THIRTY-FIVE
CAIDEN
My hands are still on the console when the rest of the room begins to empty around me.
The headset sits in front of me, set down too carefully, as if I might still need it if I wait long enough.
As if the channel might open again and Niko’s voice will come back through it, annoyed, dry, and perfectly alive.
This will all turn out to have been some ugly misunderstanding made worse by bad reception and worse luck.
My name gets said once, and I answer. I think. I don’t have a clue what comes out of my mouth, only that it’s enough to end whatever exchange they were trying to have.
After that, nobody speaks to me.
I walk back to the barracks in a guilt-fuelled daze.
Inside my room, I shut the door and stand there with my forehead against the metal.
I breathe slowly and count because numbers are easier than names, easier than pictures, easier than the sound of my own voice saying his name down an open channel like that might have been enough to pull him back if I say his name enough.
It wasn’t, but I hear it again anyway.
“Niko—” My own voice, cracks the discipline for a second, saying his name like I was still in charge of what happened next.
I strip off my jacket and sit on the edge of the bunk with my head between my legs.
I can’t breathe.
The room is too quiet. My thoughts won’t line up properly. They come to me in bits, jumbled and wrong, each one carrying a different part of the op.
The intel was wrong.
The correction was right.
The timing wasn’t enough.
I said yes.
That last thought stands out, separate from the rest. I close my eyes and see the map as it was before everything went to shit.
Clean lines, sensible assumptions, the terrain reduced to shapes, vectors, and movement windows.
Niko’s unit was exactly where it was supposed to be, doing exactly what it was meant to do, moving when I told it to move because that is what men do when they trust the voice in their ear.
I replay the whole thing.
Once. Twice. Ten times. I slow the sequence down in my head until every second feels long enough to crawl inside. Then I speed it up and look for the moment the outcome changes. A different reroute. A different pause. A different call.
But there isn’t one. Or at least, there isn’t one I can live with, which may be the more honest version. If it had been a mistake, that would have been almost easier.
Christ, listen to me. Easier.
If I’d made a clean, obvious error, I could pick it out properly. Name it, own it, even carry it in a straight line from action to outcome and at least know where to put the blame.
This isn’t that.
This is worse.
This is systems working the way they always do, and me, trapped inside it, helping it along, using the authority it handed me and trusting that if I stayed close enough to the process, I might keep the worst of it from happening.
I think of Niko in the comms room again before the mission. “I need this, Caiden.” I think of his face when I said yes, and the controlled relief on his face.
I told him I’d put him on the detail.
I told him I wouldn’t tell Ari.
I said fucking yes.
I have to put both hands flat on my thighs because otherwise I’m going to stand up and start smashing the room apart one object at a time.
Niko trusted me. He trusted me enough to ask, to hear him out, and to follow the call once we were out there. No argument. No hesitation. He went where I told him because I was on comms and he fucking trusted me.
I stare at the floorboards and wonder how many rooms like this exist, how many men have sat in them trying to work out the exact point at which trust stopped being safety and started being the thing that killed somebody.
Then I think about Vladimir.
That’s the part that hurts the most. A little boy who will grow up with stories instead of parents.
Photographs instead of memories. Other people’s versions of his father handed to him in pieces as he gets old enough to ask the right questions.
A little boy who will learn absence before he learns how to spell it.
My hands curl into fists. This is how it always happens. Men do the right things, trust the right voices, follow the right orders, and still end up dead while someone else starts the paperwork that will say it couldn’t have gone any other way.
At some point, I realise I haven’t taken a proper breath in several minutes. I force one in. Hold it. Count, then let it go. The technique works in the technical sense. My body obeys. My mind can get fucked.
Then Ari hits me. Oh God, Ari.
Ari will know soon, if he doesn’t already.
Ari will be at the hospital or in some corridor with his face gone still in that way it does when the worst thing has already happened, and there’s no point pretending it hasn’t.
He’ll trace it backwards because he’s Ari.
He’ll take the whole thing apart inside his own head, and he’ll find me threaded through it.
The operation.
The comms.
The call.
The yes before any of it started.
I picture the look on his face when it all joins up, and that thought is somehow worse than everything I’m feeling right now.
Not because I’m scared of him shouting. Ari shouting, I can survive.
It’s the cold version of Ari I’m not built for.
The one where he sees me clearly and says very little because he doesn’t need to.
The one where there’s no room left for excuses because he’d smell one before my brain even finished creating one.
I should go find him. But the thought comes and goes in the same breath. No. Not like this. Right now, I’m not fit to be near anyone. I’d either say nothing at all or say too much, and neither would undo what’s already been done.
Guilt makes you clumsy. Shock makes you selfish. Grief makes you think silence is restraint when half the time it’s just cowardice dressed up nicely.
Still, I stay where I am.
I lie back on the bunk fully dressed. “Niko,” I say his name once more, quietly.
This time there’s no static to eat it. No channel is swallowing the sound, and it still does nothing.
Of course it does nothing. Why would it?
Eventually, exhaustion drags me under, into that horrible, shallow half-sleep where everything from the op keeps starting again.
The map lights up behind my eyes. The channel opens, and the contact call comes in. I say his name, and the static takes him away again. Over and over, but different speeds.
Nothing changes; it’s the same ending.