Ash drifted down all around us like feathers falling from a pillow, dusting a broken world in shades of gray. Silence reigned on all sides except for the crunch of charred grass beneath our boots. My first return to my birthplace brought me to the shreds remaining after the enemy loosed every demon from every hell upon its people. Our shelling forced the soldiers out of the village, but it couldn't change the evils worked in our absence. This was the third of such villages we saw that day, always the same.

It is strange. I thought I would weep, seeing the green jewel of Vlástisí reduced to shells of buildings ravaged by fire and carnage on all sides. Instead, I could only stare without tears to veil my eyes.

Black flies buzzed thick over the fortunate bodies, left where they had fallen from the slaughter of machine gun fire. The unfortunate dead within the buildings had endured torments before they died, stripped of clothes and covered in livid bruising half obscured by the blood and burns. Somewhere beside me, Thaïs soldiered on without a word as we made our search through the village. I heard her tears in her breathing, jagged like the broken glass that snapped and crackled under our feet.

I stopped at the body of a woman with flaming red hair. For a moment, she was alive again in my memory: a head tipped back in laughter, warm arms, hands worn and callused from working in a garden. If Delia was here...was the house where I lived the first thirteen years of my life truly the one across the street? I turned and walked towards it. I felt like I was watching myself from over my left shoulder, as if this was a dream or happening to someone else.

Flaking gray paint charred by fire came away under my fingers as I pushed open the front door. I wish I could say it was empty, that I walked away with only the sorrows of a barren home half-devoured by fire, windows shattered from concussive waves. Instead, there were more bodies I recognized: Aunt Sofronia and her daughter, my cousin Rhaab. I hadn't seen them since my parents moved us to Helike, but I remembered calls on every birthday, cards on every holiday. In the summer, Sofronia always let Rhaab, my sister, and I pick peas in the garden, even knowing that at least half of the peas were going into our mouths.

I stepped back and closed the door on a pain I didn't feel, noting Thaïs's absence. I heard a cry in the distance, ragged and pained. Immediately, my adrenaline kicked into high gear and I hustled in that direction, head swiveling back and forth to be certain this wasn't an ambush.

Around the back of an old barn, Thaïs knelt at the side of a soldier in a government uniform. It was easy to see his wound, a great dark stain spread across his gut. The culprit was nearby, a corpse still clutching the shotgun he had held in life.

They always cried for their mother in the end. Agony and death have a way of reducing us back to when we were born, whether by feeble age or by the cruelties that take the young before their time. I walked over to his side, where Thaïs crouched, holding his hand. He looked so terribly young, face pale and twisted in a grotesque pain.

That ‌is war, yes? Children fighting children, because adults who will never have to fight themselves say it will be so. In Astera, they tell me death notices for families come in the mail. No politician has ever had to look a mother or father in the eye and explain why their child is coming home in a box. Perhaps that is why they are so quick to start wars and so slow to end them.

I felt the cost deep in my bones at that moment, looking down at the dying boy. Thaïs tried to say words of comfort, smoothing his short hair back and holding his hand.

People might assume I thought of all the dead he and his men had left in their wake, in the moments before I pulled the trigger. How can you think of such an enormity?

I thought of nothing at all.

Thaïs sprang to her feet, pivoting to face me. "Karsa!"

Her eyes searching my face sparked motion in my thoughts. I glanced down at what I had just done, the body limp and lifeless, a hole blown below his jaw. "Would it have been better to let him suffer?"

Her shoulders slumped slightly even as she looked down at the ground, where blood had turned the dusty footpath to mud. "Maybe not." Then she looked up at me and I could see echoes of my own hollowness etched in the lines of her face. "We should tell the others that the enemy is gone."

"Are they?" I gestured with one hand to the carnage all around us.

Thaïs shook her head and started trudging back the way we had come. I followed her, making no move to brush the ash from my shoulders or hair. The horrors lingered closer than our shadows. I forced myself not to think of Sofronia and Rhaab's last hours or how easily they could have been my own or my sister's, if we had not moved to Helike.

I took those thoughts and crammed them into the box in the back of my head, locking them away beneath chains of willpower and denial. As we walked, I fumbled with the little book of terrible cardboard matches, as if I could somehow smoke away the trembling in my hands. Thaïs pulled out her hip flask, filled with the harsh white lightning brewed in Zelen. She took a swig as we neared the hill with the mortar team, swallowing it down and then coughing hard. Then she held it out to me, wiping the back of her cleaner hand across her lips.

It was thoughtful, but I shook my head. I clicked the radio the moment we were about to enter line of sight with the position. We were already probably in the scopes of several lookouts. "We're approaching back from the south."

"Copy that."

The artillery team clustered around the top of the position behind their sandbags, checking in almost constantly with their lookouts and the other fighters moving around the valley. Ioudas was crouched behind the wall of sandbags with his rifle in his lap as Hekabe and her sister Lydia sorted ammunition for the mortar. These were more sophisticated than the ones we had used in Seisa, taken from the enemy. Semele was there, ready to help load the truck if it was time to advance. Not an inch of ground in Zelen was truly flat except for where generations of farmers had sculpted terraces, so there were plenty of places for us to relocate to.

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Thaïs and I were both winded by the time we made it to the top, more because we'd been on our feet for so long than the simple exertion of climbing one great hill.

Semele was the first to greet us, grabbing her flask as Thaïs and I slid down the embankment guarding the mortars and dropped behind the sandbags shoring up the earth, landing in our little nest.

Hekabe and Lydia were visibly relieved. Mnason, the leader of the ground teams, didn't even look up from his radio and maps. He was a practical young man, made indifferent to the pain of the people around him by the passing of the fighters who had already bled and died.

"What did you see?" Ioudas asked. "Are they still there? Did you find anyone—"

"Just the dead." I thought of the boy as I spoke, but couldn't bring myself to speak of it. I sat down hard on a rock, staring down at my hands. It was the first time I had killed anyone in cold blood. There were probably a few I had sent to the next world in the street fights in Seisa, but that was different: pulse roaring in my ears, adrenaline pouring through my body, the heat of battle. This was just...a click.

One little click, a bang, and an ending to another human's life. I couldn't understand at that moment why I hadn't done as Thaïs had and tried to offer comfort to the suffering. A sudden wave of nausea hit me out of nowhere, even as Ioudas handed me a lit cigarette sympathetically. We were far enough away from the ammo cans that he would risk one for me.

"Karsa?" Thaïs said quietly, kneeling at my side. She put a hand on my thigh and squeezed hard enough that I could feel it through the numbness, not even realizing it was the one covered with blood. I looked down and saw it, dried to that flaking rust on her skin. I felt such a horrible guilt at that moment for bringing her into my world.

Tears dripped down my cheeks. I felt no sorrow, no pain, nothing except the rolling droplets. I wiped at them with my ash-covered hands, but somehow they refused to stop.

Thaïs threaded her fingers through my hair and rested her head against mine. She made no promise that it was alright or that it ever would be again. Instead, she just said, "I'm here."

"I am fine," I said. My voice sounded normal. I was a machine that had sprung a leak, not some thinking, feeling thing. Or perhaps that was just what I told myself. "Just tired."

It lingered in my bones, an exhaustion that defied description, nor could any amount of rest banish it. Even as I tell you now, I feel it still.

Thaïs released me reluctantly and Semele gave me a sympathetic hug when I stood up, ignoring the ash print I left on her clothes.

"Did they retreat?"

"They did." As soon as my report started properly, the tears ended. "Halfway back to the pass from what we could see with the binoculars on entry to the area. They took a more elevated position and did a decent job concealing themselves. They'll be hard to target."

"We'll have to relocate to keep hammering them. I'll radio my unit in reserve to move into the village," Mnason said. He was the oldest of the lot, nineteen, and spoke with an authority that most needed gray hair to win. "We can at least secure it and see to the dead. Hopefully, they didn't have time to poison the wells. We could use the water."

Thaïs looked over at me. "You okay to keep pushing, Karsa?"

"We can't give them time to rest and recover," I said, pulling the folded map out of my back pocket. I spread it out on the rock I had been sitting on, pulling a butcher's pencil out of my jacket. I sketched out the path the enemy had taken and where they were holed up.

"Be careful in those open fields or avoid them if you can," Semele advised with an experience equally beyond her years. "They're a good kill zone and sometimes they mine behind them, to keep the approaches impassable. We've lost a couple people to Bouncing Bears."

"What are those?" Thaïs asked, frowning.

"You step on a plate and it sends a little bomb full of shrapnel bouncing up to about waist height. Then it explodes." Ioudas shuddered slightly. "Bad news."

Thaïs let out a hiss of breath. "No shit. Any way to tell that they're there?"

Semele shrugged. "When they go off."

I sighed. It was just one more complication, one more danger to deal with. I took a long drag on the cylinder of blessed nicotine between my fingers, letting my lungs fill with it. Then I exhaled. My mother used to call them coffin nails, with their cancerous smoke. Now it hardly seemed to matter. I would not live long enough to die of that. Someday, maybe someday soon, I would be that body in the burned out building.

Will I cry for my mother?

Mnason approached me as the others broke off to see to their various tasks. It would take us a little bit to get everyone coordinated and moving. Thaïs took the time to have another couple of drinks and talk with Hekabe, though she kept an eye on the pair of us.

"What happened down there?" His tone was curt, but that was normal for him. He didn't seem to have a gentle bone in his body. Even his jokes were bleak and sharp, a sort of tired sarcasm uttered through the lips of a corpse.

"I killed an enemy. He was the only one, left wounded by his comrades."

"Either they abandoned faster than we thought or he really pissed off his unit." Mnason didn't smile, still looking at me. He leaned close enough for me to smell the tobacco he chewed. "First time?"

I knew he meant the killing. "First time," I confirmed.

"You won't feel a thing after a while, except recoil. Like shooting rats in a trap." He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then stepped away.

Thaïs approached me after he left to give his recommendations to his own people. "You okay?"

"He kept his fangs away." I looked up at her. "You should go back with Semele, Thaïs."

She stiffened. "Why?"

I turned to face her and caught her hand with my own. "You cannot help Zosime arrange for better weapons and other things we need if a landmine takes you."

"What about you?"

"I can't do what you do, Thaïs. With people, I mean." I looked up at her. "And you can't do what I can do."

That tightness settled in her voice. "And what's that?"

"Turn my caring off."

She shook her head and pulled away from me, fists tightening in anger. "I go where I want, Karsa."

"Please," I said softly. "I want one of us to be able to feel something when this is over, and I already can't."

She sighed and let the anger recede out of her hands like the tide. She touched my shoulder, fingers featherlight on the stained canvas of my jacket. "That's why you need me, Karsa. So you remember."

"I will never remember again if you are dead." I took a deep breath. "It is only for a little while. You'll see me again in a few days, maybe a week."

Thaïs swept her hair back out of her face. It was hard to remember that once, she had worn her nails manicured and that once, we had lived different lives, never meant to intersect. We were just here, existing, without a past or a future that seemed real. "I don't like this, Karsa."

"Neither do I, but we both know this is how it has to be. Sostrate wanted us to keep the revolution alive. That has the best chance of happening if you are with Zosime and I am here."

She laughed, but not with humor. It was the sharp bark of pain leaving the body. I knew that meant she was about to cave. "Always the revolution with you."

I shrugged. "As long as it is alive, I will be."

Thaïs shook her head slightly, a bittersweet curve to her lips. "Then I will make you immortal, Karsa."