Chapter 6
TROKA
War smells like burned meat and molten glass.
The ground shudders beneath me as another plasma shell rips through the ravine wall, showering us in dust and broken chunks of red rock. Someone screams—high, sharp, human—and someone else cuts it off with a guttural, wet gurgle. I don’t look. I can’t afford to.
I’m already moving.
Blaster in one hand, pulse-shield sparking in the other, I vault over the mangled remains of a dropship, land hard in the churned-up mud, and fire three rounds at the Birex gunner cresting the ridge.
His head pops like overripe fruit.
One less target.
My armor hums around me, heat radiating from the core generator in the backplate. The HUD flickers—static from interference or damage, who knows—but I don’t need tech to know where the enemy is.
I can smell them.
The air is thick with ozone, blood, and fear. The sharp metallic sting of cauterized flesh mixes with the sulfur stink of the trench charges. It clings to my tongue, to the ridges under my scales, to the inside of my skull.
This planet—who even remembers the name anymore—is another pit in a war that never ends.
But I don’t fight for maps.
Today, I fight because it’s easier than thinking.
Because the second my pulse slows, I feel her again.
Alaina.
A whisper under the cannon fire. A soft laugh buried beneath the scream of engines and the whine of med-drones.
She’s with me.
And it hurts.
“Troka! Six o’clock!”
Sergeant Korr’s voice cuts across the comms, sharp and cold.
I spin, drop to a knee, and fire blind. The shot clips a Birex scout mid-leap.
He tumbles, hits the dirt twitching. I don’t stop to admire my aim.
I surge forward, slam my shield into a charging brute, and follow through with my elbow to his throat.
His trachea collapses with a satisfying crunch.
Korr grunts. “You’re a goddamn murder machine.”
“Trying to keep it interesting,” I snarl.
She laughs—harsh, brittle. There’s no joy in it. Just relief. If I’m talking, I’m alive.
And that’s the trick of war. You keep talking, you keep killing, you keep moving, because the second you pause, the second you let yourself feel anything other than rage, you’re already halfway to dead.
But I feel her anyway.
In the cracks. Between reloads. Between kills.
Alaina.
The weight of her thighs. The heat of her breath. The sound she made when I bit her shoulder just hard enough to leave a mark. The mark I dream of tracing with my tongue.
I shouldn’t be thinking of her.
But she’s the only thing in this hellhole that feels real.
We win the sector by sundown. “Win” is generous. We outlast them. Their flank caves, and the survivors scuttle back into the mountains like rats smelling a flood.
Our casualties are piled under silver tarps, stacked in the loading bay like cargo.
I sit against a boulder, helmet beside me, pulse-rifle laid across my lap like a tired animal.
My arms shake.
Not from fatigue. From restraint.
I fought like a beast. Broke bones. Tore flesh. Used a vibroknife on a Birex medic who tried to surrender. I didn’t even hesitate.
But now?
Now, I hesitate.
Because in the silence, in the aftermath, I do something stupid.
I pull up my compad.
The screen flickers to life. Messages bloom across it like infection.
Seventeen unread.
Four from command. Two from squad ops. Eight from my cousin, probably trying to con me into another scheme. One from a credit lender. One spam.
And just one that stops my breath in my throat.
Alaina Southland.
I stare at her name like it’s a mine I just stepped on.
Don’t open it.
You’re filthy. You’re bleeding. You’re halfway to catatonic. This is not the time.
But my thumb hovers over the screen.
The message is old. Weeks. Maybe more. I must’ve missed it in the last blitz push.
My heart pounds.
She sent something.
I shouldn’t open it. It could say anything.
Could be a joke. A goodbye. A drunken confession. A demand.
Could say she hates me.
Worse—could say she doesn’t.
My thumb twitches.
Instead of tapping, I back out.
Coward.
I save it. Archive it. Tuck it into the encrypted file system with my high-priority combat notes like that’ll make it safer. Like that’ll keep it from hurting me.
I can face a plasma cannon. I can throw myself into a meat grinder of a firefight with a smile.
But this?
One message?
It terrifies me.
So I do nothing.
I sit in the blood and dust and rot of another victory, and I pretend not to be shaking.
Later, when we’re back at field base, I’m alone in my bunk. The lights are dimmed. The air smells like antiseptic and scorched synth-fiber. My ribs ache. My shoulder's torn. I should be sleeping.
But I’m not.
Instead, I scroll through the photos I downloaded before the deployment. Stupid things. Faces I barely remember. Training shots. A meal I was proud of once.
And suddenly, her.
She’s mid-laugh. Leaning against the bar. Her eyes are half-lidded and dangerous, and her lips are parted like she’s about to say something devastating.
It’s the only image I have of her.
And I stare at it until the room disappears.
“You don’t even know,” I murmur to no one. “You don’t even know what you did to me.”
If I were braver, I’d message her back. Say something. Anything.
But I don’t.
Because some wars you fight with weapons.
And some… you lose with silence.