Amy starts filming immediately. Her lens catches scorch marks and cratered ceilings. Bits of metal and glass. Charred bedding.
And then she crouches near a pile of rubble and picks something up.
It’s small, round. Bright blue under the soot. A plastic sphere with little wings painted on the side. A toy. The kind kids used to roll along magnetic tracks. The kind you see in old commercials with warm filters and background laughter.
“Put that down,” I say. My voice is low, tight.
She doesn’t.
She turns it over in her hand like it’s holy.
“Tell me again,” she murmurs, “how this war is clean.”
My throat burns. I want to snatch it from her hand and hurl it into the dust. Instead, I walk away.
Because there’s nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.
We bivouac in a gully surrounded by shattered trees and twisted rebar. The fire’s synthetic—just a small coil of electric heat—but the glow flickers like real flame. I sit on a metal crate, watching embers dance across my retinas while the squad eats in silence.
Amy’s across from me, legs folded, chewing slowly. She’s got a protein bar and a half-melted block of synth cheese. She eats it like she’s at a godsdamn garden party.
“You get used to the taste?” she asks, catching me watching her.
“Or you stop caring,” I say.
She shrugs, tossing the wrapper into the disposal unit. “I used to think I had a strong stomach. Until Rusan Pass.”
My hands still. “What did you see there?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her chin on them. The firelight catches the fine dust on her cheeks, makes her hair glow like smoke.
“A woman,” she says finally. “Carrying her son. He was already gone, but she kept walking. Wouldn’t let him go. The way she screamed when I tried to talk to her—” Amy swallows hard. “Sounded like glass breaking.”
I don’t know why I ask it. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I want to know. “Do you believe in it?”
“The war?”
I nod once.
“No,” she says. “Do you?”
I think about that.
I think about Marn Sector, and the day Kanapa pulled me out of rubble while my blood was steaming in my boots. I think about medals and empty speeches. I think about the kid whose toy now sits in Amy’s pack, zipped up behind layers of wire and silence.
“I used to,” I admit. “Now? I believe in surviving.”
Amy’s eyes linger on mine. There’s something in her face I can’t quite place—soft, but not weak. Like compassion soaked in steel.
“That’s not nothing,” she says.
“No,” I say. “But it used to be more.”
She leans back against the crate, sighs like she’s exhaling three lifetimes.
“I came out here to prove something,” she says.
“What?”
