Chapter 4
DARUN
Kanapa’s boots hit the ground like war drums, loud and theatrical. He knows we’re watching. Hell, that’s half the point. He doesn't even bother with a briefing—just shouts “Form up,” and we’re already loading out.
Another damn “morale patrol.” No objective, no intel, no point beyond reminding the locals who owns the dirt out here. Everyone knows it. No one says it.
My gear weighs less than the silence we wear.
“Sergeant Darun,” Kanapa growls, stopping just short of the crawler, cybernetic fingers flexing like claws. “You’ll keep our embedded guest from getting herself vaporized. Or worse.” He smirks like he’s said something clever.
My jaw tightens. “Understood, sir.”
He slaps my shoulder too hard and moves on. The wind kicks grit into my mouth. It tastes like rust and old bones.
Amy’s already pacing by the convoy, camera rig slung across her chest, lip caught between her teeth as she adjusts some setting. She’s not dressed for field patrol, but she doesn’t ask for a vest. Of course she doesn’t.
“You’re not required to come,” I tell her. “This isn’t some scenic tour.”
She doesn’t look up. “You think my audience wants to see drone footage and talking heads? I need context. And that means being there.”
“You want context?” I step in front of her. “Here it is: war is ugly. War is stupid. And war doesn’t care about your ratings.”
She meets my gaze. “Then you won’t mind if I show them.”
She walks past me like I’m scenery. I mutter something under my breath that’d make my mother spit blood and fall into step.
We move fast through the scrubland. Dust clouds rise around our boots. The terrain here is like an open wound—ridges ripped apart by shelling, trees blackened into skeletal husks. Amy keeps her recorder active, sweeping it slowly like she’s tracing ghosts.
“Eyes up,” I bark at her when she starts drifting toward the edge of the column.
“I can multitask,” she fires back.
“Not when you're dead.”
Her fingers twitch on the recorder. But she doesn’t say anything.
Ten clicks out, we hit the ruins of a farming commune—flattened like a boot on an anthill. Walls melted, support beams warped into molten sculpture. There’s a silence here I don’t like. Not the quiet kind. The emptied kind.
Amy starts filming immediately. Her lens catches scorch marks and cratered ceilings. Bits of metal and glass. Charred bedding.
And then she crouches near a pile of rubble and picks something up.
It’s small, round. Bright blue under the soot. A plastic sphere with little wings painted on the side. A toy. The kind kids used to roll along magnetic tracks. The kind you see in old commercials with warm filters and background laughter.
“Put that down,” I say. My voice is low, tight.
She doesn’t.
She turns it over in her hand like it’s holy.
“Tell me again,” she murmurs, “how this war is clean.”
My throat burns. I want to snatch it from her hand and hurl it into the dust. Instead, I walk away.
Because there’s nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.
We bivouac in a gully surrounded by shattered trees and twisted rebar. The fire’s synthetic—just a small coil of electric heat—but the glow flickers like real flame. I sit on a metal crate, watching embers dance across my retinas while the squad eats in silence.
Amy’s across from me, legs folded, chewing slowly. She’s got a protein bar and a half-melted block of synth cheese. She eats it like she’s at a godsdamn garden party.
“You get used to the taste?” she asks, catching me watching her.
“Or you stop caring,” I say.
She shrugs, tossing the wrapper into the disposal unit. “I used to think I had a strong stomach. Until Rusan Pass.”
My hands still. “What did you see there?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her chin on them. The firelight catches the fine dust on her cheeks, makes her hair glow like smoke.
“A woman,” she says finally. “Carrying her son. He was already gone, but she kept walking. Wouldn’t let him go. The way she screamed when I tried to talk to her—” Amy swallows hard. “Sounded like glass breaking.”
I don’t know why I ask it. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I want to know. “Do you believe in it?”
“The war?”
I nod once.
“No,” she says. “Do you?”
I think about that.
I think about Marn Sector, and the day Kanapa pulled me out of rubble while my blood was steaming in my boots. I think about medals and empty speeches. I think about the kid whose toy now sits in Amy’s pack, zipped up behind layers of wire and silence.
“I used to,” I admit. “Now? I believe in surviving.”
Amy’s eyes linger on mine. There’s something in her face I can’t quite place—soft, but not weak. Like compassion soaked in steel.
“That’s not nothing,” she says.
“No,” I say. “But it used to be more.”
She leans back against the crate, sighs like she’s exhaling three lifetimes.
“I came out here to prove something,” she says.
“What?”
“That the war isn’t black and white. That it’s a mess. That maybe, people deserve to know.”
I nod slowly. “Good luck with that.”
She laughs. It’s small. Wounded. But real.
The stars are out, hard and silver and cold. The kind of stars you only see from the edge of civilization. They don’t twinkle. They glare.
Amy tucks her arms around herself and leans back to look up at them.
“Funny,” she says. “When I was a kid, I thought stars were quiet.”
“They are,” I say. “From down here.”
I watch her for a long moment. The way her hair spills like a gold river. The way her eyes never stop moving, scanning, calculating. She’s all sharp edges and soft armor.
And I hate how I’m starting to understand her.
Hate how it’s not hate anymore.