IV.

They trained with the armor against simulation soldiers armed with paint and learned how the shields worked and just how far they could jump. After the initial obstacle course they were never again pitted against each other, and began to work as a team. On the battlefield Connie's preference for close combat and short-range weapons paired well with Wash's preference for longer-range shots with the reliable battle rifle. Maine fought ferociously and without strategy. Carolina became more and more comfortable with an acrobatic style, cartwheeling in the air, getting every bit of worth she could get out of her long legs.

Connie found herself sometimes hiding, biding her time, tactically retreating, when she could let heavy-hitters like Carolina or Maine go ahead. She wasn't sure whether it was intelligence or cowardice.

In the evenings she would sit with South and listen to her rail out against whatever had annoyed her that day. Sometimes Maryland would join them, quietly: more often she would spend her time with the other group. People said she had started a relationship with Georgia. York and Carolina had fallen quietly and passionately back into theirs, picking back up where they had left off years ago so quickly that Connie never quite figured out how it had started or finished. Carolina had mysterious parts of her past, blurred patches that she did not so much obscure as avoid talking about.

At night before going to bed they would sometimes talk if they weren't too tired or trepidatious for whatever was going to happen the next morning. Connie told Carolina about her family and the letters she sent to them. (She had sent one packet out, three weeks in. She trusted that FILSS had transmitted it but had not heard anything back. She wondered whether her mother was still painting.) Carolina told Connie about her mother, who was, from what Connie could gather, single and quiet. They did not mention her father and Connie did not want to pry. Prying lead to, if not mistrust, annoyance, and annoyance was a sign that too much attention was being paid you in the first place.

So Connie didn't ask.

She took to eating lunch with Wash, asking about his family too. His, like hers, was nuclear and not particularly exciting. He was an only child. He was quiet but smart. They took walks, to the greenhouse or just in circles around the halls together. He tended to catch her at things, nothing embarrassing but just the small comforts: he would surprise her while she was watching television shows about urban myths, or looking at maps of space and the United States. She did not so much catch him as noticed things about him and brought them up in conversation at unexpected moments. He drank milk more often than anything else when he could get it, or loaded his coffee with it; he was left-handed but liked to throw with his right to get good at it.

York smuggled a case of beer in somehow and they both drank slowly but there wasn't enough for them to find out what kind of drunks they were.

Their relationship began with conversations about the Loch Ness monster, in which she believe, or liked to believe, and he did not.

He had asked her at dinner to tell more about her theories about the creatures lost and giant but hidden and purposeful in the wilds of Earth, and South and York took it lightly, and then Connie and Wash went walking and she started to tell him how a lot of things that people thought were untrue could be true, and things that people thought were true could be false, and we had gone to space now, but if we had landed on the moon in the nineteen seventies why did we never go back?

And Wash sat on the patch of grass in the cramped greenhouse and said, "You think they faked the moon landing?"

Connie picked at the grass. She looked up and said, "Maybe. We don't know."

He said, "Why?"

"Because if we sent people into space in 1970, why did it take us so long to get there again? The United States of America needed the morale boost. Someone had to win the war, so they faked it."

"And then they got into space later?"

"Yeah. I mean, it doesn't really matter now. I mean, space." She gestured around.

"I think it's interesting," he said, and sat back on the grass with his arms propped behind him and looked at the small potted plants.

And she wondered why he, who had expressed no interest in any kind of dissension before, thought so.

She said, "Why?"

He looked around, found none of the plants to be a satisfactory rest for his attention, and looked back at her. "Because it's you telling me," he said.

She didn't know what to say to that. Looked at the ground, looked at him, thought about the space between them. Said thank you.

"And what do you believe in," she said, "that I don't know about."

He scratched at the back of his head. "I don't know."

"Don't you?" She looked at him and in that moment they both knew this was a challenge, that she was daring him to be someone she wanted to be with.

Wash thrived in challenges.

"I believe in...justice, I guess. Being nice to people. In an...organized way."

Justice. At the time she found it blindingly noble, and that that nobility erased any need to make his aspiration more complicated than a desire for justice. (Later, she would hate him for answering like he did. She would think that he had confused justice with a whole host of things: complacency, the easy road out, or even sometimes cruelty.)

"I like that," she said. "I like that it's you telling me."

And they talked, about the plants and their hometowns and the friends they had had in high school, and the friends they had now.

For a few days they kept careful distance between them, like grade school kids at lunch time, hyper-conscious of the space. Neither of them, she thought, was going to start a relationship. It wasn't their way. Maybe she was wrong to think he wanted one at all.

York picked up on it, joked about it. Once he told her that the director was looking for her.

"Make it the counselor if you want me to believe you," she said, one hand on the common room wall and one on her hip. York was sitting on the couch with his hands in his pockets.

"Nah man, the director. Wants to see you in the, you know, super secret meeting room. Down the hall, second on the right." York took his hand out of his right side pocket and draped his arm over the back of the couch. York managed to flirt with the entire universe.

"Second on the left? That's, like, a closet, York."

"Not the super secret special room! It's real secret. Go."

"York."

"Bye Connie."

"York."

"You're going to go. You know you want to."

"To meet with the director."

"Yeah, man. Very important mission stuff."

"Did you lock South in a supply closet again?"

"You heard about that?" He lowered his arm.

Connie crossed hers. "Carolina told me about it."

"Aw, she deserved it."

"That's what Carolina said too."

"Huh." York laughed once and gave a sideways smile.

The second room on the right was a supply closet. She was pretty sure that's what it was. The door was closed. She had never seen it closed before.

"Um, hello?" She tried the button.

With a laborious clicking sound like it was protesting the treatment, the door unlatched and swung open. The room inside was dark, but she thought she remembered shelves and clutter on the floor. She didn't want to step through blind.

A moment later, a person threw themselves out of the darkness. He slammed into her, and she spun for a moment and got her back against the wall just so that she wouldn't end up on the floor with his weight on top of her. She pushed her arm up, elbowing him in the side in the process and taking a look at the snarling face.

It was Wash. "York, you - hey!" he backed up, rubbing his side where she'd hit him. "Sorry, Connie, I..."

"What did York do?" She shouted. She was sure she could hear him laughing from the next room, and just as sure that sound wouldn't carry that far.

"He locked me in here!"

Now it was her turn to rub at her arms, almost still feeling the way he'd knocked the wind out of her. Things had rattled around on the nearest shelf.

He asked, "Are you okay?"

The door was still half-open, letting in a little gray light. "I am. What about you?"

"I'm fine. A bit embarrassed, but..."

She looked around for a crate or something to sit on and, finding none, sat down on the floor. She could almost feel the adrenaline draining. It hurt a little. "He locked you in here?"

After a moment of looking around like he was under fire, Wash slid down to the floor opposite her. "Yeah! I tried to unlock it for a while. I don't know how he did it from the inside. Then I came back here and tried to build something sharp enough to wedge in the crack and pry up the lock instead."

"What did he do to it?"

"Something digital."

"But you could have gotten out." She crossed her arms again.

"Maybe. It could have taken me like hours. Besides, he told me I was supposed to be in here."

"Huh. Me too."

"Really?" He looked toward the door like he was planning his revenge.

"He said the director wanted to talk to me. I didn't believe him."

"But you came here anyway."

"I thought he might be..."

"What?"

She looked at him and glared and he glared back like daring her to say it and she said, "Wash, he's been trying to set us up for about a week."

"Yep."

"Is it working?"

She leaned her back against the uncomfortable door frame, tucked one foot against her opposite leg and stretched the other out toward her, tapping her sneaker against his knee. "I think it is."

"We're going to have to tell York he was right," he mused.

She glanced at the doorway. "We could," she said, "But not right now." She scooted forward and kissed him, his plaintive tone when he asked 'is it working' and that single 'we' echoing in her head, giving her a driving force.

The first kiss was a bit awkward and confused but there were more after that and he started to laugh and nip at her instead of apologizing if they kissed each other's noses or knocked foreheads together.

They settled into a relationship that was easier than any she had been in before, friendship or otherwise, although it was not without its sense of potential, deceptive thin ice. Wash stayed behind in the locker room, waiting for her. They would sit with one another's helmets in their hands. She told him she thought hers was ugly, and he traced a thumb along the underside of its thick cheek plates like he was checking for dust. "Does that matter much?" he said, and she said, "I don't like it."

He lifted his thumb off the metal and stroked her face in the place where the cheek of the helmet would sit. The pad of his thumb was very warm.

The relationship moved quickly after that, both of them feeling like if they blinked they would miss something. They met in what rooms they could find: his, hers, supply closets, anything without cameras. (She started to note the locations of the cameras. She realized how many there were.)

Sometimes the relationship felt perfect, and sometimes it made her sick to her stomach with fear, and sometimes the one came immediately on the heels of the other.

She thought that she was afraid of love and that Wash frightened her, and this was why she was in love with him. She expected love to be a dark windy road on a rainy night and that it would need to be navigated carefully.

He did too, which was why he approached her hesitantly, leaving her gifts on her bed or bedside table when he could. He would leave food, scraps of paper folded to stand up like ugly animals, handwritten notes, or stones and pieces of metal he had found somewhere. She treasured them, keeping them in a drawer behind her shirts. Sometimes she threw them away when they cluttered up the drawer, but she knew that he wouldn't mind. He never asked about them, and he meant enough to her that throwing away a spent bullet he had given her was not some symbolic gesture about their relationship. It was only an action.

She thought of the symbol anyway.

Although sometimes he was hesitant, sometimes he was fierce. She thought of the way he fought, quick and efficient. She thought of the way he never went easy on her, how she learned to twist and wrestle and think on the battlefield because of him, because of the program, (because of the director) and how Wash had learned those things too along with her. She thought of the way he kissed her sometimes, uncontrolled and biting, and she thought of the way he had worn her mask.

She expected love to be frightening, so it satisfied her only when it met that expectation.

Their first real mission was also the first time they saw Alpha outside the classroom. The director was talking to him when they walked into a briefing room holding a large table and some of the ship's controls, the windows as wide and brash as the ones in the training arena. The mission was against Insurrectionists, the director said. They had to go down to a planet's surface and capture ordinance they had stolen from the UNSC, he said.

"What kind of ordinance?" Carolina asked.

"The energy core for a MAC canon." The director looked sharply at her from the end of the table. Connie leaned back, folded her arms. The director didn't bother with things like standing at attention.

Wyoming whistled.

"They've got ahold of something that strong?" Wash sounded amazed, but there was probably something behind the question. Whether he knew it or not he was good at gathering information. Wash's question could invite the director to tell them who had provided the MAC, whether it had been someone on the inside of the UNSC, or if faulty ordinance had been planted in order to draw the army's attention to the location of the rebel hideout.

The other thing about a MAC cannon was that it had to be mounted on a large starship. It wasn't unlikely that the Insurrectionists would have one - they were formed from small armies all over human territories - but why wasn't the cannon being kept on it?

The director answered none of the unanswered questions. "They stole it."

He continued. "They're held up on New Xinyag, in a small warehouse complex. You will break into two teams. Washington, South, and Carolina will enter the warehouse and flush the Insurrectionists out, then retrieve the energy core."

"How big is the energy core?" Carolina asked. "What does it look like?"

The director keyed up a holographic blue image of what looked like a large bullet, with vents along its length to let out the energy that would be priming inside. "The core will be heavy but not too heavy for two of you to carry while wearing your armor. The second team will be made up of Connecticut, North, and Maryland. You will act as perimeter guards. and guard Team A when they come out with the core."

"How much resistance are we looking at?" Wash asked.

"The Insurrectionists keep only a skeleton crew in this location," the director said. "There may be a few squads, or less. Your pilot will help you gather intel about the enemy population as you arrive. Are there any other questions?"

North asked, "How far is this warehouse from a population center? Could we potentially have civilians in our way?"

"No. The warehouse is not far from the city limits, but it has been decommissions for some time. Any encounter with unaffiliated personnel is extremely unlikely, but proceed with caution. Your survival is paramount, but the death of civilians would be...unwarranted."

The rest of the team was silent. Alpha flickered behind the director, the AI now standing by a computer near the windows.

Carolina said, "We're ready, sir."

They walked into the hangar like a posse riding against a silver sunset. The Pelican that had been outfitted for them was sitting near the force-shielded bay door.

"It's shaped more like a fish than a pelican," said Wash.

"Yeah," said South, "but they didn't think anyone would be intimidated by 'the flounder'."

North looked over at his sister. "Now you be careful out there. Team A is going to draw most of the fire on this mission."

"He picked me because he thought I was right for it," South said. "Don't worry."

"He picked you because you're good with short-range weapons. I'm the sniper, which means I'll need to stay back. I can't keep an eye on you, South."

She turned around mid-stride. "I know. It'll be okay."

As they approached the Pelican the pilot walked down the ramp. Skinny and helmeted, she still managed to swagger. "Is this everybody?" She looked them up and down like they were grade school kids and she was the teacher. "I dunno, I expected the armor to make you...taller."

Carolina stepped out in front of the group. "Pilot Four-Seven-Niner?"

"That's me. Welcome aboard. Barf bags are underneath your seats." She turned and stepped back onto the ramp, proceeding into the Pelican without concern.

Connie took a seat next to Wash, with North and South on the other side. Carolina stalked all the way to the front of the ship. "Who's taking the navigator's spot?" She said to 479 as the pilot took her seat at the alcove in the front of the craft. The navigator sat above her, three steps up into a sconce. Connie saw York glance up there.

"Nobody," said 479. "But if you're rated to fly, take a seat."

"I'm rated," Carolina said with a laugh in her voice, and Connie was actually surprised. Carolina had never mentioned that she had studied that particular speciality.

York sat as close to the cockpit as he could, and Carolina disappeared around the corner and up the stairs to the navigation seat.

The engine started with a rumble, and 479 was quiet, surely relaying the details of her exit to the controllers inside the Mother of Invention. Connie had no idea what she should expect to see outside the ship, which moved along under its own intention without any apparent changes in the Freelancers' daily schedule. They were in slipspace quite often, and jumps were noticeable but had ceased being exciting after the first few days of not usually being either able to see the stars or to ask anyone where they were going. This was not unusual for UNSC ships that were too large to dock on a planet and basically used the entirety of known space as a staging area. If the Mother of Invention ever met up with other ships, the director had not seen a need to involve the Freelancers in those meetings.

The Mother tipped around her as they flew out into space. Connie could only see a sliver of the outside world through the viewport in the front of the ship, but when a planet came into view she craned her neck to see details beyond the brown patches and thick white clouds. Wash put a hand on her knee and tapped on her armor so she would know it. She squeezed his hand.

The descent was rocky and fast and they both ended up gripping their restraint bars instead of each other.

479 yelled, "First group gets off in a minute!", and Carolina started counting down from sixty, quietly, in their helmet speakers.

"What about the second?" Maryland asked.

"Don't worry about that!" said the pilot. "Team A, assemble at the back. This is gonna be fast. No way they aren't going to see us. I think he trusts that there's more of you."

"There's less than six of them?" South sounded disbelieving.

"Eh, you probably count as three each or something."

They came out of the clouds in a brown landscape of catwalks and half-fallen buildings, with dusty, cracked glass windows but also signs that part of the facility was still working: a blue force field here, a guard walking with a gun snugged up to his chest. 479 stopped almost mid-air in a courtyard, angling the engines down to wash the dirty ground with hot air. A few potshots struck the ship and zinged. "Okay, Team A, go!"

Carolina, South, and Wash ran. Wash didn't look back at Connie, and she liked him for that. Nobody needed to be assuming that one of them wouldn't be coming back from their first mission.

That didn't mean that she didn't miss him already. She thought of curling up in her bed with the nub of her wrist propped against her cheek.

When the last armored back disappeared from the ramp of the ship 479 took off even before the back of the ship had closed up again. "The rest of you will be like fifteen feet from here but outside a wall," she said.

"Thank you," said North sincerely. "We were already briefed."

"I know! Look, it's your job to call me when you're done. The second you see them come out of there with the thingie, you ping me. I'll be upstairs." She hooked a thumb in the general direction of space. "If we're lucky, the director was right about this group not having any aircraft."

She lifted over the wall and they could hear more gunshots now, small ordinance like rifles. Maryland hunched in her rust-red armor. Her helmet was the same as North's, with that alert look that Connie envied. Connie thought her own just made her look asleep.

479 put down outside what looked like the wall of a jail with more doors. Stunted trees symbolized the edge of the city that Connie could see crouching quietly in the distance. It was morning, with the sun not yet burning off the morning mist that mingled with the brown fog from the factories. The pilot yelled, "Get out of here!" and Connie followed North. She hopped down a few feet and noticed a strand of trees to the right and a reinforced wall to the left, maybe the remnant of an abandoned factory. North made for the trees and signaled for Connie and Maryland to hide behind the wall. Her shoulder brushed against it as she leaned around its edge and scanned the roof of the factory for snipers or security cameras. North disappeared into the shadows of the trees, the purple working astoundingly well to make him look a dark, natural color. Maybe he would try to climb a tree, but Connie was doubtful that one would hold the weight of his armor. Maryland leaned out beside Connie with a DMR in her hands.

Connie switched her assault rifle for a pistol and sighted along the top of the wall. A few red dots - any person except a Freelancer - meandered along at the top of her HUD, which had been modified for now to pick up heat signals instead of just UNSC FIF beacons.

"It's going to be a lot of waiting," North said quietly.

"I know," Connie replied, still scanning.

Something inside the facility exploded.

"What were you saying?" shouted Maryland over the sound and the quick, staticky change as their noise filters went up.

North said, "Oh nothing," and Connie sighted on the wall again.

Then, they really did wait for a while, settling into their places. The minutes were going slowly, she thought. She looked up what felt like every ten minutes and one more number would have turned over on her HUD, just one single change. Minutes were long here. Connie looked down at the dark brown, rutted dirt. North had entirely disappeared. She wondered what Wash was doing, how Carolina was behaving, how South was mocking both of them.

Whether they were even still alive.

Another explosion lit a few outward-facing windows in violent yellow, and suddenly York and Carolina were pushing an casket-sized object out a tiny door on the bottom of the wall and lifting it from either end, carrying it like it was heavy. More red dots appeared closer to the center of Connie's HUD and she sighted with the pistol again, hearing Maryland shift around behind her.

"We're gonna need help here!" yelled Carolina. "We can't move fast with this thing."

"479, how close can you land to the wall?" North radioed up.

"I presume that's a 'please come back message'," said the pilot, her voice crackling with the distance. "In a minute I'll find out."

Connie saw two people emerge from the windows above her, both of them helmeted and armed. One had a red stripe on his mask: the other, more important at the moment, held a sniper rifle. North shot and nearly hit the first one, who ducked back inside. The sniper recovered quickly and lashed out and dug a furrow of dirt in front of Connie and Maryland. They ducked back behind the wall, rocks clicking against their armor. Connie leaned out again immediately, zoomed in, and shot at the sniper. She may have hit him, because he pulled back, but it wouldn't do her any good to assume.

South and Carolina were hurrying, South grumbling over the radio. Wash backed out behind them, firing steadily, three Insurrectionists getting closer and closer to him.

"I'm moving up," Connie said.

"To where?" Maryland didn't sound happy.

"To give them cover."

"Okay."

"Synch."

"Synch!"

Maryland fired her gun upward just as Connie ducked out of cover, the red Freelancer providing as good a distraction as she could. North was on the move; Connie could tell by the angle of his shots, and she could see him now, on the ground between the trees. One of Wash's pursuers fell. The Pelican was nowhere to be seen, but Connie had no time to call out to 479 and it wouldn't do much good. Instead she ran to Carolina's side and shot toward Wash's pursuers. One moved closer to him and she saw him dispatch the enemy with an elbow to the face.

Carolina glanced toward her. The MAC core was stored in a box with rounded-off sides, marked in lighter black with the name of the company that had made it. Connie shot one of Wash's pursuers with her pistol, catching him on the shoulder and then again as he fell.

The body tented on the ground, one elbow at an awkward angle holding the rest off the ground although it looked like gravity should bear it all to the dirt. It was the first person she had ever killed. She had gone through psych programs for this in the very beginning of training, when they wanted to get the troops used to what they were going to be doing. They had told her that the first death would be hard, but she thought mostly that she still disliked the guy afterward. There was supposed to be respect involved, but the dislike hadn't gone away.

Two sniper shots rang out and she heard Maryland yell, then confirm "I'm fine. I'm fine!"

Carolina yelled, "Get to the ship!"

Connie had barely noticed it in the noise of the battle but the Pelican had arrived, blowing around the leaves on the trees as it came to a vertical stop maybe twelve meters behind her. North emerged from the trees and backed toward it. Wash shot someone else, then flinched as the sniper aimed at him. For a moment, Connie lost sight of Carolina and South. When the dust cleared they were almost at the Pelican and Maryland was stepping out of cover with her pistol raised to help cover them for the last few steps.

Then the space between Wash and the warehouse was clear, and South and Carolina were stepping onto the Pelican. The sniper concentrated on Connie and Maryland as North moved out of cover, then abruptly switched to him.

"Good, good!" Carolina said. "Get going."

Connie backed up. She felt a shot hit her and gasped, but it only took down half of her shield and didn't hurt. The armor would even prevent most bruises. She heard Wash's intake of breath in her ear. Then another sniper shot hit so close that she was sure it had hit her. When she felt no impact she thanked the vague thing that she thought might be God and backed up another step.

Her heel hit something. South cursed. Carolina said, "Let's go,"and Connie stepped back again, felt her heel hit something again, nearly throwing her off balance. North and Wash aligned in front of her. She registered that one of them them had been yelling about Maryland. That was her then, dead behind Connie.

"Cover me," Connie said, and North stepped one step closer to the warehouse, the long sniper rifle dipping toward the ground. A Warthog engine sounded from somewhere, probably around the corner of the factory.

Connie turned around clumsily, feeling with her feet for obstacles she didn't want to see, looked at the rust-red body on the ground, and lifted Maryland up under the arms. She couldn't see a bullet hole, but red blood had splashed the ground. She pulled Maryland onto the lip of the Pelican's ramp, stopped so as not to get in South's way as the other two women were arranging the box in a place in the troop bay where it wouldn't slide around or unbalance the Pelican, and then propped Maryland up against a chair. A pistol dropped from Maryland's hand and Connie picked it up and magnetized it to her left hip, her only empty gear spot, without thinking much about it.

Wash and North clattered in beside her.

"Close the door, close the door!" Carolina was yelling, and just before 479 keyed the controls Connie saw a Warthog careen into view from behind the trees where North had been stationed. A few sparking yellow gunshots pinged off the edge of the closing ramp door.

"Move it, Connie-" That was South, wedging the box into place. Connie forced her numbing legs to step around her.

"Got it?" yelled 479.

"Got it," said Carolina.

"I hope it's not going to irradiate the place."

"So do I."

Connie slumped into a seat and pulled the restraint down, and only really noticed the person sitting beside her when she registered him as Wash, who was looking at her with concern with his helmet still on. She saw Carolina do a headcount, pointing at each of them as if commanding them to sit, and then take a seat herself, with South almost behind the box and North leaning over to make sure she was okay.

And Maryland curled in the corner between the box and the closed ramp, slumped over the restraints. Carolina had counted her too.

Wash squeezed Connie's hand and this time she held on to him.

The Pelican was still taking off, the ascent making the floor steep, but Carolina unhooked and walked across the bay to stand over what Connie knew was Maryland's body. Her icon had disappeared off her HUD but Carolina yelled her name like she was trying to get her to wake up, lifted Maryland's chin up, listened to the clunk as her helmet touched her chest again when she let go. Connie could see two bullet holes in Maryland's chest now.

Connie said, "Hurry up, 479, we've got wounded."

"I'm flying as fast as I can," the pilot said over the mics. "We're lucky they haven't sent anyone after us."

North unstrapped too and glanced at Carolina before taking Maryland's helmet off her. There wasn't need to feel for a pulse with their HUDs working but North did it anyway and shook his head. Connie wondered what Maryland's last words had been and couldn't remember. Something about covering her. Something about the war.