Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-PING!

After Isaac fired the last round, the clip popped out of the rifle in his hands with a metallic clap. The A98 Enoch was the service rifle of the Arcadian military, not as sleek as its Zhanghai counterparts but it could fire hard and fire faster. By now, Isaac had held the gun in his hands for so long that it felt like a natural fit. When Isaac first got to the base way back when, he primarily worked on his cultivation at the fields or inside the dojo; now that he was entering the second half of basic training and had built a solid foundation for his cultivation, the Navy opened up some less esoteric skills for him to practice. Isaac didn’t mind; the whole killing his friend thing had somewhat soured him on cultivation, at least for the time being. And there was a mechanical repetition to marksmanship that helped take Isaac’s mind off of things - just lay on the edge of the firing range, reload, shoot the rifle at the targets, hear the satisfying PING of an empty clip.

Bell knelt next to him, having already finished his rifle training for the day. Because it should’ve been Babs there with him, not Bell, Isaac wasn’t in a very talkative mood. But Bell either didn’t pick up the hints or ignored them outright.

“Nice shooting,” he commented, observing the holes Isaac just placed in the targets downrange. “Almost got a bulls-eye.”

“Mhm.”

"Your reload time is kind of slow, though. But that's alright, I was the same way when I started out. Your fingers just have to get used to it."

"Mhm."

It was cold enough for a cloud of condensed vapor to appear in front of their faces as they spoke. The metallic trigger of the rifle was no less chilly; Bell wore gloves, but to a former laborer like Isaac, something as small as admitting it was so cold that you needed gloves - that was the equivalent of tossing away your manhood wholesale. Bell didn’t seem to mind, sitting there with that smile on his face, breathing steadily. Isaac just wanted to be left alone with his sorrows, thank you very much, but Bell’s continued presence forced him to speak.

“You were formerly in Squad 23, right?” Isaac asked, vaguely remembering Bell’s introduction a few weeks ago.

“The giant’s attack on the base put my two teammates in the hospital,” Bell said, his smile never breaking. “Stockham reorganized the squadrons and assigned me to Squad Reed.”

Hearing somebody say that name with a straight face was enough to make Isaac chuckle. “Squad Reed’s pretty tough,” he said. “Think you can hack it?”

Bell glanced back down the range. “I always hit the bullseye.”

This was true, and Isaac supposed Bell had a point. “How’d someone from the Research Bureau get so good at shooting?”

“My work with the Bureau wasn’t always about unlocking the metaphysical secrets of the universe,” he explained. Isaac couldn’t detect if that last part contained a hint of sarcasm or not. “I worked as a minor field agent until I unlocked the Rddhi. Then I followed Stockham to the Cultivator Marines.”

“Well, welcome aboard.”

A final PING concluded the conversation. Isaac still didn't hit the bulls-eye, but it was close enough.

The two men went their separate ways - Isaac hit the mess hall, eating alone as he usually did as of late, then headed for the hospital. The secretary waved him through and Isaac took the stairs up to the third floor. He found his destination down the main hallway and stepped inside.

“Hey,” Reed greeted, not looking up as she worked on something at the desk near her bed. Her crutches leaned against the nearby wall, glinting in the winter sunset - it was only afternoon, yet the night sky was already rising. It did little to help Isaac’s mood, but seeing his best friend always put a little spring in his step.

A notebook laid in front of Reed. She scribbled and scrawled across the pages, her penmanship mixing aristocratic neatness with not giving a shit in equal measure. When Isaac peered over her shoulder, it took him a minute to decipher her writing.

“You're recounting the train battle with the Restorationists,” Isaac realized. “And hey, why am I described as ‘somewhat good-looking albeit only from certain angles’?”

“I call it like I see it,” she said with a grin.

Isaac took a seat on the edge of her bed, the white blankets and sheet soft beneath him. “Why the train battle?”

Reed tapped her pencil on the notebook. “My recent brushes with mortality have convinced me of something.” She raised a finger. “If I were to die, my story dies with me. All the adventures I’ve been on, all the little moments of wonder and whimsy in my short, hot life - they’ll be lost. Somebody needs to keep my story alive after I die, and the only person who can accurately capture my life is yours truly.”

Isaac tilted his head and pointed at himself. “What about me? I can write and read like any other Arcadian school child now.”

“Yeah, like a school child. I need somebody with at least a secondary education to write my story.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

That earned her a frown, and not just because Isaac didn’t know what secondary education meant.

“And besides,” she continued. “You don’t know about the finer points of being Hibiscus Reed.”

“Like what?”

Reed shrugged. “I’m a woman. That’s a pretty big barrier for starters.”

Isaac crossed his arms. “I understand women.”

She squinted her eyes at him. “...do you?”

He wasn't entirely sure, but that wasn’t entirely the point. “What’s so hard to understand?”

The sherbet colors of the sunset fell across Reed’s face as she tapped a finger on her chin. “Hmm…well, I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to bleed down there once a month.”

Isaac just shrugged and pointed at splotch of gray skin on his leg. “These past few months, I’ve been bleeding everything all the time.”

Upon seeing the exaggerated way she rolled her eyes, Isaac continued before she could answer with something smart. “I’ll have you know that I’ve experienced life as a woman on at least three separate occasions while being trapped in an illusion. I don’t think being a woman is rocket science. And, in fact, I found it quite pleasant.”

The bands of orange and purple across Reed’s face were now replaced by gentle waves of twilight blue. “Effing freak,” she muttered, shaking her head with an amused smile. “You just can’t get rid of me, Isaac. I should be off the crutches in a few days and ready for combat.”

“I thought you were tired of combat.”

“I’m tired of being stuck in this hospital room even more. And besides…” Her voice took on a more wistful tone. “I need to let off some steam again. The raid on Tommy’s tavern, I felt good for the first time since the armada. I could fill countless notebooks reliving that day, Isaac. We raided the estate and stormed the Four Eagles complex almost entirely by ourselves. We were unstoppable. I haven’t felt like such a force of nature since. If only Babs didn’t…”

She trailed off, but Isaac understood. “Yeah…I know what you mean.”

The two fell into silence. Isaac had somewhere to be, so he eventually left, leaving Reed to her writing and reminiscing, pale moonlight now falling on her.

The moonlight also shone down on the administrative building at the back of the base. Stone towers rose and twisted above the interior castle, some of them covered with scaffolding as they repaired the damage from the giant's attack. A crane loomed large overhead, rising from a tower, the moonlight giving it a long silhouette in the night sky. Isaac pulled his greatcoat tighter as he trudged on, sighing in relief as he made inside the heated lobby of the building. A guard from the Combined Fleet leaned against the wall, reading a magazine; when Isaac approached, the guard tucked it away and motioned for Isaac to follow. They took a staircase and headed down a couple of hallways until they arrived at one featuring a row of spare offices. The guard knocked on a door; the gruff voice of Osip authorized entry, so in Isaac went, the guard closing the door behind him.

The room might've been used for briefings since it contained rows of chairs, most of them empty at the moment. Filing cabinets lined the walls while blinds covered the windows, so the room was only lit by a bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Beneath the bulb sat a blonde woman - Isaac remembered her as Keti, Lysandros's friend from the refugee camp. She twirled strands of hair in her fingers, studying Isaac, her eyes softening when she called him from the raid on Tommy's tavern. Osip leaned against the wall, his sleeves bare despite the chill, revealing dark muscular arms that the other woman in the room regularly glanced at.

This woman sat across from Keti. She had on a gray scally cap and a maroon bomber jacket that made Isaac do a double take because everyone in Arcadia, whether by choice or circumstances or otherwise, wore neutral colors. "Piper," she greeted, lights dancing in her eyes as she studied Isaac even more intensely than Keti did. As a former resident of Four Eagles, Keti likely scanned everyone for possible threats; this Piper gal kept her eyes trained on Isaac to see if she was worth his attention or not. Isaac, for better or worse, didn't receive any recognition for stopping the armada, and was still a relative unknown among the rank-and-file of the Navy. They might recognize the name, since Isaac got into some trouble with the Naval Police and all that, but very few likely recognized his face. The Atalantans did, and from the look in her eyes, Piper wanted to recognize him the next time they met.

"I smell a story," she proclaimed. "I can see it in your soul. You got a story to tell. A very bittersweet one."

"...you're the reporter for the Narragansett World, right?" That newspaper was owned by the Cartwrights and therefore represented Naval interests in the cutthroat world of journalistic media in a military dictatorship.

"That's me, at your service." She unveiled a pack of cigarettes from her jacket and tapped the bottom so one fell into her waiting hand. Her eyes looked around the room. "Anybody got a light?"

Isaac shook his head, Osip shook his head, Keti shook her head. Piper adjusted her scalley cap and produced her own lighter, taking a slow drag, exhaling the smoke in a thin column. "Let's keep going. I already got the details from Tommy's interrogation - the racketing, the exortion, the blackmail, all of it heading into Major Sloan's pockets. Tsk-tsk-tsk. As a journalist, I gotta expose things like that."

She was brave for it. Newspapers towed the junta line in Arcadia - corruption rarely got exposed, but as the branches of the junta jostled for power, the details of a corrupt Army major would produce a nice, splashy headline in the Navy-aligned newspaper. That was Stockham's plan, anyway; weaken the State Police-Army alliance by taking out bits and pieces, the elements at the periphery, gaining the allegiance of ostracized minority groups, exposing a corrupt government official. Heck, they didn't even need to expose Sloan. They just needed enough to threaten to expose him, and Piper's story and the possibility of it getting published in the newspapers would do the job. Little by little, the Navy would gain ground until the chips really hit the fan.

As for Keti's part-

"When we got to the refugee camp, we had nothing," she recounted, keeping her eyes directed at her shoes. "Everything we owned got destroyed in the State Police attack on Four Eagles. The refugee camp gave us shelter and the factory gave us jobs, but inflation has made money worthless. We were still hungry, even with the ration packets. We needed blankets and medicine. Tommy's men offered it to us at prices we could never hope to repay. And when we couldn't, they took our ration packets, they...made some girls into dancers, you know? We'd be forever indebted to them. That's why we up and left when the Navy offered us a better life."

Piper scrawled all of that down in her notebook, her hand a blur, honed by years of practice. She was probably a couple years older than Isaac since she had the academic air of a college graduate about her. For the next hour, she nodded along, asking follow up questions, waited patiently for Keti to find the right words. When Keti finished, Piper clapped her hands and stood up from her chair.

"This story'll be ready in no time," she informed the others. "And let me tell you - no skin off my nose or nothing, but I'm pretty good at capturing the lives of others."

Isaac felt deja vu for a moment, then let out a relaxed sigh and looked at the moonlight. You and me both.