The body on top of him weighed about as much as a grown man, which made sense, because it was one.
Sasha had pulled it over himself before the fighting reached this part of the hillside, when he still had enough mental energy left to make decisions. The natural dip in the earth had done the rest, a shallow groove worn into the slope that wasn't deep enough to call a trench but was deep enough to matter. He was grateful for it. The smell was harder to be grateful for, blood and iron and rot that set in faster than anyone who hadn't seen a battlefield would believe. It had been in the back of his throat long enough to stop being something he registered separately from the air.
He breathed through it. His jaw was locked against the wound in his side, a low simmering thing that had been making its case for his full attention since he went down. He had been lying here for hours and his throat was dust and the wound had graduated from the kind of damage that announces itself loudly to the kind that works quietly and doesn't stop. He kept giving it as little of his attention as he could manage. It kept making the case anyway.
Above him, two Diamond-ranked generals were finishing what they had started.
He watched through his eyelashes. They were both elevated, suspended on raw mana output, and the air around them sat wrong the way air does when something is burning through more power than it was built to hold. Our general held the higher position. Gareth, a name that moved through the regiment less like a name and more like a weather warning. He conjured earth straight from the mana around him, no ground required, shards of compressed rock forming and firing in sequences that gave Voss nowhere comfortable to settle, or boulders wrenching into existence and hurled with the casual precision of a man who had been doing this long enough to stop finding it interesting. He still hadn't drawn his sword. He didn't need to yet.
Voss, the Thornwall general, was not making it easy for him. His blade ran red-hot, heated past the point of being a sword into something closer to molten iron, and he carved through the rock shards before they reached him, splitting them in short sharp arcs that sent the fragments wide. What he couldn't split he read early and moved around, his footwork keeping him half a step ahead of the attacks.
Then Voss split a shard and kept the arc going, the momentum of the cut carrying his blade through a wide sweep, and the fire that came off it wasn't incidental. It was deliberate, a wave of it launched straight at Gareth. Gareth tilted his body and it passed him close enough that the edge of his beard caught, a small dark singe along the jaw that he gave no indication of noticing.
"That all you've got?" Voss called out. "Six years and you're still throwing rocks at me like a fucking child."
Gareth responded by hurling a boulder the size of a cart horse directly at his face.
Voss swore and went sideways hard, and for a moment his positioning opened. Gareth was already closing in.
A slab of conjured earth caught him from below mid-dodge, a flat dense mass that drove into him and sent him down fast and hard. He hit the ground roughly a hundred metres from where Sasha was lying, and the impact shook the hillside enough that the wound announced itself in full for a moment and Sasha pressed his face into the dirt and breathed through it.
Voss was already trying to get up. He made it to one knee before the ground around his foot closed, earth sealing over his boot and locking him in place.
Gareth's sword came out.
The arc was short but certain, and it took Voss's sword arm off just below the shoulder, blood splattering across Gareth's face.
Voss hit Gareth with everything his left hand had before the scream finished leaving his mouth, a burst of fire at point blank that drove Gareth back two steps. It didn't do much else. Gareth steadied himself as his granite shield dissolved to dust and looked at him.
"You son of a bitch," Voss said, breathing hard. It came out almost slurred.
He raised his left hand. Fire coalesced around it, thicker and more deliberate than the combat fire had been, and he pressed it hard against the stump. His face did not change. He kept his eyes on Gareth the entire time his own flame burned the wound closed.
"Six battles," he said, while it burned. "Six goddamn battles and you finally get me. How does it feel?"
"You talk too much," Gareth said.
"Burn, you golem fucker." Voss spat out with venom.
He opened his hand and let go of all of it.
The fire came out in every direction, a shapeless roaring release of everything he had left, and the heat rolled down the hillside in a wave that hit Sasha like a scalding iron. He pressed his face into the dirt and did not move as the body above him took most of it. The light through his closed eyelids went white and stayed white and the air above him screamed, and the heat filled his throat and his nose and somewhere inside it, something cracked open.
* * *
An office. Forty-something floors up, the kind of building where the windows don't open, and the air has been recycled so many times it tastes of nothing. A television on the wall showing aerial footage of something that had been a city until recently. The timestamp in the corner said 9:47 PM.
He knew this room. The smell of it, the way the screen light hit the desk at that hour, the weight of the chair. He knew it the way you know a place you have lived in for years.
The door opened. Marcus, without knocking. He set a coffee on the desk without being asked and looked at the footage for a moment before he spoke.
"Kai."
He looked up. The name landed the way his name had always landed, as natural as breathing, as familiar as his own heartbeat. It had never been anything other than his.
"Novak hit the Ardenne refineries," Marcus said. "Oil's going to tank by morning. The Saudis are already on the line."
He looked back at the footage. The city burned the way it was always going to, decided by people who had never worked a day of hard labour in their lives. He felt two things at the same time. The first was the clean swift calculation that had been running in him for twenty years, already working the angles, the calls before sunrise, the positions that would need to shift before anyone else got ahead of it. The second was harder to hold onto. The men on the night shift at the Ardenne refineries who had clocked in and would not be clocking out. He knew their number already, an estimate, the kind of figure that got attached to events like this before the bodies were even counted. He had watched enough politicians absorb numbers like that and keep moving, had watched the machinery of it, one death a tragedy, a million a statistic, had told himself early on that he would not become that. He was not sure anymore whether he had kept that promise or just gotten better at telling himself he had.
He said nothing. He drank the coffee. The screen kept playing.
* * *
The heat peaked and began to fall away.
Gareth came through it head to toe in stone, thick granite plating sealed over him completely, every joint covered, the shape of a man rendered in rock from the ground up. He moved through the last of the fire like it was weather. As his boots found the ground the stone began to release, cracking at the seams and falling away in pieces that were dust before they settled, and underneath it he looked exactly as he had before. His sword was already in motion.
Voss saw it coming. His one remaining hand went to his coat, came out with a small piece of paper covered in runes, and he got his teeth around it, tearing through it.
The sword passed through air.
Where Voss had been standing there was nothing but particles dissolving into the air, and the torn remains of the rune paper turning slowly in the heat haze, coming apart as it drifted down.
Gareth watched it reach the ground.
"Bastard," he said, quietly, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted it.
He pulled the scrying crystal from his coat. It pulsed pink.
"Voss recalled out. I took the arm, so he's done for the season, probably longer." His voice had the flatness of controlled irritation. "Eastern grid is ours. Get me a survey team for the mana crystal veins within the week. Actual casualty numbers, not the bullshit version. And next time command wants a Diamond rank, find someone else."
He pocketed the crystal, then drew his own recall talisman and tore it apart slowly, until he too turned into particles.
Sasha lay in the dirt with his throat full of ash and let the silence settle around him.
The office was as real as the mud under his hands. The mud was as real as the office. Both were his and both were correct and there was no seam between them that he could find, no place where one life ended and the other began. He had looked up when Marcus said Kai the way he would have looked up if someone had called Sasha, which was to say immediately and without thinking, the name finding him the way a name finds the person it belongs to.
He was seventeen years old. He had been fifteen when the framing happened, when the people who had decided he was a useful sacrifice had put him in a room and taken his name and his house and his future and handed him a soldier's death instead. He didn't know all their names yet. He knew some of them. He knew enough to know that it had been deliberate, that someone had weighed him against something they wanted and found him acceptable to spend.
Two years of war had not made him forget that. It had made him more certain of it, the way a debt accrues interest in the dark. He was going to survive this field. He was going to find out the rest of the names.
That was Sasha's. He was sure of that much.
The rest of it he was less certain about, and the part of him that might have been troubled by that was too busy keeping him alive to spend much time on it.
He checked the sight lines. Listened to the quiet for anything that didn't belong, footsteps, breathing, the stillness of someone else staying down the same way he had been. Nothing moved. The field held its silence the way fields do after they have finished being used.
He pushed the body off himself and lay in the open dip for a moment with nothing above him but the sky going pale at the edges with the last of the light. Then he reached out, grabbed the nearest corpse by the collar, and pulled until he found fabric that would give. He tore a long strip from the dead man's shirt and pressed it hard against his side and tied it off as tight as his hands would manage.
It wasn't enough, but it was what he had.
He got up.
His vision went white at the edges as he stood there with one hand pressed to his side and the dead strewn across the fields around him in every direction, the forest two hundred metres north waiting in the fading light.
He started walking.