She woke up on her own that morning. There was a pinhole-sized beam of sun coming through the canvas, creating a sniper’s target on her chest. She got up quietly and put on her gear. Everyone in the platoon could do it in less than ten seconds. Most of them, including her, slept with a good amount of it on to save time. Somewhere, a bird was calling in a high reedy voice. She could hear the rustle of tent fabric. The desert moved, and a fine layer of red dust coated everything it was in the process of taking. She could taste it on her teeth no matter how much she brushed them. She took a right angle to the opening of the tent and extended a small mirror through it. First east, then west. Someone was lying near a tent. It was impossible to tell how long it had been there. She watched it. She listened to the bird calling and counted to three.

She ran to the body, which was lying face down. She got behind cover and turned it over. It was Sanders. There was a bruise-colored hole in the corner of his left eye, which had turned lazy and looked out at a strange angle. There was sand stuck the surface of it. The right eye looked straight up at the sky, vacant and dumb. She sat for a second, but there wasn’t time to think about it more, so she took his dog tags. His ammo. Then she moved position, behind the massive wheel of one of the Dogs. The bird was still calling, but louder now, or closer. She looked to her right and saw someone half-out of the comms tent. It was Elijah. Half of his head was gone. His boyish black curls were scattered around him like feathers. The wind blew in a new direction, and with it came the smell of smoke.

The mess tent was burning, the brightest thing for miles. It was beyond her control and she left it, did not call out for anyone who might be inside. Instead she followed the bird, which was closer than ever. She traced the sound to a tent with a bright red cross. She pushed open the flaps. She did not clear. If this was boot camp, she’d have been ‘dead.’ But it didn’t matter, the tent was empty. Where was Yotam?

His instruments were scattered in the dirt, which struck her as strange even through the buzzing numbness. They were already half-buried by the relentless red sand. The bird call was coming from behind the gurney, past her line of sight. A strange bubbling feeling was rising up in her chest, a drowning sensation that made her cough over and over. The bird call rose to a fever pace. She could see a pair of boots attached to legs attached to a belt with an empty holster. Yotam was propped against a crate, hands clutching the side of his neck, eyes huge and glassy. The bird call came from what was left of his throat as he tried to scream. She ran to him, moving his hands. Blood jetted out in an arc. It struck the side of her face, hot and thick.

“What happened?” she asked over and over. “What happened?”

She moved his hands back tight around the ragged hole in his neck, told him to keep them there. She would call for dust-off. They could be on-site in ten minutes. They would bring cover, fire from the sky. They would bring help. Blood trickled through his fingers and the sand absorbed it greedily. She told him not to panic as she started to go cold. Shivering cramped the muscles in her legs and made it hard to stand. Yotam reached for her but she was already on the move. She sprinted back to the comms tent, not thinking about cover. Elijah still had the smaller radio on his belt. She took it and tried to ignore the huge flies that were already dancing all over his shattered head. Back in the med tent Yotam was pale, his eyes closed tight, lips drawn like purse strings as he struggled to tear off each breath. His torn throat was making that bird call still, but it was reedy and thin. He tried to say something but it made the trickle between his fingers pour out faster. She told him not to talk. The radio beeped as it turned on and she made the call for help but there was no answer. Yotam kept trying to say something. She put the radio down and focused on him. If they could get him stable, she could go for help. She could take one of the Dogs and run over anything in her way.

He looked at her, gasping urgently. Trying to tell her something. His eyes huge, almost animal-like, rolling fluidly in all directions. The blood was pattering onto the sand faster now and his color was leaking out with it. He was trying to tell her something but it came out as a tubercular wet gurgling.

“Hey,” she whispered to get him to focus, to think about something else. “Listen, remember the bonfire?” It seemed like he didn’t hear it, as if he too was now watching all this from a distance. “Remember Joshiah?” She knew he did. They’d all gotten drunk on cheap whiskey brought on re-supply and made a huge fire in the middle of the desert. Everyone started telling stories and Josiah had started laughing really hard at something Wykowski had said. It wasn’t even funny, what he’d said. But Josiah couldn’t stop laughing. He looked at them and they all saw he was terrified. But no one did anything. They just let him ride it out until he was quiet and he’d wiped the wetness off his face. It was one of those things that happened more and more the longer you were out there. It was an unremarkable event in the greater landscape of the war but she remembered it now and it seemed important to mention it.

“What did Wykowski say?” she asked urgently. “You remember.”

Yotam strained forward, moving his mouth silently. She leaned closer.

“Please.”

He was reaching for her belt. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely keep his fingers open.

“I’ll kill them,” she assured him. But he shook his head, wrenched his mouth open for an awful breath that seemed to go on forever until he coughed up a huge glut of bright red arterial blood.

“Please!” he choked out.

“Every one of them,” she promised.

Yotam’s whole body seemed to seize, and his eyes rolled up. She pressed his jittering hand against the torn-open side of his throat and fumbled for her radio. She wasn’t going to honor the pact they’d made. It hadn’t been real. They weren’t here. In the cozy backyard light of the fire that night, none of this was real yet. No one followed through with the promises they made during peace, just like no one really gave themselves to God once the world fell back into line. How could he even think she’d do it? But the disappointment couldn’t be mistaken. She had let him down. Yotam gave one last heave and stopped shaking. She put her hand behind his head to support it. All the fight had gone out of him. He could barely open his eyes. His chalky face was smooth. There was water dripping on his cheeks. She blinked a few times. One fell into his eyelashes and hung there like a star.

“I can’t,” she told him. He looked at her like he understood but he couldn’t hide the disappointment, and she felt a horrible sense of shame attach to her in a way that suggested the rest of her life. He didn’t try to reach for her gun again. He just looked up at her, into the rain. He took another of those long sandpaper breaths. Then he died. The hand under hers went slack and almost instantly began to lose its heat. The blood under their hands trickled slowly, no longer moved by anything other than gravity. Salia put his hand at his side and- thinking of Sanders- closed his eyes. Then she got up, feeling hundreds of thousands of miles away, and left the tent. She turned right, headed for the burning mess hall. The two frag grenades she was carrying wouldn’t harm anything, but thrown into the conflagration they’d buy her enough time to get in one of the Dogs. In the end, none of those things happened.

The first bullet missed but came close enough the singe the fabric on the temple of her helmet. The second pierced through her left shoulder. She felt neither but understood in a clinical kind of way that something had happened. She aimed, fired several shots, and struck him once in the thigh. He crumpled, hollering. She moved to fire again but froze. Faust clutched his leg, trying to stem the bleeding. It was almost too awful to comprehend- how long had they all spent training to prevent exactly this? But it was made worse when Furst recovered his gun and aimed it at her head.

“Captain?” she stammered. Her voice was tiny, light on the wind. It went somewhere else.

“It was my mistake,” he called. Sportsmanlike, he chuckled. “I should have gotten you first.”

The wind picked up and carried ash with it. The smell of burning rubber was briefly overwhelming. She took aim, deadlocking both of them. His pant leg sagged with the weight of the blood pouring into it. He had minutes, if that. She wondered about how to call it in. She thought of the explanation she’d give as Furst was taken away in the med chopper. A mistake. They would understand. War isn’t clean. Mistakes happen. But Furst hadn’t lowered his gun. She stared into the barrel.

“It’s Elson, Captain,” she told him, as if that would be the end of it. They’d be horrified by the mistake but later, at base, they’d compare wounds and laugh about it. A potentially disastrous mistake made comical with the knowledge that those involved would come out of it. She pushed up her helmet. “It’s me.”

He gave her a pitying look that she couldn’t make sense of so she tried again. “Y-Yotam, he-”

“Yes, I’m sorry for that,” he apologized. “Unfortunate. I liked that young man. But, he saw me. It would have been clean, otherwise, like the others.” He coughed, spat red-tinted spit into the sand, and steadied his gun. “It won’t happen to you.”

“Me-?” she started to repeat back but he closed one eye, sighted in, and she realized with horror that she was about to die. She let out a terrified wail. All of it happened in less than a second. Her mind ran at light speed. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Click.

The gun was jammed. She would shoot first or never.