Fuck. The thought reverberated throughout the trap of Eoran’s skull. He didn’t want to do this with this girl, play word games spanning the pages of their combination dictionaries, deriving meaning from words cobbled together from thoughts barely lived in. The PFC drew in a slow breath. That was his reaction to her evincing of his friend. It hadn’t been Eoran’s gift. Two people, huh? There was no body in the stairwell. Just dust. Three people; dust. He exhaled.

“If you know me,” Eo’s misleading query began, “Then why ask?” His head tilted, a challenge boldly stated above the fluttering of his restless heart. Conciliation was not far behind. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. This city belongs to Varonian, but if I am destined to be your brother, then come down in peace and let us share a drink of water.”

“We could just take her out,” Brint said to Kasse, doubtful in the midst of more conversation between the girl and his other soldier.

"Not you, no. Your brother, then? The one who lurks beneath these stairs? Is your brother the ghost in Biko?" The girl only knew this war. If threatening this man's teammate got her somewhere safe, so be it. "Does the white one know? Aah, I know. The country that owns you and wants to own me would make him an object, wouldn't they. That is what Amstead does. It decorates its stolen house with stolen you, stolen me." She tilted her head to the side. "Stolen him."

All Kasse could see was Eoran's face when he heard the words skeleton and stairwell. Watched him realize. Watched the way he took that deep breath like it would hold back the discovery's escape. Watched him swallow. Watched him choke. Watched him let her keep talking.

"She knows we're here," Kasse said. All he knew was this war and if he had to sacrifice this girl to stay hidden, so be it. "I think… I think she's a bloodwright.”

“Fuck,” Brint mouthed.

“You won’t drink with me, then,” Eoran said. “Amstead isn’t so bad. There’s opportunity, even for people like us. My brother of blood was recently accepted into the highest college for wrights. How can you say we are owned? He lives free, I live free. You, too, can live free rather than in this shell of what used to be. Riki, please.” The boy’s bargaining was motley assemblage of truths and falsehoods, words that made him want to gag softened by memories he was not able to linger in for long.

“That’s enough, this is only going to get worse.” Those were the last words the sergeant gave to Kasse before he was slipping away, finger hooked to the trigger of his gun, eyes wrapping around the side of the couch he was beginning to peer past. He glanced back as if to ask: Ready?

"Are you free though? Like really?" The girl smiled as she lowered her hands slowly. "Will your boy be free if I say it in your other tongue? Should I try it? How do you say yayeva in Amsteadean? It's utility, right?"

Kasse tightened up, nodding to Brint. He was concentrating, imagining the step under Riki snapping in half. It wouldn't be weird. It was an old, warshocked building. Old wood broke.

So was that what that sound was?
From the hallways, or an echo in the kitchen?
A noise on the stairs?
A creaking upstairs?
Or a heavy footfall—Brint. Kasse?
The stairs. Her step. Her hands. The stairs. Another's steps.
Thick boots, working soles clobbering closer. Her smile. A creak across the ceiling, the floor, the stairs, oh fuck, the stairs. The building was complaining. That was what that was, right?

Not quite.

A flash of dying light caught the corner of Eoran’s eye like an albino glimmer cutting fractions from the molecularity of their shared air. The boy’s head snapped sideways, but it had always been too late. A man flew into the room from the stairwell, hair a tear of night against the forever fraying day, build proper and full like it was the product of an erstwhile life—day-laborious and practiced to carry a measure of toughness like his hands, like his fingers. His body hit with a force hard enough to knock the boy out of the surety of his stance, but the noise it came with was sick. A crunch hung between the thud of body hitting body and the gasp of breath forced from lungs, sharp like an osteoporotic snap; an echo that could only ever be partnered with pain.

The man was strong and his face was worn. As Eoran struggled with him, he felt the inruder’s long fingers grasp his body, around his waist. He was pushing, hold stretching impossibly long like the ability to encircle the boy’s organs in a single grip was an entirely natural ability. In return, Eo’s hands gripped the man’s face, digits squeezing the shape of a skull that wasn’t quite right beneath a crepey shroud of skin clinging loosely to his late middle aged musculature. The young soldier grimaced. His skin felt like fire.

Brint jumped from cover, taps rapping in metronomic threes, gone wide from the girl. His dismay and handicap were reconciled in his inaccuracy. The string of bullets introduced themselves to the door of a cabinet whose wood was hastily downgraded into a pile of splinters.

As soon as bullets flew, as soon as daddy was home, Riki was leaping off the ladder, impossibly quick. She was a blur behind a splayed veil of bone shard darts that blanketed the room, but she was after the white man with the gun, leaving two fragments of her very own bone sticking out of Brint’s thigh and hip.

“Quick-come, you fucking monster!” she shouted at the sergeant—both an enraged taunt and a playful tryst. “Hurry up and murder this child.”

Kasse was already a storm, his fear slicking his rage to a chill evaporating from his cottonmouth lips. He moved without thought, inconsiderate and feral adrenal response lacking better judgement or strategy—only a gutsick mantra of Eoran’s name left screaming on repeat in the length of his shadow. The close-quarters combat rendered him unwilling to shoot, unable to save his friend’s life with a death by friendly fire so likely.

Always a vicious thing, a rabid mongrel wearing a soldier’s skin, Kasse landed with his knee between the older man’s vertebrae, bolt knife like a handle where it first plunged deep into the bloodwright’s trapezius and down into his ribcage.

“Dad!” the girl shrieked, even if her focus was still waylaid baiting Brint—goading him with her charnel projectiles.

“What the... FUCK, KID—“ Brint shouted, stumbling for cover, scrambling limbs outstretched to pull him back toward the hideaway he’d emerged from. He inadvertently left a blood trail on that blast-dust floor so the girl could find her way. She was so fucking fast—they were so fucking outnumbered.

Rearing away from his prey like a wild-eyed beast of a great familial burden, the father tried to shake the hunter from his back, spinning and spilling over, spilling out through an unnatural maze of flesh overclotted with bone now open to the hot day. The man snapped away from the soldier he pinned in a crunching dismount, cold shattering filling the stale air’s graveyard of screams and splintersong sharp. That fracture spread in his voiceless howl from a gaping maw stuffed with too many teeth.

Eoran cried out as that man left him full of shivved flecks of bone. Brittle bits and daggers penetrated into his young flesh, past clothes and a camouflage carapace, foreign ivory swirling in his reddest recesses as he was jostled and lodged; inhabited, even in his solitude, by the elder bloodwright’s probing hands. The Toriet boy curled into himself, unable to grasp all the sources of his blinding pain with only two hands. Inside—silent, agonizing—his body was trying to make peace with too many incursions, his utility set itself on a path of furious absorption, seeking to permanently implant bone-wastes where they should not be.

Eo’s black eyes shunned the day as though their preference was for the night he felt he was tumbling headlong into. Blood welled beneath his clothes.

“Eo!” Kasse shouted. “Stay the fuck awake! Don’t you fucking go anywhere—”

Even when he twisted the bolt knife he was split in twain. His wild dog instincts had him clamped down on this kill until it stopped struggling while his very human fear of losing needed to be tucked flush against Eoran’s side, familiar and safe in the summer drawl shelter his best friend cast as a shadow.

Kasse’s whorl of awareness fell apart. He could only see through the pinpoint aperture of Eoran’s arrhythmia. His anguish sang a violent aberration disrupting Kasse’s somatic euphoria, that dopamine high the ghost felt when the other boy was near. Even with the screams of the daughter flushing Brint from his hiding spot, even with the roar of the father reverberating in his lungs till his chest cavity retched, even with the slick slip tumbling imbalance in his spinal fluid rushing to hit the floor, even as his fingers dug in till closed around the older man’s meandering contortion of a mouth, Kasse’s bolt knife ripped outward till the bloodwright’s clavicle lost its ligament grip on acromion, all tendons severed by that boy’s razored grief weaponised in absolutes, supraspinatus and bursa and rotator all jagged and raw and fuck his shoulder was gaping open and the bone was crawling back in to fill the spaces and

oh fuck—

oh

FUCK

—

blind, terrified, he

cut

Kasse’s ribs cracked under the dead weight impact of the bloodwright bleeding out on top of him, bone spines like armor stabbing into his chest, between his ribs, tearing across his sternum. Knife still lodged in the father’s gurgling throat, Kasse barely had the will to breathe, hardly the energy to roll the body off his stampede chest, didn’t even hear his crocodile brain shout, predator to predator:

“T-TARGET DOWN—I’m wounded, Brint, get the fucking girl—”

All Kasse knew was Eoran,
all Kasse wanted was Eoran—

and that was all this ever was.

The soldier drug himself on elbows through that widening pool of blood till he could grab Eoran’s hand, press it to his cheek—let him know, simply, succinctly

I’m still here.

“Kasse, I can’t—“ Eoran groaned, voice a squirming mirage in sunstruck air made heavy with heat, “My ut—body, I—I’m—"

“I’m fucking trying!” Brint’s delayed shout filled the empty spaces left for breath in Eoran’s words. The noise of him fueled the degradation of their soundscape atop stuttering spurts, metal retaliation rapping on an aged aluminum can sent flying into a bullet-gnawed wall, all their misfires and misjudgments careening in repeating solecistic staticbeats. The very atmosphere was enveloping and oppressing.

"H-aah—" Eoran opened his eyes again to stare into the face of his friend. There were far worse powers at play than the rabid aggression of a dead father and his dart of a daughter.

"It’s—" growing. It was growing. Impossibly, the shards sought each other out in languid extension, either moved of their own volition or were manipulated by the osteocentric mind of another. Cells upon cells, like webs efficiently woven through the slick interior of that laid out boy, made themselves at home; they congregated in hardclots rejected by the body they actively made a home of.

"Fu—" Eoran writhed as a second skeleton was slowly being assembled inside of him, a sharp spine starting to form in the meat of the boy’s abdomen. In its every segment cultivated, the thing began to emerge into the cavity of his stomach, announcement incessant in the overdrawn newness of its jagged spines. His body, his utility was not cut out to handle something like this. Eoran was being overwhelmed from the inside out, struggling to maintain control over his own making disfigured by the call of a phantom sculptor whose pygmalion vision felt him out. “—CK...!”

Ineffectual hand brushed his beloved friend’s cheek before sliding down to grip his uniform’s collar. Eoran pulled Kasse toward his agony, needed him close to his body like his nearness would make any of this better.

“Help me—please—” Stars fell from his infinite gaze, crystalline and shimmering in their saline shimmying down skin smeared until filthy with war. Canary-hearted thing sung in all his mortal distress, the frantic lachrymosity of his suffering, the melody of a dilatory end unfurling at the behest of fate’s cruelest hands. “Kasse, I, fuck, I—”

“You said—” Kasse bleated into the cracking of his voice, hoarse from war and gunfire and fear. “You said you’d make it through, I—”

I can fix this
I have to fix this
I need to fucking fix

T H I S

but what happens to us when I do?

Forcing himself up to his knees, legs splayed coltish around him, Kasse was just a wounded boy in a warzone who no longer had the willpower to act like a man, body racked with his strangled sobs, crying because he didn’t know what he was more afraid of: losing his friend or sacrificing his cover.

Crying because he wasn’t brave enough to act despite the consequences.

“Eo—Eo, fuck, Eoran—” Pulling the other boy into his arms, Kasse all but collapsed atop him, forehead to forehead like he could rewind and forget his stupid fucking plan, go in guns blazing, fuck the war crimes, fuck everything else that wasn’t

this.

“Eo,” he whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”