Page 12 of My Tiny Human Wife

“She will bring an army,” he says.

“She’ll bring paperwork first,” I say, “and then an army.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “We have until the storm breaks. Days, maybe. Torvak, clever isn’t going to be enough now. We need a reason bigger than us for people to look at this tower and see something worth saving instead of something worth seizing.” I lower my hands. “We need to hand them a truth that’s louder than we are.”

I don’t know yet that we’re about to find one, buried in the station’s own dead records, waiting two years for somebody desperate enough to go digging.

CHAPTER 18

TORVAK

The staged wreck from the valley has never once loosened its grip on me, and now, at last, I have both the reason and the desperation to hunt down whoever built it.

I have carried the picture for weeks—the civilian hauler dressed in Coalition transit markings, the fragments seeded around it stamped with Vakutan ordnance codes, the whole grim tableau composed to press a single lie on whoever found it: that Vakutans murder the helpless and leave them to the ice. We did not. I knelt in that snow and I knew we did not. But knowing a thing and proving it are divided by a wide stretch of ground, and until Okafor stood in our control room promising to return with an army, I had permitted myself to look away from the crossing.

I can afford to look away no longer. If the Coalition means to seize this tower, then the only shield broad enough to cover seventy people is the truth about why the war threatening them refuses to end.

I begin with what the station holds. Beacon Seventeen has passed two years logging every transmission that crosses the northern coast, dutifully, automatically, a vast dull archive no one has ever had cause to read. Avery teaches me how to walk it. Kalen builds me filters. And slowly, across three sleepless nights, a shape begins to lift out of the noise.

The staged wreck was not the first. It was not the twentieth. Across two years, dozens of civilian sites have died in precisely the same grammar—an attack dressed in one side’s colors, salted with the other side’s ordnance, always found intact, always placed where a patrol or a refugee column would be certain to discover it and carry the outrage home. Coalition convoys blamed on Vakutan raiders. Vakutan settlements blamed on Coalition strikes. Each atrocity staged flawlessly to enrage the side that suffered it—each timed, I start to see, to land exactly when talk of a ceasefire had begun to gather weight.

Someone has been feeding this war. Not fighting it. Feeding it, how one feeds a fire he has decided must never be allowed to go out.

I carry what I have found to the one person who can test it from the outside. Dareth answers on the third night, his voice climbing up through the encrypted band from the relay shed, rough with cold and older suspicion. “You are asking me to pull sealed Vakutan intelligence and hand it to you inside enemy walls,” he says. “You grasp that if I am wrong to trust you, I have ended myself alongside you.”

“I grasp it exactly,” I answer. “I am asking regardless. The wreck that stranded me—pull the ordnance lot numbers. Tell me where those rounds were logged before they were scattered across that valley to frame us.”

The pause runs so long I am sure he has refused me. Then, quietly: “Give me a day.”

He takes two. When he returns his voice has changed, and I have known him long enough to hear the thing running beneath it—fear, the specific fear of a man watching the ground he stood on turn to water. “The lot numbers are ours,” he says. “Vakutan ordnance, signed out of a rear depot eleven months ago under a requisition I cannot fully trace. The authorizing seal climbs up into the high command, and then the trail simply goes dark. That ordnance was never issued to any unit that ever deployed. It was drawn, and it vanished, and the next time it appears in any record at all, it is fragments in the drift beside a burned human hauler with your commander bleeding out ten meters away.” A silence. “Torvak. Our own people staged the wreck meant to kill you. And they used munitions our own high command made disappear.”

I ruminate with that in the dark for a long moment, and something I have believed since I was a boy in uniform quietly dies.

It is not only the Coalition lying. It is not only mine. It is both, in concert, working the same grim instrument from opposite ends, and the music they are making together is a war with no possible victory and no permitted end.

There is more, and Dareth gives me the last of it before he closes the channel. He has been intercepting Coalition traffic out of the southern post—the same post that painted our beacon. Their intelligence officer, the one Avery named Okafor, has been filing reports upward that keep returning to her amended. “She flags a discrepancy,” Dareth says, “and a day later the official record shows no discrepancy ever existed. She is being managed, brother, by someone above her who does not want her questions asked. She does not yet know she is following the same scent we are. But she is no fool, and a woman like that does not stay managed forever.”

We end the channel. I sit alone with the sleeping tower around me and the size of what we have found pressing down like deep water. It is Avery who comes to me in the dark, as she has learned to, and she takes one look and does not bother asking whether something is wrong.

“You found it,” she says. “The thing big enough to be afraid of.”

“I found the reason none of it ever stops,” I tell her. “Yours and mine, both. The same hand, feeding the same fire, for a purpose I cannot yet fully see.” I look up at her. “It is not a war, Avery. It is a machine built to resemble one. And I believe we have just become the first two people in a long while with the means to prove it.”

She is quiet, taking the measure of it. Then something kindles behind her eyes that I have learned to love and to dread—the look she wears in the instant before she resolves to do something reckless and right.

“Then we’d better dig up the rest of it,” she says, “before Okafor’s storm breaks.”

CHAPTER 19

AVERY

The station has been keeping secrets far older than either of us, and tonight it finally lets me find one.

I am not even hunting a conspiracy. I am hunting a working memory core. Okafor’s visit shook something loose in me, and I have torn for two days into the station’s deepest systems, trying to understand exactly how much a full Coalition inspection could drag out of these walls. Beacon Seventeen was not always a civilian beacon. Before the war chewed up the northern coast, it was a military relay, and military relays are built like packrats—they never throw anything away, they only bury it deeper and forget where.

That is how I find the partition. A slab of storage the decommission order was meant to wipe and never did, tucked behind three layers of dead encryption that somebody in a hurry assumed no one out here would ever have the skill or the cause to peel back. I have both now. I have Kalen, who breaks ciphers the way most people crack knuckles, and I have a very good cause parked in the shadows across the room, watching me work with those steady eyes.

It takes most of the night. When the last layer finally gives, I sit back and read, and the floor of everything I believed tilts a few degrees and never quite comes level again.

The files are Coalition. Genuine, stamped, chain-of-command Coalition, routed through this relay years ago and quietly archived where no civilian was ever meant to look. And they do not match a single thing I was ever told.