Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,3
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.
Two cadets in clean, new fatigues sat across from her desk, both young, one boy and one girl. The girl wore her dark hair in a severe braid; she turned at the sound of his light knock on the doorjamb.
It was Rose Greer.
He felt a spark of emotion in his gut, and refused to call it eagerness. A frisson nonetheless; a prickling awareness all through his tired limbs that had him standing up straighter, keenly aware of the mud on his face and clothes. It was probably in his hair.
Her face was narrower; sharper. She’d lost weight, but she didn’t look sick. No, far from it. As she titled her head and scrutinized him with alarming indifference, he saw the strong line of her throat, and the way her shirt clung to the muscles in her arms and shoulders. She was strong; had been training hard.
The boy he noticed as an afterthought: young, and curly-haired, scruffy-chinned. He didn’t look old enough to be here.
Captain Bedlam lifted her head from the files she was scanning and clocked him in the doorway. “Du Lac, good, I was just going to send for you. Meet your new teammates: Francis Gallo, and Rose Greer.”