He had gotten far enough. Noah wraps his hood around his head and continues to walk, ignoring the ashes and smoke rising from the gene bank behind. Even a mile away, the explosion leaves traces of dusk red and orange, the pollution obscuring the stars in the sky. It has been a while since he’d seen skyglow – he dwells far away from bright city lights and wattage – though he feels less nostalgic than bittersweet.

Every step he takes, the heavy backpack clanks against his spine. The medications aside, he wonders exactly what the colonel has in there for it to be so heavy. Noah realizes that he practically stole the colonel’s bag but there’s no way he can return it now. After all, he has no obligation to tag along with him and his riffraff gang, destination nowhere pleasant, and Noah hadn’t forgotten the pain by his ribs nor the marks on his wrists.

Then they might be able to find that alpha, Hannes, and even without being able to conduct a proper autopsy, the bullet hole on his head will give it away. Noah doesn’t feel guilt but perhaps he takes some blame – he did end the man’s life with his own hands.

For now, he will make his way south. Noah should be able to see it in wintertime – Orion’s belt, one of the brightest, most prominent stars in the night sky. To tell time and direction without a working compass is a fundamental survival skill and one he’s honed for a decade at least. He squints his eyes, filters out the smaller dots, and identifies it immediately. There it is – the conspicuous hourglass that guides his way.

There is a while left until sunrise.

Under the vast night sky, a lone traveler hikes down the tundra.

The oceans have coagulated into slippery ice. Snowfall pelts all around him. His face is pale and his hair is even paler, like he’s born of deep frost and glass. He’s always had an ethereal nature to him – the colonel wasn’t wrong – and in places like these, Noah looks even more otherworldly, a wandering specter, blending in so much with the environment he just might disappear.

---

“He has been identified.”

A group of white-clothed aides carry over a stretcher. On it is an extensively charred body, posed pugilistic, so grotesque it’s hardly recognizable. The frame of it is male, tall and brawny. “Sergeant Hannes Miller is declared deceased as of 12:40 a.m.”

Yang Rong flicks the soot off his cigarette. He’d taken one from Yoo Seok earlier. While the First Unit soldiers aren’t chronic smokers sans Hannes, they do indulge in smoking, drinking and the like once in a while. “I see.”

They’d chosen to write it off as 12:40 a.m., the same as all the other bodies they’d recovered. It’s typical none of them would bother with a stamp on their death certificates, let alone a proper burial. The forensics team had risked taking a copter here. Short-staffed as they were, they worked fast after the fire had been extinguished three hours ago.

The current time is four post-midnight. The retrievals are completed, and the biohazard removal specialists are now disinfecting the entire area. In the aftermath, the ringlets are all burned and contained, the victims have been identified, and the building is being scoured once more for affirmation.

“What is the body count?” asks Yang Rong.

“There are 34 unidentifiable bodies thus far, 220 identified personnel from the Nordak biobank and one soldier from the First Unit. A total of 255 casualties.” The specialist takes off his helmet and bows slightly to pay respects. “I am sorry for your loss, Colonel Yang.”

“You’ve worked hard.”

“We have retrieved an item on Sergeant Miller’s body.” The man passes over a diamond ring kept in a clear plastic bag. The gemstone was carats of beautiful diamond dusting but now it’s charred a dirty gray. “If he has family in the city, we can send it back.”

Yang Rong says, “No, you can throw it out.”

“Understood.”

The forensics team’s being here was more for formality than anything else. No one had expected any survivors in a fire of such scale, but they have a duty to confirm and report their losses to Command. Their losses… are heavy. Of all the workers in the gene bank, only nine survived, and then Unit 1, always lacking in manpower, had lost a skilled sergeant.

Hannes Miller was shot – that much they can figure even though the man’s skin was charred and hard to see. Apart from the bulbous pores, the engorged blisters and the unsightly fat tissues, there was a one-inch hole on his forehead. He can narrow it down immediately – Hannes, knowing he was infected, had killed himself or he was killed by somebody else. It’s unfortunate he cannot determine the proximity of the bullet wound; the surface is too damaged to confirm.

“Wait,” Yang Rong stops the specialist from leaving, “is there a possibility of a miscount?”

“We cannot deny it is possible,” the man says. “However, the 254 staff casualties match the number in our system. Is there a problem, Colonel Yang?”

“There is no problem.”

“Then I will excuse myself.”

The specialist leaves to rejoin his team. They’re recording the deaths on memo, though the team of ten is having a difficult time identifying one victim from another. It hardly matters in the end – they’d all be discarded as ashes. They shouldn’t have bothered bringing out the stretchers.

Yang Rong takes a long drag of his cigarette and then tosses it on the snow-covered ground.

“Colonel Yang,” Yoo Seok walks up and hands him back his comms device. “You have been issued for a summons. We are to head back to the Nexus and assess our unit’s effectiveness. I believe it means we will be having a change in the command chain.”

“It means I screwed up the operation so thoroughly they’re thinking of demoting me,” he replies nonchalantly.

Li Jiayun stomps up toward him. She looks upset and angry all in one. “How are they blaming this on you, Colonel Yang?! How could you have possibly done anything? Those inner-city officers – all they do is eat and sleep and they’ve the nerve to order you—"

“Relax,” he calms her down, “they won’t actually demote me, though it hardly matters in the long-run. They’re simply going to hold a conference to berate me and then send me off again.”

She isn’t satisfied. “If Unit 641 had reached out to us… If they hadn’t encountered a ringlet nest, then none of this would have happened. That researcher – is he an idiot? How did he not realize that his bag was heavier and—"

“Xiao-Yun.” Yang Rong seldom hears her use derogative language. It’s for his sake, he appreciates, but there’s no doubt he was too shortsighted to anticipate such a tragedy. “I have neglected the possibility of a breach, and thus the responsibility lies on me as well.”

“…Nobody could have foreseen it,” she whispers, still dejected.

“That’s how it is,” the colonel says. He finds it unfortunate she has on her helmet, else he would’ve messed up her crimson dyed hair. “You are still too green, Xiao-Yun. A single overlook and there will be consequences.”

“I-I have grown a lot!” The soldier refutes and – are those tears brimming under her eyes? Yang Rong is a little taken aback. She sniffles and she immediately rubs her eyelids, hiding any sign of vulnerability. “It’s just… no matter how many times I experience it, I dislike… losing people. Hannes was with us only a few hours ago, laughing and cracking his dumb jokes and now…”

The reveal was a shock to Li Jiayun especially. She was always the most emphatic of the bunch – of course, there’s hardly competition between the stone-faced Yoo Seok and the seemingly carefree Yang Rong. The older two have had at least a decade of experience in this field and Jae, on the other hand, has a way of closing himself off.

Li Jiayun joined only about two years ago. Yang Rong still remembers training the naïve female rookie, beating her half to death each session only for her to adamantly get back up and demand a rematch. In some ways, he treats her quite favorably not because she’s young, but because she’s tenacious and hardworking.

“He’d be upset to hear how you truly feel about his jokes,” Yang Rong tells her. “You were always so unnecessarily supportive.”

When the two of them converse, they switch to using Chinese. The First Unit soldiers often speak in their native tongues. Though English is primarily spoken in the city, they find comfort in conversing in foreign languages that may become obsolete in the near future. Yoo Seok and Jae speak in Korean daily, and even Hannes had learned to pick up a few things in both languages – his pronunciation, though, wasn’t standard.

Yang Rong thinks it’s perhaps this type of atmosphere that’s led the squad to being more attached to one another. This is another problem he’d neglected – he’d have to reconstruct the team atmosphere.

“Li Jiayun, you should not be so attached to your companions,” he says. “It will be a detriment to your mental state.”

“Colonel Yang, you…” Li Jiayun’s lips are pursed. She’s pressed to say something, but she stops, looking more upset by the second.

It is at this point that Yoo Seok throws him a hard look. “Colonel Yang, you should speak for yourself.”

Yang Rong raises a brow. “And by that, you mean?”

“You might not know this, but you look like you’re ready to snap any moment,” Yoo Seok says. He folds his arms – asserting dominance, is he? Yoo Seok was never scared to speak his mind. “Your pheromones are so strong I can sense the agitation in them. What are you thinking about?”

He frowns and rubs the back of his neck. “I am agitated?”

“Is it Miller?” Yoo Seok examines his expression. Yang Rong allows him to look – there’s some small competition brewing here, alpha versus alpha, both hard-edged and proud in their own right. The black-haired soldier sure is talkative today despite being so normally stone-faced. Yoo Seok then says knowingly, “Oh. It’s Noah.”

“Hm…” Yang Rong does ponder it for a while. “Perhaps I’m annoyed he has stolen my bag.”

“What is your relationship with him?”

“He is a human hybrid who happens to be quite pleasing to the eye. If I had to assign a relationship, it would be… prisoner and captor?”

“I see.”

Yoo Seok drops the topic soon enough and then he’s back assuming his perpetually introverted self. He turns and walks away to a camel-colored military truck. The engine’s warmed up hours ago when they should’ve boarded and left.

Truthfully, Yang Rong has a trillion things on his plate right now – draft a report, contact Command, quell the peanut gallery again, finally respond to summons, schedule a visit to the Nexus… Then he has to report the location of their previous vehicle, the one that has a month of research specimens on toll, and then he’d need to… do so much more.

He lights up one more cigarette and watches as his soldiers leave for the vehicle. He shouldn’t be stationary right now, standing next to his sergeant’s dead body, smoking off-brand cigarettes, being lost in thought. Colonel Yang Rong feels he might be too inadequate to be carrying the weight of humankind.

How stifling.

“…Fuck,” he whispers, rubbing at his sore eyes.