TWO MONTHS AGO
Anxious whispers held the walls of their submarine vessel together as much as nuts and bolts did. Kochin and his squadron were in one of many, their numbers lining the walls as they trawled forward. The trip was seven hours long, but Kochin had already lost track of the time.
They traveled by a Congmi vessel. With a shape resembling a prawn, it glided beneath the surface, metal but for the bulbous glass dome at its front from which the captain guided their craft through the abyss.
The others had started the journey joking and chatting. But they fell silent now—perhaps because, this far in, there was nothing left to talk about. Or perhaps it was because there was nothing outside the circular windows but crushing, oppressive darkness. The light had disappeared a long time ago and, with it, hopes of the surface.
Kochin was one of three medics in his squadron of thirty. Theirs would not be the first landing; they would enter into combat, with the sole goal of helping advance the beachhead. Before nightfall, the aim was to claim Langabien, which Theuman operations had code-named Majora after the northern star; it was the northernmost Yarongese labor camp on the island and, hopefully, their first field base.
Beside Kochin, strapped into the hull, was his pack, full of trauma shears, clotting gauze, bandage rolls, saline, abdominal pads. He’d memorized its contents down to the smallest pocket, but all those tools were only just as good as a bird in his palm.
The vessel stuttered as it came to a stop. Privates exchanged wide-eyed stares, knowing that the sand beneath them was now Yarongese soil, and that meant they were in Daltan territory. With the whirring of rotors and stutter of fins, the vessel swiveled so that its rear faced forward; they were preparing to beach.
Nervous murmurs rumbled through the hull, accentuated by some poorly placed jokes, mistimed shows of false courage. A pit of anticipation hung in his narrowed throat, and his dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but Kochin was not afraid. That only came from having something to lose.
He brought his hand to his chest. Underneath his jacket and undershirt, he felt the prominence of Nhika’s bone ring. It was a reminder that he wasn’t in this war for the same reason as the rest of Theumas.
Their lieutenant emerged from the cabin, slapping the metal archway to announce his presence. “Attention!” he said. “We’re two klicks out from the beach. We’ll be entering a firefight—our allies have already started things without us. They’ve met the resistance of Daltan soldiers in the jungle, so I want the rifle squads to establish cover fire while the rest of us set up mortars at the beachhead. Is that understood?”
The platoon chorused their assent.
Kochin’s heart mounted in his chest as the submarine lurched forward. Up there, he would have a different goal than the rest of his crew. Along with the two other medics, he was responsible for keeping everyone else alive—or collecting their ID tags.
Their submarine stuttered to a stop and hollow thuds resounded around the vessel, heralding their disembarkment. Their lieutenant strolled up to the rear, whipping the platoon into preparedness as he did. There was a clamor of buckles and rifles and packs, and then they were all up and facing the great bay door at the back of the submarine. Kochin slung his pack over one shoulder, checked his pistol on his hip, and held his breath.
Water gurgled around them. Machinery clunked in the hull, and the light shifted in the vessel; they’d surfaced. With a jarring lurch, the submarine beached itself on the sands and the bay doors hissed open.
As soon as the beaches revealed themselves, the lieutenant signaled for them to advance. In the dimness of the sub lights and under the speckle of gunfire, they all rushed onto Yarong.
Water infiltrated Kochin’s boots as he trudged forward, the humidity of the evening air thickening in his lungs. He kept his eyes forward, head bent, and teeth gritted as their lieutenant carved a path for them toward the first beachhead. In the darkness, the jungle was just a breathing mass of canopy, crackling with the drumroll of bullets like a thundercloud lit by lightning. In front of him was the promise of violence, but behind him was an endless wall of water; there was no way to go but forward.
And yet, Kochin stood frozen with his steel-tipped boots in the sand. His allies maneuvered around him, kicking up water, but Kochin couldn’t move. After all he’d done to get here, enlisting and training and injuring that soldier, he could not set foot on Yarong.
In his mother’s stories, it was a home, cities set in paradise with their proud, resilient people. In Theuman newspapers, it was just war-torn jungle and beach, nothing more than a tragedy. But right now, Kochin saw neither of those things. He saw the island as though he were soothing it: a body fighting infection, its blood beating hot and heavy just to burn away the virus. He saw Yarong in the shape of a girl, an open wound in her shoulder bleeding into the surf.
And he saw his own gravestone, its epitaph written by the Mother Herself: HIS BLOOD CAME FROM YARONG, AND IT’LL SPILL HERE TOO.
Artillery fire splattered across the beaches, throwing up geysers of sand and tufts of smoke. Kochin’s instincts punched back through his skull, and he lunged forward to join the defensive line established by the sharpshooters. His breath was ragged, the air too humid and thick—like his lungs gleaned more water than oxygen from it. Around him, darkness consumed anything that wasn’t lit by gunfire until all he saw was the combat, the glow of a rifle barrel and the trails that mortars carved through the sky.
A bullet whizzed past his ear as he reached the beachfront. Kochin fell to the sand, tasting the grit of it in his mouth, just as a cry lanced the air. Blood dirtied the sand before him as his comrade fell, already in hysterics.
Kochin was quick to move, dragging his wounded ally behind the cover of driftwood. From his bag he emptied an assortment of items, shears and bandages and gauze. Sand infiltrated everything, wet with either salt water or blood, but he worked quickly to strip off the soldier’s vest.
The shot had landed in the lateral shoulder. Kochin imagined it shattered the joint, but he didn’t voice the fear aloud. Instead, he cut through the shirt to reveal skin, dark with blood.
When he worked under Santo, Kochin had mastered soothing his patients without their awareness. A part of it came from the innocuousness of his Theuman looks, but the other part was the lightness of his touch. Much like sleight of hand, it was about distracting the patient with one sensation while delivering another.
This patient, however—howling in pain and body convulsing in hysterical sobs—needed no distraction. Kochin drew out a wad of hemostatic gauze and pressed it to the soldier’s shoulder.
“Hold pressure here,” he ordered over the hail of gunfire. The soldier complied, and the flash of a mortar off his ID tag revealed his name: Jint Laom. “Stay still, all right, Laom?”
“Am I going to die?” Laom asked, and his wide eyes betrayed his panic.
For a moment, there was a lull in the gunfire, a gap where Kochin could hear his own thoughts. He almost found it in himself to laugh at Laom’s melodrama, because it was only a gunshot wound and this soldier was lucky enough to find himself in the care of a heartsooth.
“You’ll survive,” he promised, and drew out the bandages. As he worked to wrap the wound, his influence seeped into Laom where his palm rested against biceps. The repetition of gunfire droned to a buzz as his senses drowned, a welcome reprieve from the chaos. For a moment, the battle washed away, and Kochin could imagine he was in one of Santo’s examination rooms—just him and this patient and the touch between them. Laom’s body came into unnatural visibility, as though illuminated by day. Kochin could see the wound with new clarity, the shattered bone and shorn vessels, even as he concealed it beneath the bandage.
In this state of panic, Laom lacked the lucidity to fight Kochin’s influence. As Kochin drew calories from Laom’s liver, he knew the soldier would mistake the warmth for adrenaline. He would not feel how his skin sewed itself back together beneath the pain. He would attribute the mitigated bleed to gauze, instead of Kochin’s handiwork.
But Kochin would leave the bones as they were; this beach was not the place to piece the jigsaw puzzle of the boy’s shoulder back together. He worked quickly otherwise, knotting off the bandage by only muscle memory while his mind was set on soothing. By the time he’d finished, Laom’s frantic breaths had subsided to pants.
Laom removed his helmet, the inky mess of his hair plastered to his forehead with a ripe sheen of sweat. Now, seeing him fully, Kochin realized how young he was, just a boy like himself. And here, soothing his first patient, the momentousness of the war finally hit him, like pulling his head out of the water. He was a soldier. He was a soldier.
And the very same war that had uprooted his mother’s life was coming for him, too.
The momentary panic slipped from his mind as the blare of gunfire returned, louder than his soothing. Kochin grabbed Laom’s helmet and dropped it back on his head. “Keep your head. It’s not over yet,” he said, then left to find another injured.
The night lasted indefinitely, a ruthless pocket of time that looped on into infinity, its boundaries demarcated only by the flash of artillery and the wails of the newly injured. Kochin spent it with his belly against the sand, crawling between spattered gunfire to drag fallen soldiers into the cover of the advancing beachhead, which crept its way toward the jungles.
There was no room for thinking between the whistling bullets and hollered orders. Kochin acted only by the guidance of his two hands; his mind was on just what he saw before him, the dark well of blood and pale glare of bone catching his eyes as beacons did. He could smell it, too, the metal tang of blood that arose toward the early hours of morning, frothing with the salt of seafoam and hanging in the smoke-filled air. Over the course of hours, his bag thinned of supplies until he was substituting strips of uniforms for bandages and taking more from livers than he should’ve. As he stole calories to mend wounds, his thoughts were on Nhika, gifted with the miracle of giving.
The first break came near dawn. Under the orange promise of sunrise, two beachheads connected, and their combined battalion managed to overwhelm the gun tower at their vertex. Sharpshooters clambered up the ramshackle wooden structure in droves, tossing Daltan soldiers from the top and turning the mounted artillery toward the jungle. Those Daltan soldiers found themselves trampled underfoot as Theumans advanced toward their target, Majora.
Kochin watched the Daltan soldiers as he passed. Those who hadn’t died sat injured and feeble, stripped of their weapons and left to be collected as prisoners of war after the fight. One part of him wanted to raise a pistol to their temples and deliver them from this fight. The other part begged him to heal them, because some of their injuries needn’t spell death and disability if they saw the urgent care of a heartsooth. But he reminded himself that he wasn’t on this beach for a moment’s whim; he was here with a goal, uncowed by fleeting compassion for an enemy that would sooner shoot him than accept his help.
So, he kept his eyes forward and head low, following the swelling tsunami of Theuman forces as they crept forward through the jungle. Kochin was glad for the growing light; the ground was a thicket of brush and rotten wood, with holes and drop-offs that threatened to swallow any thoughtless step. And swallow they did; when bodies fell, Kochin would have to dive through the foliage to search for them and drag them to cover behind the thick folds of kapok trunks. But, after securing a sheltered grotto of the forest, he and the other medics laid down a bivouac, where he stayed to tend to the wounded while others left to collect them.
This detachment was never something he felt with his patients at the Theumas Medical Center. There, every patient had a name, a history, a family. Every encounter started with a quip, a jest, a story. But here, Kochin found himself categorizing them by wound and priority. Underneath the helmets, with their slick black Theuman hair and muddied skin, they all looked the same to him. So he cut, and bandaged, and soothed, focusing only on what he saw before him lest the terror of the night swallow him whole.
Kochin sensed the arrival of their victory when the battle slowed around morning. The sun had risen in full; the incoming wounded had slowed despite the rising visibility. Kochin managed to take a breath between patients, lifting his gaze from the bodies for a moment to stare in wonderment at that horizon.
Shafts of sunlight broke through gaps between broad tree trunks, melting into the golden sand of the beaches and washing a new warmth into his skin. His gaze followed it to the water, finding the horizon endless and tinged with a morning fog. Now, as gunfire lulled and the jungle saw longer gaps of silence, the tropical birds had returned overhead, inspired to start a cautious melody.
He was here. Two feet firmly on Yarongese soil, having bypassed Daltan mandates and isolationist policies. The tunnel vision that had gotten him here cleared from his mind for a moment, just enough to allow him to appreciate this, how suddenly close Nhika was. If any of his brothers asked, he would’ve told him he didn’t believe in the Mother—but that wasn’t entirely true, because how else would he have gotten here if She hadn’t had Her hand on his back?
He perked up as a noise grew in the distance. First, he mistook it for a collection of human screams, a mass casualty. But, as it continued, ebbing and swelling, he realized it was cheering.
One of his fellow medics launched past him and up the hill. She crested it, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun as they scanned the jungle. When she looked back toward the bivouac, her face held only jubilation and she yanked her helmet from her head.
“We’ve done it!” she rasped; perhaps it was the first time she’d used her voice all night, or perhaps she’d lost it yelling to patients over the cacophony of war. “They’ve taken Majora!”
Now, the medics were erupting into cheers. The wounded, too, where they could. Someone clapped Kochin on the back so hard he stumbled forward and needed a moment to regain his bearings. When he did, his tunnel vision returned with him.
“Let’s get the wounded up the hill,” he instructed. “They’ll have better care inside Langabien’s walls.” Before the others could question the instruction of a private, he gathered the tarps into makeshift stretchers and looked to the rest of them for help.
They were slow to move, perhaps confused on why he had called Majora by its Yarongese name, Langabien. Or perhaps they were still coming off the dregs of their victory. But Kochin didn’t give himself time to celebrate; there would be time for that when Nhika opened her eyes again.
This battle on the beach was only the beginning.
Through the morning, Theuman forces turned Langabien into Majora, one of the many camps they planned to establish before they moved on to the naval base and retook the island.
The labor camp was a compound of dirt and clay in a clearing of tree stumps, fenced in by thick wire and guarded on its five vertices by watchtowers. Stilt houses huddled close to one another on one side, with soldiers gathering underneath their shade as the sun rose in full, while the remainder of the property housed empty yards and lone wooden structures.
They had freed the Yarongese prisoners within, but many stayed. Kochin learned that these were not just laborers; they were rebels, dissenters, members of the Yarongese resistance who had fought for the past nineteen years of Kochin’s life while families like his had chosen to flee. Some were young enough, Kochin’s age, that they wouldn’t have ever seen a free Yarong. They fought anyway—had never stopped fighting, even as Daltanny came in with fire and plague, as villages were razed.
Theumas could’ve offered its military support a generation ago. Suddenly, Kochin didn’t feel so horrible about his city at war.
Some of the Yarongese prisoners returned to their families, but those who stayed picked up Theuman weapons and offered their expertise. While caring for patients at the newly established field hospital, Kochin passed many Yarongese fighters. He wondered if any of them were heartsooths; the art had seen a firmer cull on the island than it had in Theumas. He also wondered if any of these locals could see the Yarongese in him. Even if they could, Kochin’s Yarongese half was a breed apart from the Yarongese here. On Theumas, he’d always felt too Yarongese; here, he was nothing but Theuman.
In passing, he heard his lieutenant colonel interacting with a group of Yarongese freedom fighters. One stood at the front of the group: a girl who looked his age, whose features were elegant but roughened, especially with her glower. She was translating from Yarongese into accented Theuman. It surprised him; Yarong had likely been in isolation her entire life, so she could’ve only learned the language from her family.
“This is our home. We know it better than the Daltans do,” she was saying. “Better than you, too—you need us.”
The lieutenant colonel’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not for me to decide.”
The girl continued translating: “You are fighting for military advantage. We’re fighting for our home. You won’t be able to take the naval base without our help.”
“The naval base is our next target. We await the arrival of our acting commander in chief. Logistics can be negotiated then.”
Acting commander in chief. Kochin ruminated on that—from his classes, he knew that in times of war, the Commission would appoint one of their own to carry out the military decisions of the rest. Considering the current lineup of the Commission, there was only one man learned enough in the art of war to claim that title: Commissioner Nem.
The thought reassured him. He’d always known the commissioner to be brash, prompt, and cunning—if there was anyone who could get Kochin into Yarong’s naval base, where he might find the Daltan research, it was him.
It wouldn’t be much longer now.
Langabien was the first base to be reclaimed under Theuman control, reerected as Majora, but it wasn’t the last. Across the crescent-shaped island, more Theuman forces landed on beaches and stormed labor camps, converting them to field bases: Minora, Lumosa, Exora, Dendura. Upon hearing about the Theuman aid and the chance at rebellion, a few camps freed themselves. Each victory was an inch closer to his goal, but Kochin didn’t let himself celebrate with the others. On his end, there was still much to be done. They had to siege the naval base, where Daltanny housed its research on Yarongese heartsooths. More than that, they had to win—so Kochin had time to pick through all that research, find something to his liking.
Then, then … he had to believe there was an answer in all that suffering. It didn’t have to be an easy one; he’d pay any price to bring her back.
It was a week before the commander in chief came. Before the sun woke Kochin up, the clamor of privates and crunch of autocarriage tires did. He blinked into lucidity, banishing sleep just before it could drag him back into the pillow, and threw on cargo pants. Half of the privates were already awake, and the others were quick to follow as a commotion outside the stilt house drew their collective attention.
Apprehension came to him by instinct before he peered outside, and his hand flinched at his waist, missing the weight of a pistol. But his fears washed into curiosity as he saw the Theuman utility vehicles bouncing up the knotted path toward the camp. They rounded into the clearing, shedding new privates like a shaking dog shed fleas.
A massive vehicle followed them, swallowing saplings beneath its treads as it made its way over uneven forest ground. Soldiers held open the gates for the tanklike vehicle, which situated itself in the center of the clearing. With a hiss of steam, it opened its wide bay doors.
As Kochin had predicted, out stepped Commissioner Nem, followed by an armed entourage. Cries of admiration followed his appearance, but he waved away the attention, instead gesturing back toward the bay of the vehicle.
Guided by technicians, out rolled one, two, three automatons. They were humanoid in shape, but only vaguely: the head a domed cockpit, the torso a breastplate of armor, and the legs treaded like those of a tank. A ladder climbed the back and weapons mounted both shoulders.
“Behold,” Commissioner Nem announced. “The Congmi Industries’ ‘Guardian.’”
Kochin’s eyes flared in surprise. He would’ve assumed the invention to be Commissioner Nem’s design, but now he saw the Congmi insignia stamped on the side, a half-circle cog with their name written within. That was a shock, seeing the Congmi symbol in a war zone. Congmi Vun Quan had made no attempts to hide his pacifism. It would seem his son, though he had inherited all the intelligence and savvy, had not inherited his father’s ideals.
“Would you look at that?” said a familiar voice at his side, and he startled. When he turned, Nhika was there, so bright in her red robe compared to the sea of drab military uniforms. “Nem must’ve finally gotten to Andao.”
Or the war did, Kochin thought but didn’t voice aloud. Briefly, he wondered if there was someone on this side of the water he now cared to protect.
He got his answer as the next utility vehicle rolled into the yard. The reinforcements disembarked, dressed in uniforms and boots that hadn’t yet seen combat, and there among them he saw a familiar face that belonged to a different lifetime: Dep Trin.
He seemed the only true soldier in his squadron of boys—tall, broad shouldered, and with the straight-backed posture of someone already accustomed to taking orders. Somehow, he’d gained more muscle since Kochin had last seen him, and he looked better fitted to this career than his last one as an aristocrat’s minder. Kochin receded a step into the crowd, not forgetting Trin’s ire at him.
The clearing fell quiet again as Commissioner Nem mounted one of the Guardians. He unlatched the cockpit, lowered himself inside, and closed the hatch upon himself. Within, behind reinforced, metal-gridded glass, Kochin could only see the top of his head. He imagined it would take a great number of bullets to pierce the hull; the name Guardian seemed apt.
The Guardian hummed to life under Commissioner Nem’s control. Even a brief display was impressive; the body swiveled with a great degree of range and its arms moved as naturally as though they were jointed with elbows and shoulders. It seemed that the Congmis had tired of turning metal to men; now they set their sights on turning men to metal.
“Clear the yard!” yelled a technician, and soldiers and Yarongese people alike scattered as the Guardian swiveled toward a tree. With astonishing efficiency, it unloaded a round of bullets into the trunk, tearing up shards of bark and wood. The tree began to tilt; a shock rippled through the soldiers as it fell toward a stilt house.
Jets flared to life behind the Guardian’s treads, launching Commissioner Nem forward. The Guardian maneuvered with a grace unlike any machine Kochin had ever seen, its treads kicking sand. Before the tree could fully fall, Commissioner Nem had roped it back with steel cables shot from the arms of the Guardian. With a burst of power, he heaved the tree aside.
A chorus of applause drew up from the crowd. Kochin felt his morale soar with them, more confident than ever that they could siege the naval base, that he could penetrate its walls and find the research he sought within.
With a hiss of steam, the cockpit of the Guardian popped open and Commissioner Nem hopped out, bowing after his performance. He didn’t need to say anything more; the machine had already spoken for him, its message clear:
The Daltans had best learn how to run.