Page 19 of My Tiny Human Wife

By the time the two armies finish measuring each other and remember they both came here to erase us, the light has gone the flat gray of a day that has not decided whether to let anyone see its end. I stand at the heart of my roaring, wounded, impossible tower—Torvak’s voice on the internal channel calling the eastern defense, Dareth’s answering, Okafor sealing the evidence away, Kalen white-knuckled over a relay, seventy hearts refusing to run—and I feel the whole thing gather itself for the blow that is coming.

I key my headset one last time before it starts for real, and I find Torvak’s channel in the noise.

“Signal’s loaded,” I tell him. “Nine relays. The second it’s loud enough, the whole planet hears us at once.”

“Then make it loud,” he says, and beneath the command there is the other thing, the private thing, the one life. “Hold your signal, Avery. I will hold the door.”

The southern column’s engines change pitch. The Coalition remembers what it came for. And the last quiet breath before the real battle slips out of the tower and is gone.

CHAPTER 28

TORVAK

The bombardment stops, which is how I know the true assault has come. Artillery softens a target. Infantry takes it.

They come at the walls from the east and the south at once, and for once the two armies stand close enough to the same objective that they nearly become one, a single tide breaking on a single rock. I command from the center, where I can feel both fronts through the floor, and I send my thin forces to wherever the tide runs hardest, and for a time—well past any span we had a right to expect—the tower holds.

We hold because we are fighting for a thing the attackers are not. A soldier of Vek’Thar’s fights only to avoid a firing squad for cowardice. A soldier of ours fights because behind him, in the core room, sleeps a child he has decided will see the morning. I have commanded both kinds of men across a lifetime of soldiering, and I have learned tonight, too late to be of use to anyone but these people, which kind wins the fight that truly matters.

The baker holds a doorway I would not have trusted to a trained soldier, giving ground by the inch, making them purchase every one. Dareth and the young lieutenant turn the eastern stair into a place Vakutan regulars learn to dread, two warriors who a week ago served the general, now bleeding to keep his lie from winning. Kalen runs ammunition and dressings and messages through the killing halls with a courage he does not know he owns. Human and Vakutan and refugee, Coalition-born and Coalition-fleeing, all of it dissolved now into one desperate shape with one purpose: hold the walls, hold the walls, until the signal can fly.

But holding carries a cost, and the tower begins to pay it.

The old man falls on the eastern stair, a length of pipe raised against soldiers three times his strength, buying Dareth the sliver of time he needs to seal a breach. He is dead before Tess can reach him. I do not learn his name until Avery says it into the internal channel, low and cracked, the way a person speaks a name they are refusing to let vanish. He is not the last we lose. A defector, one of the eight who crossed the open ground this morning, cut down defending the people he was sent to slaughter. Two of the refugees who begged me for the harder jobs. Each loss lands on me the way losses always have, as a weight I will carry in the quiet afterward, if there is an afterward. But I have no seconds to spend on grief now. Grief is a debt you settle once the fighting stops, and the fighting has not stopped, and I begin, coldly, to doubt that it will stop in our favor.

Through all of it one channel stays open in my ear, and it is hers. Avery has not left her console. While the walls burn she nurses the signal, re-routing around dead relays, coaxing our voice through a network coming apart under fire, waiting for the moment the killing grows loud enough to loose it. Each time a section of wall threatens to give, I hear her naming the next relay, the next patch, the next small victory that keeps the truth alive one more minute. She is fighting my same battle with none of my weapons, and she is not losing hers, and that knowledge alone keeps my own hands steady.

Between one assault and the next I climb to the center platform and read the entire shape of the thing at a glance, the way a lifetime of war has taught me to, and what I read is not good. Our thin line is thinning. The defectors and the refugees are magnificent, and there are simply not enough of them. The east will break within the hour. When it does, the south will pour through behind it, and there will be no line left to hold the center, and everything I love will be inside the tower when it falls.

I have lost battles before. I have never before stood within the one I could not afford to lose and felt it sliding away beneath me.

For a single breath I let myself feel the full size of it. Then I set it down, because a commander who drowns in the odds drags his people down with him, and I climb back into the fighting. If the tower must fall, it will fall late, and loud, and only once the truth is three steps out the door and running for the whole of the planet. That much I can still buy them. I mean to buy every second of it with whatever I have left, down to the very last coin.

I find Avery’s eyes through the smoke one more time. One life, that look says, in both directions at once. Then I turn back to the wall and give the order that commits our final reserve, and the battle for Beacon Station Seventeen climbs toward whatever end is waiting for it.

CHAPTER 29

AVERY

The moment comes the way Torvak said it would: when the killing gets loud enough that nobody on either side has a hand free to stop me.

The east is breaking. I can hear it in Torvak’s voice over the internal band, in the way his orders have gone from holding to trading—a corridor for a minute, a stairwell for thirty seconds. The whole tower is a bell somebody is beating apart around me. And in the middle of it, watching the eastern line buckle and the southern armor finally commit, I understand that this is it. This is as loud as it is ever going to get. If I wait for a cleaner moment, there will not be a tower left to broadcast from.

So I stop waiting. I put my thumb on the key, and I loose the truth onto the world.

Nine relays light green across my board, one after another, and the whole evidence dossier—two years of staged massacres, the munition lot numbers, the sterilize order with this morning’s timestamp, Okafor’s authentication, Dareth’s intelligence, all of it—leaves Beacon Station Seventeen in a single pulse and races out across a whole planet’s worth of frequencies. For one heartbeat I just watch it go. Two years of staying quiet and small, one thumb on a key, and the biggest secret on Armstrong is loose and running and can never be called back.

Then the sky tries to kill me for it.

They work out what is happening almost at once. Both armies. A signal this size, hitting every channel together, is not a thing you can miss, and the answer is instant and murderous: they stop trying to take the tower and start trying to erase it. Artillery that was walking careful patterns to soften our walls abandons all subtlety and simply falls, everything at once, trying to knock the array off the air before the truth completes its spread. The tower shrieks. Something structural lets go two floors beneath me. My board fills with damage I cannot fix from this chair.

Relays start dropping—not from range now, but from sabotage and shellfire, the enemy hunting my repeaters one at a time. I lose the third, then the sixth, and each time one dies a piece of the planet goes deaf to us. I reroute what I can from the console, but some of them need hands, physical hands, on equipment out in the killing zones, and I cannot be in nine places, and I cannot ask⁠—

I do not have to ask. That is the part that breaks me a little, even now. Kalen is already moving, already halfway to the exposed junction with a tool kit and no armor and a look on his face like he has decided something. A pair of the refugees go out with him. They patch the sixth relay back to life under fire with the shells still walking the yard around them, and the signal steadies, and then, without being told, they move on to the next one, and the next, chasing our dying voice from junction to junction. All over the tower, people I was supposed to be protecting are running toward the most dangerous places in it, because they have understood what I understood: the walls do not matter anymore. Only the signal matters. Keep it singing, whatever it costs.

It costs. I will not pretend otherwise. But the truth keeps flying.

And then, faintly, underneath the roar, the board begins telling me a different story. The relay cities are answering.