The Oldest Friend

The figure didn't answer.

It took one step forward, into the edge of the torchlight, and Adrian's thumb moved on the safety catch — and then the figure's legs gave out.

Not a collapse, exactly. More like a controlled surrender. The knees first, then the hands, a person who had been using all available will to stay upright and had simply run out of it. Koffee's barking cut off abruptly, replaced by a low whine, the animal's hackles still up but its posture shifting from aggression toward something uncertain.

Adrian was moving before he'd made a decision to move.

The man was middle-aged, or looked it — it was difficult to tell, because whatever he'd been through recently had aged him by some additional increment that had nothing to do with years. Dark skin, grey at his temples, a jaw that hadn't seen a razor in weeks. He was dehydrated to the point of serious concern, his lips cracked, his hands shaking slightly as Adrian caught him by the shoulder and kept him from going all the way down.

Alice came up on the other side and took his weight.

"Factions," the man rasped. His eyes were trying to focus and not quite managing it. "The factions are—"

And then his eyes rolled back, and he was gone.

Adrian lowered him to the ground. Checked his airway, his pulse, the slow rise and fall of his chest. "Alive. Dehydrated, probably exhausted, maybe more. We need to get fluids into him." He looked up at Alice.

She was staring at the man's face with an expression Adrian couldn't immediately name.

"Alice."

"I know him," she said.

They carried him back to camp between them, Koffee circling their feet the entire way with the anxious energy of a creature that had opinions about this development but no mechanism for sharing them.

They laid him on the tarpaulin. Alice sat back on her heels and looked at him for a long moment — at the lines of his face, the set of his jaw, the specific way his brow furrowed even unconscious, as if he were always working through a problem.

"Roger Michels," she said. "We called him Uncle Roger, in the field. He was the youngest person in our platoon and somehow the one everyone went to with their problems." She paused. "We were told he was dead."

Adrian crouched beside the man, studying him with different eyes now. "When?"

"After Strauskadz." A beat. "After everything."

Adrian took the canteen from his pack, tilted a small amount of water past the man's lips, waited. Then more. Koffee sat down beside them and rested its chin on the man's ankle with the gravity of a creature performing an important duty.

"We watch in shifts," Adrian said. "And when he wakes up, we find out what the factions are."

Dawn arrived without ceremony.

Adrian built a fire — small, controlled, positioned against a section of standing wall to diffuse the light — and set water to boil for the oatmeal they'd salvaged. Alice changed the cloth on Roger's forehead and spoke to him in the easy, one-sided way she had with unconscious things, the same way she spoke to Koffee when it was sleeping. Adrian had always found this quality in her quietly extraordinary: the ability to extend care toward something that couldn't receive it yet, simply because it might, eventually.

He was watching her do it when Roger moved.

Not the gradual surfacing of ordinary sleep — a sudden, violent lurch upright, one hand finding Alice's throat before she'd registered he was awake. His eyes were open but not present, fixed on something that wasn't her, a destination behind his own face.

"Die," he said, in a voice stripped of everything but the instruction. "Replicant. How dare you—"

Alice's training was faster than her fear.

Her legs came up and she shifted her weight, turning them both in one motion until she was on top. He was stronger than he looked, or had been — but he was also depleted, and she was not, and the elbow she drove into the hinge of his jaw was precise and final. He went still.

She sat astride him for a moment, breathing hard, one hand pressed to her own throat.

Adrian arrived approximately two seconds later.

He looked at Roger, unconscious again. He looked at Alice, who was rubbing her neck and regarding him with an expression of considerable feeling. He said: "Old man's got one hell of a grip."

A pause.

"Why," Alice said, very quietly, "are you smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"Adrian."

"I'm just—" He pressed his lips together. "I didn't know you still had that in you."

She picked up the closest thing available — which happened to be a tin of beans — and held it in a way that communicated intent.

"Okay," he said. He held up both hands. "Okay. We tie him up until he's properly conscious. Come here, let me look at your neck."

Two hours later, Roger woke to the sound of Koffee breathing enthusiastically into his face.

He surfaced slowly this time, in increments — blinking, registering the restraints at his wrists, registering the dog, registering the two people sitting across the fire from him with expressions he couldn't yet read. He looked at them for a long time.

"My friends have been dead for ten years," he said. His voice was steadier than it had any right to be. "So either I'm hallucinating, or your makers got very good at DNA replication." He paused. "Which is impressive, genuinely, but I am not falling for it."

Alice set down her cup.

"Roger Michels," she said. "You went by Roge in the field and hated it every time. You were twenty-three in Strauskadz and looked forty-five, which is where the uncle thing started. You wore the same lucky bootlaces for four deployments running — green, the left one slightly frayed — because your sister braided them for you before your first tour and you were absolutely convinced that losing them would get you killed." She tilted her head. "Her name is Clara. She wanted to be a marine biologist. You used to carry a photograph of her in your left breast pocket and take it out when you thought no one was watching."

Something moved across Roger's face.

"In Lwenge," Alice continued, her voice softer now, "after the minefield at the outpost — I remember walking through that market with you and Adrian and Grease and Spade, all four of us covered in things I won't name, and some of the locals were staring, and you just looked at me with this expression that I couldn't interpret at the time. I understand it now. It was the face of someone who can't believe they're still alive and isn't sure how they feel about it."

Roger's jaw was working. His eyes were very bright.

"Piju," he said. The word came out like something that had been held under pressure for a very long time. It was Alice's field name — the one she'd been given by the Fourth Wing on her second deployment, meaning something in a language most of them didn't speak, something that roughly translated to the one who sees clearly in bad weather. Roger was the one who'd given it to her. He'd never explained why.

"Hello, Roge," she said gently.

He looked at Adrian. Adrian met his eyes.

"Piju," Roger said again, in a completely different register — and then his throat worked, and he looked away, and for a moment the hard-worn surface of him came apart at a seam.

Adrian reached over and untied his wrists without ceremony.

They sat together in the early light, the three of them, and told each other what they knew.

Roger's story came in pieces, the way soldiers' stories always did — not in sequence but in the order that the mind could bear to release them. He had been reassigned after Strauskadz, he said. A letter from Lieutenant Whitethorn, hand-delivered, informing him that Adrian and Alice were among the casualties. He had been told to lie low. Told it was for his safety — the militants they'd been targeting had connections that reached further than the official reports acknowledged, and survivors were liabilities.

He had done what he was told. He had disappeared.

"Ten years," Adrian said.

"Ten years," Roger confirmed. He looked at his hands. "You were dead. I watched you both get lowered into the ground." He paused, and something in the pause had a quality Adrian catalogued but didn't name yet — a slight friction, the sense of a sentence that had been edited before it arrived. "What Whitethorn showed me was convincing."

"Whitethorn told us you were one of the casualties," Alice said.

Roger looked at her. "He told you the same thing in reverse."

The fire crackled. Koffee moved from Roger's ankle to Alice's lap, as if reallocating its comfort services.

"Something to think about," Adrian said, in his flat, careful voice — the one that meant he was filing something away rather than losing it. "Later. For now, tell us what you meant. Last night, before you went under. The factions are—"

Roger exhaled. "Right. Yes." He accepted the cup Alice handed him and held it in both hands. "How much do you know about what happened?"

"We know there was an event," Alice said. "We know it was catastrophic. We know the world we walked back into is not the one we left." She glanced at Adrian. "And we know about the stars."

Roger looked up sharply. "What do you know about the stars?"

"We'll trade," Adrian said. "You first."

Roger called it the After-World.

He said: ten years ago, a beam of energy struck the earth. Not visible to the naked eye, registered by most seismographs as a minor tremor — until the second beam hit, and then the ordinary vocabulary of disaster stopped being sufficient. Tectonic plates shifted. Gravity destabilised in certain regions. A quarter of the earth's mass was, by various accounts, simply rearranged at the atomic level.

The beam did one of two things to living matter: it obliterated it, or it enhanced it. There appeared to be no middle ground, and no discernible logic to which outcome occurred — not yet, at least.

"Enhanced," Alice said. "What does that mean, practically?"

"Abilities. Augmented biology. The new science — it came directly from studying the people who survived, what had changed in them, how to replicate and extend it. Earthanica — that's the nation that formed from the largest surviving territories in this region — developed what they call ABs. Augmented Bionics. Chips and bio-robotic components embedded in the body. Makes you faster, stronger, sharper." He touched the back of his neck, briefly. "I had them before this mission. Had to have them removed to go undercover."

"Which is why you collapsed walking through the dark," Adrian said.

"I've been running on adrenaline and muscle memory for three days, yes." Roger had the grace to look mildly embarrassed. "Anyway. Earthanica is the largest and most organised power in the AW. Strong military, advanced infrastructure, augmented citizenry. They have laws. They have order." He paused. "They have tendencies."

"What kind of tendencies?"

He chose his words. "The kind that come with believing you're the only functioning civilisation left."

Alice absorbed this. "And the others? You said factions."

"The Manics," Roger said, and his expression changed — a tightening around the eyes, a professional assessment rather than fear. "Raiders. Territorial, hierarchically organised, which people assume means disorganised until they find out otherwise. They control significant resource deposits and they are not gentle about it. Stay away from their camps."

"And the ones we saw last night?" Alice asked. "The crowd, near the orbs of light."

Roger's expression shifted again, into something more complicated. "Survivalists. Fundamentalists. They believe the rupture — that's what they call it, the event — was a message from their goddess, Nyx. They've been interpreting the signs ever since." He looked at his cup. "Killing anyone who isn't part of their congregation, as an offering."

"The lights," Alice pressed. "The orbs. They said those were Nyx?"

"That's what they say." A beat too long. "I wouldn't put too much stock in anything Survivalists claim to understand."

Adrian was watching him. "And what would you put stock in?"

Roger met his eyes, held them, and smiled with only the lower half of his face. "Getting to Motherbase and letting someone with more answers than me do the explaining."

The silence stretched.

Then Alice said: "Roger. Before we go anywhere — there's something you need to tell us."

"Several things, I imagine."

"How long have we been gone?" She kept her voice even. "Not how long the world has been in the After-World. How long have we been gone. You said ten years. But to us, Strauskadz was six months ago. We went into the bunker, we had the visions, we slept — and then we woke up here."

Roger put his cup down. He looked at them both for a moment with an expression that a different person might have used to preface very bad news.

"If Strauskadz was six months ago for you," he said carefully, "then one of two things is true. Either the bunker had properties that shielded you from the event in a way that also stopped time for you both—" He paused. "Or you slept for ten years and haven't aged a day."

The fire popped.

"Which do you think it is?" Adrian asked.

"I think you two look exactly as you looked the last time I saw you, and I look like I've had a very difficult decade." Roger spread his hands. "I know which one I'd bet on."

Alice stood up.

She didn't do anything with it — didn't speak, didn't pace, just stood, as if she needed the vertical space of it. Adrian watched her, not moving, giving her the room.

"We lost ten years," she said. Not to either of them. To the fire, or to the air, or to whatever was listening. "Everyone we knew. Everything we were going to do." Her hand went to the pendant at her throat — the one Adrian had made for her, the gold-lined diamond on the silver chain, the one she wore when she slept. "My mother. She would have been — I was going to — we were going to try—" She stopped.

Adrian stood up. He came to her and put his hands on either side of her face, tilting it gently until she was looking at him.

"I know," he said.

"I'm not ready."

"I know that too."

"Adrian, ten years—"

"Yes." He held her gaze. Steady. The way he'd learned to be steady — not because it came naturally but because someone had to be, and he had decided a long time ago that it would be him. "And there will be a time when we sit with all of that. When we find out who made it and who didn't and what we missed and what we owe. That time is not right now." His thumbs moved, gently, across her cheekbones. "Right now, there's a man behind us who has answers we need, and a world in front of us that we have to learn. And I need you with me for both."

A long breath in. A long breath out.

She pulled his hands down from her face and held them both in hers, gripping for a moment with a pressure that meant something she didn't have words for yet.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay."

She turned back to Roger, who was looking at the middle distance with the elaborate discretion of a man who has been around enough soldiers to know when not to watch.

"Motherbase," she said. "How far?"

"On foot, through the safest route?" He calculated. "Three, four days. Maybe more. The Eusten Trail has checkpoints — gates that verify citizenship of Earthanica. Which presents us with a minor complication."

"Which is?"

He looked at Adrian with the expression of someone delivering a message they know will not be well received. Adrian looked back with the expression of someone who has already identified the incoming problem and is not pleased about it.

"You don't have ABs," Roger said. "And I don't currently have mine. Which means we have no way to verify our identities at the gates." He paused. "I have a plan."

"What kind of plan."

"The kind you're not going to like."

The fire burned down between them, and Koffee looked up from Alice's lap with the alert curiosity of a creature that had no context for this problem and was grateful.

"Tell me," Adrian said flatly.

Roger opened his mouth.

And from somewhere in the dark beyond the camp, the sound of engines.