Kasse nodded to Eoran as his hand moved to pat his shoulder, to rest passively in the solid reality of his best friend’s presence for just a moment more. He turned back to Brint with a shitty careless smirk dancing so crooked and light on his sharply marked face, denying the significance of the prior moment to all observers. “Morale, sir. Gotta keep that morale up, you know.”

With a half-assed cheesy salute, that vandal of a boy disappeared around the corner without another sound. The pair left behind settled into their watch.

Brint leaned against the alley's left wall, twisting his torso so the brunt of his weight was funneled onto his good arm. Slow, careful movements made it possible for him to lift the barrel of his rifle to the empty avenue in case something hostile decided to come stalking down its length. Eoran took up a position next to him, observing the spaces his sergeant's eyes ignored.

Silence settled between them, each preferring to keep their ears open for any noise from their dispatched PFC than fill the air with idle chatter. Brint grinned at the afternoon, realizing his fondness for Kasse's ruffian's methodology, his courage, his guts. Eoran was quickly gaining the understanding that a certain amount of fondness had grown in him, too.

Kasse, on the other hand, had little time to focus on anything but remaining vigilant, silent as he carefully passed the long face of the building and its vacant eye windows boarded up, roll up storm door spools lolling out onto the sidewalk like so many abandoned tongues, flaking to rust.

The wood slat obfuscation across the building’s facade was either a sign of complete vacancy or served as fortification. Maybe both at varying intervals—the soldier anticipated resistance as he silently rounded the corner, rifle readied.

The next alleyway was a bit more crowded. Pallets stacked in a dumpster reached high enough that even without utility, Kasse could have achieved enough height to climb into a second story window. The only sign of life was the squeaking of rats, skinny and starved, scuttling across and between the dry rot crenelations of their splintered parapet, watching the young soldier with their drought slowed eyes. He laughed, bleak. How often was it that a person related directly to the way a slowly dying swarm of rats felt? Street kid all grown, he knew hunger, knew the sort of scarcity that ended lives. He knew if something laid down in that alleyway, the whole colony would flood out until the fractured asphalt was alive with hungry spines, called by the prospect of a feast, whether dead or alive.

“Not today guys,” the boy said low, barely a whisper as he passed the dumpster and its famine kingdom to clear the rest of the dead end alleyway. Rifle slung to his back, he pulled a bolt knife from his waistband as he stalked along the wall, bouncing his electromagnetic sense through the crumbling brick. He generated a basic idea of a floorplan—at least in the way it lined up along the wall. A narrow space, either a bathroom or a stairwell, a larger alcove, a shallow room toward the front. He couldn’t sense any movement but returned to where the smallest space was, just to be safe.

Squinting up at the sky, the boy shoved the second half of his energy bar into his mouth. He was going to need some fuckin’ complex carbs for this shit.

Tossing the wrapper into the dumpster and masked by the enraged deathmatch squeaking and scuttling of the rats fighting for the foil lined wax paper, Kasse loosened the electromagnetic resistance of the wall and passed through, closing the portal once he was inside.

The boy hadn’t realized how the wind created an atmospheric howl through the desert until he was in the absolute silence of that concrete stairwell, accompanied only by the echo of water dripping from a pipe leaking somewhere up above. Now there was nothing to obscure the auditory evidence of his presence—or anyone else’s, for that matter.

Breath held, Kasse listened. There were voices. Faint voices, obscured by walls. Toward the shallow area he’d mapped in his mind with his MRI vision. It made sense. If anyone was using this building as a stronghold, they’d be where they could see out, where they could shoot. Not willing to test the grimy door half ajar in front of him, the boy passed through the next wall, the shiver of old concrete lingering in his bones when he entered what appeared to be a stock room.

The voices were louder now, but just slightly. Two of them, maybe three, huddled around a quiet radio playing some rap track from the last decade, interrupted by occasional interference from a dying walkie-talkie, the other end an unintelligible garble of static and truncated syllables.

Fuck my life.

Kasse frowned at the presence. With Brint and Eoran likely to come through on their way to the stairwell to clear the building, there were no shortcuts. Not without questions—so many fucking questions. Gripping the bolt knife, the young soldier carefully picked his way across the store room floor, nearly entirely comprised of debris. Amstead issue ammo boxes and gun cases were stacked high and wide in the center of the flophouse-turned-armory, staged to fuel the resistance in the immediate area. How their fire team had managed to stumble on this was a fucking miracle. Lingering to examine the cases briefly, the boy felt a sorry sort of dread run up his arms and into the collar of his shirt. A premonition, anticipation, though this time, his paranoid body's hypertuned fear of discovery was justified. He ducked down as soon as he heard the screech of chair feet along the concrete, ricochet sound hitting him hard in the quiet. One of the men was getting up.

—fuck fuck fuck—

"—espatyayeva irenikyevant," the departing man said to his companions with a hearty slap to the back.

“Iyariespat, Vokon!” A man in a grey hoodie called the words to the freedom fighter now jogging into the store room. It sounded like a taunt, like he was teasing him for something past. “Sutetsa, sirai sutetsa!”

The last man in a ratty graphic tee seemed a little more focused on the outside, past the hole through which they witnessed the world beyond. “Pah hamadanta—doroyevareigo natare reigoyevanta, karang.”

The first man, all in black, was still laughing when he came to the gun stash on the opposite side of the boy soldier’s hiding spot, pulling a rifle from the case before heading to the stairwell. He was heading to the roof—he’d find Brint and Eoran in the alley if he made it to the fucking roof.

Alarum sharp with his specter on edge, Kasse was a harpsichord thrum of bullet point heartaches, afraid for the safety of his fireteam—but was that all that was? Was a generalized protector’s instinct really all it took to make the boy’s throat yellow with bile?

Was it his tether to Eoran’s watery photophobic eyes that made him so nauseous, ready to do absolutely anything to secure his safety? Or was he so willing to lash out in some attempt to impress Brint, the impulse of some immature vanity lurking in Kasse’s guts—

or did he just want to murder this man?

Was that what this was?

Closing his eyes, Kasse sank to the floor. The screech of the door was the stagnating charge, footsteps the countdown in the stale air,

slow breath out his rasping trigger.

The boy left no body behind, leaving what-once-was-man immixed with the stairs. There was no sound, no evidence—just an open door, an empty stairwell, two more men to murder, and Kasse’s overwhelming hunger pains.

Back in the harsh slice of shadow cutting down the alleyway, Eoran shifted.

“You saw it too?” Brint whispered into the wind.

“Yeah,” the boy confirmed.

“Let’s move back a bit.”

Upturned palm extended to the team leader, Brint’s dismissal of the PFC’s offer came in a brisk flapping of his own hand. The pair withdrew to creep deeper into the alley, and the sergeant took up second position, letting his subordinate maintain the watch focused on the street from which they had sought shelter.

Atop the building across the way, a shadow danced within a window that, by some miracle, was not yet obliterated into a mist of crystal like so many others. The shade may have been a powerline, or some other remnant of the civilization that once existed in Biko, lynched and left to sway in the early evening. It could have been any number of the threats that had accosted them prior, now confused or regrouping or reloading. As his hands remained steady on his clutched rifle, Eoran felt his heart racing as though it was within the muscle’s power to make time move faster with its own frenzied will.

“Brint, how do you deal with the stress of combat?” The Toriet boy suddenly asked, volume reticent, unsure if he was trying to preempt any later conversation about his emotions, or if he genuinely wanted advice. Perhaps it was ultimately a ploy to have anything to think about other than endless amount of things that could be going wrong right now.

“Aah,” the sergeant exhaled, “Well, you get used to a lot of things when you go through the same shit over and over again. I’ve seen guys ripped up by shrapnel, dissected by air support. You get desensitized to the horror. The mind stores it away for later, when you’re back home at your momma’s house eating noodles with red sauce and are suddenly thrown back in time and all you can think about is ‘fuck, that’s a lot of blood.’ You’ll get better at compartmentalizing, Toriet. Everyone does, if they want to make it out.”

“Okay,” Eoran nodded.

“Besides,” Brint further offered, “Each guy out here has their own little ticks. Sejan is sly, but did you see how he stress ate that bar?”

“Was—“ that what that was? Come to think of it, that wasn’t the first time that’d happened during a firefight. Eoran focused on the movement ahead. “I mean—yeah. How much longer should we wait?”

“How long has it been?”

The young PFC’s eyes fell to his watch. “About ten.”

“We’ll wait for five minutes longer. If there are still no signs of life, then we’ll go after him.”

“Gods, do you have to say it like that?”

“Relax,” Brint laughed, “He’s probably just trying to pop a lock or something.”