuffy bureaucrats went about their stuffy business. Far better to let our heroes fly ahead to Dis, where hours and hours of tedious administrative chores on Earth would pass in the time it took to pop a few champagne corks. It was the right idea, undoubtedly. I only wish one of the stuffy bureaucrats wading through those hours and hours of tedious administrative chores wasn’t me.
One benefit of staring extinction in the face is that it has finally shaken us from a few of the more entrenched and dogmatic policies we’ve assumed over the past few centuries—among them, our long-standing campaign of duplicity and misinformation among the settlements. Preparing Earth to repel the next wave of invasion will require the complete and combined efforts of everyone on the planet, and it was decided the best way to secure the necessary level of cooperation would be to finally bring the settlements in on the full truth about our war. Part of me will be sorry to miss what may be the greatest overhaul to society since the establishment of the Principates, but the rest is just glad to be spared the hassle of sorting through the bedlam that will doubtless become a worldwide reality for much of the near future. What the end result will look like, I can’t say, but if
we of the MapleWhite Campaign ever do make it back to Earth, I expect we’ll find it a very different place from the one we left behind.
It’s been just under six weeks, or roughly forty hours—depending on whether you’re counting time in Hestia or Dis—since the first wave of the great Valentine Host was finally dispersed. In that time, we’ve set into motion the machinery that will, if all goes according to plan, yield a fully restored Legion in under twenty years’ time, and successfully rebuilt our flying city—a process that involved a deal more actual building than getting it airborne in the first place—with a few notable improvements. Even Kizabel, who violently denies the merest suggestion that her baby could ever have been flawed in any way, will admit the restored version may possibly be more perfect than before.
Sorting through the aftermath of the battle wasn’t easy, not by any means. There were too many losses we simply couldn’t repair or replace. I can say with confidence that reviewing the casualty reports for the encounter at Dis was the worst experience of my life. I knew, intellectually, that we lost even more people during the opening attack, when the Valentines had a clear shot at our cities and settlements, and I understood the toll would have been incalculably greater had we evacuated as Feeroy proposed. But even so. This was the one scenario in which people died as a direct result of my actions. Staying to defend Earth was my idea; if it weren’t for me, it’s likely this battle would never have happened. Meaning that, in a very real sense, each of those lost lives is on me.
I can’t help thinking how many might have been saved if only I’d been a little smarter, acted a little faster, planned a little better, worked a little harder. I tell myself the Valentines were always the aggressors, that I did only what was necessary for our survival, that every life lost should only motivate me further to end this war any way I can. But there are still days when it seems nothing can justify something so destructive, days when it feels like I’ve left a gaping wound in the universe, a crater in reality, that will never heal no matter what I do.
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