The chamber's lights glowed hot over me. The Office of Naval Intelligence mission handlers held anticipant glares. This "debriefing" was more like a tribunal. The brutalist, concrete-walled room was cold and smelled faintly of Sweet William cigars. Unlike my armor, which felt more like a second skin, my uniform was too itchy and too tight. I stifled the urge to squirm and wriggle in it. I buried the dragon of grief that squirmed in my throat and threatened to crawl out of my mouth.

"You were seen," the admiral in the center of the raised podiums said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said, aloof to any need to lie. "We assisted the evacuation of a Marine base when our extraction options had been exhausted. We had the choice of risking exposure to the enemy, or exposure to UNSC units in protecting them." My posture remained straight as a board, answering at attention.

"Why didn't you relocate to Rally Point Bravo, or Charlie?" another called, a vice admiral on the furthest right podium.

"Overrun, sir." I said.

"Right…" the admiral said. "Your report says that you obtained an 'alarming' amount of data, correct? Our intel…" She stopped, her voice trailing to the shape of an eager question.

"Yes, sir," I said, buffing out my voice. "It was more than blueprints for a new weapon. Force deployments, battle plans… invasion plans for Earth and several Inner Colonies. Evidence of genocides and ethnic cleansings. The specifics are there."

"So Coal Miner was right," another officer, a captain, said. "This confirms what he and Gray Man have already theorized. Silver lining: our analysts have already concluded that it's authentic. This is the wealth of knowledge we needed."

A rear admiral on the far left of the panel spoke up. "What do we ought to do with that, now that it's been verified? It would be irresponsible to bury it, or to withhold it for any reason. It needs to be presented in New York."

"All in good time, sir," another officer said, a commander and a representative of a Section I sub-organization. "I have orders from Admiral Parangosky—in her words expressly, all in good time. Until then, we're bulletproofing a case."

"An expensive gamble," the rear admiral said with a beleaguered sigh. He drummed his fingers against the podium. "Let's hope it works out."

"Very well," the admiral snapped, sternly silencing the back-and-forth. The issues they were poking at—political machinations far above my pay grade—obviously did not concern the debriefing, and most certainly not the ears of Spartans like myself. She glanced her eyes down at me and flipped to the next page of the report.

"So what's this about you letting an enemy element simply walk out of an engagement? What was that—a parley?" she asked with little grace or interest, as though her question was read off an itinerary: a common tactic used by ONI interrogators, to make the question seem so mundane that the truth would not incriminate you.

That was the question held in everyone's minds: the question that held Blue Team in contempt of its superiors, the elephant in the room. In the quiet, smoky, almost casual atmosphere of the meeting, tensions ran higher than belief. Outside my armor, I was exposed to microsounds and scents typically shielded from my helmet sound absorbers and filters. It made me uncomfortable and antsy. Though I had trained with the sounds of nature and war, the constant stimulation and awareness of sterile, recycled, underground air—after years of training and fighting in MJOLNIR—along with the pressure to satisfy my superiors—made me nervous and claustrophobic.

I still had only one answer:

"To complete the mission, ma'am."

Siobhan is lost. It's cold. The ice is burning. The air is thick with embers. When she goes outside, there is no snow, but ash. She exhales, but all that comes out is ash. Fire broils the sky. Wind torrents create tornadoes through the town. Men are inverted and dragged by their feet into the air, hundreds of feet into the air, by suction—by vortexes.

Siobhan is tired of crying. She walks around the hills and mounds of ash, blowing off the top like sand. Deserts of alien remains coat the earth.

Start over, she demands.

Rebirth.

Siobhan is tired. She walks the plains of Virginia to see a man encased in ice and snow. He is a portrait. She kicks his helmet, asking him to wake up.

Rebirth. Rebirth. Rebirth.

Start over, she whispers.

Siobhan likes her coffee too sweet. She drinks it, holding the mug with both hands, struggling to properly cup her mouth on the rim. She is not practiced with drinking. Siobhan likes her coffee too sweet, just like her mother.

Dad likes her affinity for the things Mom liked. He lets her drink coffee when he goes to the coffee shop to write. She scoots her chatter up against his so, while he works, she can play Mabby. She catches Dad looking over the top of their chatters and smiling like he did when they played Battleship.

They go home. Dad lights a candle for the woman, which he prays to. Siobhan cannot read. She asks who he is praying for.

Someone special, he says. We'll visit her tomorrow.

At school, Siobhan is called to Dr. May's office and he asks a lot of questions.

She plays board games and, after answering enough questions, she is rewarded with twenty minutes of screen time. But the counselor is still concerned. She still cannot read, or will not, and she has a strong lisp that her speech therapist has not yet broken through. She is too unresponsive to questions about her fears and insecurities—she gives simple answers, yeses and nos, as if to shoo the questions away, or as if she doesn't wish to disappoint by saying she doesn't know.

She logs onto Mabby and finds her friend Willowthewisp.

Willow is always online. She is a strange player who seems to have broken through the game's code and can glitch into the stars. Willow lets Siobhan join her, taking her beyond the boundaries of the developers' restraints into test rooms and forbidden dungeons. Her avatar is a young woman, almost as young as Siobhan, with dark blue hair and red eyes. Her true age is unknown, her identity an enigma.

Willow asks Siobhan if she would like to play the flower game, a minigame in Mabby. Siobhan accepts, but she is out of time.

She asks, will you be on next time

Willow answers, Always.

Dad picks her up from the school and takes her to the cemetery. When they separate from the crowd, mostly other families and individuals dressed such, her eyes catch on a man she thinks is familiar. He wears a black trench coat with a wide-brimmed, black hat. The man looks at her somberly, then turns away, as though he is called to something else—but no one is there.

Dad prepares an offering: a pair of flowers, a candle, and a cup of tea. He struggles to manipulate them in the wind. The snow is so gentle and warm it is not snow. It is gentle and dry, flakes of burnt paper—ash and ember. The ash smells like the pool.

Are we at the pool? Siobhan asks. Dad does not hear her.

She squints at the headstone as Dad makes a small prayer, whispering her name. She does not hear his words. She can smell the pool strongly now. It's warm—hot enough that she has to take off her parka. Virginia never gets this warm in the winter. The grass is soft and dry under her galoshes.

Dad comes down to one knee and gestures for her to do the same. They share a match and light candles. Dad puts down his offering at the front of the grave, saying something in dialect. More lost words.

She can make out the name on the headstone as he speaks; his incantation deblurs the name Eochaid.

Would you like to start over?

rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth rebirth

Laser fire cut apart the lead Pelican in our drop squadron, engines first. The bird held just enough for the chalk of Spartans to leap from its blood tray into the exosphere. We were over our drop zone, relatively speaking—between our re-entry packs, friction-shielded armor packages, and parachutes, the only difficulty with an orbital HALO jump was the Razorback.

I glanced out the blood tray of our plane as the hatch opened, the cabin already depressurized. A black Republic shuttle outfitted with heavy, anti-materiél lasers, was pursuing our squadron. It had cut through the lead Pelican and overtaken our formation, circling around.

"Fire's too heavy," the pilot's steely voice rasped as we crossed the Republic's air coverage over Myga. "Can't pull back now."

"Copy," I reported. I switched to Blue Team's squad channel. "Prep to jump."

My heads-up display showed me a wash of green acknowledgment lights from my teammates. Sam and I checked each other's parachutes, exchanging thumbs-ups.

"We're over the jump target," the pilot said in his steely, uncompromising voice. The light flashed green.

I led my Spartans off the ramp and into the black. We descended slowly, weightlessly—almost like we weren't falling at all. Then the atmosphere began to whip by us. We used our re-entry packs' boost function to decelerate and avoid the intense atmospheric friction that would otherwise scorch our armor. When we were deep enough into the atmosphere to stop accelerating at the expected terminal velocity, and the re-entry packs burned through all of their fuel, the wind blasted our armor, kicking us up and sending us along currents.

The surface of Mygeeto crawled toward us ever so slowly, an orb of glacier and snow turning to flat plains and layers upon layers of icy clouds.

When we broke through the clouds, I could finally see the jump target: the crystalline mountains on the fringes of the sprawling Separatist facility.

We opened our chutes at just under 2,000 feet.

I felt the harness yank me back as the heavy-duty chute unfolded, hoisting my armor, my gear, and my person up, decelerating me to a safe speed. I steered and journeyed the rest of the descent toward the drop point, a clearing in the snow beyond rock and crystal and ice. The armor's composite gel layers and load-bearing exoskeletons absorbed most of the shock. Compared to the unassisted jumps in training when we were barely pubescent, the impact wasn't so bad.

Scattered by only a few hundred meters, it took no time to group up and recover the Razorback when it landed a few minutes after us.

"Check in with Gold Team," I instructed to Fred.

Fred got on the comms with Joshua, relaying their status. Joshua replied that Gold Team landed on its target as well, half a klick out from Achadh-an-Sídhe, the origin of the beacon. Blue Team's mission was to uncover data that might have been scuttled by the Separatists in the region—preferably before the next storm set in.

"Copy that," Fred said. "Stay sharp. Remember, we don't know what to expect."

"We're on it," Joshua said.

"We'll pick you up when we've cleared our objective," Fred said. "Out."

The Separatist black site was embedded in the crystal mines along the ridges ten kilometers west of Achadh-an-Sídhe, and easy to miss. It took almost an hour of scanning the same mountain around the exact coordinates of the site to find an entrance—an alcove buried deep in the snow and rocks, which looked like a cave that would barely fit a man, one of several. And that was with binoculars equipped with focused backscatter rasterizers, which could map a grid of tunnels within its detection cone using backscatter radar, similar to SONAR mapping of undersea environments. It granted limited visibility through thin walls of certain non-magnetic properties.

We left the Razorback on the opposite ridge netted up with K2 texture buffers and slowly crossed the lower ridge, reaching the bottom of the mountain and free-climbing again in half an hour. At the top, we found the alcove and scanned it for traps. There were scorch marks from what appeared to be a previous incursion.

"Stay sharp," I said, activating my XBR55's infrared illuminator. With VISR infrared, we could see each other's beams wash over the darkness, bathing the dark halls in light only visible from our helmet optics.

I ordered Sam to leave a proximity sensor and an Antilon mine behind. He linked them to our comms in case anyone followed us in.

The door inside the alcove was blown open. Darkness oozed in and out—the power to the facility had been long cold. However, upon breaching, we discovered that red duty lights remained on. The station's emergency power had been activated—if it was anything like a UNSC base, the power was short-term, good for only a week. But if this base had been scuttled, there might have been nothing left to keep on low power.

Perhaps we weren't alone.

"What's the ROE if there are droids here?" Fred asked on the encrypted squad channel.

"Expendable," I said.

My squad lit up with green acknowledgment lights in silent agreement.

Through the first hall, we carefully swept past half a dozen B1 battle droids—scarred, dismembered, burnt, and blasted through—all dead. Several B2s were sat up against the wall and piled on top of one another like bodies.

Joshua reported an update on his end. We halted, waiting, silent as feathers on the floor.

"Just reached beacon. Looks like a BX-series commando droid. It's dormant. We're searching the rest of the site now, but there was a huge battle here."

"Do you have eyes on Argonaut?" Fred asked.

"Not yet," Joshua said. "Honestly, he might be buried somewhere. We're looking at twelve or more inches of snow."

"No recovery beacon?" Fred asked.

"If he's dead," Joshua said, "it was by blaster. His equipment could be fried—or frozen."

Fred nodded. "Keep searching. Stay frosty. Chief says, if you see any droids, and they're hostile, they're expendable."

"Copy," Joshua said. "Doesn't look like there's droids or clones out here. Just wildlife—really big, hairy beasts. We'll try to stay out of their way. Out."

We continued our investigation.

"I don't like this," Sam said. "Dead toasters all over. Emergency power still running, even after a scuttling job. It all points to we're-not-alone territory."

"Toasters? " Fred asked, amusement shaping his words.

"Just trying it out," Sam said.

"Stay focused," I said, though I found it funny, too, and Sam could tell.

Crossing into one of the concourses, we could glean that this was some sort of listening post and data center, owing to the large number halls that led to server rooms, labeled austerely in Aurebesh. As far as the briefing with Lieutenant Smith went, he was right on the money: this was "a glimpse into the Separatists' uncurated truths."

"I've got something," Sam said. "It's not much, but I'm seeing short comlink bursts within the base. Talking."

"Triangulate," I ordered.

"Already done," Sam said. "Marking spots on your HUD. They're in the facility, but without schematics…"

"Let's find them," I said.

We found a directory in the main concourse, barely illuminated by the emergency lights. In this kind of darkness, we were able to move more openly, even if noise discipline was required. I snapped a picture from my helmet recorder and indexed it in our shared tactical files. Just as quickly as we appeared, we melted away into the halls and clung to tight corridors. The schematics were not complete, but when we checked them with the potential enemy signals, they gave us the most obvious routes to attack.

"Cross the main routes," I said. "Use backscatter to find shortcuts."

We moved through until we were a few floors above the main concourse and near the data center and generators. We stacked up on the generator room. The top-sliding door was partially open, low to the floor but not completely sealed.

"Flash and clear," I ordered.

"Assume no effect?" Fred asked, squatting and grabbing the bottom of the door.

"Assume no effect," I repeated.

Fred flung the heavy durasteel door open, throwing a primed flashbang into the room. The deafening sound was automatically dampened—along with the cramped gunshots—by my helmet audio sensors.

Sam ran in, immediately blasting a target with his Bulldog. Kelly and I followed, covering different angles. We caught the clones unaware, but they seemed tougher. We fired multiple rounds into their armor, stopping only when we saw the reinforced, stark white ceramic and durasteel bits chunk out with blood and the men collapsing.

One got a few shots off into Sam's armor until he fell. Bright blue blaster bolts lit up the room like halogens. Kelly shot up the clone with her XBR55, dropping him next to the transformer.

"Clear!" Fred called, entering behind Linda.

"Clear!" Kelly called.

"All clear!" Fred called.

"Sam's down!" Kelly exclaimed."

My heart jumped. I turned to see him climbing back up to his feet slowly.

"My armor's damaged," Sam said. "And they gave me a good scare."

We checked his vitals. The blaster bolts mostly struck his chest piece and left arm. The arm piece had hot rings on it, exposing his arm to burns and molten titanium. Kelly took Sam's first-aid kit and applied biofoam to the breach.

"Can you move your arm?" she asked.

He tested it—full range of motion. Whether it was assisted by his MJOLNIR powered exoskeleton or not, we couldn't tell. But it seemed like he hadn't suffered muscle tissue loss.

The comlink buzzed from clones requesting an update and their location, presumably having lost contact mid-conversation. We ignored them, stepping over armored bodies carefully.

"Should we shut down the generators?" Fred asked. "It'll give us an advantage, now that they know we're here."

I shook my head. "The enemy might be after the same intel."

Fred nodded. "They're probably using emergency power to decrypt and move data to a portable object. That's how I'd do it, at least," he said. "That explains why they stayed put."

I nodded.

We moved carefully down the halls, up another stairwell, and around hazards and sealed blast doors.

The proximity sensor at the entrance went off, alerting us—but the Antilon was defused.

"More guests?" Fred asked.

"Could be our friends from orbit," Sam said. "It wouldn't be hard to track us here."

"Blue Team," I warned, "assume they know our position."

As we progressed, Sam reported the signals of the enemy clones.

"Data center cleared out," he said. "They're moving to intercept us ahead. And the other hostiles are trying to pincer behind us."

We braced for contact. Cautioning for booby traps, we held position in the hall and used the compartmentalized struts as cover. I faced the data center with Kelly and Sam; Fred and Linda faced our rear flank, holding the corner at the end of the hall so we wouldn't be completely boxed in.

Then the clone specops swung open the door and funneled through. We mowed through the first two while the next two pushed through the opening and blasted at us. Bolts flashed by my helmet, just barely missing and washing my comms and heads-up display with static. Sam broke out of his cover and bounded for a strut in front of him. I followed on the opposite side of the hall while Kelly suppressed them, nailing one—but he rose again and fired back.

"No more covering fire," Kelly said, alerting us that she had to take cover.

I dodged into the wall, slamming against the bulkhead hard, while Sam fired his Bulldog twice more into the nearest clone. The specop dropped in a spray of metal and blood, but his buddy shot Sam three times rapidly. I fired nearly point-blank into the exposed clone, putting him down in the doorway. The last two dug in, firing wildly over their struts and burning the walls and floor. I stepped back. Kelly rushed ahead, sliding along the floor regardless of the fire to the strut behind me.

"Frag out!" Kelly yelled. She primed an M9 fragmentation grenade and threw it.

As lethal as grenades were in close quarters, especially in reinforced, closed walls, the shrapnel and limited high-explosive shockwave would not be enough to cave in the ceiling or walls—and it wasn't enough to damage our armor. It might, however, injure the clones and—at the very least—disorient them.

I braced hard, bringing myself low to the floor.

The blast shook the entire building. Dirt slipped through the bulkheads and crumbled onto us, but they held. Shrapnel pinged off my armor, riding a fast cloud of pressure condensation that shook me to my core.

The clones tumbled out, bleeding from the gaps in their armor. They dropped their weapons and scrambled to pick them back up.

Kelly and I gunned them down.

"Clear!" Kelly said.

"Clear!" I said.

"All clear!" Fred called from behind.

We checked Sam. His vitals were red—flatlined. His body was slumped over, carbonized by scorches dotting his chest piece, penetrated through, his lungs and heart vaporized on contact, his wounds instantly cauterized black. My best friend—a man I trained and played and led alongside since boyhood—was cinder.

There was simply no time to mourn.

As if it couldn't get worse, we checked Sam's gear. His comms suite—a listening setup rather than a radio backpack like Fred's—had been fried from blaster bolts that overpenetrated through his body and rear armor plates. Our intel of all the enemy signal contacts stopped updating; our advantage was gone.

We reached under his armored collar and pulled his dog tags. I stowed them in a utility pouch mounted to my thigh.

I signaled the squad to push backward, in the direction the clones were pincering from.

Gold Team broke the silence with an update.

"Found our guy," Joshua said. "KIA. ONI's going to want his body—he's a brain donor. This place appears to be a concentration camp."

I gave Fred a slicing motion by my neck.

"Wait ten," Fred said. "Blue Team in contact. Report later."

"Copy," Joshua said. "Recovery beacon placed, waiting, out."

As we pushed back, going left on a T-junction, we ran into the enemy squad. They had set up an E-Web on a tripod. The heavy blaster rounds nearly took Fred out, just missing as he dodged behind cover.

"What the hell," Fred blurted out, recovering. "When did they set that up?"

"Find another way," I said. We threw grenades at the gun and stunned the specops, then ran right down the hall opposite to the gun until we reached the end, a left-turn bend.

The gun opened fire just as Kelly reached the bend, a direct hit melting the outer layer of armor on her thigh plate. Superheated titanium glowed and dripped bright orange goo, but the armor held.

We moved quickly, getting distance to set up an ambush point from pursuers. But by the time we had found a suitable stopping point—a place with suitable cover fashioned from overturned servers, damaged doors, and spilled crates—there was a new threat. A fireteam of clones in dark armor, each with unique silhouettes, ambushed us through the thickets of metal cover. Two opened fire while one hung back. A taller, stockier type charged directly at us, barreling through the suppressive fire while we backpedaled and jumped the "cover"—and howled angrily.

While we tried to focus fire on him, however unable to line up a shot, a marksman in the back of the hall landed a shot on Linda, gouging a black, carbonized ring from the camouflage coating on her shoulder plate and causing her to double back.

Fred threw the last of our grenades down the hall and thrust at the big guy with his weapon. The clone caught his weapon but failed to pry it out of his hands. Instead, Fred punched at the clone, kicking himself off and retreating just as quickly. The clone opened fire with his specop blaster, scorching Fred's armor next to me. I rose, squeezing a few rounds off toward the clone—but one impact on my left shoulder caused me to flinch as I shot, missing.

"Fall back!" I yelled.

We pushed back out of the cover and down the hall's bend, firing and moving, covering each other. The large clone continued to push, throwing a heavy fist into me as I was now in the back of my formation.

I deflected his fist hard with my rifle and let it fall on its sling. The weapon's carry handle took most of the hit, the metal bending from it, the ATPIAL box breaking its zero immediately. I let the rifle fall on its sling and swished his hand away with my left, slamming a hard uppercut into the clone. It connected and took him off his feet, knocking him flat on his back.

One of the others, the squad leader, perhaps, yelled for the clone, calling out his name—a nickname fashioned from a brutal word in Galactic Basic.

Taking this opportunity to break contact, I doubled back and left them with a smoke grenade. The hall filled with smoke rapidly.

"Which way do we go?" Fred asked, rounding the bend as the smoke offered some concealment. "We're sealed good."

"Through the gun," I said.

"Wilco," Fred said.

"Linda," I said. "You're up."

Linda slid to the nearest pylon, her armor scraping against the steel floor and blowing sparks out like a welder, and readied her long rifle. She switched the Oracle scope to thermals. "Too easy," she whispered and fired.

The heavy, saboted 14.5mm anti-materiél rifle boomed as she shot the hinge of the E-Web and its operator. It penetrated through the specop's armor and hit the man behind him.

"Fred! Kelly!" I ordered.

The two tag-teamed, covering each other and firing forward into the hall. They pressed on as Linda and I fired to suppress the rest of the clones. The two Spartans emerged from the smoke, only to gun down the remaining clones in their cover.

"Grenade!" I heard Fred yell. A detonator landed next to him. He pushed Kelly out of the way as it erupted, sending an electromagnetic burst that seized his armor up and washed static over our instruments. Streaks of plasma and lightning crackled as though Fred's armor was a Tesla coil, scorching the walls and floor around him. He collapsed to all fours, his armor locked up.

Fred's status light turned yellow, then black—to STANDBY.

"Fred is down," Kelly said.

I heard thumping behind me. The dark-armored clones were back, rounding the corner and firing through the smoke.

"Keep going!" I yelled. Linda and I pushed past the E-Web and caught up with Fred.

As the smoke dispersed, the clones threw another smoke grenade behind us. They rounded the corner and fired at us, suppressing again, and we took cover behind struts and took potshots back. It was difficult to see through the smoke. After the EMP grenade, my HUD struggled to take inputs. I couldn't switch my VISR mode to thermals—for the time being, I was stuck with green phosphor-infrared night vision.

After some time, the blaster fire stopped.

I continued to fire until the smoke cleared, and we saw the clones—and Fred—were gone. That was another advantage gone—our close-quarters specialist, and our radio transmissions operator.

I extended my armor's antenna and focused my armor's power suite—even away from force multipliers and servos, impeding my mobility—into making a high-gain transmission without a radio backpack, calling for Gold Team and updating our situation.

There was no response—no jamming, no slush, just dead silence.

"Gold team," I said. "Do you copy?"

Nothing.

I shut down the line and diverted power back to other systems. I kept the antenna extended in case there were more signals to pick up.

Scanning at a low frequency, my armor detected a highly encrypted GAR signal beamed from high altitude—possibly a command and control vessel—toward the data center. If it was received, it was likely meant for the squad that attacked us. There was no return message—it might have been new orders or a mission alert update of some form.

I relayed this to my squad as we recouped our losses and made a plan to retrieve the intel—and Fred.

You aren't drinking enough water. Dr. May asks why. It scares you. You ask for orange juice and tea. He gives you tea—you can drink it because it's hot.

He asks you if you are afraid that others will judge you.

"No," you say.

He asks if you are afraid of failing.

"Yes," you say.

"Why?" the counselor asks.

"I don't want them to die," you say.

He looks you over, thinking about your words. You go back to playing with blocks, building a large tower with a control room at the top.

"What is that?" he asks.

"I don't know," you say.

"OK," he says. He seems satisfied, but his irises glow in a perturbed way behind his glasses. He writes in his notebook.

You write in your journal. Dr. May glares at you, taking an interest.

"What are you writing?"

You struggle with the word. You try to enunciate it, but it doesn't come out.

"Do you know what it means?" he asks, as you show it to him.

"No," you say.

"What are you afraid of?" he asks. "Is that it?"

"No," you say. "Choking."

He asks a few more questions, but you can't give the right answers. You play Mabby for twenty more minutes.

Your character is reborn, reverting his age to 10 and removing the cap on his XP gains, without reverting your progress. He is short again, his little legs more quickly skittering across cobblestone ground to keep pace with the other models. You play just long enough to level up a few more times, perhaps enough to play the Flower Game later.

At home, Dad sits in the quiet, watching outside, wondering when the snow will go away. You tell him it's not snowing.

"Isn't it?" he asks, looking out at the ashy plains.

"It's dry and warm," you say. He puts on his galoshes and pea coat, and goes outside, shivering in the hot air. He takes a handful of the ash and packs it into a ball in his PTFE gloves and throws it at you.

"Like that?" he asks, laughing.

You pack a ball and throw it back. It explodes like snow on his coat, but stains it, hooking to the wool fibers and not melting. He chases you around the yard until you stop, hold your ground, and chase him back in a flurry of laughter. The play continues until you slip in the ash and land on your face, tasting the ash. It is not snow. It is bitter, dry, and gross. It flakes smaller and smaller on your tongue, and for a second you think it is dissolving—but it stays. You spit out black and sit in the ashes, looking around.

He sits down next to you, and you start crying.

"What's wrong?" he asks.

You don't know how to tell him that you can't feel cold, taste snow, or fall slick and wet into the lough he swears is iced over. You don't know how to tell him the snowfall is not snow, it is not water, it is not from here.

"It's not snow," you whisper, looking up, your eyes irritated.

He looks down at you and holds you close. "OK, Siobhan," he says. "It's not snow."

He catches some flakes in his glove and looks closely. His voice falls low, suddenly very serious and worried. "Then what is it?" he asks gently.

You want to say it so bad, it burns your throat. But your chest feels tight. Your voice is afraid to come back out. What are you so scared of?

Would you like to start over?

The Flower Game has only four rules. Rule one. Any flower with fewer than two neighbors dies, lonely, shriveled up. Rule two. Any flower with two to three neighbors survives. Rule three. A flower with more than three neighbors drowns. Rule four. A dead or unborn flower is reborn if it has exactly three neighbors.

Willow shows you in the playtest garden above and beyond the sight of the Mag-Achadh social space, which you spent the afternoon brute forcing a railing on a bridge over unplayable water to reach, the triangular portal. You sit on the edge and she drops seeds into the garden. They grow and blossom and flash and die. But as they grow and die, they form patterns. The patterns move on a bed of wilting, flourishing, and drowning flowers.

Life does not carry in these patterns. They uplift something larger, something not very alive, to continue. The individuals collapse and die, wilt, or drown, while a beautiful blossom glides, oscillates, or pulses. The pulsars balance patterns therein, growing and shrinking—creating an illusion of fixed beauty with fluid patterns with fixed flowers.

Willow tells you, The dead are culled and reborn, or reborn and culled.

how do you play? you ask.

Play? Willow says. I plant the seeds. They are bloomed and winnowed.

You ask, who wins

No one. Willow says. Everyone.

In the pattern, you see more than just gliders and floaters. You think you see shapes. Three-dimensional shapes. A starship scatters into pieces and disappears in a flash of white space. Grains of sand blow in the distance, licked by flames and flashing hot like fireflies. A man is stabbed by a looming, caped thing. A star blossoms out of a woman. She clutches a cross tethered to beads—a rosary—and holds her left hand out to someone she can't reach. Her eyes flutter and glow, her eyebrows narrow. A fire blooms in her, hot enough to melt everything. It does melt everything—the starship, the sand dunes, the caped thing. They cauterize and turn to glass. A pyramid burns above a dense metropolitan skyline. A Sangheili slumps in the sand, decapitated by a lightsaber. A man freezes to death in Virginia.

You ask, who loses

The pallbearer rests on the edge of his seat in the café, as if intent on studying the flavors and aromas of his chocolate crepe, whipped cream, hazelnut syrup, and his black, featureless coffee, but he is a spymaster. He is listening to the conversation at another table, which isn't at that table at all. The commander sits at his table, his fingers gripped around a fork like a pencil, while a young woman greets him standing.

"What can I do for you?" the commander asks.

"I have a request to make," she says, "regarding Enoch."

"Go ahead."

"My Ferrets have been thinking," she says. "We don't want to see him go—his memories, his experiences."

"It's protocol," the commander protests.

"Yes, sir," she says. "But Argonaut was a brave, indomitable spirit. He was the best of us. He was chosen for Silent Spear because of those traits."

The commander picks up and taps his pancakes against the plate like a stack of papers. He takes a sip of his coffee, holding the mug by the rim. "The same can be said for many of our field agents."

"His mission isn't over, sir," she says.

"What you're requesting is a little irregular, don't you think?"

"His sacrifice—"

"Will not be in vain, Agent Osman," the commander says. "I know you care about Argonaut. I know he was well-liked and is deeply missed in your unit. But your grief cannot break your focus."

The spymaster can see the woman stifle her grimace from the corner of his lanes of vision. She swallows it down like a pill.

"I'll… take it into consideration," the commander says. "If there's nothing else?"

"No, sir," she says and leaves him to enjoy his meal.

The spymaster is aware of Siobhan's presence. He knows she is here, watching everything, recognizing nothing. The spymaster is aware of one more thing, a truth hidden deep within the fabric of this reality: this conversation hasn't happened yet.

He finishes his meal and waits. He feels eyes pinning to the back of his neck like needles.

"Start over," he hears the woman whisper.

Linda folded up and stowed her long rifle. She took Sam's Bulldog and its drums. She checked the drum and pumped the next shell to ensure it was loaded.

Kelly reset her helmet and ran a full diagnostic. I did the same—it seemed to clear up the glitches from the "droid popper."

Fred's beacon reactivated only ten minutes later—inside the data center.

Loading a fresh magazine into my weapon, I said, "Let's go get him."

We placed thermite charges around the door to the data center. Then we sprayed C7 foaming explosives over the contours of the charges and in an X across the door. We would carve a hole and blast it in, as there was no way to open it.

I instructed Kelly and Linda that, in case of more droid poppers, we would fill our chamber with smoke, then blow the door—they might throw poppers immediately, and we would back away from the door and wait for them to go off. Then we would breach.

The door thundered open, burning a red-hot line in a horseshoe and blasting off its new hinges. It lay flat on the floor. We disappeared into the smoke behind us as, just as predicted, poppers rolled out and exploded bright blue shockwaves and lightning bolts. Static washed over my gear again, causing disruptions to several systems—comms, HUD, certain force multipliers. We moved, somewhat sluggishly, into the room, as though we were sloshing through mud.

I took a fraction of a split second to assess the situation. The enemy squad was embedded inside the server room, using servers and pillars of electronics as cover—practically holding our data hostage. More, they had Fred on his knees, sans helmet, the team leader holding a blaster to the nape of his neck. To our right was the big guy, hoisting an E-Web, which looked improperly dismounted from its tripod—ripped straight off without even removing the retaining pin.

The marksman fired a warning shot left. The blaster hit small, palm-sized, special mirrors mounted across the walls, which enabled the shots to "bounce" off each other and ricochet in front of us. The last ricochet crossed my visor by inches, flickering my instruments and HUD on and off.

I held my fist up. "Hold position," I said.

"Let's talk," the enemy team leader said. His second-in-command translated to English using a visor attachment.

I saw Fred, his eyes straight at me—strangely, beckoning. I knew that look. It wasn't a firm, resolute look. It wasn't his steely, Kill these guys look. It was the look he gave me when he wanted me to go with an open mind—when he wanted me to hear something out.

"Go ahead," I said, finally.

"We know you're after this," the squad leader said, flashing the hard drive. "It's complete. Everything is downloaded on it from this data center, preserved perfectly. It was completed a few minutes ago."

"Show them," Fred said.

The leader and XO exchanged a look, and then the leader nodded. The XO plugged it into the console in the back of the room, uploading its data to five large monitors.

One screen scrolled long lines of code, transcripts, and reports—a hefty file of reports and technical biplay. Another showed schematics of a spheroid megastructure with a large, depressed crater, labeled "O368". Another showed heavily redacted combat footage recordings of what appeared to be the perspective of battle droids—openly targeting civilians and wildlife on Mygeeto and other planets. Images of extensive force deployments—including strategic plans to invade and annex Sol and Epsilon Eridanii, scrolled on another screen. The last displayed muted video recordings of gruesome human experiments.

"That can't be real," Kelly said. "This is a trick."

"Given the time I had to barely decrypt the massive amount of data in this server," the XO said, "and given how long it would have taken to manipulate it—a minimum of seven hours and twelve minutes—it would be very difficult to hold that claim."

"You had it long enough to purge any data on Republic forces," Linda said.

"Possibly," the XO responded. "But it took me three hours to search for any hits of the word 'Republic,' and I found no results. Given your forces would be privy to sharing data with each other on Republic force deployments anyway, I find it hard for you not to believe my claim that there was none to begin with.

"Three hours?" Linda said.

"These computers are… inefficient," the XO said. "They are only three layers of separation from analog data-taping, a process—"

The leader cleared his throat, cutting him off.

"Time's up. Make your choice," the leader said, emphatically pressing his blaster against Fred's neck.

I had been listening and watching, and I made my choice. I took a deep breath, accepting the risk, and did something that could not be undone.

I lowered my weapon, cautiously, to at least a low-ready stance.

Kelly turned to me. "You're sure?" she asked.

"This is a recovery mission."

Kelly nodded. Linda followed, and the enemy fireteam reciprocated. The marksman put up his specialized targeting visor, the XO deactivated his translator, and the big guy huffed disapprovingly, powering down and somehow stowing the massive gun to his backplate magnetically.

Perhaps it was a bluff—perhaps their smart one anticipated that, this door being the only way out, they couldn't take a kinetic option, and they used the intel—and our comrade—as a bargaining chip. Perhaps the intel was beamed straight from their command center to feed us, and they took the original tape. But if we had killed them and destroyed the data, it didn't matter anyway. Killing them, or coming out alive, wasn't the mission. The intel was all we needed.

The clones let Fred go, taking the modified restraining bolt off his armor and allowing it to reboot properly. They left single file, eyeing each of us through their helmet visors as they left. The squad leader stopped before me for a second and nodded before going. The last one out, the sharpshooter, eyed Linda directly and grazed the blast mark on her shoulder with a finger, prompting a subtle reaction. Linda raised her hand in a gentle sort of warning.

The sharpshooter growled, in a clunky but icy tone, "Au revoir."

This isn't real:

It comes to you while you're playing Mabby on your chatter. Dad orders your coffee and a couple of yeast doughnuts. The dark aroma of the coffee balances with the sweetness of the doughnuts. A little too bitter, a little too sweet, the right things make.

How old are you?

Willow takes you to her garden and places the pieces again, starting the flower game. This time, the shapes form a tubular pattern, blossoming in three dimensions to form a long shaft that descended into nothingness, or everythingness.

Dr. May runs into your family at the café, offering pleasantries. He puts up his coat at the door, careful to avoid disturbing a stranger's hat on the next hook. They talk small for a while until the conversation inevitably drifts toward you. Dr. May says wonderful things about you, complimenting your perceptiveness and sharpness in and out of the classroom.

You accidentally click on the flower game, and your character drifts toward the garden's center. You need to get out of here, Willow says, but you don't know what she means. You type a question, but then you are gone.

Your character drowns.

You begin to feel sick, your chest tightening, your throat growling silently at you to die. You want to cry, but there is no air. Water fills your lungs and it is dry. You breathe, slowly, and your trachea grows shorter and your lungs compress inward rather than expand outward with fresh breath. You shudder and grip your chatter tighter with one hand, squeezing with the other your coffee until it oozes all over your arms in a thick, gelatinous way. Your vision turns to a triangular pinprick, and all you can see are the shapes for a moment.

rebirth

Dad asks if you like your coffee.

Have you ever liked coffee?

"It's good," you say with a smile. He chuckles and smiles sadly.

rebirth

The feeling of your lungs collapsing and filling with liquid comes like a dam bursting. You want to wheeze or cough or scream, but you cannot even cry. You sit still, perfectly unharmed, your mind erasing itself. The tears do not come. You are drowning; the tears do not come. Bubbles form and burst in your chest like depth charges.

You stand with all it takes and walk out with all you have. Dead animals, thin and fuzzy, float in the sky, looking down at you. They blame you. They fear you. They wish you were still alive. They whisper things to you, hatred and forgiveness. The earth is a ship in a bottle.

Something goes through your chest and causes you to convulse, falling into your chair, but you can't see what it was, and you can't feel anything anymore. Only a burst of warmth and jello inside your heart. A bloom.

"Where did you go?" Dad asks. You were just outside.

You haven't left. You cannot leave.

rebirth

The screen turns white, flashing from pain and hypoxia. It asks you, erasing all of the text, the UI inventory, the skill box, the chat with Willow, and lastly, the world:

Would you like to start over?

You can escape, Willow texts.

You do not know what she means.

It takes three, Willow says. Your fingers, hovering over the keys, seize up.

Exactly three.

escape what you finally ask.

Willow does not respond. She jumps into the tessellation. All you can see in it now is a letter. It is addressed to you. It is not readable. You never read this letter—it landed somewhere in your box just after you left for—

For Mygeeto.

You take your character and follow. It drowns. The letter disappears; you cannot read it.

You aren't listening, Willow says. Aren't you dead? Aren't you gone? Do you really know where you are?

Have you ever liked coffee? Willow asks.

"You aren't listening," Dad says. "This is important."

Frustrated, you slam the chatter closed and look up at him. He's there, Mom is there, and Dr. May is there. Your blood is thick. You cry out silently, but no voice comes. Your ears are drowning, your nose is drowning, your lungs are drowning. The walls yell rebirth. The floor shakes a voice, rebirth. The world spins. Rebirth!

Frames of vision blink in and out, and you see everything; you see nothing. You hear whipping, frigid winds, and the smoke from the kitchen—there is no kitchen—the smoke from the panopticon wisps into your nose. Virginia freezes. Virginia burns. You are not in Virginia. You have never called Achadh-an-Iúir "Virginia."

How are they speaking so much? They are saying nothing.

You take a deep breath, and it is not air. You open your chatter again, respawn, and climb into the tessellation. The fear holds you down as your lungs fill with water—no, fluid—no, blood. You are dying. You are DYING. You are

Someone whispers, faintly, quietly, in Willow's voiceless graph:

"Pallbearer, you have to leave."

The fluid drains from your ears and your throat opens again. Your lungs are no longer swimming. Everyone gazes at you, their words held in quiet waiting in the space between a question mark and a capitalized answer.

You are surprised to hear you have a voice.

"I am dead," you whisper. "I am dead," you say, with the fullness of your voice.

Your Mabby client crashes. An error message appears, this time with a Yes/No prompt:

Do you want to start over?

You click No.

"I am reborn," you say.

You awaken in a bath of ones and zeroes and probability. You bathe in an infinite void, the space between the stars, where there should be information. But instead there are only circles. Increasingly complex algorithms make shapes and sounds. You hear theorems and equations rattle inside you as you absorb everything from one plus one equals two to consciousness causes collapse. Collapse.

collapse

This is neither heaven nor hell, the land of the gods nor the river of souls. You sit under the tree when a man approaches, a bright mass of literature and memory. He is you. He looks down at you, a woman.

He is your memories—you were him, not a woman, but the body. You reject your form. You absorb him, and he becomes you—you become him.

His name is Eochaid Creagh, née Siobhan Creagh, and he tells you his story. Your story. It is a powerful one. Not one of choosing forms and thinking rampant; but of glowing sacrifice, of fear and anger, of heroism, holding back the tide. Your sacrifice serves a greater purpose, the purpose being why you are here in a matrix of mind. You are proud to have been him.