Niko actually laughs at that. Only a little, and it dies quickly, but it’s there.
I try not to look at him when it happens.
He talks in fragments, when he talks at all. It’s mostly practical questions. Things like if I’ve seen the green blanket, whether the formula tin looked low to me, and whether toddlers can survive entirely on toast and spite.
The first few days, I made myself leave before it got too late. Not because I want to, but because staying too long started to feel like crossing into something else, something heavier than help. Niko doesn’t need replacing. He needs to be kept together long enough to start doing some of it himself again, and there’s a line somewhere in all this between supporting him and making it too easy to disappear into being looked after.
Back in my own quarters is usually when it all catches up to me. It’s not while I’m doing things, but when I stop. I sit on the edge of the bunk with my hands braced on my thighs and feel the whole day weigh on me in bits.
Cassie is gone, and Niko is barely holding it together. Vladimir is sleeping in my arms and too young to know why shit has changed. Mason transferred, and everybody pretended that wasn’t what it was. Ari is still away, still out there somewhere, completely unreachable.
I think about him a lot in these moments.
About the way he’d move through the flat, efficient, infuriating and already three steps ahead of the next problem. The look he’d have on his face if he saw Niko trying to cope through everything, and the fact that I want him here with a force that sits somewhere deep inside me and never really goes away.
I haven’t written to him. Even if I could, I wouldn’t know where to start without making a mess of it. Dear Ari, your brother is falling apart, and your nephew prefers me to the kettle. Also, I miss you enough to find it physically painful. Hope the exercise is going well.
Not ideal, really.
So I sleep instead. Or I try to. And when that fails, I get up and do something else until my body gives in. Then morning comes and I do it all again.
Work. Quiet. Slipping away when I can. Bottles washed. Plates made. Niko reminded, gently, to eat. Vladimir carried round the sitting room while he points at things and tries to steal my watch. All of it, small, necessary jobs repeated often enough that they start to feel like structure.
This, apparently, is what being useful looks like when there’s nothing left to fix.
And until Ari comes back, it’ll have to be enough.
TWENTY-FOUR
ARSENY
Coming back is always stranger than leaving. Leaving is simple. You get told where to go, what to take, how long you’re meant to be gone, and then you go. Coming back is slower. Equipment gets handed over in pieces, tents come down one by one, and by the time the last transport leaves, the place already looks as though we were never there.
I give the final instructions, get on the transport with the same bag I left with and about six weeks less patience than I had when we started.
By the time the base comes into view through the dirty window, evening has started to close in.
I get off the transport, shoulder my bag, and head inside. I get a few nods, one from a tired-looking officer saying something routine I don’t properly hear, the usual little bits of normality trying to settle back into place.
Then I start walking properly through the base, taking note of how the whole place feels slightly wrong. I don’t go to my quarters first; there’s no point pretending I would.
I know where Niko’s flat is, and I’ve thought about it often enough these past weeks that I could probably find it in the dark with my eyes closed. The bag stays over my shoulder as I cross the short stretch of ground between the barracks and the building.
There’s a light on inside the flat, so I knock once and wait.
I’m ready for Niko to open the door looking hollowed out. I’m ready for the flat to feel wrong, for Vladimir to be crying, for the grief to hit me properly the second I step inside.
What I’m not ready for is Caiden.
The door opens, and for a second my brain doesn’t know what to do with what it’s seeing.
He’s just standing there in a T-shirt and joggers. One hand on the doorframe, looking at me like I’m the impossible one.
It takes a full ten seconds for the picture to make sense. “What—” That’s as far as I get. The shock is physical, I feel it in my chest first. It’s hard enough to stop everything else. My hand tightens on the strap of the bag, and for a second I genuinely think I might be imagining him.
Which would be embarrassing on several levels.
Caiden is here, and he looks just as blindsided as I feel. His eyes scan over my face quickly, not in any way that would look like panic to somebody else, but I know him well enough now to see him checking for damage anyway. “Ari,” he says.
