Subject Zero: Faceless

She had the notebook closed and the lamp turned up, and she read the three prints in the order he laid them down and touched none of them, as she had read a routing block on a grey plate a week before, and when she reached the entry she read it through, and then again, and put both hands flat on the table on either side of it.

”Foundry liaison.”

Transitional.

”I can read.” She didn’t look up. ”I’ve been called a liaison on every form with your name on it since your intake. And there’s a — a tier — with the same word in it, that was writing in files under our stamp while I was being told the question was above mine.” Her hands didn’t move. ”That’s the seal. The black one. Confirmed above the records desk. I asked who, once, and the answer was a category, and I took the category for an office because I’d never seen a category sign anything.”

It signed you. You signed under it.

”I signed under it. For a man whose box is in that valley now. Under this.” Her hand came off the table and hovered over the word TRANSITIONAL and did not land. ”I’ve been one of the hands. I said that to you the night you gave me open. I didn’t know whose hands I was one of.”

He let her sit with it. Then he unclipped the slate and wiped it and wrote the thing he had begun to write on a roof and had stopped, because it had not been his to hand over then and he had decided tonight that it was.

There’s a fourth print. Not here — at the Directorate, in my intake file, and a copy of one line in my pocket. The file has an annex in the margin. The composite session. The morning you walked me to that room and waited outside it.

She went still.

”The composite session.”

The annex assessed it. A technician’s paragraph. The reviewing analyst is a code, and the code resolves to this. He touched the entry. A Foundry hand assessed the composite. In a Meridian annex, under Meridian’s procedure. I’ve known the tier was defunct since the week before the fence. I’ve known its name since dusk.

Sela didn’t answer at once. He watched her reach for the thing she was going to say and set it down and reach for a different one.

”I put my name on that session’s access log.” Quietly. ”So the brigadier couldn’t move it and me not know. I never read the annex. I wasn’t cleared to. I put my name on the outside of a folder and I thought that was the same as being inside it.” She looked at the mask. ”What did the paragraph say.”

He set the stylus to the slate.

He had written it once, on a roof, as far as its third word, and stopped. He wrote the first word now — Assessed — and the flap of the tent went back, unscratched, and Hollis was in it with the camp’s lamps behind him and his rifle in his hand instead of across his shoulder.

”Major wants him on the ridge. Now. Both of you, she said.” He looked at the table, at the prints, at the slate with one word on it, and back at the mask. ”They’re burning something.”

* * *

The observation post had more people in it than it had room for, and Renner had the glass up and didn’t lower it when they came over the lip.

”There.”

The valley was lit at its near edge by the ward line and at its center by the buildings’ own windows, and lit now, at the far end past the vehicle yard, by a fire.

A single roofed building, long and low, with flame standing out of a stack at one end and out of a hole in the roof at the other, and the light of it lying orange across the yard where trucks stood in a line. Men moved between the trucks and the building with the steadiness of a working party. He laid the sense that stood in for sight over the yard and counted seven shapes in a line, six of them sitting heavier than the seventh, and the gate at the valley’s north end standing open, with a truck already through it and its lamps going away up the corridor’s far leg into country nobody in this camp had walked.

”That’s the depot,” Renner said. ”That’s what the response force saw from the ridge above the depot two provinces west, an hour before it got there. Trucks out the back and a building lit at the front. What they can carry, they carry. What they can’t, they fire in place, and we found the ash.” She lowered the glass at last. ”I said every day we sat here the odds went up. They’ve stopped going up. Every truck through that gate is a box I don’t get back, and I count seven, and the building they’ve lit is the one my analysts had down as the records store.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelPhoenix for the authentic version.

”Six loaded and one with its tailgate down,” said the threat-assessment officer, who had the second glass. ”Colonel, you’ve had my assessment on what they build. Here’s my assessment on what they do next. They lost three screens and forty men and a handler in a week, and they’ve concluded the ground’s turned. They’re leaving.”

Marrow had not spoken. He stood at the OP’s front lip with the folder under his arm and looked at the fire, and Rook, beside him, read the man’s silence the way Osei read a count — as a thing already done, being checked.

”Major. Your clock.”

”Tonight,” Renner said. ”Failing tonight, tomorrow. After that there’s nothing in that valley worth a company.”

”Corporal.”

”Dead ground under the wall on the near side, from the gatehouse west for two hundred yards,” Bram said. ”I walked it the night before the picket. A company can lie in it in the dark and the stanchions don’t light it because it’s below their line. It’s where they’d have put their own sortie if they were us.”

”Lieutenant.”

”Six,” Osei said. ”I’ll need a relay and a glass and someone to carry them, and I’ve got someone.”

Marrow turned round.

”Tomorrow night.” He gave it to the OP as an order. ”Not tonight. The company’s on two flanks and can’t be moved into that ground before light without being seen doing it, and if they see it they don’t come out. Tomorrow, at dark, the company goes into the dead ground in fours as it’s been going everywhere else on this front, and lies there. At the hour they’ve come out every time, he stands on the picket where the whole wall can see him, with Third Squad, and the section on the far position.” He looked at the mask. ”They come out for you. They’ve come out for you three times on this corridor and lost more each time and come out again, and they’ll come out tomorrow, because they’ve decided the ground’s turned and you’re the one thing in this valley they can’t put on a truck. When the gate opens, the stanchions either side of it go dark. They did five nights ago, to get eighty men through, and I’ve assumed since that they did it at the hut, because the ward lets their own out no more than it lets us in. The company goes through the dark behind the sortie, and it doesn’t stop at the wall.”

”They’ve no screen left,” Renner said. ”Three in a crate. They walked three of them into the draw once and lost thirty men. Why do they come out a fourth time.”

”They had four hundred of our cells and the assessment officer has seen thirteen. Or they come out with rope while the trucks go, because a sortie at the gate is the cover that yard needs to finish loading. Either way they come out, and either way the gate’s open while they do.” Marrow didn’t turn from the fire. ”And the thing on their band that knows where he sits reads their own, Major, not ours. It has never put a man where the company was. It puts them where he is. I’m counting on it.”

”And the archive,” Renner said.

”Is your tasking, Major. You and the assessment officer and the reconnaissance section go through with the company’s rear and turn for the yard. Whatever’s on a truck that hasn’t gone through the far gate, you take. Whatever’s in that building, you take out of it before it finishes burning, and you do it while the company’s doing the thing Corps sent it for, and if the two taskings meet at a door, mine goes through first.” He turned back to the fire. ”That’s both clocks. Neither of them fits the force, and I’ve stopped waiting for one that does.”

You told Osei you wouldn’t tell her next time.

Rook turned the slate so Marrow could read it in the ward light. Marrow read it.

”I told her I wouldn’t tell her she was bait. I’m not telling her that. I’m telling her she’s the assault’s leading element, which she is, and I’m telling you the rest because it can’t be done without you standing on a picket knowing why, and because you’re the one thing on this front that stands the same either way.” He nodded at the mask. ”They can read a squad’s posture. Nobody alive can read that. Stand there tomorrow the way you’ve stood there every night, and let them read it.”

* * *

They went down the path in the order they’d come up it. Osei went ahead to wake Ilsen and Cade; Bram peeled off toward the motor pool. The officer stayed on the OP with Renner and the fire.

Sela walked beside him and did not speak until the ridge’s shoulder had taken the valley out of sight and the camp’s lamps had taken its place, and then she said, ”You were in the middle of a word,” and a runner came up the path from the command tent at a jog and stopped in front of her.

”Ma’am. Colonel’s compliments. The major’s put a register entry and three relay prints on his table and he wants the liaison’s account of the seal written tonight, in his tent, before he takes it to Corps at first light. He said tonight, ma’am. He said it twice.”

Sela looked at the runner, and then at the mask. Her coat was buttoned to the throat against the cold coming off the valley, and the prints were in the inside pocket of it, where the notebook rode; he had seen her put them there before she followed Hollis out of her tent, one movement, unasked.

”Tell the colonel I’m coming.” The runner went. She did not move at once. ”Assessed. That’s the word. I read it before Hollis did, and I’m going to spend the night writing what the seal meant to a colonel who thought it was a metaphor yesterday morning, and you’re going to spend it on a wall, and tomorrow night you go through a gate.” She said it as an inventory, no heat in it. ”I’m not going to have the rest of that sentence from you on a path in the dark with a runner waiting. I want it in a room, with the book open, and I want to be able to read it slowly. After.”

After.

”It’s a word I keep.” She started down the path toward the command tent’s lamp, and stopped once, and turned. ”You’ll know tomorrow what you’re being used for. So will I. He’s right about the one thing, and I’d hate him to be right about it for nothing.”

She went. He stood on the path until the command tent’s flap had dropped behind her.