Chapter 44: The Squad, Later

Grier found him in the corridor outside the records wing, a slate of her own tucked under one arm, as always when she'd come to tell him something before he could hear it secondhand.

"Two names came through on this morning's visitor manifest," she said. "Corporal Hollis. Private Wren." She let that sit a beat before adding the rest. "Corps wants firsthand statements for the Corvale file. The same one Calen told you is teaching new techs. Someone above her decided a written report wasn't enough corroboration on its own. They'll be here most of the day, in and out of an interview room three doors from here."

Do they know I'm here.

"They know this is where you were posted. Whether anyone told them you'd be in the building today, specifically — I don't know. That wasn't my call to make either way." She studied him a moment. "I can arrange time with both of them, if you want it. I can also arrange for you to simply not be in the building. Either is a real option."

The file's become training material. Statements for the same file — is that a separate thing, or the same effort continuing.

"Same effort, different office," she said. "Calen's side builds the curriculum. This is Corps making sure the underlying record can survive someone challenging it later. A review board, an appeal, a reporter with the wrong clearance leak, whatever eventually comes asking. Nobody tells me which of those they're actually worried about. I've stopped assuming it's paranoia rather than planning."

He thought of the bench outside Marrow's office, Grier waiting there because she'd chosen to rather than because anyone had ordered her to. He thought of a wrench lifted off a shoulder at a motor-pool gate, and a name said aloud twice by a man bleeding through a field dressing.

I want the time.

* * *

Hollis was waiting in the corridor when the interview room's door opened, in field uniform rather than the pressed dress version Corps usually put visitors in, his sling long since gone but a stiffness in the shoulder he hadn't fully lost. He didn't offer a hand. He never had, and Ashfall-Zero had stopped reading anything into that months ago.

"They had me walk them through the crest kill four separate times," Hollis said, before the door had even finished closing behind him. "Same questions, different order, like they were checking whether my story would hold up different ways. I told them the same thing four times because it happened the same way four times. Then a tech asked me to describe your face going still right before you moved. Like it was a data point. Like I'd remember your face doing anything."

I don't have an expression to go still. You know that.

"I know that. She didn't, and it didn't stop her writing it down anyway — 'subject's affect flattened prior to discharge,' something like that. I watched her write a sentence about a face that isn't there, and she didn't even blink at doing it." Hollis's jaw worked once. "That's the part that got to me. Not the questions. Somebody's going to read that line in a classroom two years from now and think they know something true about you, and they'll never once have stood on that ridge."

Calen told me the file's required reading. I didn't know it had reached the stage of inventing details that weren't there.

"Neither did I, until this morning." Hollis leaned against the corridor wall, arms crossed, some of the old wariness in the posture even now. "Calder's Ridge got talked about for two years by people who weren't there either. I used to think that was the worst part. Everybody having an opinion about a thing they never saw. Now I've watched it happen to something I actually did see, in real time, and it's worse. At least with Calder's Ridge I could tell myself the story just drifted because nobody who knew better corrected it. This one's got me standing right here correcting it, and it's still going in the file wrong."

What did you tell them, when she wrote it down.

"I told her to fix it." Hollis almost smiled. "She thanked me for the input and left the line exactly as written. Apparently that's not how the form works." He was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again the edge had gone out of his voice. "I'm not telling you this because I want you to fix it. I know you can't. I'm telling you because I think you're the only other person in this building who'd actually understand why it bothers me — watching something true get filed as something almost true, and knowing the almost is going to outlive the true version because the true version isn't the one anybody wrote down."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I've understood that for longer than you have. I didn't expect to watch you learn it too.

"Yeah." Hollis pushed off the wall, rolling the stiff shoulder once. "Small mercies, I guess. At least I know who to complain to." He paused at the end of the corridor. "Here's what I've got, anyway. Whatever they write down about that day, I know what actually happened. That's not nothing. It's just not enough, either." He didn't offer a hand this time either, but he faced the mask a beat longer than the exchange required before he turned and went to find whoever was walking him back to the transport.

Ashfall-Zero stayed on the bench a while after Hollis's footsteps faded, turning the exchange over, looking for the seam where it should have hurt more than it did, and not finding one. Hollis hadn't come to relitigate Calder's Ridge. He'd come because a file was being built wrong in front of him and he needed to say so to the one person in the building who'd understand what "wrong" meant.

* * *

Wren found him afterward at the same bench outside the records wing, dropping onto it beside him with none of Hollis's careful distance.

"They asked me the exact same four questions Hollis is probably complaining about," she said, without being told he'd already heard. "I gave shorter answers. I don't think that made the tech happy." She knocked her shoulder lightly against his arm. "I brought you something. Don't get excited, it's not good."

She held out a small folded square of paper — a hand-drawn map, crude, clearly done in a hurry on the back of a mess-hall menu, marking a fountain, a market square, five stick figures labeled only the ghosts.

Where did you get this.

"Ilsen drew it. He heard from somebody who heard from somebody that you've been going into some town near your new posting, and apparently there's a children's game involving hiding your face. He thought that was the funniest thing he'd heard all month and made me promise to bring you a map in case you ever wanted backup." She grinned, unrepentant. "I told him you probably didn't need tactical support to lose at tag with a bunch of ten-year-olds. He said that was why it was funny."

He held the folded paper for a moment, turning it over, putting the undignified kindness of it away somewhere he didn't yet have a name for.

Tell him I'm undefeated.

"I'm telling him you got tagged once and are lying about it." She laughed. "It's good, seeing you have something like that. A town. A game with kids in it. None of us really had anything like that at the Ninth Front. It was all just each other, and then whatever came through the wire." She sobered slightly, though not all the way. "Hollis give you the whole speech about the file?"

Most of it.

"He's not wrong to be angry. I'm angry too, honestly, I just don't carry it the same way he does. Never have." She was quiet a moment, watching a records clerk cross the far end of the corridor with an armful of folders. "Can I say something and have you not turn it into a bigger thing than it is?"

Say it.

"I used to be scared of you. Actually scared, not the polite kind." She said it evenly. "I'm not anymore, and it's been long enough now that I don't think of it as something that changed. It just feels like it was never really true to begin with, even though I know it was. You're one of maybe four people I'd actually trust to tell me if I was about to do something stupid. That's not nothing." She bumped his shoulder again, lighter this time.

He sat with that, the folded map resting on his palm.

I heard it. I'll keep it.

"Good." She stood, brushing off her uniform, half a step toward wherever she was due next. "Don't lose to a ten-year-old on my account. Ilsen will never let either of us hear the end of it."

She left him on the bench with a badly drawn map of a town he'd started, without quite deciding to, thinking of as somewhere that was his.

* * *

Grier found him there again as the light outside started going long, a transport manifest confirming both squadmates had cleared the gate on schedule. She sat without waiting for an invitation.

Hollis is angry at a filing clerk on my behalf. Wren brought me a map to a children's game drawn by a man who's never met me. He held up the folded paper. I don't have a category for either of those, and I've stopped minding that I don't.

"That's most of what a real relationship actually is," she said. "People doing small, slightly ridiculous things for you that don't fit anywhere on a form." She glanced at the map without asking to hold it.

He folded the map back along its worn creases and put it in the same pocket the wooden bird had once ridden, months and one war ago. The other thing the day had left him rode less comfortably. Two signed statements about a day he'd lived, in words he would never be shown, already on a transport clearing the gate — joining a file that was teaching strangers who he was, one line of which had never been true. Hollis had told them to fix it. The line was still there. He turned that arithmetic over once, at his own door, and could not make it come out to anything smaller than it was.