Chương 18: Barracks Seven

Lira arranged the visit herself, three days after the transfer news, and she did it the way she arranged everything, without asking whether Keth wanted the specifics of how, simply informing him the morning of that they'd be walking to the eastern garrison after drills and that he should not, under any circumstances, embarrass her by causing a scene.

"I don't cause scenes," Keth said.

"You attempted to infiltrate a restricted Census facility with a length of rope and a hunch," Lira said, not looking up from the drill roster she was marking.

"Forgive me for setting the bar where recent history suggests it belongs." He didn't have a good comeback for that, so he didn't try one. Barracks Seven sat at the garrison's eastern edge, a long, low stone building with narrow windows and a courtyard worn to hard-packed dirt by generations of boots. It looked nothing like the transfer wing. No barred windows at eye height, no single guttering lamp.

It looked like what it was, a machine for producing soldiers, and Elian was standing inside it now, temporarily, while the machine decided what to make of him.

"This isn't permanent," Lira said, as if she'd read the shape of Keth's worry off his face.

"Standard training rotation, same as any other conscript, until his Echo actually manifests instead of just sitting confirmed-but-dormant on a form. Once it does, I'm pulling him. I already filed the request."

"Pulling him where?"

"Into a squad I'm building myself. Small. Five people, myself included." She glanced sideways at him, something almost testing in the look.

"You. Aurelian. Talia. Your brother, once he's cleared. I'm not handing him off to strangers to babysit through his first field deployment. Not after everything it took to get him this far." Keth stopped walking for a second.

"You're putting me on active patrol duty?"

"You're fifteen going on sixteen, you've trained harder these past months than half my actual conscripts, and I would rather have you where I can watch you than have you sneaking into restricted wings on your own initiative again." She kept walking, forcing him to catch up.

"Don't thank me. I'm doing it for my own convenience as much as yours." He didn't thank her. He was starting to understand that was exactly how she liked it.

They found Elian in the training yard, third rank from the left, indistinguishable at a glance from thirty other gray-tabarded conscripts running through formation drills. Something about the uniformity of it struck Keth harder than he expected — his brother reduced to a number in a line, though the stillness underneath the uniform was unmistakably still his.

Talia was already there, sitting on the low fence at the yard's edge, apparently having talked her way into an early dismissal from her own squad's drills for reasons Keth didn't ask about and suspected involved either genuine charm or an outright lie told with total confidence.

"He's fine," she said, before Keth had even finished crossing the yard.

"I already checked. Well — fine's relative. He's bored out of his mind and everyone around him is terrified of a rumor about him that isn't even true yet, but structurally? Physically? Fine."

"What rumor?" Keth asked.

"That he doesn't bleed right." Talia said it with the same breezy, matter-of-fact energy she used for everything, swinging her legs against the fence.

"Some kid nicked him during a sparring drill last week, apparently, and the wound closed weird. Not fast — just wrong, like the skin decided healing was optional and did something else instead. Now half the barracks thinks he's cursed and the other half thinks he's about to get promoted over their heads and either way nobody wants to stand near him at meals." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Keth's chest went tight.

"Is he okay?"

"Physically, yes, I just said. Socially, he's basically eating lunch alone, which honestly — " Talia paused, visibly reconsidering her own tone, "— which honestly sucks, and I told him so, and he told me to stop feeling sorry for him, which, rude, but also very him."

"You talked to him already?"

"Obviously. I have connections." She grinned, wide and unbothered, and for a second the mature edge she usually carried cracked entirely, replaced by something younger, brighter, barely containable.

"Also.. okay, unrelated, but I found the coolest thing on my last patrol, do you want to hear about it, you have to hear about it—""Talia," Lira said, without looking over.

"—it's relevant, Commander, it's about the coral—" Talia was already pulling something from her belt pouch, a small glass vial with a fragment of something pale and branching suspended inside it, and her voice had climbed a full register, fast and bright and utterly unselfconscious.

"Okay so you know how the coral crunches like bone, right, everyone says that, it's not actually bone, I ground some down and ran it through vinegar and it doesn't fizz the way real bone does, which means the calcium structure is completely different, which means it's not skeletal material at all, it's something else pretending to be skeletal material, and I think — I genuinely think — it might be doing that on purpose, like a defense mechanism, mimicking bone density so predators think there's a skeleton worth avoiding when actually—""Talia," Keth said, gently.

"—when actually there's nothing inside it, it's hollow, I checked, and if I'm right that means every single coral formation out there is basically lying about what it is, which is insane, which means the entire ecosystem might be built on some kind of collective evolutionary bluff, and nobody's ever documented that before, not once, in any Index record I could find, and I want to write it up, I want to actually write it up properly and submit it, do you know how hard it is to get the Index to even read something from an Unmarked conscript—" She kept going.

Keth let her, mostly because interrupting Talia mid-enthusiasm felt roughly as productive as interrupting weather, and because some small, warm part of him had missed this exact sound in the weeks since the wing — someone in his life being loud about something that wasn't grief. Lira finally turned, unhurried, and fixed Talia with a look that had ended arguments twice Talia's rank.

"Later," Lira said.

"Not in a barracks courtyard where anyone can hear you theorize about mimicry in a defensive organism and file it under interesting intelligence for the wrong audience." Talia deflated slightly, tucking the vial back into her pouch, though the light in her eyes didn't fully go out.

"Fine. Later. But it's a real theory, Keth. I'm not just excited for no reason."

"I believe you," Keth said, and meant it, mostly because he'd learned that Talia's excitement, however loud, was never actually attached to nothing.

The drill ended. Conscripts broke formation, filing toward the mess hall in loose, tired clumps, and Elian peeled off from the line the moment he spotted them at the fence, his pace picking up in a way that would've looked, on anyone else, like eagerness he was trying not to show.

"You're not supposed to be here," he said, though something in his voice suggested he was glad they'd broken that rule anyway.

"Lira arranged it," Keth said.

"Officially, so don't panic." Elian glanced at Lira, who offered nothing but a short nod, and something in his shoulders eased, the particular relief of a boy checking whether the ground under him was solid before deciding to stand on it fully.

"You look tired," Keth said.

"Everyone here looks tired. It's the uniform's fault, I think. Something about the color." Elian's mouth curved, small, and Keth realized, with something like relief, that his brother could still make a joke even here, even now, even with thirty strangers eyeing him sideways over stew he apparently ate alone.

"Talia told me about the rumor," Keth said.

"About your wound healing wrong." Something flickered across Elian's face, not surprise, more like the specific weariness of a subject he'd hoped to avoid for one more day.

"It's not a big deal."

"It kind of sounds like a big deal."

"It closed fine, Keth. It just closed differently, and apparently that's enough to make thirty conscripts decide I'm either blessed or possessed." A small, tired shrug.

"I'd rather they think either of those than the truth, honestly. At least those are interesting stories." Keth wanted to press it further — wanted, badly, to ask what the wound had actually looked like, whether it had anything to do with the finger, with the hum, with the wall's slow heartbeat under his own palm months ago, but Lira's presence made the question feel wrong to ask out loud, in a courtyard, where any answer might travel further than either of them intended.

"When you're back with us," Keth said instead, "we're getting proper food. Not barracks stew."

"Is that a promise or a threat?"

"Depends how bad the stew actually is." Elian actually laughed at that, short, real, the first unguarded sound Keth had heard out of him since before the letter arrived, and for a moment the courtyard, gray and cold and full of strangers who didn't know what to make of him, felt like a smaller, more survivable place than it had a minute ago.

"I've got maybe five more minutes before Fessin notices I'm not eating with the rest of the squad," Elian said.

"But... thank you. For coming. Even if it's technically against a dozen regulations."

"It's against zero regulations," Lira said flatly.

"I outrank the regulations."

"Even better," Elian said, and for the first time in weeks, Keth left a conversation with his brother feeling something closer to hope than grief not because anything had actually gotten easier, but because Elian had laughed, genuinely, at a joke about stew, and some stubborn, unkillable part of Keth had decided that counted for more than it probably should.

They walked back through the garrison gate as the light started failing, Talia still muttering theories about coral density under her breath, Lira silent and unreadable beside them, and Keth thought, not for the first time, that whatever was coming for his brother, it would have to get through all of them first.