Page 5 of My Tiny Human Wife

TORVAK

We rebuild what the raid broke before we permit ourselves to feel what it cost.

The south shutter is slag. The west fence stands open in two places. I work through the ragged end of the night with whatever the station can spare, and Avery labors beside me, and neither of us speaks the obvious truth: that the next force to find this place will be larger, and better armed, and less easily turned. Word moves fast along a frontier. A tower that can be taken is a rumor. A tower that broke a raiding party is a prize worth gathering an army for.

She is running on nothing at all. I have watched soldiers reach this state, the ones who have privately decided that rest is a luxury reserved for other, weaker people, and I know precisely how it ends. Near dawn she misjudges a simple lift, and a heavy coil of cable nearly carries her off the catwalk into the dark. I catch a fistful of her jacket and set her back on her feet before she has finished gasping.

“Sit,” I tell her.

“I'm fine.”

“You are not. Sit, or I will declare the catwalk forbidden to anyone whose name happens to be Avery.”

She sits. I count it among the night's victories.

We end on the floor of the control room with our backs against the warm housing of the power core, two enemies far too tired to keep performing hostility. For a while we don't reach for words at all. The beacon ticks above us. The wind has finally exhausted itself.

“Can I ask you something,” she says, which isn't really a question. “Why did you stay? Your own people will come looking eventually. You could have slipped out during that first storm and been halfway back to your lines by now. Instead you're mending my fence and letting a fourteen-year-old grill you about whether you breathe fire.” I weigh the honest answer a long moment before I give it. “Because I have spent nineteen years defending an idea,” I tell her. “Here, at last, I am defending people whose names I know.”

“His name was Elias,” she says, out of the quiet. “My brother. Eli.” She turns a spent power cell over and over in her hands. “He enlisted because he wanted to keep people safe. That was the entire reason. Not glory, not the homeworld, just—people. And the war swallowed him inside the first year and pressed a folded flag into my mother's hands, and I decided I'd keep people safe too, except I'd do it without ever once lifting a weapon, because weapons are the thing that took him.” A short, cracked laugh. “And now look. I've got a Vakutan special forces commander running my defenses. Real consistent of me.”

I let her words settle before I lay any of mine beside them. Among my people, grief is not given away cheaply; to speak a loss aloud is to ask the one listening to help shoulder it. I decide she has earned the asking.

“I had three brothers,” I tell her. “One remains. We are a military bloodline; it is the only thing my name has ever been permitted to be. My father measured each of his sons in campaigns won. I was good at the fighting, better than the others, and for the greater part of my life I mistook being good at a thing for the thing being right.” The cell goes still in her hands. She is listening the way almost no one bothers to. “Two years ago I began to doubt they were the same. Tonight, inside your tower, I stopped doubting it altogether.”

She doesn't rush to fill the silence with comfort. She only nods, slow, as though I've passed her something fragile and real and she intends to hold it with care. Then she tips her head back against the core, close enough that her shoulder comes to rest against my arm, too spent to recall she is meant to keep her distance from me, or perhaps too honest at this hour to keep performing the wish to.

I do not move away. I tell myself it is only because she needs the warmth a body offers. I am becoming a worse and worse liar where this woman is concerned.

Once, I would have logged this closeness as a weakness and corrected it without a second thought. A commander does not let an asset, still less an enemy, settle against his side in the dark. But I have grown tired of the male who lived by that rule, and that male kept losing the very people he had sworn his life to keep. So I let her stay.

We stay that way until the gray light seeps in, the enemy commander and the human who refuses to despise him, and somewhere in the long hush between our shoulders a thing puts down roots that neither side's command would ever pardon. I find I no longer care what they would pardon. I care that her breathing has finally gone slow and even against my arm, and that for the first time since the valley took my soldiers, I am warm.

CHAPTER 9

AVERY

The next convoy reaches us four days later, and this time we have a reputation walking ahead of us.

They stagger out of the white in the gray before noon, eleven souls drawn by the same beacon and the same rumor: that Seventeen takes people in. One of them is a wiry, sandy-haired kid named Kalen who introduces himself by immediately telling me everything wrong with my secondary relay and how he'd fix it. Another is a sharp, tired field medic named Tess, who takes one look at my overcrowded sickbay and starts sorting the worst cases before she's even shed her coat. I could weep with relief. Skilled hands are the rarest currency on this whole frozen planet, and the storm just delivered me two pairs at once.

More people means more mouths, though, and more mouths is the arithmetic finally turning against us. I count the stores three separate times hoping I've made an error. I haven't. At these numbers we have nine days of food, eleven if I let everyone go hungry. The core is dying by slow degrees. The medical stock is a joke I've stopped being able to laugh at. We've gone from a forgotten outpost to the last warm room on the northern frontier, and the frontier understands that now, and it will keep sending us its wounded and its orphaned until the weight of them caves us in.

Torvak and I work the rationing out at the same table, both our heads bent over the same grim figures, and somewhere along the way we quietly stop sorting the decisions into his and mine. He carries defense and the brutal logistics. I carry the people and the signal. The matters that fall between, we settle in a shorthand that built itself without either of us agreeing to build it. Jonah is the first to remark on it. “You two,” he says, watching us finish off each other's plans across the table, “are going to be a real problem for somebody one of these days.” He doesn't say it as a warning. He says it like a man enjoying the view.

Our first true test as a pair arrives that same evening. A feverish toddler needs the last of the antibiotics; so does a grown man whose leg wound has turned the wrong shades of red. Tess lays the impossible thing out flat and looks to me, and I look to Torvak, and without a single word crossing between us we land in the same place: the child. The man takes the verdict well, or makes a convincing show of it. Later I find Torvak sitting with him a long while in the dark, saying little, simply there, and I understand that sharing the choice with me was never about halving the blame. He meant to make certain I never had to carry the weight of it by myself.

No one stands up and declares it. It simply becomes true. By the close of the week, Beacon Station Seventeen isn't an emergency tower with refugees crammed inside; it's a sanctuary that happens to have a beacon bolted to its roof. Coalition civilians and families who fled my own side's advance sleep in the same crowded rooms, and a Vakutan commander moves among them and not one hand drifts toward a weapon anymore. If anyone wearing a uniform and a rank could see this place, they'd have a tidy word for it. Treason, most likely. From in here it only looks like a roomful of people refusing to die on the schedule the war picked for them.

And I notice him. That's the part I can't engineer my way around. I notice the particular quiet of his hands when he splints a child's arm, far too large for the task and somehow precisely gentle enough to manage it. I notice the way a crowded, frightened room loosens when he steps into it, as though the building itself has decided to trust him. I notice that I've begun saving the day's worst problems to bring to him last, after everyone else is asleep, because some part of me would simply rather face them with him than without.

He catches me at it one night. I'm watching him from across the control room and I forget to look away, and he glances up and finds my eyes already resting on him, and I don't break the look the way two careful enemies should. The moment holds a heartbeat too long to be nothing. Long enough, too, that neither of us can later call it an accident. He doesn't smile, not quite, but something in that gold gaze warms by a single degree clearly meant for me alone, and something low in me tips over, slow and quiet and impossible to take back, and I think, with perfect clarity: oh. Oh, no.

Not long ago I would have called this a death sentence, falling for the enemy at the heart of a conflict that wants us both buried in the frozen ground. Tonight, with the beacon humming and the sanctuary asleep and the warmth of that look still sitting on my skin, I can't make myself regret one single step that carried me to this exact spot. That ought to frighten me more thoroughly than the raiders did. For reasons I'm in no hurry to examine, it doesn't frighten me at all.

CHAPTER 10

TORVAK