CHAPTER 5

This was the ass-end of the world, Hoffman was certain.

No amount of fine Silver Era architecture or magnificent history was going to change the fact that Anvegad was a lonely rock of a place. He wouldn’t miss it when he left. Three months down, four to go. He was counting down the days to the end of the deployment on a calendar pinned to the wall.

It was one hell of a view from this window, though.

He paused mid-shave and reached out to push the wooden frame fully open, letting in cold air that made the foam on his face tingle. The plain spread out below him could have been from another world. There was nothing out there but stony yellow soil with occasional thornbushes and the pale line of a single lonely road running parallel with the imulsion pipeline into the refinery in the distance. Generations of goats had grazed the place to bare rock. On mornings like this, the refinery merged with a backdrop of mountains that looked like ragged purple clouds on the horizon.

It’s only a few more months. I can handle that.

The briefing document had given him a description of Anvegad, but no sense of what it felt like to be here. It was a natural fortress on a rocky cliff overlooking the pass into Kashkur from the south. Armies had fought over it throughout history to control Kashkur’s rich cities and silver mines. The silver had been mined out long ago, but Kashkur still had plenty to interest invaders—one fifth of Sera’s imulsion reserves.

When Hoffman’s COG transport rumbled down that road for the first time, and he saw the fort rising up out of nowhere from that crag, it looked like a mirage, a bizarre trick of nature. The air was so still and clear most mornings that every color, even the black shadows, seemed unnaturally vivid. Captain Sander, Hoffman’s CO, painted pictures of it.

That was his hobby—watercolors. He said this place was magical, the poor deluded bastard. Hoffman was marooned here as second in command to a goddamn artist—and an artillery captain, at that. Maybe COG command was trying to civilize him, the same way that Staff College had instructed him on the right fork to use at dinner and how to press his best dress uniform. He was nearly thirty. He didn’t need to be taught how to wipe his own ass, thanks. That still rankled.

Come on, you’re an officer now. If you can’t hack the internal politics … you should have stayed an NCO.

The spectacular landscape changed color as the sun rose. He’d have to take a picture for Margaret, or maybe she’d prefer one of Sander’s watercolors. Married or not, Hoffman was still at the stage of worrying that he was just a bit of rough for her, a novelty she’d tire of and then wonder why the hell she hadn’t married one of her own kind. She was a trial lawyer, for God’s sake—college educated, having dinner with people who’d probably expect the likes of Hoffman to park their cars or mow their lawns. She was well traveled in the kind of way that didn’t involve rolling into foreign towns with an armored division. She was out of his league. And yet—she’d married him.

Yes. A nice painting. She’ll like that. Or maybe some of the local silver jewelry. Or is silver too cheap?

Hoffman went back to shaving. The mirror reminded him unkindly how fast his hair was thinning. He studied his scalp, moving a little so that the harsh light from the single bulb caught the worst reflection, and then made the decision he’d put off for some time. He wasn’t going to turn into one of those insecure assholes who always fretted about their bald patch. Fuck it. It was just too much testosterone, that was all. He’d embrace it. He’d flaunt it.

His hair was buzz-cut anyway. There wasn’t much to lose. He lathered the shaving soap over his head and took the razor to it.

It’ll grow again if I change my mind. Or if Margaret doesn’t like it.

When he rinsed off the soap in the shower—a trickle of tepid water, two minutes, nothing indulgent—there was still a haze of dark stubble under the skin. But he felt unburdened. He dressed and made his way down the steep stone staircase to the adjutant’s office, not expecting anyone to be up and about yet except the duty sentry, whose task was more to keep out pilfering locals than the enemy.

Anvegad had one thing going for it, at least for anyone who wanted a quiet war, which Hoffman didn’t. It wasn’t on the front line. Vasgar—neutral, but not stupid when it came to keeping the COG placated—was a nice big buffer running the length of Kashkur’s southern border. There were no Indies loitering in the front yard. Hoffman wasn’t used to that.

“’Morning, Victor.” Ranald Sander looked up from a pile of paper on the signals desk, phone pressed to his ear, and froze. “Is this the new barbarian look?”

Hoffman ran his palm over his scalp. “I didn’t want to look too civilized.”

“Good.” Sander held up a finely pleated sheet of teleprinter paper soaked with black ink. He had three piles of paper in front of him on the desk, and he pushed one across to Hoffman. It was the stack of regular messages from the Gears’ families. “Just going through the overnights and checking what’s missing. This bloody thing’s still jamming.”

“At least the family-grams came through. Remember, if there’s anything urgent from HQ, they’ll call.”

Sander seemed to need to be reminded of these things. He was very young, a brand-new captain at twenty-three. Hoffman felt like a sergeant nursemaiding a green lieutenant again but that wasn’t a bad thing. He knew how to do that, even if he had never done it outside the infantry. It beat worrying about using the right fork at dinner.

Hoffman sorted through the messages, checking off the names with a stub of pencil. Some men didn’t get messages at all. Some got the maximum allocation of three a month, two hundred words each. This far from home, morale hinged on a few basic things—letters from loved ones, a full stomach, and the weekly delivery of a single precious movie that everyone on Jacinto had seen a year ago. The full stomach had to be shipped in too. Anvegad relied mostly on food brought in by road from the north. A fortress city’s strengths were also its drawbacks.

Sander put the phone back on its cradle a little too heavily. “Screw them. I can’t wait all day.” He took the vehicle keys off a hook on the wall and tossed them to Hoffman. “Come on, let’s walk the course.”

Sander grabbed his camera and a small wooden box with a brass catch. Hoffman humored him. Everyone was marking time here, and maybe one day Sander’s paintings would be worth something. He drove slowly through narrow streets that were almost deserted at this time of the morning, catching scents of baking loaves, spice-laden coffee, and drains. There was one way in and out of Anvegad. The steep, winding track was just wide enough for a large truck, flanked by a sheer drop onto the rocks below. Even in the small all-terrain vehicle, Hoffman took things carefully.

“How’s your wife, sir?” Hoffman asked.

“Complaining about swollen legs and indigestion,” Sander said. “Five weeks to go. At least we’ve agreed on a name now—Terrance if it’s a boy, Muriell if it’s a girl.”

Hoffman hadn’t given much thought to families. They happened to other people, and he was still caught up in the adventure of being a couple. “You really should put in for compassionate leave.”

“I’ll do that. How’s married life treating you? Your wife’s a lawyer, isn’t she?”

No need to sound amazed. “She is, sir.”

“How did you meet?”

“She was working on an inquiry for the Defense Department.” It wasn’t at a cocktail party after the opera, but you guessed that, didn’t you? “She asked me some questions and I gave her some frank answers.”

That was what she told him later: You’re the most honest man I’ve ever met, Victor. And I don’t meet many in this job.

“Very cryptic,” Sander said.

Hoffman let it drop. He breathed again when the track leveled out and all four wheels were on the flat. From the base of the cliff, he drove out on the usual route—the road south through the narrow V-shaped gorge that was the pass, seven kilometers down the pipeline to the Vasgar border, and then left to follow the invisible line that divided the Coalition of Ordered Governments from a nervous neutral world that hadn’t made up its mind yet. There was nothing physical to mark it apart from a thick red strip painted around the girth of the overground pipeline, and the remains of a seasonal riverbed that had been dry for so long that even the maps didn’t show it in blue.

Six more kilometers would have taken them to the refinery. Sander tapped the dashboard to bring Hoffman to a stop.

“I won’t be long,” he said. “Five minutes. Ten, tops.”

It was the light. Hoffman had worked that out by now. Sander liked painting Anvil Gate when the sun was just above the horizon, because the shadows were dramatic, and this was the best vantage point to look back on the whole cliff.

Shame about the gun battery. And all the metal gantries. Spoils the Silver Era illusion.

Sander got out of the ATV and sat on the fender with the contents of his wooden box laid out on the vehicle’s hood, roughing out a picture on a piece of card with a stick of charcoal. Hoffman jumped down from the driver’s seat and wandered off for a smoke. He’d have to give that up before he next went home. Margaret didn’t like it. It’d be the death of him, she said.

When he turned and ambled back toward the ATV, Sander was busy taking photographs.

“That’s cheating,” Hoffman said.

“It’s that, or stay here for another hour or two.” Sander frowned at the camera, fiddling with the lens. “Why’s it cheating?”

“Aren’t you supposed to depict what you notice with your own eyes?”

“And you keep telling me you’re not a cultured man.”

“I married a cultured woman. She knows all that stuff.”

Sander chuckled to himself as if Hoffman was being witty. But Hoffman meant it. He didn’t point that out. They climbed back into the ATV and carried on along the border for a while before looping back and returning to Anvegad. A truck was grinding its way up the narrow track, and Hoffman decided to wait until it made the gates at the top before he followed it. Trucks broke down on that gradient all too often. Turning or reversing all the way down wasn’t something he fancied doing. By the time he saw its tailgate vanish between the huge carved pillars, his guts were rumbling in protest at being forced to endure goddamn amateur art while empty.

“I’ll take the family-grams over to the barracks,” Hoffman said. Anvil Gate was a small garrison, around a hundred men and women—a battery of Prince Ozore’s Artillery, with two attached platoons from 26 RTI and the Ephyra Engineers. “I could use the exercise.”

He’d grab breakfast with the men, too. There was no officers’ mess to speak of, just a sitting room in the HQ building where his quarters were, and they often ate at one of the local bars that Sander had taken a shine to. But Hoffman missed the company of sergeants. Separation from the ranks left him feeling lost.

The Gears’ quarters were spread across a number of buildings, some in regular barracks on the far side of the compound, some in the first cellar level of the huge gun emplacements. Anvil Gate was a vertical sort of place—more deep than wide, a small footprint with tunnels and cellars dug deep into bedrock that was already honeycombed with natural caves and fissures. There was even an underground river that branched off from the surface ten klicks away. Hoffman didn’t like the underground world and its damp, fungal smells. When he wandered into the small mess in the main battery, the perfume of frying eggs and local sausage did a thorough job of disguising them.

“Safe as houses down here, sir,” said Padrick Salton, pulling out a chair. “Fried egg sandwich?”

“It’s a damn coffin,” Hoffman muttered. He put the sheaf of printed messages in the center of the table. “Here’s the mail. And yes, I will have one of your heathen delicacies, Private. Thank you.”

Salton—“Pad” to everyone—was a South Islander who’d brought strange food habits with him, not that Hoffman was complaining. Pad didn’t cook the exotic native dishes of fruits, strange roots, and goat meat. He was a descendant of northern colonizers. But he existed somewhere between the two cultures. His northern fried egg sandwich was laced with blisteringly hot Islander spices, and he had full-face blue tribal tattoos on freckled, pale skin. Hoffman was fascinated and always tried not to stare at him. What looked right on darker-skinned indigenous people looked disturbing when topped by red hair.

It wasn’t just the stark contrast in color. It was a kind of warning that Pad had embraced everything about his particular island’s culture, including the tendency to no-quarters-given warfare.

The sandwich was an experience. Hoffman’s eyes watered as fierce chemical warfare was waged against his sinuses. The rest of Pad’s platoon showed up and helped themselves to the bread, fried eggs, and sauce, a ritual that seemed timed to the minute to coincide with the 0700 radio news.

“Ninety percent boredom, ten percent shit-yourself panic,” said Sergeant Byrne.

“Make that ninety-nine percent here,” Pad said. “Maybe a hundred.”

Hoffman chewed in silence, wondering if having an officer there inhibited them, an officer who’d been one of them until recently. He also felt that nagging guilt that he was coasting here while most of 26 RTI—his comrades, his friends—were on the much tougher, much bloodier front line on the western border.

He wondered where Bernie Mataki was at that moment. She had tribal tattoos, too. None on her face, though. She said her tribe didn’t do that.

The radio burbled away in the background. It was a weak signal this far from Ephyra, but nobody cared as long they heard voices in an accent and a language they could understand. The first morning bulletin with its international headlines was something they all knew their families would be listening to at that same moment. It gave them a sense of communion across thousands of kilometers.

Margaret listened to it, too. She’d promised she would. Hoffman closed his eyes and tried to imagine how she’d interpret the headlines. She always had something to say, and she didn’t have a lot of respect for politicians. He liked that in a woman.

The crackling voice reading the bulletin this morning was a young man’s. “Vasgar’s President Ilim is facing a vote of no confidence after his administration failed to agree to budget measures with the opposition Unity party. Meanwhile, on Vasgar’s southern border, the dispute with the UIR over gas supplies to—”

“I hope they can pay their imulsion bill,” Pad said. “Or we’ll have to go out there with a frigging big spanner and turn off the pipeline.”

Everyone laughed and Hoffman got up to fry another egg for himself. Life went on. Bills got paid and letters got read. After more than sixty years of fighting, war had become the normal, the stable, the expected, and all of Sera—formally involved in hostilities or playing at being neutral observers—had rebuilt its reality around it. Hoffman wasn’t sure if that was stoic resilience or plain damn stupidity.

He’d still rather have been on the western border at that moment. Sitting on his ass like this would drive him crazy. He took his seat again, and realized the only man not reading a message from home was Sam Byrne, his platoon sergeant.

Byrne’s sense of home looked more centered on Anvegad every day. He’d acquired a local girlfriend, an interpreter who did the routine liaison for the army. She was a good-looking woman, typically Kashkuri with her dark eyes and olive skin. Soraya? Sheraya? Hoffman couldn’t recall the name, but Byrne was a single man, and Hoffman wasn’t about to warn him off. He was damned if he could think of any regulation barring a Gear from making friends with the local civilians.

There wasn’t much else to do here except maintain the guns, after all.

“More eggs, anyone?” Pad asked.

Adam Fenix had always tried to do his packing in private to avoid upsetting Elain.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t understand his job; she just seemed to find the sight of him preparing to ship out a bit too much to bear. She wasn’t a demonstrative woman, so there were no tears or histrionics. She’d just get that look, that way of turning her head very slowly as if she was imagining the worst that could happen to him and was dragging her eyes away from the awful scene.

And now he had to lock the bedroom door, because his son was old enough to understand where Daddy was going, and he’d get upset too. Marcus was nearly five. He’d learned to knock on the door and wait a few moments, but then he’d open it anyway.

It was time for Marcus to get used to partings. He had to start school in a few weeks, and that was going to be a bigger wrench than watching his father get ready to go back to the front. Adam folded his last pair of socks, forced them into the remaining gap in his kitbag, and secured the outer zip. There was a science to packing. He’d mastered it. He had everything he needed and nothing that he didn’t, every item in that bag tested for necessity, and there were no bulges or edges straining against the canvas fabric to fray on hard surfaces.

Elain had a point. It did feel final. It always did.

He unlocked the door and went downstairs, one hand skimming the long, polished banister, conscious of the gaze of previous generations of Fenixes from the ancestral paintings that lined the walls. If anyone thought that long familiarity stopped him noticing them—it didn’t. Too many of them had that implacable blue stare. Adam had been told he had it, too, but that didn’t make it an easier gauntlet to run. The portraits had expectations of heroism.

I could donate them to the Tyran National Gallery, I suppose. Dad’s not here to stop me now.

Adam walked from room to room, looking for Elain. Finding anyone in a house of this size always took some time. Calling for her always felt vulgar; he could almost hear his father’s voice telling him that only the laboring classes and clerks yelled, and that the one fitting place for a man to raise his voice was on the battlefield.

It’s my house now. But he’s still here, dead or not.

He found Elain sitting at her desk, scribbling furiously. She didn’t even look up. “Two minutes, darling …”

And there was I thinking my packing upset her …

Adam had never been sure if that cool distance was her coping mechanism or if she really did forget everything around her while she was working. She was a single-minded woman.

“Where’s Marcus?” he asked.

“In the library.”

“He’s four. It’s a lovely day. Whatever happened to playing in the gardens?”

Elain paused for a moment, looking as if she was checking the last line she’d written. “He’s fine. The maintenance people are doing the lawns, anyway. Too dangerous with all that machinery about.”

“I better go make my peace with him,” Adam said. “By the time I finish this tour of duty, he’ll be at school, and … well, everyone says kids change fast after that.”

“Good idea.” Elain swiveled her seat around and looked at him as if she’d noticed him for the first time. “Aren’t you going to ask me what’s so important?”

“Do you want me to?”

She indicated the computer screen, tracing her finger around the outline of an X-ray image. “Does this ring any bells, Doctor Fenix?”

Elain was a developmental biologist. Adam prided himself on a broad-based science education that went further than engineering, but she left him in the dust on morphology. He studied the ghostly outlines. It was a leg, that was all he could say. A hind leg. He could guess that from the way the joints articulated, because form and function spoke to the mechanical engineer in him.

“Not many, Mrs. Doctor Fenix.” Elain had a doctorate too. Adam leaned over her and put his finger on the screen. “It’s not human, and I think that bit there is the knee.”

“Very good, dear. But didn’t you read Romily as a child? The monster under her bed?”

“Oh, girls’ stuff …”

“Don’t mock, darling. How’s the monster always shown? That story goes back centuries, and the monster always has the same features—long front fangs and six legs.”

Tyran culture was rich in myth and fairy tales, but Adam was a scientist, a rational man, and even as a boy he’d recognized that monsters were invented to keep the curious and argumentative in line. If he’d been a psychologist, he might have gone as far as to identify the fairy-tale monsters as the darker urges of humankind, but he looked for the most obvious first and worked from there. There were always monsters waiting in forbidden places to trap the disobedient and unwary.

He’d never believed in them.

He remembered crawling under his bed every night for a whole week with a flashlight and a camera, defying the monsters to appear so he could get a good look and prove or disprove their existence. But they never came, and he knew his father had been lying all along.

Monsters don’t exist. But if they do—they’re within all of us.

“Elain, are you telling me that’s a sixth leg from a mammal?” he said at last.

“It is.” She lit up. It troubled him that she only hit that visible peak when she was engrossed in her research. Sometimes he felt that neither marriage nor motherhood ever fulfilled her that much. “Adam, all monsters come from some reality. The six legs are a folk memory. Something like that once existed on Sera, and we reduced it to a fairy tale in the end, but now—I think I’ve found its nearest living relative.”

“Just tell me you didn’t find it under the bed.”

“You want to see it?”

“You’ve got it, and you never told me?”

Elain laughed and pushed back her chair. “I shouldn’t have given it such a buildup. You’ll be disappointed. Just remember that things don’t have to be on a planetary scale to change the world.”

She went to the bookcase that filled the entire wall and moved a few volumes to pull out a glass jar hidden behind them. Adam hadn’t realized that she kept specimens in the house; it seemed oddly old-fashioned, considering that she still had access to La Croix University’s modern laboratories. But she’d insisted on being at home for Marcus until he was old enough to start school—no child-minders or nannies for her. She never trusted anyone else with the complicated jobs in life.

“There.” She handed him the specimen jar. A tiny rodent floated in formaldehyde, perhaps seven centimeters long. “I kept it out of sight in case Marcus saw it. I think he finds that kind of thing upsetting.”

Adam wasn’t fond of things floating dead in jars of formaldehyde either. He felt slightly nauseous at the sight of the animal drifting like a drowned man. He imagined it alive, busy among leaves and grass, all twitching movement. Then he tried to imagine it as the subterranean monster from Romily, with six legs, claws, and fangs, and failed to make the phylogenetic connection.

“Now, I’m just a simple engineer,” he said. “But I can count enough to see four legs. Not six.”

“Okay, darling, I’ll put you out of your misery. The legs are vestigial. You remember I did my master’s thesis on rock shrew cell differentiation? Well, I found a dead one when I was out walking a couple of years ago, or at least I thought I had. But it wasn’t a rock shrew. And I could feel these small symmetrical lumps along the pelvis.”

“My wife spends her leisure time fondling decomposing vermin.”

“Examine, darling. Not fondle. And vermin is an emotional classification, not a biological one.” Elain gazed at the creature with a childlike expression of wonder. “Anyway, I found more of them over the last year, all with the same feature. When I dissected them, they all had the extra pair of vestigial legs.”

“Good grief—are you telling me you discovered a new species? Are you sure it’s not just a mutation?”

“Remember who’s the embryologist here. Yes, that’s entirely possible, but it seems widespread, and there are other variations that suggest they might be a different species. Genetic variations.” She dropped her voice. “I think these shrews may be the remains of a genus that once included much larger tunnel-dwelling creatures.”

Adam was genuinely taken aback, not because she’d made such an intriguing discovery but because she’d kept it from him until now. Years. Years. His hurt must have shown on his face, because she took the specimen from him and clasped both his hands in hers.

“Darling, you know what happens to scientists who speak too soon—they’re made to look like fools,” she said. “If I’d started talking about identifying a new species and then it was shown to be environmental mutation, my reputation would be ruined. And I do want to return to work ….”

But you could have mentioned it to me. I wouldn’t have judged you. “So where did you find them?”

“Near the Hollow. I like walking up there. I used to take Marcus with me.”

“That’s a restricted area! What were you thinking?”

“Look, I know the ground’s prone to subsidence. I don’t go beyond the warning notices. It’s not as if I go caving down there.”

Marcus. Adam realized they’d been so caught up in this debate about morphology and new species that they’d forgotten him.

“Come on,” he said. “The monster shrew from the pit of hell can wait—this is my last day at home for a few months. Let’s spend it as a family.”

“If you knew what aggressive, sex-crazed little beasts shrews were,” Elain said, “you wouldn’t think a two-meter one with six legs was a joke.”

Adam found Marcus still sitting in the library, just as he’d been told to. He was perched on a chair that wasn’t high enough for him, trying to read a book, with his chin about level with the surface of the table. Adam could see him swinging his legs, heels occasionally hitting the chair. He wasn’t engrossed. He was just behaving, waiting as patiently as a small child could.

“How’s my clever boy?” Adam said, standing behind him to see what he’d chosen. It was a book of maps. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk. It’s stuffy in here.”

Marcus scrambled down from the chair and looked up at his father. He had a way of slowly turning his head to one side that made him look as if he never believed a word anyone said to him. Adam wondered if it was a gesture his son had picked up from him. No, it was very Elain. It was definitely Elain’s look.

“You’re going away.”

“Not until tomorrow, Marcus.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s my duty. I’m a soldier. A Gear. Soldiers have to go where they’re sent, to protect everyone.”

“But why?”

It was sobering to meet Marcus’s fixed gaze. He definitely had the Fenix eyes, very pale blue just like Adam’s own, and even in a child’s face they looked more accusing than innocent. Adam was suddenly aware of Elain standing behind him. The answer was going to be as much for her as for his son.

“Because all the other Gears go when they’re ordered to, and if I don’t, I’m letting them down,” Adam said. “They’re my friends. They’re the people who’ll look out for me so I don’t get hurt. We take care of one another.”

Marcus blinked as if that had struck a chord in him, then looked away. “I’ll be a Gear, too, then.”

“Ah, not my clever boy.” Adam went to pick him up—something he rarely did—but Marcus looked startled, and he thought better of it. “You’ll be a scientist. You won’t need to be a Gear. And the war will be over by the time you grow up, anyway.”

Marcus frowned. That obviously wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Adam had the feeling that whatever he said would do nothing to erase the impression that being a Gear was somehow so wonderful that he preferred to go to war rather than stay home with his son.

He could have stayed, of course. The post at the COG Defense Research Agency was still waiting for him. So was the standing offer to teach at the university. He could do both, in fact. He could have unpacked that bag right now, this very moment, and picked up the phone to accept the job, and the Kashkur border would have been another place he’d never visit.

But Adam Fenix couldn’t live with himself if he did. The rest of the 26th Royal Tyran Infantry didn’t have those choices, and neither did their families. It was best that Elain didn’t know it was even possible.

Yes, maybe I’ve given Marcus the true picture after all. It’s about loyalty. It’s about comrades. But I still don’t want him to follow me.

“Come on, Marcus,” he said. “Let’s have some fun. Did you know your mom’s found a monster? It’s got six legs.”

Marcus still had that accusing ice-blue stare. “There aren’t any monsters,” he said gravely. “But if there are, you can shoot them. You can make them go away.”

“Quite right,” Adam said, laughing, but his heart broke to see Marcus’s absolute faith in his ability to put the world right. He almost dreaded the day when Marcus was old enough to understand that the real world wasn’t like that at all. “That’s my clever boy.”

Adam held out his hand. Marcus hesitated, then took it, and they walked around the gardens. Marcus could identify most of the tree species, and with their proper botanical names at that. It was pretty damn impressive for a little boy.

My son. What’s he going to be like when he’s my age? I don’t recall ever being like him.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine when he starts school,” Elain said. She could read Adam like a book. “He’ll make friends. I feel guilty sometimes that we didn’t give him a brother or sister.”

“Never too late,” Adam said.

Elain just swept past the comment as if she hadn’t heard it. She didn’t even blink. “Come on, Marcus,” she called. “Time for lunch.”

That evening, after Marcus was asleep and while Elain was taking a bath, Adam went to his study and settled down at his desk to listen to the radio. It was less distracting than the television. He could let the information wash over him in the background while he worked. The important details would leap out at him and demand his attention when necessary.

Vasgar did.

Adam put down the folder he was working on and sat back in his chair to concentrate.

“… and President Ilim has resigned. We’ll bring you more details when we get them, but Vasgar’s official news agency, Corisku, is saying that he stood down before a vote of no confidence. He was widely expected to lose that vote, of course, so let’s go over to our East Central correspondent to discuss where that leaves Vasgar and its neighbors. It’s a nonaligned state, and that raises some interesting questions ….”

Adam got up and walked across to the world map on the wall. It was covered with pins and notes—random comments, reminders, even scribbled diagrams—to mark places of concern to him. There was Vasgar, a long corridor sweeping along the borders of Kashkur, Emgazi, and the Independent Republic of Furlin. If Vasgar didn’t hold its neutrality, the strategic map of the Eastern Central Massif would change drastically, and for the worse as far as the COG was concerned.

He took the packet of colored pins from his desk drawer and pushed them into the map at various points along the borders to mark the strategic cities and installations he suspected might be listening to the news of Vasgar just as carefully as he was. Almost as an afterthought, he searched for a speck on the map high in the mountains to use up his last pin.

It was a fortified city called Anvegad.

It had been a harsh winter. Now it was turning into a bad summer. Bai Tak wondered how long it would be before he had to give up on his herd and find work in the town.

He followed his last surviving cattle further up the hillside as they searched for grass. They grew more bony and wretched with every passing week, and it was getting harder to find decent grazing for them. His only option would be to slaughter some and dry whatever meat they were carrying for the winter. It wasn’t much. But he could sell the hides, and the bones wouldn’t be wasted either.

Maybe it’ll rain. Maybe I should wait. But I’m not going to ask for help from the village—not yet.

His wife, Harua, was working further down the hillside, taking advantage of the tinder-dry vegetation to get ahead with collecting firewood for the winter. She was bent double under a wicker pannier full of branches, struggling to hack a dead tree into more manageable pieces. Bai let the cattle find their own way—they were in no hurry—and half-ran, half-skidded down the hillside to give her a hand.

“Come on,” he said, drawing his machete. “Stand back and let me do it.”

“It’s only because I’ve got this stupid little girl’s blade.” She brandished her cutting tool, a smaller version of the one all the men carried. Women needed theirs for self-defense and kitchen duties. Only men needed the heavier blade for slaughtering animals or—occasionally—fighting marauding Shaoshi clans from across the Pesang border. “Why can’t I have a proper one like yours? This isn’t heavy enough.”

“I’ll buy you one when we have the money.”

“That’ll be never. As soon I’ve filled the fuel shed, I’m going to find some work in the town. Cleaning. Maybe even cooking.”

Bai was appalled. It was the ultimate admission of failure to provide for his family. If he let his wife take a paid job, everyone would talk. Everyone would say he was a no-good, bone-idle bastard who made his wife do two jobs while he lazed around watching his herd die on their feet. He couldn’t let that happen. It would bring shame on Harua, too, for choosing a useless idiot for a husband, and if anything ever happened to him, she’d find it hard to get anyone else to marry her. The responsibility for getting them out of this crisis was his alone.

“Can you manage to look after the cattle as well as everything else?” he asked. He shielded his eyes against the sun to check where the herd had gone. The cows were standing around listlessly, gazing back at him as if they were waiting for him to come up with a better idea than the parched scrub they’d found. “If anyone goes to town to find work, it’s me.”

Harua took off her bandana and wiped her face with it. “Every herder’s suffering the same. You won’t find men’s work down there.”

“I will if I look hard enough.”

Harua grinned and cupped his face in both hands. She shook him a little, like he was a child she was teasing.

“You’re always so determined,” she said. “That’s why I picked you and not your cocky brother.”

But Seng—cocky or not—had done all right for himself. He’d served in the army, fighting for the Coalition of Ordered Governments, and what looked like modest pay to those city people in the west was a fortune back here. Seng had saved enough to set up a company exporting traditional Pesang clothing and build a really nice house with plumbed water. Bai would have followed him into the army if he’d been taller and he hadn’t already married Harua.

And not just for the pay. For the honor.

Harua wanted him to stay home to run the farm. He couldn’t really argue with that, especially as the land was hers. He was also a few centimeters below the COG regulation height, even for a Pesang. That had disappointed him more than anything.

“Okay, I’ll go today,” he said. “It’ll only take me a few hours to walk into town. I’ll stay a couple of days and see what work’s going.”

Harua looked more resigned than relieved. “If you end up working in town,” she said, “I still want a baby. I can’t manage the farm as well when the baby’s small.”

“If I get a job, you won’t have to. I’ll make enough to get help.” He knew she didn’t want to abandon the farm. The land had belonged to her family for generations. “It’s only while we wait for the drought to end.”

That was optimistic talk. But it beat looking at those starving cows and counting down the days to ending up just like them. At least he was doing something, taking action instead of hoping for some unseen force to bring the rains.

It took him three hours to pick his way down to the valley floor and join the rutted track that was the main road to Narakir. Trucks and oxcarts passed him in both directions, kicking up clouds of pale dust that hung in the air like a fog. The town wasn’t as busy as usual. He made his way to the square, expecting to find at least a few traders there who might be looking to hire help, but there was just someone selling fabrics and an awful lot of scrawny goats and sheep in temporary pens waiting to be sold. Nothing for him there, then; he decided to trawl the inns and workshops. He’d need to find somewhere to stay the night anyway.

Bai wandered into an open shed where a strong smell of animal piss made it almost impossible to breathe, even for a man used to living alongside cattle. It was the local tannery. Preparing leather was a backbreaking, dirty job, but he thought that if he started with the least popular work, he’d stand more chance of finding a vacancy. Tanners used urine for soaking the fresh hides—it turned them a soft, creamy white—and dog or fox shit for tanning them. It wasn’t most people’s first choice of career.

But when his eyes got used to the dim light, he realized that most of the men working on the hides were fellow farmers. He wasn’t the only desperate herdsman with the same idea, then.

“Welcome to the perfume emporium, Bai.” Noyen Ji heaved a pail of piss into a wooden butt. “Can we interest you in a bottle of our rose essence?”

“Don’t suppose you need an extra pair of hands here, do you?” Bai made a quick mental list of the other workshops he could try next, starting with the blacksmith. “I’m willing to do anything.”

“Sorry, friend. You could try the laundry up at the monastery, though.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Bai spent the afternoon trudging from building to building, asking the same question and getting the same answer. Times were hard. Everyone was showing up looking for work to tide them over until things took a turn for the better. And each time Bai crossed the square, he noted that the number of miserable-looking animals in the pens was dwindling. He couldn’t see the point of getting a few coins for your animals when you could eat them yourself. The fruitless afternoon depressed him so much that he decided to take a break at the inn. He had enough money for a pot of tea, and he could make that last for hours with the free top-ups of boiling water.

In a few hours, he could think of something else. He couldn’t go back to Harua and admit he’d failed again. He had to return home with a job.

Yes, tea always made things look a lot brighter. He wandered down the street toward the tattered red silk pennant that flew from the inn’s upper balcony, glancing into the windows of the buildings he passed. On one of the walls, there was a peeling and faded poster that caught his eye.

He’d seen it many times before but on this occasion it reached out and stopped him in his tracks. The words on it were printed in very poor Pesan, as if the person who’d made it didn’t understand much of the local languages. The meaning was clear, though. The image of the smiling, healthy foreigner in his smart military armor, holding out a hand of friendship, was saying what a great career it was in the COG’s army, and how welcome Pesangas were to serve in it. There was even a special regiment for them.

I’m too short. And Harua would kill me if I enlisted, anyway.

Bai walked on, somehow feeling the poster was aimed at him personally today. His father had served in the COG forces, and he raised Bai and Seng to understand that soldiering was an honorable living. Pesangas came from a warrior tradition; part of that tradition was to aid allies. The COG was respected, and it hadn’t needed to invade Pesang to get the hill tribes’ support for its war against the UIR. Bai was shocked when he first heard that nations did that—that they rolled over like beaten dogs and did the invaders’ bidding. They should have driven them out. You could only fight alongside those who respected you, and those who you respected in return.

Bai could have used a big dose of self-respect right then. He opened the inn door, found a table, and sat down, suddenly realizing how exhausted he was. A radio was chattering in the background while a bunch of old men gambled with dice.

“Don’t tell me, tea and jug of hot water,” the waiter said. “But you look like you need a plate of rice.”

“I need a job more,” Bai said. “Anything going?”

“Nah. I could use someone to wash the dishes when I close tonight, though.”

“Okay. Can I sleep on the floor?”

“If you sweep it first.”

“Done.”

It was a start. Bai hadn’t gone looking for work since he was a kid. He needed to get back in the habit, and this was as good a way as any. It didn’t bring him any closer to going back home tomorrow with good news for Harua, though. Somehow, he’d set himself a deadline and felt duty bound to stick to it. It was more for himself than for her, he suspected. He sipped his tea and paid no attention to the radio.

He didn’t care much about politics, especially beyond Pesang, but the knot of men sitting around the ancient radio set was growing one by one, and they were frowning in concentration. Bai was curious. He listened to the broadcast. It was in Tyran—he could understand a lot of it, even if he found speaking the language hard—and it was talking about the situation in Vasgar.

Vasgar was hundreds of kilometers away, but there was nothing between Vasgar and Pesang except mountains, so that made them neighbors.

“The Indies are going to invade, mark my words,” one of the old gamblers muttered. He kept his eyes on the dice. “They’d better stop before they reach our border, though, if they want to hang on to their balls.”

“And heads,” said another. “They wouldn’t get far without those.”

Everyone laughed. No army had ever invaded Pesang. They said every foreigner was scared shitless at the prospect of encountering a Pesang hill-man with his machete, and believed they could never hear Pesangas coming until it was too late. Bai didn’t quite see himself as menacing, although he wasn’t afraid to use his knife.

Did it really matter how tall he was?

No, this was stupid. Harua would go mad if he so much as thought about it, but he did. He thought of that poster, and how the white-faced recruiting sergeant had measured him and told him he was just a bit too short, but he couldn’t stop thinking that it was worth one more try if the war was coming this close to home again. He’d been a little boy the last time anyone had talked this way.

“Where’s the nearest recruiting office now?” he asked, knowing someone would answer.

One of the men sitting by the radio slurped his tea from a saucer. “Paro,” he said. “Why, you getting all patriotic?”

The words just fell out of Bai’s mouth. He didn’t even think about it. “I’m going to sign up.”

There was a silence around the room. Bai could hear a dog yapping in the distance.

“Me too,” said another man. “In case these Indies get ideas. Anyone know where we can get a ride?”

“My brother drives a truck,” said another man. “I’ll go get him.”

It was that simple, and that impulsive. An hour later, Bai found himself in the back of an open truck, bouncing down the potholed road to Paro with a dozen other men he’d only just met, not knowing if he’d be turned down again, or if he’d be a soldier this time next week, or if Harua would disown him when she found out.

He liked the feeling. It was more than needing the money. He really wanted to serve. It was a matter of pride.

When the truck reached the COG recruiting office, a soldier in armor stepped out onto the street to look them over. He was huge, a head taller than any of them, with very light hair and eyes.

“So you want to be Gears,” he said. He spoke pretty good Pesan for a foreigner. “Can you all use that machete?”

Every Pesang male carried one. Each man from the truck drew his from its sheath with a rasp of metal on leather.

“Can you all speak some Tyran?”

Bai plunged in with his best accent. “Sah, yes, we can.”

“That’s what I like to hear. This way, gentlemen. First thing—I’m a sergeant. Sergeants aren’t sir. We’re Sergeant.”

Bai decided it was now or never. He walked up to the sergeant and craned his neck to look him in the eye.

“Sergeant,” he said. “I tried to join before. They said I was too short.”

“That was then, son,” said the sergeant, ushering him into the office. “You’re just the right height now.”

Harua would kill him. Bai reasoned that she would calm down when she received her first envelope full of banknotes.

It wasn’t going to be forever, after all.