Six
"How many times did we drill it?" Breda demands, pounding the steering wheel. "How many fucking times—don't leave your post, Havoc."
"Alright, gently. No need to aggravate the tendons."
"I know—I know. But if I hadn't gone—Breda, you should've seen this thing. It would've destroyed her in seconds."
"Sorry the light is such crap, Doc."
"Don't leave your goddamn post! How many times? You're lucky Rebecca got the truck together so quick. The hell would you have done, if we weren't waiting at that corner? Guarantee they saw that explosion in Central."
"Just try to keep it steady, Lieutenant. Best you can."
"Grumman will cover for us. Don't be paranoid. We knew this was a possibility going in."
"Sorry, Riza, honey. Keep still, and Knox will fix you right up."
"Yeah, it was a goddamn possibility! One to be avoided at all costs. And you blew the fucking contingency when you left your goddamn post!"
Riza hears it all but absorbs nothing. Her hand radiates pain, clawed around the damage.
Knox. Knox. Riza knows that name—it tastes like desert dust on her tongue, parched throat and sun-raw cheeks. The name generates a familiar heat as well—not the flicker centered in her palm or the storm she can still see in the after-images dancing behind her eyelids. No—this heat is veiled and somehow diffuse, encompassing as a blanket, inescapable but shot through with the sense that the surface was close enough. If she could only keep kicking.
Ishval. Less a thought than a somnolent whisper. The endless sunset of her life: heat rash and splinters beneath the calluses on each thumb, black-bitten nails, and the rasp of a spade in sand. Digging down and down, watching the slow recline of her canvas-wrapped rifle along the crumbled ruin of a wall. Stables, once, somewhere long ago—still straw in the loft, and they closed the half-door to conceal themselves. To hide their sins from God, she thinks, a little perversely.
Boys leering at her—peeking between flaps of canvas on trucks too broken to be anything but tents. Women were thin in the ground at the front—the first thing Riza noticed, after the heat and the dry and the stench. The first night she spent with her bayonet up her sleeve and her sidearm beneath the pillow. The second night she spent in a tower, high above and far away, watching the silent world through a scope.
But that—the tower, the boys, the heat, the desert dust—that is not Knox. Knox is a man: squinting through half-fogged glasses, pressing a thick finger into Riza's swollen purple skin, his hand easily encircling her wrist. Stubble tracks from one side of his jaw to the other, and there is more grey in his hair, more lines spidering from the corners of his eyes, than she would expect for a man of his age.
Riza blinks. Knox, and not Ishval. A truck, and Rebecca Catalina bent forward, lantern held high, chewing her lower lip. In the front seat, Jean is arguing with Second—no, First Lieutenant Heymans Breda. Jean has a cloth pressed to his neck, concealing the bruises that must be rising on his skin.
A smudge of antiseptic in the back of her throat: the field hospital. Doctor Knox, with captain's epaulettes, squinting over an open abdomen, an excised burn. It was only her second week in the country, second week away from the academy, a day into her first break from the line. They needed someone to carry the bodies—still called casualties, still seen as living, until a medic could etch the accusatory X across their foreheads.
Not living. Not dead. Hovering somewhere between until the final assignment.
Her first casualty, and her first friend: a sergeant snatched her off the line and shoved the handles of a half-collapsed litter in her hands. A mortar shell destroyed the boy's face, and his hands twisted up in the fragments of his jacket. He was still breathing, and she had heard that noise before, the guttural rasping moan of every inhale, and she leaned forward, towards the ragged hole that might have been his mouth. The split end of identification—she wiped blood from the silver indents. His name—or part of it—was Roy, and she poured a little water into his mouth. It dribbled out the side. Living or dead—and no telling until the medic arrived which one, which one.
No. She twists her head, shaking loose the grip of memory. Not Ishval, Knox, not Roy—
Except. The echo: which one.
"Lieutenant Hawkeye. Tell me if you can feel this."
Except it was Roy.
She looks up and meets Jean's gaze. The noise of the truck—the engine, the arguing voices, the crunch of gravel—fades down to a sharp point, a tunnel to amplify her whisper.
"Which one."
Now there is silence. Rebecca is trying to lean into her line-of-sight, lantern light dancing with the sway of the rumbling truck. Breda watches cautiously through the mirror.
"He said homunculus, and you said which one."
Jean staring back, mouth half-open. He closes it, licks his lips, inhaling.
"Riza—"
"You knew."
She can feel her own lips curling—disgust, revulsion, the tightness in her chest the precursor to a scream. She wonders, wildly, if she's even said anything aloud.
But she has said it—some of it—and she knows he can't deny. He looks away.
"Stop the truck."
"Lieutenant, look," Breda says, "we're taking you somewhere—"
But she's not interested in repeating herself. Riza pulls her broken hand from Knox's slackened grip and yanks the door latch down. Breda swerves to the shoulder, swearing, and the momentum tips Riza from the truck. She slams the door hard and then leans her forehead against the icy metal, trying to keep her feet.
A brief flurry of words inside the truck, and then Jean, cutting through them.
"She's pissed at me—let her stay pissed at me. Stay in the truck. I've got this."
So she pushes off, cradling her broken hand, spinning around to the tail and marching out. East, south? It doesn't matter. She needs distance.
"Dammit, Hawkeye, come back!"
"Get away from me!"
He jogs a bit to catch up—longer legs, longer stride, but she's not stopping. His hand closes over her shoulder, and she wrenches away.
"You knew, you son-of-a-bitch, and you let me believe—"
"If you give me just five minutes to explain—"
"Fuck your explanation!"
She shoves him, almost unbalancing herself, and Jean falls back, more from respect than her efforts. She can barely see him anyway—the weakness of tears blinds her and burns her chest. He reaches out again.
"You gonna walk all the way back to East City?" he demands. "C'mon, Hawkeye, don't be stupid."
"Get your hands off of me! You knew it was him—outside my apartment? You knew right away that it was him, and you said nothing. What the fuck is wrong with you—took me all the way out to the cemetery, bought flowers, put on this charade and the whole time, for what? How could you—how could you do that?"
He stops fighting back, arms limp at his sides, waiting her out.
"How could you let me believe—when you knew he wasn't gone? How could you just—?"
Her voice, brittle as ice, cracks and splinters beneath the weight.
"You knew what it did to me, and you still let me believe that he was—that I was alone, and he—"
She turns away from him, hand half-covering her face. Running in place for so long has only worn her down, and everything is rushing up from behind—no chance to dodge the impact. She opens her eyes and lowers her hand and stares down the empty road, too blurred to take any of it in at first.
Pinpricks of light separate from the main mass and spiral out in eddies and lines. They are less form than a lack of movement. Buildings and the roll of hill after hill stand squat against the sky, black on blue. She is looking for the end—the exact point, where the sky meets soil and swallows everything up.
East City—she lived there once, for years, and never thought of it as home. Central isn't home, and her father's house never was. Ishval, she thinks, but that's no one's home anymore.
Riza takes a steadying breath. The pain helps to keep her grounded.
"I wanted to tell you," Jean says quietly. "I was ordered not to. We all were."
"I saw Fuery at the station when I was leaving. Falman's in it as well?"
"Yes."
"And the Elrics?"
"They know, too."
Something like a laugh leaves her—but her throat is rough and tears it into a sob.
They are standing at the swell of a particularly steep hill: the road curves sharply right on its downward path, with only a half-hearted stone wall standing between the pavement and the black pit of valley beyond. Riza wonders now, as she often does when faced with such sudden shift in altitude, if the fall would be enough to kill her. A running jump, a swan dive down. If she can't see the ground, will she ever reach it?
How many towers in Ishval did she look out of, fighting the same intrusive thoughts? How many bricks, dropped from inches above her perch, did she watch descend, knowing the loose sand would muffle the impact and blunt her own chances?
"You're a wreck, Riza," Jean says. "You have been since we lost him. It wasn't my decision to keep you out, but I agreed with it. It was all we could do to keep you alive, and we had no proof to give you. Nothing. Until that week I came to Central with the boys, I thought we were on revenge."
"And now what? There's a chance it's a rescue?"
He is silent for a long while. A few meters behind, Breda's patience has worn thin, and they hear the engine's rumble die out. The cooling metal ticks, acting as the absent insect chorus. She is farther now from Jean and the truck than she was from Roy, only an hour or two ago.
"I don't know what we saw in that alley," he says at last, stepping through each word with strong caution. "I don't know if it really was him, or just a clever parlor trick. But I mean to find out. We all do."
East City, then the desert and the ruins of Xerxes, and then Xing, and somewhere far beyond it all is the rising sun. The first ray of light hits her face, and Riza snaps her eyes closed.
"I know this isn't enough of an answer. There's a lot more to explain, but I'm not the one to do it."
She already knows who will have the answers—but she is hollowed out, empty of anything but anger.
"No," she says roughly. "No, you're not."
She doesn't follow him back—she goes first, shunning his offered hand and slamming the truck door in his face. He climbs into the front seat again, silent, facing forward.
Breda glances back through the mirror.
"We good?" he asks, fingers drumming on the wheel. "Everything settled?"
"Just drive," Riza says shortly, holding her broken hand out to Knox and meeting no one's eyes.
Knox can do almost nothing for her—as the truck stutters on and forward, he paws through the meager aid kit provided, frowning.
"You need a surgeon," he grunts out, winding gauze tight to serve as a temporary splint. "A real goddamn doctor. Not some underpaid chopper like me."
"We've got people in Mebdo," Breda calls back. "We'll figure it out, Doc."
"You should get some sleep," Rebecca says quietly, hand warm on Riza's knee. "Or try to, anyway."
There's space enough to lie down, and a blanket, and even a coat bunched beneath her head to act as pillow. Knox and Rebecca sit on the bench bolted to the wall behind the driver's seat, not talking. Silence out of respect.
But Riza can't close her eyes. She watches Rebecca lean forward, pulling the towel from Jean's neck to check the skin beneath. Purple and red. A bouquet of brutal flowers.
For three hours, they keep the morning sun on their right and rumble over rough back roads. Riza watches the ceiling, the lights dancing across flat white metal, pushing from her mind thoughts of anything but her own steady breathing.
Mebdo arrives around them—the doors are thrown open, and hands reach in. Squinting past the sun, Riza allows herself to be pulled up and lifted and passed along.
"We've got wounded!" Knox calls out, and a rough voice answers.
"Over here. Yoki, go find May."
Riza reaches the end of the receiving line, and her vision darkens in the shadow of a massive man: tan skin and a thick white X gouged between his red eyes.
"Scar?" she breathes, and he sneers.
"Amestrian."