They found a side exit through a heavily-built door secured from the inside with a locking wheel. They opened it cautiously after checking for traps. It was mid morning and the air was pleasantly cool, carrying unfamiliar smells. The door opened outside the base wall, to a partially-overgrown path that led northeast to the main road. They followed it cautiously, moving quickly and quietly. Once they were a kilometer or so away Mallory took out the remote detonation switch.

‘Ka-boom, baby,’ he said, and pushed the button. At once an explosion rocked the base, flinging dust and bricks and debris into the air. A billow of flame rose into the sky. They turned their backs and kept moving.

Buzz was walking more freely now they were fully armed again. The commander carried stress better than anyone Neb had ever known, but no matter how well he managed it, the burden was heavy and lonely. They were like a different outfit now that everyone was fully armed.

They passed through hot, sandy country as they went east from the base. There were low hills of sandy overgrowth with hardy, knotted trees. They saw the ruins of what might have once been a vineyard with a manor house, but all that remained now was the base of its walls, still jagged and sharp from the force of whatever had destroyed the building.

‘Everything we see in the Game is ruined,’ Gray observed. ‘Every building, every town, everything.’

Neb hadn’t thought about that, but she was completely right. It was another thing that could be a message from the Game, or just a random aesthetic. Maybe none of this meant as much as he thought.

They settled into a rhythm of walking, relaxed but alert, rifles in hand. It was too far to make it to the gate before nightfall, and the map didn’t show any safehouses in the area. There was a village a few klicks short of the main north-south road where they hoped to find somewhere to bed down for the night. They’d make the final push for the gate in the morning. There were just over forty hours remaining on the Game clock. Enough time to get everything done, Neb thought, but not enough time to allow for any major fuck-ups.

As they walked, Neb found his thoughts wandering. Meathead was ahead of him, his huge back and thick neck moving rhythmically with his steps. Who had Meathead left behind on Earth, Neb wondered? Who did he intend to have the Game money, assuming he never made it home? Neb knew so little about Meathead or about any of them, and almost for the first time since they had met he found he wanted to know.

When Neb looked at the map he felt anxious that they were again doing the obvious thing, taking the main roads straight to the gate. But yet it also felt like an inevitability. They had survived -- barely -- at the military base, and got the guns that Buzz so dearly wanted. In a way, bar Jasper’s death, things were going brilliantly. A straight-shot attempt at the target was just too tempting to pass up. It felt to Neb as if they were caught up in a current of events that they couldn’t escape even if they wanted to.

It was getting dark as they came near the village, and they were tired and hungry. They approached it cautiously, getting off the road and coming in through the scrub land from the south. Neb felt stress and tiredness fight for supremacy. His rifle was heavy and unfamiliar and his arms ached from carrying it. He wanted nothing more than to shove it into his inventory and forget it.

They followed a narrow street into the center of the village. The street was lined with small houses, most of them badly damaged, interior walls and floors exposed in a way that Neb always found obscene. There had been a significant battle here at some point in the past, the walls scarred from projectile and energy-weapon impacts. Another damaged place, as Gray had said. Some of the houses had been obliterated by heavy ordnance so that only craters remained, slowly being colonized by grasses and tough plantlife. Looming over the town was a damaged church, a slice of its spire cut away cleanly, exposing the internal structures. It did not look stable. Beside the church was the village square, and in the center of the square was a long-dry fountain. A damaged statue stood a forlorn vigil on a plinth, one arm raised but part of its head and the other arm missing. ‘Hope it’s not a sign,’ Meathead muttered.

Neb felt his own anxiety growing. There had been dozens of players still in the military base when they left it -- where were they all now? This road was the logical route for everyone to take to move towards the gate. And some of those players would be itching for revenge on the humans. He felt a shudder at the thought of the sawfish, and reached back and touched the handle of the sword almost unconsciously. The weapon was his now, for better or worse.

The humans moved through the village like quick, silent shadows, and they did not see or hear another soul. It was almost fully dark. Gray was beside Neb, scanning with her rifle. ‘Where the fuck is everyone,’ she said quietly.

Good fucking question, Neb thought, but he didn’t answer. They did not dare to use any lights, but it was getting hard to see where they were going. There had been no night-vision or motion sensors or comms equipment in the armory, and now that Neb thought about that, his chest felt even tighter. Something is not right here.

‘We need to hunker down,’ Buzz said. ‘Gray, Mallory -- clear that building.’ He pointed at a house across the street that was almost intact bar a hole in the roof.

They hustled across the street and were back out in a few moments giving the all-clear sign. The house, like the rest of the village, was empty.

They went inside. The interior was not welcoming. The place had been empty and abandoned for a long time. Dampness stained the walls. The staircase was crumbling and did not look safe. There was no glass in the windows. The front door was leaned up against the living room wall, and Neb wondered who had done that, and when.

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The air was cold and getting colder. They finally risked some light, and in the dim glow of their torches the shadows seemed to come alive threateningly and the house seemed even gloomier. Buzz stationed sentries upstairs and downstairs, and the team ate from the supplies they had brought from the hotel.

Buzz and Mallory had a short, quiet conversation, and then Mallory disappeared out into the night. Neb looked at Gray questioningly, guessing she would know what was going on. ‘Mining the perimeter,’ she said quietly.

So Buzz was feeling it too, Neb thought. He glanced over at Anna. Neb allowed himself to remember just for a moment how she had felt in his arms. Then he heard her voice in his mind: This only means what you want it to mean. Which looking back was her way of saying: This doesn’t mean anything. She was just used to getting what she wanted.

Anna did not look over at Neb but he was certain she knew he was staring, and he forced himself to look away. Meathead, Mallory and Buzz were on first watch. Meathead was upstairs. The stairs creaked ominously as he went up. There were two rooms up there, one partially destroyed where the hole in the roof was. Meathead looked out over their northern approach, past the village square. He was silent and still, not fidgeting or restless. Not only could Meathead and the others march forever, Neb thought, they could watch forever. Occasionally Meathead crossed the room with heavy, creaking footsteps to check the window looking south. Otherwise, it was utterly silent.

Gray, Anna and Neb were supposed to be sleeping in the other upstairs room, but they sat wide awake beside each other, their backs against the wall. Everyone was feeling the oppressive atmosphere. It got colder and darker still. Buzz forbade them to use any more light, and Neb could not see his hand in front of his face until the moon rose and cast a pale glimmer. The night breeze chilled them. We are not resting, Neb thought. We are waiting.

Anna stirred. ‘I’m going downstairs,’ she said, even though it was not her watch for another hour. They saw the shadow of her slender form leave the room, the pale skin of her neck and face bright in the darkness.

Gray and Neb sat without speaking. Neb tried to make himself look at the map, and he thought of showing the non-gun to Gray, but he did neither of those things. His mind was slowed and taught, and it wanted only to stay in each moment and get through it to the next moment and then the next, to try and find some path to the distant morning.

‘Do you like her?’ Gray asked quietly, catching Neb off guard.

He looked over at Gray, barely able to see the outline of her face. Neb didn’t answer at first. Then he said: ‘We’re soldiers in the Game. Everything else is secondary.’

Gray shifted position slightly, trying to get more comfortable. ‘There’s a coldness to her,’ she said, her voice even softer than before. ‘More than that, it’s almost a…’ Gray trailed off. ‘She just doesn’t have some things inside her that everyone else has.’

‘Yeah,’ Neb said, not sure if he fully agreed.

Then Gray said: ‘You know she has been with Mallory also?’

Neb kept his voice even. ‘I did not,’ he said. ‘But she is free to do as she pleases.’

‘She is beautiful,’ Gray said, not quite in answer. ‘But just be careful, Neb. Mallory knows how these games are played. But you are… you’re not like him. Not like us.’

‘I am a soldier,’ he answered defensively.

‘That you are,’ Gray said. ‘I see it in you. And maybe more than you know. But you are not a soldier the way the rest of us are. We are only soldiers. You are a soldier and also more than that. That’s why we need you and you need us, why our fates are so deeply entwined.’

They were silent again for a while. Then Gray said: ‘I knew Anna before any of this, you know.’

‘Where?’ Neb asked. ‘When?’

‘We were in a special ops group sent to a world called… Marindine,’ Gray said. She hesitated at the name. ‘It was a Cluster-level mission, under C-council authority. Marindine is a Rym colony, but there was an uprising there. The Rym appealed to the C-council on the basis that it was a strategic bulwark for them against the Jage. The Council agreed, and sent us to sort it out as quietly as possible.’ She fell silent.

‘And did you?’ Neb asked, his voice too very low. He felt anxious now almost to the point of terror -- the oppressive dark, the old house, Meathead’s footsteps, Gray’s whispered story, the sense of something going terribly wrong and not being able to do anything about it. All of it pushed on him suffocatingly.

‘We did,’ Gray said, now barely audible. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, it was a dark op, but… It doesn’t matter now, I guess.’ She sighed, trailed off. ‘Just ask her about it, Neb. Ask Anna about Marindine. Judge for yourself.’

They were silent. Then Neb said: ‘Gray… Why did you come to the Game?’ ‘The money,’ she said simply. ‘My family has never had any. They live on a farm near Charleston. For them nothing ever changes except to get slightly worse. And my life… The things I’ve done… It just didn’t work out the way I had hoped. A one way ticket out doesn’t seem that bad.’

She was silent for so long that Neb thought the conversation was over, and he was starting to think that in spite of everything perhaps he could sleep a little, when she spoke again. ‘I can’t find absolution,’ Gray said, as if this fragment was part of an ongoing dialog with herself. ‘But perhaps atonement.’

Neb did not know how to answer. He was exhausted. He felt his head droop and hang. Dreams and memories and hopes started to mingle. He saw his childhood home, but Buzz lived there now. He saw the habitat beside the Earth Gate but a hundred thousand sawfish lived there, baying for his blood. He saw Anna swimming naked in crystal water at the base of a pounding waterfall, but she was with Mallory, not Neb. And Gray was leaning into him, whispering into his ear, ‘Be careful, Neb… Be careful…’

He lifted his head and opened his eyes in the instant before the room lit up as if from a reddish sun, a sudden glare that bathed them in brightness before fading away to the oppressive night. A moment later the sound reached them, a thunderous boom rolling across the world. Then the light flared again and then again, a double step up of brightness, and Neb was on his feet even before he was fully awake.

‘POSITIONS!’ Buzz roared from downstairs. ‘POSITIONS!’

Mallory’s perimeter devices were triggering.