Page 6 of My Tiny Human Wife

There is no privacy to be found in a tower as crowded as ours, and so Avery and I are forever within arm's reach of each other now, whether either of us intends it or not.

The sanctuary runs on a rhythm we assembled together without ever drafting a plan for it. She wakes the place; I shut it down at nightfall. She tends the signal and the people; I tend the walls and the watch. A dozen times a day our paths fold across some shared trouble, a failing valve, a quarrel between exhausted strangers, a child who will not stop coughing, and just as often I notice that I have begun to look forward to the folding.

I start teaching those who can still stand how to shield those who can't. It is no army. It is a baker, a freight hand, a pair of farmers, and Kalen, who can rewire a relay blindfolded but holds a weapon as though it might turn and bite him. I drill them regardless, with a patience my own instructors never once wasted on me. Stance. Cover. When to hold a doorway and when to give it up. They are clumsy and frightened and they try, and trying, I have learned inside these walls, counts for considerably more than I was ever raised to believe.

Avery watches one of these sessions from the catwalk, arms crossed, and corners me the moment it ends. “You're teaching them to die well,” she says. “Teach them to live instead.”

I bristle on an old reflex. “A defender who fears death hesitates. Hesitation⁠—”

“Kills. Yeah. You've mentioned.” She doesn't retreat a single step. “But these people aren't soldiers and they're never going to be. Train them to hurl themselves at a line and they will, and then I'm burying the baker. Train them to buy time. Train them to run clever. Their job was never to win the fight. It's to still be breathing when you and I have finished winning it for them.”

I open my mouth to argue and discover I have nothing to argue against. She is correct, and correct on a level nineteen years of doctrine left no room for. Among my kind, a warrior who flees is shamed for the rest of his days. Avery has just told me, without a flicker of apology, that for these people fleeing is the bravest and most useful act available to them, and the galling part is that I know she's right. I rebuild the next session around her correction. The baker learns to fall back while covering the man behind him, and survives to drill it again, and I say nothing aloud, but I file away both the lesson and the careless skill with which she handed it to me.

We argue often after that, and I find, to my private bewilderment, that I enjoy it. Not the hostility of the early days but something keener and cleaner, two fast minds testing one another for the simple pleasure of the test. She calls my plans beautifully overcomplicated. I tell her hers lean on luck. “Luck,” she answers, “has kept this tower standing two years longer than any of yours would have,” and she is, infuriatingly, correct about that too.

We are not nearly as private as we imagine. I catch Jonah studying us across a planning table with the look of a man who has already placed his wager and is merely waiting to collect on it. Tess is less subtle; she informs Avery, loudly and within my hearing, that the scary one watches her like she hung both moons, then has the gall to wink at me while she says it. Even Mila has taken to announcing my entrance into any room by watching Avery's face to see whether it changes. It does. So, I am told, does mine.

Mila corners me herself one evening, grave as an officer delivering a briefing. “You should know,” she says, “that Avery smiles more since you turned up. She thinks nobody keeps track. I keep track.” Then she pats my forearm as though consoling me for some misfortune and strolls off, leaving me to absorb the fact that I have been thoroughly outmaneuvered by a child with a tactical interest in her guardian's happiness. I am at a loss for how to use the intelligence she has handed me. I keep it regardless, the way I have started keeping every small thing that brushes against Avery, filed somewhere I can return to later.

I ought to be alarmed by how plainly visible we have become. A Vakutan commander and a Coalition operator are permitted none of this, not by any law either of our peoples would recognize. Instead, standing in a crowded room full of people who have decided not to care what the two of us are to each other, I feel a thing I had not felt since long before the valley swallowed my soldiers. I feel that I have come home. It is a perilous thing to feel in the middle of a war. I allow myself to feel it anyway.

CHAPTER 11

AVERY

It begins with one sick child and turns into a catastrophe by nightfall.

By the time Tess pulls me aside there are six of them burning up, then nine, then a whole corner of the sanctuary trembling with fever. “It's the water,” she says, grim, peeling off gloves that won't help anyone now. “Something got into the melt tank. Bacterial, fast-moving, and I'm out of nearly everything that would touch it.” Nine people. Most of them small. Every one of them mine to keep alive, and the only thing standing between them and the worst of it is a field medic with bare cabinets, and me.

Torvak doesn't wait to be asked. He drains and seals the fouled tank, lashes a crude still together out of a spare heat exchanger to boil what little clean water we can manage, and carries the sickest to the warmest room himself, two at a time, as gentle as though they were blown glass. Tess directs. I improvise. The three of us move through the makeshift ward in a grim wordless choreography that would almost look rehearsed, if any of us had ever been given the chance to rehearse it.

A toddler I've watched Mila carry on her hip for two weeks goes limp in my arms partway through it, fever climbing past anything Tess can chart, and for one bottomless stretch I'm certain we've lost her. Torvak lifts her from me without a word, folds his enormous frame down around her tiny one to lend her what heat he has, and walks her slowly through the coldest hours until the fever finally breaks somewhere near dawn. He hands her back asleep and breathing even, and the look we trade over her small head is the first time I let myself wonder, openly, what he and I might have built in a world that wasn't working so hard to kill us both.

Then Tess hands me the choice I've been dreading. “There's a clinic eight hours south. Abandoned, but the drug locker may still be intact, and it's the only place in reach that could hold what these kids need.” Eight hours out, eight back, across open country thick with patrols, in the dead of winter. “Whoever goes might not come back,” she says. “And if nobody goes, some of these children don't see the week out. That's the arithmetic. I'm sorry. I hate it as much as you do.”

The room has gone silent around us. People are listening the way frightened people listen, straining for someone to promise them it will be all right. And one of the newer arrivals, a hard-faced man who lost his family to a Vakutan strike and has never once looked at Torvak without loathing, surges to his feet. “Why is she deciding?” he demands, stabbing a finger at me. “She's no doctor. She's no soldier. She's a girl who answers a radio. Who put her in charge of whether my nephew lives or dies?”

Before I can answer, before the fear has even finished climbing my spine, Torvak is there. He doesn't raise his voice. He has never needed to. “I did,” he says, and every head in the room turns toward him. “I have served beneath thirty commanders. I watched most of them spend lives the way other men spend coin. I have followed exactly one leader who weighs every soul in a room as though it were her own blood, and you are looking at her now. If you hold a better claim to this decision, stand and make it. Otherwise sit, and let the woman keeping your nephew alive get on with her work.”

The man sits. And the mood of the room turns, not against me but toward me, dozens of frightened people deciding all at once that if the fearsome Vakutan has thrown his full weight behind the girl who answers the radio, then perhaps she's worth following after all. Jonah starts assembling volunteers before I've managed a single word. Kalen puts his hand up for the supply run. So do four others. The sanctuary, which an hour ago was splitting apart at every seam, draws itself back together around one shared refusal to let the children die.

Later, when the worst of the triage is behind us and the fevered are finally sleeping and I'm so tired the floor keeps tilting, I find Torvak in the unlit equipment bay and I no longer have the strength to be careful. “You shouldn't have done that,” I tell him. “Given them one more reason to follow me. If this goes wrong now, it's mine. All of it.” He looks down at me, and there's nothing flat or guarded left in his face. “It was always going to be yours,” he says, low. “I only made certain they could finally see what I see.” We are standing too close. I know it, and I don't step back, and neither does he, and the air between us has gone thick and warm and impossible, and the single reason nothing happens is that Tess calls my name from the ward and the moment releases us. I walk off on legs that aren't quite steady, and I accept, fully, that I've run clean out of any ability to pretend this is anything other than exactly what it is.

CHAPTER 12

TORVAK

Avery informs me that she is coming with me, and she does not trouble to phrase it as a request.

“You'll want someone who can talk to the clinic systems if that locker's coded,” she says, already dragging on her heaviest coat. “And someone who knows this ground, and someone watching your back, which is three someones, so unless you've been hiding a squad in a storage closet, you're stuck with me.” I lay out every reason she should remain behind. The cold. The patrols. The fact that the station cannot afford to lose her. She hears all of it with the serenity of a woman who has already won the argument, then says, “Every one of those is also a reason you shouldn't go out there alone,” and she is correct, as she has a maddening habit of being, and that settles the matter.

We leave before first light on the station's one working crawler, and for eight hours the dead world unspools around us. Armstrong was beautiful once; you can still read it beneath the ruin. We pass a town the war hollowed out, its houses standing open to the snow, a child's sled abandoned mid-street, frozen laundry still pinned to a line no one will ever come to gather. Avery takes it all in and says nothing for a long stretch. “I used to think the worst thing war did was kill people,” she says at last. “It isn't. The worst thing is all of this. Everyone who got out, and everything they couldn't carry, just waiting here for them to come back. And they're never coming back.” I have crossed a hundred ruined places and never once let myself see them as she sees this one. I suspect, more each day, that she has been quietly remaking the way I see everything.

For a while she rides in silence with her shoulder set against mine, the crawler's heater steadily losing its war with the cold, and I am aware of every point where we touch, a warmth with nothing of the battlefield left in it. My whole life has trained me to register threats. Registering this instead, the plain fact of her beside me, feels like learning a language no one thought to teach me as a child.

We reach the clinic by midday, and the locker is whole, half a miracle, and we pack two crates with the medicine the children need and a third with whatever food the cabinets still surrender. We are loading the crawler when I hear them: engines, more than one, spaced with the discipline of a military patrol rather than the sprawl of a scavenger band. Coalition, by the formation. I pull Avery down behind the crawler and we hold as still as the dead town around us while the patrol grinds past at forty meters, close enough to make out the unit markings on their hulls, close enough that one badly timed cough would finish us both.

They should roll straight by. They very nearly do. Then one peels off to sweep the clinic, his boots crunching a path toward the precise corner we're folded into, and the time for stillness is spent. I move before he clears the wall. It is fast, and it is quiet, and it is done before his squad registers that he is gone. I drag him out of sight while Avery smothers the noise of the crawler waking, and we are rolling, lights killed, before the patrol thinks to wonder where their man wandered off to. A shot finds us anyway, late and lucky, and it is meant for her. I put myself between Avery and the round before the decision reaches the front of my mind. The impact catches me high in the shoulder, a hand's width from the old wound, and I hold us on the road through the white blaze of it, because the alternative is surrendering her to them, and that, I have discovered, is no longer something I am capable of allowing.