“Keep scowling like that and you’re going to scare the half of the security team that isn’t already sure you’re going to kill them if they step out of line.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone that doesn’t deserve to die,” Kari Yamazaki muttered, continuing to scowl at the screen in front of her. “I might beat the snot out of one or two of them in the ring, though.”
“I can hear them quaking in their boots from here.” There was a certain sort of practiced inelegance to the way John Wakefield fell into the chair next to her in security operations, something that suggested far more refinement than his overall appearance suggested. There was almost a laconic grace to the man, whose roots—at least on the surface—were nothing if not humble. “What’s got you all knotted up?”
“Nothing that important,” she growled, her gaze flicking up to meet his. He’d know she was lying. He always did. “What are you doing here? I thought you were on arco seven today.”
“I swapped shifts with Ramirez,” he said. The light of the various cams and screens set in the wall in above them reflected off his face, the shifts in light and shadow highlighting cheekbones and jaw as familiar to her as her own reflection. “He’s got a family thing later, so I took his night shift.”
“His night shift.”
His sigh was just shy of explosive. For a second, he looked away. “I know, Kari. I know. But how could I tell him no? It’s his abeula’s eightieth birthday and the whole family’s going to be on the call to celebrate. One night isn’t going to kill either of us.”
She glowered for a moment as she turned back to the smaller screen in font of her, the one where images and words told a tale she hadn’t wanted to know. John’s brows knit as he leaned toward her.
“Kari.”
“I’m fine,” she said, too quickly. It was a lie and he’d know it instantly—they’d been together for too long for him to think anything otherwise. All she could hope for was that he’d think that something else was bothering her, not what actuallywas.
“News from the front lines?” he guessed, pointing at the screen. “Because that’s the look you’ve got right now. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s not the best news, either.”
“None of it’s good news anymore.” She leaned back, glancing at him, holding his gaze for a few seconds. He stared back, that same blue-eyed stare that she’d fallen in love with lightyears away back on Earth. They’d been younger then, caution a foreign concept to a pair of Marines thrown together on the same post. “But let me tell you, there’s not a second that I’m not glad that I’m not there.”
“It’s getting worse, then.”
“I’m not sure how you’re not already aware of that,” she said, glancing back to the screen again. “It’s not hard to figure it out.”
“It is when you try to actively avoid news from back home,” John murmured. “It just seems safer that way, Kari. I don’t worry about shit I can’t change anymore and that’s a big barrel of shit I can’t change.”
She sighed. “I guess that’s probably a good way to look at it. I just—I just can’t look away, you know? Eventually I’ll end up back there. At least, that’s what I figure—until General Morrison gets over the bullshit.”
“Or retires,” John said. “But that day might not come. You might get your out before he calls it quits.”
“Bold of you to assume I’ll take my out.”
His brows went up. “You wouldn’t?”
“You haven’t.”
John shrugged. He watched the wall in front of them, stared up at the screens showing various views of the arcologies, of unguarded entry doors, of the hangar bays. “I have my reasons.”
“It can’t be that you like it out here.”
One corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk. “Oh, it can’t, huh?”
She looked at him sidelong, her brow furrowing. “Wait, you do?”
“Why not?” he shrugged again. “Come on. You know me. It’s not like there’s much back home for me now, not since the Narrows got blown up.”
Kari winced. Early in the war—nearly six years ago, now—the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island had been blown up in retaliation for a UAS strike. John’s parents had been part of the first wave of first responders that had showed up to help in the aftermath, only to be killed when a section of the bridge that had been spared in the initial attack collapsed beneath them. It had meant hundreds more dead in what had already been a mass casualty event, and many of that batch had been first responders like John Wakefield Sr. and Beth Henebry. She still wasn’t sure that he’d made it back for the funeral—it was something they didn’t talk about, something that was still a raw wound in his soul. “I guess.”
“So I stay here,” he said. “It’s not like they’ll ever ask me to come back.”
They never talked about whatever he’d done to get himself exiled out there to Skypoint. About half of the security contingent didn’t, while it was an open secret for the other half. John was part of the former, she was part of the latter—her incident with General Morrison’s spawn was practically legend now, an example of how not to school a superior’s ego-tripping child. She maintained that it was worth it, though, even if it had gotten her reassigned to Skypoint—a punishment detail, to be certain, for someone whose career up until that point had been on a meteoric rise.
“Well, not like it matters anyway,” she sighed. “Even if either of us wanted to take our outs, we’d be trapped in a stop-loss nightmare until the war ended.”
“Has that been happening?”
This time, it was Kari that shrugged, tucking black hair back behind one ear. “That’s what the rumor mill’s saying. I haven’t heard anything one hundred percent credible either way, but I’ve been hearing too much for me to think that it’s not happening at all. They’re desperate for folks to keep up the fight.”
“They should be, I guess,” John muttered, standing up and starting to pace. “Especially when you begin to consider the ridiculousness of all of it. There’s no reason any of this should have been going on for as long as it has.”
An argument started to rise on her tongue but she ruthlessly suppressed it. It wasn’t worth the argument that would ensue, especially when she was already miffed that he’d swapped his shift today for Ramirez’s shift tonight.
Just simmer down. He didn’t know you were going to try to cook him dinner and just have a quiet night in. You can’t be mad that he’s broken plans that you hadn’t even made yet.
“It just seems like such a waste,” she said softly. “None of it makes sense anymore.”
“I don’t know if war ever really did,” John admitted, stopping on the other side of the console. He braced his hands against its edge and stared down at her, expression softening for a second. “It wasn’t anyone you knew, was it?”
She managed a smile and shook her head. “No. Not on any recent casualty lists, anyway. Hell. The last big one that would’ve had any kind of significant impact was Hunter and…well.”
He smiled a crooked smile. “Yeah, we know how that turned out. Does it still bother you?”
“That they told us she was dead when she wasn’t? Yeah. Yeah, it really does. Sometimes it makes me wonder what they were actually planning to do with her after that happened—if they were planning on doing anything.”
John shook his head slightly. “Something tells me that she wasn’t in any kind of state after that to be asked or told to do anything. Whatever her last mission was, whatever actually happened, that was the end of it. It was going to be years before she could do anything like what she used to. That’s not something that the powers at be were going to wait for, war or not.”
“It all sounds logical when you say it,” Kari said. “But then I ask myself when intelligence ever really employed thought processes like that. Seems like never.”
“I think you’re just paranoid.”
That, at least, made her smile. “Can’t have that,” she said, grinning up at him. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
John, at least, had the grace to blush.
