Page 3 of Night in a Waste Land

She was strong – but it wasn’t a brute strength. She couldn’t have bested him at arm wrestling or weight lifting, but she’d been taught well – taught to fight in a way that made the best use of her own unique talents. She was quick, and slippery; could twist out of every grip he tried to apply; could dodge; could chop at his ribs, or the side of his neck; kicked his shins and knees. Flexible enough to bend back at the waist and evade him when he grabbed for her; athletic enough to kick up to her feet from flat on the floor.

But everyone had weak points. And Lance had the stamina to keep going, matching her with blocks, noting the way she reacted; learning her patterns, her feints. Her weak points.

She stepped back from his next strike, whirled into a pirouette, spinning around to kick at his chest–

And he caught her ankle.

He saw her eyes widen, saw her lips part in shock. Then he yanked her off her feet.

She didn’t go down easy – thrashed, and resisted, and elbowed him in the ribs, just like she had the night she lost Becket, hissing and cursing and clawing at him.

But he had her. Caged her in with his arms and bore her down to the mat; pressed her to it face-down, an arm twisted behind her back, his legs pinning hers, his free hand pressed between her shoulder blades.

She was breathing hard; he could feel the heat coming off her body, smell the sharpness of sweat. He could feel the way she trembled, too. She was furious with him.

“Yield,” he said, almost gently.

She bared her teeth like a snarling animal.

“Yield, Rose, or I won’t let you up.”

She panted a moment, body tight, resistant. And then she sagged on a deep exhale. “I yield.”

He released her, and stood, and offered a hand down to help her up, convinced she wouldn’t take it.

The room was silent around them, the tension of their audience palpable. Rose rolled over, sitting with knees drawn up, still out of breath. She smoothed a stray piece of hair from her forehead, and stared at his hand a long moment, expression guarded, impossible to interpret.

Then she tipped her head back, and met his gaze. For one second, the flicker between blinks, he could see how badly she was hurting on the inside, and wondered if it was a slip. If she’d let go of her mask a moment – or if she’d wanted him to see. Then she smoothed her face, and took his hand.

~*~

The Rift Walkers were an elite group; eighty-five percent of the cadets who started in the program washed out; ended up in the regular infantry, got shuttled to scientific or communications duty, or quit the military altogether, based on a variety of factors. The strongest and the sternest stayed on, finished their training, and then got assigned to squads: small, highly-mobile units that could move in and out of an area at a moment’s notice.

The day he pinned Rose to the mat, he paid a visit to the intake office, made sure all her paperwork was in order, gave a personal recommendation to ensure she began her training with the other Walker candidates, and then he went to the front lines. The world was erupting in fresh chaos and violence in the wake of the Rift reopening; in the wake of the second Rift, the one that had opened in Tony Castor’s basement and closed around Arthur Becket.

It was four months before he saw Rose again.

“Fuck,” Tris said, without inflection, straightening and planting the tip of his shovel in the mud.

Thunder rumbled, and the first, fat drops of rain spattered against the tarp they’d rigged overhead as a precaution.

Lance lifted his head, gaze sweeping out across the lumpy plain of bare dirt that stretched before them, all the way to the hills. Burial mound after burial mound, all of it ceilinged with low, black clouds. Lightning chased in long, jagged stripes over the distant peaks.

“Was it…Crawford?” Lance asked, too exhausted to find anything like grief in his heart for their newest loss.

“Cromwell,” Tris said. “I think.”

Lance looked toward his teammate, and found Tris’s gaze trained, as his had been, on the distant hills. The churned-up mud of the burial field. Tris had been with him the longest, a survivor, his short beard threaded with gray, his face lined with the strain of service. Lance didn’t know why he’d never made officer – he should have been in charge of this squad, based on experience – but suspected it was the same reason he kept mostly to himself: he didn’t care. Perhaps not about anything. Definitely not about medals, or valor, or personal gain.

“Did he have any family?” Lance asked of their fallen teammate.

Tris shrugged. “He was calling for his mother, there at the end.” When he’d been bleeding out all over them. “The captain will let them know.”

Lance swallowed. “Yeah.”

They gathered their shovels, and their weary bones, pulled their hoods up, and started back up the hill toward headquarters.

Life as a Rift Walker had taught Lance to crave only the simplest of pleasures. Right now, he wanted a hot meal, and a hotter shower. But when he poked his head into Captain Bedlam’s office on his way to the barracks, just to let her know that the burial was done, and that she didn’t need to bother any orderlies with it, he found that she wasn’t alone.

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