CHAPTER 1

If you want to flood the city, we can handle it. The evacuations already under way by road, we’ve got ships on standby, and this is a population that’s used to emergency drills. They move when we say move. But that’s the easy part. It’s winter, and somehow we’ve got to carry enough equipment and supplies to create a giant refugee camp from scratch in the middle of nowhere, then sustain it for maybe a year. We’re going to lose a lot of people, whatever happens. So let’s start by accepting that. (ROYSTON SHARLE, HEAD OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, JACINTO.)

JACINTO, ONE HOUR INTO THE FLOOD.

Dying really did bring its own moments of clarity, just like they said.

Bernie Mataki didn’t see her life flash before her. Instead, she found herself weirdly detached, reflecting on the shitty irony of sailing halfway around the world only to drown in Jacinto.

Water. I bloody hate it. No bastard should have to drown in the middle of a city. She could see a patch of whirling sea ten meters away, like a sink emptying down a plughole. Debris rushed toward it. Chunks of wood, vegetation, plastic, and even a dead dog—a little brown terrier thing with a red collar

—raced past her on the surface to vanish into the maelstrom. A chunk of metal pipe bobbed along in its wake, clanging against her shoulder-plate and nearly taking her eye out before it spun away with the rest of the flotsam. I’m next. Sink. Get it over with. Nowhere to swim to. Drown here now or there later … no, screw that, I’m a survival specialist, aren’t I? Get a grip. Do something. I’m not dead yet.

“Sorrens? Sorrens?” All she could see was columns of black smoke and the occasional flash of sunlight on a distant rotor blade. The last Ravens were heading away from the stricken city. Saltwater slopped into her mouth.

“Sorrens, you still there?”

There was no answer. He was the last man left of her squad; they’d fought their way to the surface, radios dead, staying a few desperate meters ahead of the flood. But the Ravens had already gone, and the sea engulfed the city. It pissed her off that Sorrens had survived the battle but that she’d lost him because the frigging COG

itself pulled the plug. That felt worse than losing him to the grubs somehow. But they thought we were dead. We can’t have been the only ones who missed the RV point. How many got out alive?

Jacinto, which had always seemed so ancient and eternal, was vanishing a landmark at a time. The sea didn’t give a shit about humanity’s little nest -building efforts. Buildings were subsiding into the caverns beneath the city, creating whirlpools that dragged in everything on the surface. She’d be next. Her hands were aching with cold as she struggled to hang on to a roof gutter that was now at sea level. The roof itself was gone, and only the end gable jutted at a sharp angle above the water. She looked for some refuge, but there were no surfaces she could balance on, just a finial, a twin-headed heraldic eagle that loomed over her and offered nothing to settle on. Two minutes, they said. Two minutes in icy water before hypothermia killed you. She’d been here longer than that, she was sure. And then there was the fuel floating everywhere. That wasn’t going to do her a lot of good, either.

Can’t let go. Bloody radio …

Bernie steadied herself, timing the moment to take one hand off the gutter and try her radio again. The current tugged impatiently. Once she lost her grip on her last fragile link to solid ground, the weight of her armor would drag her under. It was the modern stuff, heavier, a two-handed job to remove, not designed for long immersion. She needed both hands free to jettison any plates, and once she let go she was dead. She couldn’t tread water: too exhausted, too heavy, too far from dry land.

All she could hear was the roar and crash of the sea filling the sunken city, creaks of buckling metal that sounded like screams, and a fading chakka-chakka-chakka as the last Ravens shrank to dots on the amber horizon. There was a stench of unidentifiable chemicals and sulfur, as if some kind of gas was pooling on the surface.

Shit, don’t let that catch fire. I can’t handle burning to death in water as well. That’s one fucking irony too many.

She had to get on with it.

One … two … three.

Bernie took one hand off the gutter and waved her arm. But it was a waste of time, and she knew it; the choppers were too far away. Even the ships and small vessels were out of range. She was just one more tiny speck in a chaotic soup of debris. But now that her hand was free and she hadn’t been snatched from her refuge by the force of the water, she risked turning around, trying to scan the choppy surface for signs of other survivors. There were bodies. She could see how fast the current was running by the speed at which they shot past her. Did they get left behind? Or did they decide to die here rather than keep running?

People did the damnedest things in disasters. Wanting to stay put was common. Bernie always prided herself on getting the hell out.

She pressed her finger hard against her earpiece, rocking it slightly to make sure the switch made contact. There was an encouraging hiss of static. It was still working despite being soaked.

“Sierra One to Control, this is Mataki …” Time. She just didn’t have time. Even if anyone heard her, could they loop back and find her before she went under? There were no bloody miracles on the way, that she knew. If she was going to survive, she’d have to perform her own. “Sierra One to Control, this is Mataki, are you receiving?”

There was just the empty random hiss of background interference. Maybe they could hear her, though. Maybe they couldn’t respond. She needed to give them a location, just in case, and tried to work out where she was in this suddenly unfamiliar landscape, but it was hard to orient herself when only her head was above water. She racked her brain for where she’d seen the eagle finial before, trying to visualize Jacinto as it had been only hours ago.

“Sierra One, this is Sergeant Bernadette Mataki … I need extraction urgently, repeat, urgent extraction … my position is … wait one …” Shit. Where the hell am I? What’s that dome over there? Suddenly it came to her.

“Allfathers Library, south side of the roof. I’m facing the Ginnet Mausoleum. Request immediate extraction, over.”

This was the point where it suddenly got harder and demanded decisions. How long did she wait before she decided they were never coming?

Bernie found herself scanning the horizon to the east, looking to see if any of the small islands around the harbor had survived the seismic activity. If she could shed at least some of her plates—maybe grab the next chunk of debris that passed as a flotation device—then she might make it to dry ground. She could see only the outer harbor wall now, a stump of granite that had once held a lighthouse. It was a very long swim, even under the best circumstances.

“Control, I’ll hang on as long as I can,” she said at last. “Request immediate extraction, repeat, immediate extraction.”

Bernie decided that if anyone had heard, then she’d given them long enough to triangulate on her signal. She shut down the radio to conserve power. All she could do now was stay put and try to avoid being hit by the flood of rushing debris.

How long before it gets dark?

She had two or three hours’ light left. Maybe getting up on that gable end was feasible after all—if it didn’t crash down on her or sink with everything else. If she moved around to the other side, a little further along the gutter, the sloping gable would be facing away from her. She could edge her way up it. For a moment, she felt inexplicably pleased with herself, and realized that it was because of the water—her worst nightmare, the thing she dreaded, and yet she was in control. It hadn’t beaten her. If she could deal with this, anything was possible.

“Screw you,” she said aloud to nobody in particular, and felt carefully beneath the water for her belt. If she took it slowly, she could find a length of line even with fingers so cold they felt like they were being crushed between rollers.

Don’t drop it. No, don’t open the pouch, lift it so the stuff doesn’t float out. Bernie shook out the line and almost lost it. Now the challenge was to form a loop to anchor it to something solid. Tying a bowline one-handed when someone threw you a line was a basic survival skill, but with nothing to secure it to, she had to slide the line under her other hand, the one gripping the gutter. It seemed to take ages. Eventually, gathering the line with slow care, she managed to form a noose, and clamped the end between her teeth to avoid losing the thing if she dropped it.

Pirate time. Shit, I must look like a complete dickhead.

Then she made her way hand over hand along the gutter until she was looking at the inside of the gable end. It took every scrap of strength she had left, but she dragged herself over the gutter, taking her weight on her chest, then swung one leg as if mounting a horse. The sea had now overtopped the wall. She straddled the brickwork for a moment, struggling to balance properly because her thigh-plate had caught on something she couldn’t see, and slowly lifted the line in both hands to try to lasso the finial.

Shit.

She missed twice. She missed a third time. Either the polymer rope was too light or she didn’t have the strength now to heave it.

Again …

As long as she was trying, she was alive. And the effort was warming her up.

And again …

The loop of rope caught around the neck of the eagle with a wet slap, and she pulled the line tight. It held. The gable leaned at around fifty degrees; all she had to do was walk up that slope, even crawl, and the rope wouldn’t have to take her whole weight.

It was weird how the brain compensated, she thought. Something that was plainly as dangerous as staying put had now become a sensible option. She found out just how dangerous when she tried to work out how to stand up. The wall, of course, wasn’t level. It was at the same canted angle as the gable, because the whole building had tilted. It was just the fact that it was broken—split vertically—that gave her hands and backside the illusion of being level. When she pulled one leg out of the water and jammed the heel of her boot into a gap in the brickwork, she found herself slipping toward the gable. Standing up took a massive effort that was more like an explosive squat. Her face smacked into the bricks, and she found herself spread-eagled on the inner surface of the gable, one boot on the wall and the other dangling in the sea that had filled the building. But she had the rope in one fist, and she was mostly out of the water. It left her feeling heavy and oddly warm. Now all she had to do was climb.

Easy. Really, it is.

Bernie had to believe that. And she had to think no further than the next step. That was how you kept going, one hurdle at a time, then the next, and the next, until the huge task had been chipped away. Now she was halfway up the slope. When she got close to the top, she’d work out how to secure herself with the rope, free both hands so she could assess any injuries, check that her Lancer still worked, and see what kit she still had in her belt pouches.

And time to call in again. Shit, they can’t have lost all comms, can they?

She lay flat and listened for a moment. The city still groaned and screamed as the weight of water crushed it. But that was a little further away; closer to her, she could hear rhythmic slaps on the water, as if someone was swimming.

I’m not alone. God, I’m not alone. It’s Sorrens. He made it.

Bernie took a few breaths and gathered her strength to sit up as best she could and take a look. Before she did, she tried calling Control again.

“Control, this is Mataki, requesting immediate extraction. My position is the Allfathers Library roof.” She could still hear the splashing. It was getting closer. “Control, come in …”

The splashing stopped.

Bernie raised her head and looked down at the sea. Now that she was facing away from Jacinto’s death throes, the seascape simply looked stormy, the drifting smoke more like dark clouds than the end of urban society. She couldn’t see anyone in the water—nobody alive, anyway.

“Sorrens?”

She couldn’t ignore what she’d heard. She tugged on the line to make sure it was secure, then tied the other end around her waist like a safety line. She was losing body heat, she reminded herself, and there was a cold night ahead, so any survivors would stand a better chance if they huddled together. Braking her slide with her heels, she edged down to the top of the wall again, wondering how she’d haul him inboard. The sea looked almost solid, like churning, oily lumps rather than water. She strained to see a head bobbing between waves. Nothing.

Then the water erupted.

A body burst through the surface like a porpoise breaching. She sucked in a breath, jerking back, because it wasn’t Sorrens, and it took her a second in her exhausted state to register that fact. She was face -to-face with a Locust drone, a big gray bastard of a grub. It could swim. It should have been dead. It wasn’t. It scrambled for the wall, her wall, her safe haven.

“Shit,” she said, and reached for the knife in her boot.

KING RAVEN KR-239,

EN ROUTE TO PORT FARRALL.

The comms link crackled in Dominic Santiago’s earpiece. “KR -Two-Three-Nine to Control. Are you receiving that signal?”

Oh shit oh shit oh shit, did I do it? Oh God, I did it, I killed her. I killed her. Dom could hear the chatter between the two Raven pilots, but it was just noise, words, sounds without meaning. His body was carrying on without him; he felt like he was coming around from an anesthetic. Whatever instinct had held him together during the mission was now wearing off, leaving behind it a paralyzing horror that drove out everything else except the sheer choking pain from that last look into her eyes. I killed Maria. I killed my own fucking wife. It couldn’t have been her, could it? Did I really do it? Oh God oh God oh God, how am I going to breathe again—

“Roger that, Two-Three-Nine. It’s Mataki. We lost the signal, but she’s somewhere on the Allfathers’ roof.”

“We’re low on fuel.”

“Okay, we’re just calculating which KR can get back to her—”

Marcus’s voice cut in. “Control, I’m up for it. If Sorotki thinks he can make it.”

“And if not?” Sorotki said.

“Then drop me off and I’ll frigging swim back for her.” It wasn’t a growl. Marcus just sounded exhausted.

“Baird, you got any objections?”

Baird must have shaken his head, because Dom didn’t hear a reply. The guy always came back with some smart-ass retort about Mataki. But not this time.

“Just so you understand,” Sorotki said, “we don’t have the fuel for anything fancy. We just winch her clear and go, okay? We’ll be flying back on vapor as it is. Hey, Mitchell, quit the sightseeing and get your ass back here. Crunch me some numbers.”

“On my way.” The co -pilot abandoned the aerial recon and stowed the camera. “Mataki punched out Baird. We’ve got to rescue her, so she can do it again.”

Marcus put his hand on Dom’s shoulder. “Hey … you with us?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it.” The words were out of Dom’s mouth before he could think. Shit, he couldn’t think. There was a loop playing in his brain now, over and over, disjointed but agonizingly vivid, and it wouldn’t stop even when he shut his eyes.

It was just the beginning. It wasn’t going to go away. He wanted to die; nothing mattered now, not even breathing. But when he turned his head and met Marcus’s eyes, he was jerked back into a world where people depended on him, where friends put themselves on the line for him. That included Bernie. There was no giving up now.

The co -pilot returned to the cockpit and Sorotki banked the Raven in a loop to retrace their course back to Jacinto. Dom stayed at the door, staring down onto the ocean as the chopper skimmed over an extraordinary fleet of vessels that ranged from hovercraft and rust-streaked beam trawlers to tankers. A group of carriers —Raven’s Nest class—led a flotilla of shabby warships. One was just a matte black lump right on the waterline, then the helicopter tilted, and Dom picked out a solid sail and the bulbous outline of a sonar dome on the bow.

“Shit, look at that,” Baird said. Dom felt something clack against his back plate, and realized Baird had clipped a safety line to his belt. That wasn’t like him at all. “We still got a submarine. Hey, I just got to play with that. Torps away, flood Q, all that shit.”

Dom felt Baird was humoring him, like he was a kid who’d just woken screaming from a nightmare and needed distracting. Baird had heard what he’d told Cole. He hadn’t realized Dom had found Maria, let alone that he’d taken his sidearm and—

Dom could still see it, over and over, whether he wanted to or not. But he couldn’t say it even in the privacy of his own mind. He stared at the carrier beneath, trying to shut out everything else.

“That’s Sovereign.” Dom could see the pennant code under the bridge wing, peeling and faded. He couldn’t remember the other carrier’s name. “They were overdue for the scrapyard even before E-Day.”

It was the sheer volume of small civilian craft that surprised Dom—tiny clinker-built dinghies, rigid inflatables, grimy white motor cruisers with wheelhouses covered in nets and wicker fenders. He’d never known this navyin-waiting existed; all these shabby hulls must have been carefully laid up on blocks in garages or derelict buildings for years, waiting for the worst to happen. People still ventured out to fish in the estuary after E-Day to supplement their meager diet. And everyone knew there were distant islands out there—for those willing to risk the journey, anyway.

Like Bernie. Island-hopping from the other side of Sera. Crazy woman. Dom had experienced the sheer terror of the sea in his commando days, and the idea of spending months afloat in a boat that size almost made him shit himself.

“Pretty impressive that they can hold a convoy formation,” Baird said. “We haven’t had a fighting navy since E-Day, let alone exercising with civilian vessels.”

“Discipline, man.” Dom tried to imagine how many people could cram into a carrier. “We got an orderly, welldrilled bunch of—”

She’s gone.

And I killed her.

Dom ground to a halt midsentence. For a few moments he’d thought about something other than Maria, but now it had all come crashing back again. His free hand shook. He grabbed the adjacent rail just to keep it steady. All he wanted was oblivion—fuck it, just five minutes of nothing in his head so he could pull himself together. The images superimposed on everything he looked at. He found himself screwing his eyes shut and turning his face away from the open door. It was like that night on board Pomeroy, when he’d lost his brother at Aspho Fields, lost half his buddies, and heard his daughter had been born—a terrible chaos of agony and joy, unbearable, so disabling that he didn’t know how to get through the next hour. All the time he was fighting to stay alive, he could cope. Once the pressure was off, the tidal wave flooded back. The Locust were finally gone. The world could start over. But Maria was gone, too, more gone than she’d been for the ten years she was missing, and he was the one who’d killed her.

Maybe I could have saved her. Why didn’t I get to her sooner? Why did I pull the trigger?

He knew why. He knew she was past saving. He also knew that wouldn’t stop him tearing himself apart thinking about all the things he could have done differently.

His torment must have showed on his face. Baird nudged him with his elbow but didn’t say anything. Baird wasn’t good at reassurance. He didn’t have Marcus’s unerring ability to say the right thing when it really mattered, but at least he wasn’t carrying on as if nothing had happened, like he usually did.

“Ten minutes.” Sorotki’s voice interrupted their short-range comms. “Lots of smoke drifting down there. I hope we can spot her. Fenix, you’re winchman. If Mataki’s not in any shape to help herself, you’ll have to go down yourself and put the sling on her.”

Marcus checked the clips, tugging the sling and cable hard and scrutinizing them. “Under the arms?”

“Yeah. Cable to the front, slip the sling over her shoulders and under the armpits, then get her to keep her arms down at her sides or hands clasped in front and relax. Grab her when she’s level with the deck, and pull her inboard. Simple.”

Marcus nodded to himself and sat with the harness on his lap, head bent as if he was meditating over it. Baird didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. There was no small talk to pass the time, not now.

“Two hundred meters, port side,” Sorotki said. “I have a visual on the building.”

Dom moved across the bay deck to the other door and stared out. Jacinto looked just like someone had thrown a pile of broken dollhouses into a bucket of water. The scale was somehow distorted; the landmarks were all in the wrong place, or at least it seemed that way because some of the ornate towers and domes were missing. Even when the Raven dropped to twenty meters above the sea, the city didn’t look life-sized any longer.

“Oh, shit,” said Sorotki.

Marcus leaned out of the door, hanging on by one hand. Dom was blinded by the mass of rolling smoke. But the pilot could detect something they couldn’t. Baird put his goggles on and peered out as well.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Can’t you see her?”

“I see her, all right. Which of you is the best shot?”

It was the worst thing Sorotki could have said. Dom felt his guts knot. His mind raced ahead to fill in the gaps. No, Sorotki didn’t mean that at all.

“She is,” Marcus said calmly, still gripping the sling. “She’s a sniper. What’s the problem?”

“She’s got company, and not the let’s-keep-our-spirits-up kind …”

The wind parted the smoke for a moment, and Dom caught a glimpse of someone else’s hell for a change. A Gear—it could have been anyone in that armor—clung to a jutting section of brickwork while a grub tried to climb aboard too.

“Time to break up the party,” Marcus said. “Sorotki, get me in close as you can.”

ALLFATHERS LIBRARY.

Bernie heard the sound of a Raven getting closer but didn’t dare take her eyes off the grub to look up. The thing was struggling, trying to heave itself out of the water. That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to kill her. Locust were tougher than humans, harder to kill, and all that nearly drowning had done to this one was exhaust it. It looked right at her—vile pale gray eyes with pinprick pupils—as if it was surprised that a human had survived. And she was stuck.

She was now lying flat on her back on the sloping wall, trapped and hanging from the length of line. Her Lancer, slung on her back, was jammed underneath her. All she had to rely on was her knife and a very bad attitude toward anything that wasn’t a Gear. The grub gripped the brickwork with one huge clawed hand, then tried to lunge upward. She kicked out at it.

“Fuck off,” she yelled, trying to work out the best place to strike. The nearest target would be its head or hand, not exactly effective places to stab an assailant. She needed to slice into a major artery or somewhere blindingly painful. Stabbing was a slow kill, or a distraction to slow someone down while you tried something else, but that was all she had. “This is my frigging wall. Just piss off and die.”

The chopper was definitely very close. The noise was deafening, and she could feel the downdraft. She still couldn’t take her eyes off the grub. If the pilot hadn’t seen her by now, he never would. The grub looked up, though, and she could almost see its thoughts; it was too exhausted to swim away, its enemy was hovering above, and all it could do was revert to instinct and grab for safety, however short-lived that was. And it did.

It must have found purchase on the submerged brick, because it sprang up from the water with a massive bark of effort, crashing down on top of her. It landed with its head level with her waist. Its claws hooked on her belt, and it began hauling itself upward.

Its breath stank.

This was just a frozen second, but the smell and the sheer weight of the frigging thing on top of her triggered a memory in Bernie that she still tried hard to bury: helpless, pinned down, unable to fight back. She wanted to kill. It was all she could see, think, feel, taste. Kill it. She rammed the knife into the first place she could reach—its shoulder—but it was like trying to stab concrete.

It bellowed. Had she even scratched the thing? It still clung to her, crushing the breath out of her. She drew back her cold -numbed arm to stab blindly again, and again, and again, until the blade didn’t pull clear and she didn’t know if she’d finally pierced its thick hide or snagged the knife in something. She struggled to pull it out. All she was aware of was a fierce downward wind sandblasting grit onto her face, a wall of screaming noise that made her head hurt, and a frenzied rage that closed her throat as tight as a stranglehold. Yes, there was a Raven right above. She thought she caught a glimpse of someone aiming a rifle at her. But the grub was still clinging to her, one hand on her belt and the other hooked into her chest-plate; it had to die. She pulled the knife back one more time, looked down into the grub’s nightmarish face—mouth open, venting meaningless noises and terrible, rotting smells—and rammed the slim blade as hard as she could into its ear canal. Now … that worked.

The grub screamed, a long gurgling noise, and hung from her belt by one fist as it flailed helplessly at the knife. It was going to drag her down with it. And she wanted her knife back. A fight was never cold logic, and all kinds of insane shit went through her mind at times like this, but right now her knife mattered more than anything, and she yanked it clear. Then she dug the point hard into the back of the grub’s massive hand and ground the point around like a screwdriver.

The grub was still screaming. Her belt broke. The creature thrashed for a second as it fell back into the water below, and then it was gone.

Now she could look up. The downdraft from the Raven almost blinded her. The chopper backed off a little, and she could see someone with a black do-rag squatting on the open deck, gesturing with a bright orange rescue sling.

Marcus.

Bernie couldn’t hear him above the noise, but she knew what to do. She just didn’t know if she had the strength to do it. The line hit her in the face, not that she could feel much now, and she grabbed it one-handed. But that was as far as she got. She couldn’t get the loop under her arms because her back-plate and rifle kept snagging it, and she didn’t have the energy or strength to struggle with it. The harness slid out of her grip and vanished back into the Raven. Shit, were they giving up, or trying again?

It was Delta. They wouldn’t leave her here.

She shut her eyes for a moment to get her second wind. Then something heavy crashed down next to her. If that grub had come back, she was going to have to bite out the bastard’s windpipe this time—but when she looked, Marcus was standing on the steep slope of the gable, hanging on to the winch cable.

“Brace your feet against my boot,” he yelled over the noise. “Sit up. Come on. Up.”

She reached above her head and cut the line that now tethered her to the sinking building. Whether she sat up on her own or Marcus hauled her, she wasn’t sure, but the sling was around her and she crunched hard against Marcus as the cable went taut again and her boots left the brickwork.

“Shit, am I glad to see you.” She was so cold that she had trouble making her mouth work. “I owe you one.”

“No, you don’t.”

Dom and Baird reached to pull them inboard when they were level with the deck. It was an undignified scramble and she ended up in a tangled heap with Marcus while Baird disconnected the slings. She was still slumped on the deck as the Raven swung around and headed north again. Dom closed the doors on both sides of the Raven’s bay. The noise level dropped instantly.

“It’s damn cold,” he said. “You need to get your body temperature up again.”

“Thanks, Dom.” She propped herself up but could only reach his leg, so she patted that. He nodded, then slipped through into the gunner’s compartment as if he wanted to leave them to it. “And you, Blondie. Thank you. No sign of Niall Sorrens? He was right behind me.”

Baird helped her to the aft bulkhead seat and draped a blanket around her. That was so unlike him that she really wasn’t sure what to say. She wondered if she was in worse shape than she thought.

“Nobody else, Granny,” he said. Well, at least a bit of the normal me, me, me Baird was functioning. “Creative knife work, by the way. Very entertaining.”

“I’d do it to every last frigging one of them,” she said, carefully reburying all the memories that the fight had dredged up. She was shaking uncontrollably—from cold, fatigue, ebbing adrenaline—and she didn’t want to look weak in front of Baird. “But we finally finished the bastards, didn’t we? Except the stragglers. Just send them my way. I’ve got scores to settle.”

“Yeah, Granny,” said Baird, still unnaturally civil. The jibe didn’t even feel offensive anymore. “Next grub we find is all yours.”

She craned her neck to see what Dom was doing. Through the narrow hatch, she could see him manning the gun position, staring out into the growing dusk. He looked wrong somehow; so did Marcus. Even Baird didn’t have his usual perma-sneer in place. Bad news was imminent. She could feel it. And there was someone missing, someone she expected to see with Delta Squad.

“Cole?” Her gut somersaulted. Cole was a force of nature, an endearing blend of raucous humor and solid wisdom, and she had a soft spot for him. He was not replaceable. “Where’s Cole? No, not Cole, I couldn’t—”

“Don’t worry, he got out on Hoffman’s flight,” Baird said. “With Anya.”

No jokes, no sarcasm, even from Blondie. Shit. What’s coming?

Bernie was running out of names to play guess-who-didn’t-make-it. Marcus braced one hand on the bulkhead above her, leaning over with a look in his eyes that said he was working up to telling her something that even he couldn’t quite handle. And that was starting to scare her. She’d known him—and Dom—when they were young Gears in the Royal Tyran Infantry, before anyone had ever heard of the Locust. Even in a world where everyone had suffered and grieved, though, Marcus looked especially ravaged by loss, and it wasn’t just those facial scars.

“Just tell me,” she said.

“Tai’s gone.” His voice was almost a whisper. Tai Kaliso was a South Islander, like her, another comrade they’d both fought with at Aspho Fields. “Did you ever meet Benjamin Carmine? He’s gone, too.”

Marcus paused. It was clear he hadn’t finished. He’d always been self -contained, but she could see accumulated years of anguish in his eyes. This was the Marcus she’d glimpsed a long time ago, distraught at the death of his buddy Carlos, Dom’s brother.

“Marcus,” she said, “just tell me, sweetheart.” She could call him that. She was twenty-odd years older, so she could play the veteran sergeant with him. “Whatever it is.”

“It’s Dom,” he said at last. She couldn’t hear him now. She had to read his lips. “He found Maria. He had to …

stop her suffering. Shit, Bernie, he had to shoot her. She was just this skeleton, this brain-damaged skeleton. I told him it was okay.”

Bernie had steeled herself not to react. But it was so far from what she was expecting to hear that she actually felt her mouth open in shock. Her immediate instinct was to go to Dom as if he was still that teenage kid she first knew, give him a hug, tell him he’d get through it, that everyone would help him. But it was complete bollocks. She knew, because she’d been seconds from putting Carlos Santiago out of his misery at Aspho Fields. And she knew that if she’d pulled the trigger, then she would have found that bloody hard to get out of her head every night, every time she tried to fall asleep, every unguarded moment.

She didn’t ask for details. There’d be a proper time for that. She caught Baird’s eye as he watched her and Marcus, but he looked away fast.

“Does everyone else know?” she asked.

“No.” Marcus straightened up. His eyes looked distinctly glassy. “And I want to make it as easy as I can for him.”

“Want me to warn people off?” Every Gear who knew Dom would ask him if he’d found his wife yet. Every Stranded, too, if they’d survived. The man had spent ten years shoving a photograph of Maria in front of everyone he met, asking if they’d seen her. “It’ll save a lot of painful questions.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“No detail. Just that he found a body, so they’ll shut up about it.”

“Thanks, Bernie.” Marcus patted her shoulder, distracted. “He’ll know we’ve got his back.”

Bernie rested her head in her hands and let the airframe’s vibration lull her into something approaching sleep. Shit, what a letdown. She’d always thought that defeating the Locust would be a cause for celebration, but if there was one thing she’d learned about wars, it was that their endings were just temporary lulls. Rebuilding human society was going to be hard, slow, and generations long; the entire human species—the tiny remnant that remained—was bereaved. And it no longer had an external threat to hold it together. It didn’t have something to live for yet, just the shared instinct that said stay alive.

Survival’s an ugly thing. Seen it. Done it.

Bernie found it was a lot easier to forget her own traumatic memories when she thought of Dom. Poor little bastard. What a shitty way to begin the first peace we’ve ever known. She looked up and started to rise from her seat, planning to make her way to the gun bay and just sit with Dom to let him know everyone was there for him. But when she glanced through the opening Marcus was already there, just standing over him with one hand on his shoulder, staring out into the dusk. If anything was going to rebuild humanity, it was comradeship. Gears had that in shitloads. Bernie knew exactly what kind of society she wanted to see emerge from the ruins.