4. FOUR
FOUR
CALVEROUS
Location: Jiradesh Desert
Calver swerved, head down, between the rows of supply wagons under the Jiradeshi highmoon.
He pulled the hood of his cloak tighter around his neck.
Icy wind struck him with gooseflesh, flapped at the infinite canvases, rustled the sparse, scraggly bushes set into the sands.
It gave no indication that in a few hours it would be hot enough to sweat sitting still.
He approached the nearest wagon, glanced around, and rattled its frigid door handle. Locked.
He moved to the next wagon, took the five steps that raised its platform over wide, corrugated wheels.
Also locked, as with the hundred he’d tried before it.
A ten-day spent memorizing night-watch patrols—their weaknesses, their oversights—just to spend another ten-day rattling doorknobs.
The wagon deadbolts were not easily picked, but anyone who’d spent as long with Fankalo as he had knew that locks were a lottery.
Try enough doors and somewhere, someone would have forgotten.
Somewhere, someone wouldn’t care. Somewhere, someone would take their chances.
He moved to the next. Some of these wagons housed Aethertech Mechanics’ latest innovation: defensive plates—a kind of distortion shield Calver knew little about—that had somehow wreaked havoc on eight careful years of planning.
Unbeknownst to most, they had been delivered into this recruitment by enemy forces.
Get his hands on one, and he might just uncover intelligence to bring back to Fankalo—but that involved a lot of ifs for a consolation prize.
Had he done his job correctly weeks ago, the plates wouldn’t have gotten here in the first place.
Now here he stood: on the well-trodden path of course correction…
which felt an awful lot like one big fucking circle.
A subtle crunching of earth indicated a patrol moving in his direction.
Two men. Calver climbed up the side of a wagon and flattened himself across the top.
It gave him a prime view of the slumbering Red Wing encampment: fifteen thousand tents, hundreds of wagons, their white canvases green and purple beneath the spectrum from above. A prison without walls.
The night guards passed through slowly, scanning the rows between wagons.
When they’d put a dozen meters between them, Calver slid back onto the sands.
Though he’d stalked the defensive plates and their usage since the caravan began, the wagons which stored them were interspersed at random.
That made this a guessing game, with a slim shot at victory.
He padded up the creaking wooden stairs to the next wagon’s door. Turned the handle.
Open.
His heart leapt as he slipped into the space, letting his eyes adjust to a darkness even deeper than the night outside. Then it settled into its well-frequented bed of disappointment.
Not distortion plate shield storage. Mess supply.
The wagon was scarcely tall enough for Calver to stand without cramping his neck. Thousands of metal trays lined one side; thousands of sets of cutlery lined the opposite. Their silver was scratched and dull, overutilized and under-polished: fitting for the soldiers that used them.
An unfounded prickle spread over Calver’s skin. Blood rushed to his limbs. He had fallen into a combat stance and backed against the wall beside the door before his eyes caught up to his other senses. Directly ahead, the silhouette of a small man stood frozen. He was why the door had been unlocked.
Calver weighed his options between heartbeats. He could incapacitate the man, though a body in the encampment would do him no favors. He could run and implicate himself. He could do absolutely fucking nothing until he was forced to—he was good at that.
One foot slid backwards. Then the next. He waited for the foretelling impression of the small man charging at him.
None came. With the finesse of a cat shorting the distance from one ledge to the next, Calver stumbled backward from the wagon, closed the door, and heard from within a shuddering sigh of relief.
He was gone, zigzagging through the endless wagon rows.
No, no no no. Idiot. He’d been caught. If General Prime Thyatira knew Calver was looking for something, it wouldn’t take long to guess what it was.
He’d be done for. And he’d broken up with—not that they were ever together—the only person who might save him from punitive action just yesterday. Fucking idiot.
Like the very breath of destruction sending ripples against a pool, something stirred in the back of his mind.
For the first time in nearly a moon, the Survivor had become a grain of sand among the dunes of his psyche.
Calver dropped to his knees, stifling a fast-bubbling panic.
Expected or not, this was a drill he was seasoned in.
Void. Victory over the mind can only come with an embrace of the void. For only in nothing can you find everything. Void void void.
He waited, focused on the motion of his diaphragm, the coolness of the highmoon air on his skin. The Survivor was still there? How lucky he was to have forgotten that, in his pre-destined slice of life, things could only get worse when they were already abysmal. He had actually thought…
It didn’t matter. That was the paradox of destiny—it shifted with every heartbeat.
When his mind stilled and he was positive he hadn’t relapsed into the Survivor’s control, he considered the mess wagon encounter.
Some men fought. Some ran. Some didn’t move.
That man had been the last of those three.
He hadn’t wanted to be found. Kretch. Why?
What interest could someone else take in robbing a mess wagon?
At least, if Calver was right in his assumptions that the figure wasn’t supposed to be there, there was minimal chance of them notifying command.
He released a slow breath and looked at the sky, not yet tinged ocean-gray where the dunes met the horizon.
Calver had never been good for sleep, but in the desert, without the ability to sleep in front of the door, he was worse for it.
The last thing he wanted was to be followed to his tent.
It was best to put a little more space between him and the wagon for a while.
The only way to beat an opponent was to stay one step ahead.
The only way Calver knew to stay ahead of the day was to move at the tail end of the night.
Start before the sun, and he might continue to drive one heartbeat to the next.
He trained in the pre-dawn dark, a mile or more into the desert.
For eight years he’d risen early to prepare to fight for his life against Cul’Mon—a routine which now, ironically, brought comfort.
Plus, it came with the benefit of a breathtaking view.
The desert was at its most beautiful in the early hours.
Stars still burned overhead, but a bloody hue pierced the line where the land met the sky.
Calver paused his exercise to watch. For the few precious minutes the sun lingered on the horizon, his perception distorted so that the sand looked like it could be the sea.
He pretended he was still with Fankalo. That he hadn’t messed up so badly as to become a liability to his only kin. The ocean hadn’t done for him what it had for her; it hadn’t freed him. But it had put him beside her, which, in hindsight, had given him temporary peace.
The illusion faded as the sun passed the threshold of the dunes. The time for peace was over.
Calver turned to return to the encampment. It was hard to say what made him pause to listen, but listen he did. An off-beat slipping of sand. A padding of near-silent feet.
If it was Raimee again he would… He thought about things he hadn’t before. Things like the angles of collarbones and the texture of hair and—
This was escalating. He had no idea what he would do. He—
He would ignore her. Easy.
As if that’s ever worked.
From the shadows of the dunes, a silhouette encroached.
Not Raimee. A young man, awkwardly pubescent in a too-large Red Wing uniform.
He had a hawkish nose and sprouted shoulder-length ebony hair, stiff and slick like a horse’s mane.
He crept down from the dunes with an exchange of the world’s most gut-scrambling currency: eye contact.
Those black eyes seemed entirely too dilated. An Azadonian.
What was he doing here?
He was young enough to have been born after the Azadonian quarantine; the Red Wing only began recruiting men at age seventeen. Panic, sharp and cold, sliced Calver right through. This was the shadow he’d seen in the mess storage wagon.
When the young man was within striking distance, he spoke, somewhere between a question and a demand. “What are you doing out here?”
What was he doing? He had been trying to not kill the witness, and the witness in question was presently Chaos-bent on thwarting that plan.
The boy leaned sideways, waiting for a response.
It would be safer for Calver to kill him out here in the desert—where a mile of dunes and crags and caverns stood between them and the encampment—than it had been in the wagon.
How long would it take for anyone to come looking for the body?
How easily would this death be traced back to Calver?
Calver’s stomach churned. Without the Survivor, he was not prepared to strangle this boy.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have to. He’d caught this boy doing something he shouldn’t have. The boy had come to him—to parlay. He was going to be sorely disappointed. Calver put a hand to his mouth, pulling it away before slicing sideways. It was usually the most effective way to get the message across.
“You don’t speak?”
Calver nodded. Usually people left him alone after that.
Usually.
“And you’re training outside of sanctioned hours. You’re revoked?”
What kind of person kept asking a mute man questions?