CHAPTER 12: THE COST

  The cots were the hardest part.

  Seven empty cots. Still made. Still bearing the impressions of the people who'd slept in them last night. The creased wool, the divots in straw mattresses that held the shapes of bodies that would never return to fill them.

  The legion didn't pause for the dead. By tomorrow, someone would strip them. Fold the blankets. Remove the personal effects, the small evidence of a life in progress. A sharpening stone. A letter from home. A pair of socks with a hole darned by someone who cared about the man who wore them.

  And then the cots would just be empty cots, and the seven would be names in a ledger, and the cohort would keep marching.

  Senna sat on her cot and stared at the one across from hers. Donal's. I hadn't known they were close. I hadn't known Donal well enough to know who he was close to. He'd been the stocky kid with the axe. The one who took the weapon that replaced finesse with commitment.

  "He told me about his mother," Senna said. Her voice was quiet. Flat. Not her normal controlled and calm. The flatness that came when the grief had run its course and shut down. "Last week. He said she made bread every morning. Said he could smell it from his bedroom. Said the best part of waking up was that smell."

  She paused. Looked at her hands.

  "He'll never smell it again."

  Corvin was on his cot. Face turned to the canvas wall. He hadn't spoken since the pit. The cut above his eye had been cleaned and closed with a strip of adhesive someone had pressed onto the wound with quick, impersonal hands.

  His silence worried me more than Senna's grief. Grief moved through you. Silence was a shutdown. The sudden, total quiet of something that had stopped without being told to, something broken at a level you couldn't reach from the outside.

  Kel sat on his cot and cleaned his longsword with methodical care. The cloth moved in long strokes, each one removing a layer of dried blood, revealing the steel beneath in stages. Not hurrying. Not delaying. Working through the task the way a soldier maintains his kit.

  He'd glanced at my arm once. The torn sleeve. The wound beneath that was already closing, the tooth marks shallow where they should have been catastrophic. His eyes had noted it the way they noted everything. A data point, stored, cross-referenced with the growing collection of things about me that didn't fit.

  He didn't ask. The question lived in the space between us, patient and permanent.

  I unwrapped my arm in the corner of the tent, facing the wall. The tooth marks had sealed. New skin, pink and thin, covered what had been exposed muscle four hours ago. By tomorrow, the marks would be scars. By the day after, they'd be barely visible.

  I rewrapped the arm with fresh cloth. Added extra layers. Made sure the wound looked appropriately injured. A man maintaining his cover, managing the gap between what his body was doing and what his body was supposed to be doing.

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  The gap was getting wider.

  I couldn't sleep. Again.

  The warmth sat in my chest like a banked fire. Still there. Hours after the pit, hours after the beasts and the dying and the flood of energy that had filled the void to its highest point. Still there, barely diminished. The reservoir Aldric had been building, session by session, had received its largest deposit and was holding it.

  Lying on my cot in the dark, I could feel the warmth the way you feel a second heartbeat. Present. Constant. Part of the body now, so integrated that I'd have to concentrate to distinguish it from normal sensation.

  The cot springs creaked when I breathed. The canvas ceiling hung six feet above me, close enough to touch if I sat up. Twenty-three people breathing in the dark. Minus seven. The subtraction changed the sound. Fewer breaths, more silence, the sound of a room that was emptier than it should be.

  I thought about Michael.

  Eleven years old, sandy hair that Rachel kept trying to tame and he kept letting grow, the gap between his front teeth that the dentist said would close on its own. He had this habit of building things with Lego and then dismantling them immediately, not because he wasn't satisfied but because the building was the point. The finished product didn't interest him. The process did.

  I'd watched him do it once, during one of my summer visits. Sat on the floor of his room in the big house in Colorado while he assembled a spaceship from a set that was rated three years above his age. His hands moved with a focus that reminded me of myself. Not thinking about the individual pieces. Just letting the pattern emerge from the work.

  He'd finished the spaceship. Looked at it. Nodded once, satisfied. Then, with the same careful attention, taken it apart piece by piece and sorted the pieces back into the box.

  "Why?" I'd asked.

  "Because then I can build it again."

  I hadn't understood at the time. The answer had seemed like something an eleven-year-old says when he doesn't have a better reason. But lying in the dark with seven fewer people breathing around me and the heat of dead beasts sitting heavy in my chest, I thought I understood. The spaceship was never the point. The capability was the point. Knowing you could build the thing, that was what mattered. Having the pieces. Understanding how they fit.

  Possessing the potential.

  The warmth beat steady against my ribs. I pressed my hand against my chest. The brand was a raised line of scar tissue, the lie that kept me alive. Beneath it, the void that should have held a Core. And inside the void, the reservoir, the stored energy of weeks of training and one terrible afternoon in a hole in the ground.

  I had the pieces now. Not all of them. Not enough. But more than I'd had yesterday, and more than I'd had the day before that, and something was building toward a shape I couldn't see yet.

  The question was whether what it was building would be worth the price.

  Seven cots. Seven names I should have known and mostly didn't.

  I tried to sleep and the warmth kept me awake and outside the tent the wind moved through the camp and the sounds of the army at night were the sounds of something that never rested. Boots on gravel, low voices, the distant clink of metal that could have been weapons or cookware or the maintenance of empire happening in the dark the way it always happened, unglamorous and essential and invisible to the people it kept alive.

  Sarah would be at school right now. Or would have been. I didn't know what time it was in Colorado, didn't know if time in Colorado still applied to a man who'd died on a factory floor and woken up in a world where the dead were counted by the number of empty cots in a canvas tent.

  Dad, are you even listening?

  She'd said that on our last call. The birthday call. I'd been half-present, phone wedged between shoulder and ear, hands busy, the conversation given whatever attention was left over. Not enough. Never enough.

  I hadn't been listening.

  I was listening now. Every sound. Every breath. Every creak of canvas and whisper of wind. Listening with the desperate attention of a man who'd learned that being present was the only thing that mattered and that he'd spent a lifetime being absent.

  The warmth held.

  I let it.