Imperial Capital of Giad

September 7th, Stellar Year 2140

This was to be Shin's last night in Barrier. He would make it count.

The sky was clouded over tonight, an ink-black ceiling without a single star in sight. Guards patrolled along lit pathways. They swept flashlights through the dark and turned their heads in all the right directions, but in terms of true vigilance, they were lacking. Too many uneventful nights had dulled their danger sense. Shin watched them from the top of the barracks, feet planted on a corrugated metal roof. Below him, a little over two dozen orphans slept on stiff fabric cots - all the other kids from the schoolhouse. Peering ahead, he traced out the path of least resistance to the command center.

His target.

Barrier wasn't the largest of the rebel's forward operating bases, but it was the most well-hidden. It was poised in the basin of an ancient caldera, one half of the base dug into the stone, the other half hidden by dense stands of pine trees. In the months since the rebels set it up, they'd used it as the staging point for countless raids and ambushes, effectively stalemating the Empire's entire northern front despite their forces being five times smaller.

Shin had already relayed the base's coordinates back to his masters in the Nouzen compound. After he and the other children were transferred off tomorrow - as they had been repeatedly over the two months - the clan's artillery battalion would fire enough shells to pulverize the whole caldera into loose soil.

But before that happened, his master demanded one last gift from him.

Ambush parties moved constantly in and out of Barrier, such that there were more soldiers out of the base than were in it at any one time. On a night like this, there were liable to be at least a dozen rebel units deployed to the field, lying in wait for Imperial patrols. Shin was to learn their immediate positions and movements.

"They fight without honor, striking from the dark like rats. We will kill- them- all. As a lesson in battlefield decorum if nothing else."

For Shin, the bottom line was that bad things only ever happened when he didn't do as he was supposed to. The schoolhouse burned because he'd been too cowardly to do the right thing. He wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

The guard passed below him, walking by the barracks door. He shone his light into the darkness of the forest ahead and behind.

But not above. Shin had learned quickly that people rarely looked up. When the guard got a good distance away, Shin dropped onto the ground with a silent thud, cloud of dusty soil thrown up at his feet. He scanned the field, noted the count and positions of all the flashlights in the dark. He began to move.

Quick and silent were his footsteps. Even before he underwent his master's training Shin was naturally quiet; a gift from his Onyx blood. But those six months had sharpened his talents to a ghostly, supernatural edge. The thick forest that kept the base hidden from Imperial eyes hid him from the rebels' as well. Venerable trees shielded him from sweeping lights, dense shadows from night-blind eyes and soft moss from untrained ears.

Shin had been caught once before, a couple days after he and everyone else arrived here. The guards let him off, thinking he was just a young boy who got lost wandering around after dark. He couldn't count on the same clemency if he was spotted again. Since then, reports had reached Barrier concerning three other rebel bases: Delta-2; Horizon; Liberty's Crossing. Each now lay in ruins, suddenly and inexplicably destroyed when they'd been perfectly hidden for months beforehand.

Accusations of intelligence leaks and the presence of spies were already running rampant. Nobody had put two and two together yet to point out that these were all places where Shin and the orphans had been passed between like hot potatoes, but they'd realize it quickly enough if they saw him out right now.

So Shin wouldn't be seen.

The forest gave way to excavated earth and striated stone, buildings to hollowed-out rooms of bare rock supported by wooden pillars. Natural light didn't reach this far into the artificial cavern, which meant more electric lamps, fewer shadows, less cover. Shin timed his movements on a week of late nights spent watching the watchmen. In light of the recent news, these guards took their duties more seriously than most others would, spending at least half again as much time moving than they did sitting down. But their habits were still predictable.

The command center was positioned at the farmost end of the cavern, with only two entrances and exits each defended by standing troops at all hours of the day and night. It should have been impossible to sneak into, but the designers had made the mistake of putting the ventilation shafts above the doorways. Apparently they hadn't understood the simple fact that people never looked up.

Shin chose the left side as his point of entry, the two guards there already engaged in animated - distracting - conversation.

"-no, no, I don't want to hear it," said one, shaking his head in disgust. "Every goddamn day it's more of the same. This base got hit, that base got hit, these guys got ruptured. I'm done with it. I'm just done."

"What do you mean, 'done?'" replied the other, her voice so exasperated it edged into shock. "You're fighting this war, how can you just bury your head in the sand about everything that's happening in it?"

"No, I'm not fighting. I'm guarding the same door I've been guarding all week, looking at nothing, seeing nothing, and damn well shooting nothing. You telling me about the hundred people our side lost yesterday isn't gonna help me do that any better. All it does is put me in a shitty mood."

The woman turned her entire body to face the other rebel, mouth dropping open with disgusted disbelief. Shin chose that moment to dart past her. He reached the back-wall and shoved himself flush against it.

"Well excuse me for not considering your precious fucking mood, Holt. I should have realized that the state of our war isn't nearly as important as whether or not you've got a smile on your stupid shit-for-brains face."

The stone would have been unclimbable for hands larger than Shin's, and the ventilation ducts likewise too narrow for anyone much older. He thought idly that this was probably yet another reason Shin had been chosen and trained for this assignment; small bodies could fit into far more places.

"Morale, Andrea. Just consider that, will you? The only thing you and about a hundred other guys on base will talk about is all the ways we're getting fucked. You don't care about what battles we're winning, no, nothin' like that. What effect do you think that has on morale? When everyone starts to believe that the Empire really can see ten moves ahead of us like it's goddamn chess, what do you think's gonna happen?"

"Come up with all the excuses you want, asshole. But you know I'm right. We're soldiers. It's our duty to know as much as we can about the state of the war."

"And I guess you can come up with all the platitudes you like too. Look, as far as I'm concerned, my only duty is watching this door. So if you could stop talkin' to me so I can do that undistracted, I'd appreciate it."

An appropriate sentiment, given Shin's activities tonight. Also an untimely one; he was already ten feet down the vent by then.

As luck would have it, the shafts ran over every room in the command center, including the war room. Luck also had it that the shafts were toe-to-top choked with dust, thick as a carpet and smearing in his clothes. He did what he could to sweep it aside before he opened up the grate into the war-room, but a fine layer of it remained to spill out over the operations table. Something he couldn't afford to worry about just yet.

He dropped down onto the floor, knees bent at the landing, one hand bracing on the stone. He ignored most everything except the presenting theater. The maps on the table were his target. He put the Para-RAID to his cheek and activated it, cool blue glow igniting over the darkness.

".:Master:." Shin said softly. ".:I've made it in:."

".:Then speak:."

".:Yes sir:."

He glanced over the maps. They were the length and width of his arm fully extended, laminated and covered in marker-drawings. Notes, mainly, outlining troop positions, planned movements, predictions of enemy forces.

Shin's education was by most metrics an incomplete one. His parents taught him language and courtesy, but they both died before they could touch on grammar. He could add, subtract, and multiply, but the schoolhouse burned before his courses reached division.

His academic history was a series of half-measures each cut miserably off at one end or another. All except for the one that led him here. For six long, single-minded months Shin had worked to prepare for this moment. The Nouzen clan hadn't given him grammar or division, but they made well sure the boy could understand the frank mathematics of war.

".:Squad, Feldress, coordinates 42,92, objective: proactive patrol:.

".:Platoon, infantry, coordinates 153,61, objective: route ambush:.

".:Squad, infantry-:."

Shin carried on through the list. It would have been faster to steal the maps themselves, but he was trained to leave no trace. A scatter of dust on some furniture could be rationalized away, but missing documents? Documents that just so happened to be annotated with the plans and positions of all currently deployed units? Not so easily forgotten.

".:-141, 12, objective: search and destroy:.

".:That is all, sir:."

There was no reply. Just a burst of static, then silence. The Para-RAID's soft blue glow bled to darkness. Shin blinked once, waited until his eyes had re-adjusted to the lack of light before he jumped up to the vent, caught the grate, climbed into the shaft. It was easier to make his way out of the command center than it had been to get into it - the guards were looking primarily in one direction, after all.

Shin took the same path back to the barracks. Past the guards and their roaming flashlights, beyond the breadth of the artificial cave and its electric lamps, back out beneath the clouded night sky. He knew he'd succeeded when he felt the cold slice of the wind on his cheek, cutting through his clothes, sharpened and focused by the curve of the caldera.

The backdoor to the barracks was propped open with an old book. A weatherbeaten copy of some child's fairy tale, the cover all but illegible and the pages not much better. Shin picked it up and dusted it off. The door closed shut behind him. He stood alone in the locker-room, maintenance closets to his right and showers to his left, dry and somehow forlorn. No thoughts were present in his mind. He set down the old book and peeled off his dust-smeared jacket and jeans, methodically - mechanically. He'd worn his nightshirt underneath.

The other kids slept fitfully. Shin passed by their double-bunks in ghostly silence. He glanced dispassionately down at the younger ones, saw the uncertainty in their sleeping faces, the raggedness around the edges that came from being always on the run and repeatedly, invariably cast out of every home they came to. None of the bases they were been brought to were willing to accommodate the kids for more than a week before they sent them off elsewhere, repeating the cycle.

The old schoolteacher and Vance and Tori all tried so hard to keep their spirits up. "Sightseeing, kids, we're sightseeing! Not many kids your age get to go to so many new places all the time!"

But Shin knew the truth of it. He suspected the some of the younger kids did too, even if they couldn't put it into words just yet. They were burdens; problems to be coped with until the logistics grew too troublesome, at which point they'd be foisted off to weigh down another set of shoulders. That was always what they were, Shin was sure, but at least before the schoolhouse burned, they were easily-managed burdens. The children had slept much more peacefully back then.

Shin came back to his bed and found Kette laying atop the covers, a small flashlight in one hand, the other propping up her head as she read out of a chapter book. Shin noticed she was closing toward the end.

"Out late again, Shin?" she asked softly, kicking her feet idly in the air.

Shin thought it was alarming how used to this he'd gotten. He barely thought twice at seeing her, or about sliding under the blankets beside her.

"Yeah."

"You know I can't sleep when you do that, right? It's very un-considerate."

Shin rolled his eyes. "Weren't you sleeping just fine before we became friends?"

"Nope," she said cheerily, and snapped her book shut. Her flashlight cut out a moment after as she shuffled beneath the covers to join him.

"What do you even do when you're out there, anyway?" she asked.

"I look at stuff. And think."

Both were true enough. Shin was out almost every night now, and most of the time it was to do exactly that. It wasn't like there was a vital piece of intelligence to leak every single night. Most of the time he'd be out there to watch the guards and figure out their patterns. Sometimes he didn't even do that. Sometimes he just stared out into the night and let his thoughts take him where they would.

"Do you really have to be wandering around at night to do that, though? Couldn't you think and look at stuff in here?"

"There's not much to look at in here."

Shin registered movement at the corner of his eye. He turned over. Kette was fidgeting her fingers, pressing them tentatively together.

"You could look at me."

She said nothing, and Shin said nothing, and he looked at her (as he was asked to) and she looked at him, and her face flooded with a blazing ear-to-ear blush.

"I was-" she started, stopped herself. "That was a-" she said again. Stopped herself again. And without another word whipped herself furiously around, turning her head toward the rest of the barracks - pointedly away from him.

Shin stared at the back of her head for a moment. Then snorted quiet laughter.

"So that's what you were reading, huh?" he said, smiling despite himself. The cover of her book, set on the nightstand beside the flashlight, read A Rose Blooms on the Battlefield: the Novelization.

She had paraphrased a line from the twelfth chapter, a scene after the protagonist, John, returned home from the war. He was newly married to the woman he met on the battlefield. But even after he'd left the war, the war hadn't left him.

His wife caught him when he sneaked off to his study in the middle of the night to sit at his desk by kerosene lamplight, staring at a medal clenched in his fist. A medal heat-scorched at one end and jagged at the other, closer to shrapnel than anything else. It was only faintly recognizable for what it was.

It wasn't his medal. It was his best friend's - blown off his body when an artillery shell pulverized him into meat and sent the piece of scorched brass flying back, striking John in the chest.

"What are you doing?"

"Just looking at some stuff. Don't worry about it."

"…Felix wouldn't want you to be like this."

"What?"

"He would want you to remember him, not to torture yourself over him. He would want you to be happy."

"I am happy. I'm married to the love of my life, aren't I?"

"Don't lie to me with a straight face. You promised to be true to me."

"You think I don't love you, Sarah?"

"I know you love me. And I love you too. But love alone doesn't make you happy."

"What the hell do you want me to tell you? He's gone and I'm not. There wasn't even enough left of him to bury. This medal might as well be the only proof he was even alive at all."

"You're the proof. You and me and everyone else who ever knew him. Felix's gestures, his actions… the little things that made him the person he was. The parts of him we mimic, even now.

"How you brush your hair behind your ear before you smile, just the same way he did. The way you crack those stupid jokes at the worst times just like he would, the idiot. You carry his memory, John. Not some broken piece of brass."

"…"

"Whenever you feel like looking at that medal, look at me instead. I can be your proof. Felix was my friend too."

"Did you like it?" Shin asked. "The book?"

Kette crossed her arms. The blush continued to burn on the tips of her ears as she refused to look at him.

"Yeah. I really like it," she answered.

"It's the best," Shin agreed. "It was my mom's favorite movie. She wouldn't let me see it though, so I read the book." For a moment his chest was lanced through with an aching, painful chill at the mention of her. "But after, I saw the movie anyway. My brother bought a copy for me. She didn't know that though."

Nor would she ever know it.

Shin remembered that scene again. John at his desk. John by the window, his face lit in harsh shades of kerosene orange, the jagged medal in his hand glowing like a piece of the sun. It wasn't that long ago since he saw the movie. Two years ago, maybe. He remembered the thought, word for word passing through his mind, wondering if it hurt John's hand to hold onto the sharp parts. It looked like it did.

"Hey, Shin?" Kette asked, turning herself around again to face him. "You're always so cold when you come back."

"What?"

"When you go out at night like this. To look at stuff and think, or whatever you do. You're cold when you come back. It's uncomfy."

"You know you can sleep in your own bed, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "Twenty-two," she counted.

"And tomorrow it'll be twenty-three. I'll just keep on telling you until you actually do it."

"Good luck," she said.

A pause, punctuated by nothing at all. The world seemed preternaturally silent in that moment, not even the sounds of breathing to fill it. A guard walked past the window. The beacon of his flashlight passed across the glass, shining light upon the barracks and all the children in it, pale and huddled in their blankets like tiny veiled corpses.

"You don't do anything bad when you go out, right Shin?"

"No," Shin told her. It was the truth to him. 'Bad' would have been staying put when he'd been ordered to act. Doing what he was trained to do could only be a good thing.

"Okay," she accepted. "It's just sometimes you get this look on your face when you come back. Like you're sad about something, or mad, or both."

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's a little scary sometimes."

"Sorry," he said.

"No, not like that. I'm not scared of you," she said, scoffing as if the very idea was ridiculous. "That'd be impossible. Nah, it's more like… when you look like that, I get scared you're gonna go away or something." She scratched her head. "I don't know."

Shin thought about that for awhile.

"I want us to be friends forever," she declared.

She took Shin's hand, warm fingers spreading across the cold flat of his palm, melting the ice in cartilage joints, a tingling heat thawing out the skin.

"I meant it, you know. When you feel like going out at night, to look at stuff or think or whatever, you can stay with me instead. I can be your proof."

Her eyes shone with an edge of deep steel. Her mouth was a firmly set line. There was no blush on her face anymore. No embarrassment, just a look of open-hearted resolve Shin almost couldn't stand to look at, it was so pure.

"Proof of what? Are you trying to act out the scene now?" he joked, because nothing sincere could come to mind right now.

Kette smiled shyly. "Maybe… we can't do it right unless we get married, though. You know. It wouldn't be authentic."

It was unclear to Shin just how long time stretched for a period after that. Whether it could be measured in seconds or entire minutes. He could feel the pulse of his heart. Could hear it, it was so loud, but his mind was too preoccupied to count the beats. His skin drew tight and hot, a flush across his back, and the only real thought he could put together was a repetition of, okay, okay, okay, the word repeating like a cadence, as if the ceaseless rhythm of it could reorient the shuffled-up mess of his brain.

"You know, people who get married stay together forever and ever. So if we did, we'd never have to stop being friends."

"Uh, Kette, only people who love each other get married. You know that, right?"

"Well, I love you," she said simply. Like it was a fact to her.

You would think that after four months of knowing Kette, he'd have gotten used to her bold, brash method of existence, that bulldozed straight past barriers and stunned into submission anything that showed resistance. You would think that, and you'd be wrong. Shin just looked at her in the moments after, face frozen over, mind reeling with the recoil of that simple four-word sentence.

Love was a complicated thing for Shin, even now at this young age - especially now. He and his brother and his mother had a special understanding of love. It was not something abstract like it was for many others. It was not an idea. It was a physical sensation that occurred inches left of the heart, a spreading warmth that scientists could have measured. Had measured, in fact, during the process of developing the Para-RAID.

And ever since his mother died, Shin had not felt love the way he'd known it. He'd started to believe he never would.

"Well?" Kette said, her voice outwardly impatient, but her eyes starting to waver, biting her lower lip to keep it from trembling. "You gonna say something, or what?"

"Do you really mean that?" His voice was gravely serious, his eyes as hard as they'd ever be at this age, though it would become a common look for him in not-too-far-off the future.

"Yeah," she said unhesitatingly. "Ever since the forest."

The thought crossed his mind that she must have been too young to know what love meant. It did not occur to him that he was a year younger than her.

"Do you love me, Shin?" she asked. Her voice was small. Her green eyes were intent.

"I…" Shin was going to lie. Lying would be easier. Less scary.

"I don't know," he said, and it was the truth.

She shrugged, not seeming too put out. "Well, do you like me, at least?"

Once again he tried to lie.

And once again he failed.

"Yeah," he said, eyes flitting up to meet hers, then glancing away because eye contact was just a little too much right now. "I like you, Kette."

"Good enough! We can work on it."

The time he first heard those words, Shin felt an ungodly mix of terror and anticipation, a shunt of dread in his chest and a bloom of runaway thoughts, because whenever Kette Svensdottir declared she'd 'work on' anything, it was always followed by an extreme share of violence, ill-conceived plans, and generalized chaos.

Now when he looked back on these memories, Shin felt only an iron-tight wish to be dead.

Happy Wednesday!

It's been a good day. I tried to mix up my morning routine by standing in the shower and just letting the cold water hit me straight off, instead of waiting for it to heat like I usually do. Shit woke me the FUCK up. Like I was hyperventilating at first, the shock was so intense, but it woke me up and put a pleasant endorphin buzz in my arms and legs. My mood was better today than it's been in quite awhile.

So do enjoy this extra chapter. As for me, I am going to enjoy throwing three hundred or so bullets at a few targets on the range in a couple hours. See y'all Saturday.

- Verbosity