This is a clip from chapter four:
“I want to know everything.” Hark’s voice is a whiplash. “What you know about X—and what you haven’t told us about your term and what the tap happened to your face. Now. All of it.”
“Just a captain like any other.” I press my fingers into my forehead.
“Don’t give me that vapor,” he snaps. “You were discharged.”
Dead men, lying all twisted, scrub glistening in the gloss of their blood. Scrubby grass all turned red. Red sand and mole-hills. Tundra dirt turned red underneath them. Red dirt on their faces when I turned them over.
“I lost,” I say slowly, unrolling the bandage, “my squad.”
He’s silent and I know it’s not enough. I don’t want to tell him this, I don’t even know him, but he’ll never shut up if I don’t and I want to be left alone. I don’t want to come here every night and find them waiting and hating me cause I might know something about Traitor X.
Funny how hard it is to just say what you need to say.
“All my boys. Lost them all. All lying in the scrub. Grass doesn’t grow tall up there. Cold as orbit.” The stupid end of my bandage won’t stick. “Doesn’t grow tall at all.”
I can hear Hark breathing and someone’s stomach as I mash the end of the bandage down.
“What happened?” Hark demands.
“I don’t want to talk about what—’’
“X! Talk about X! He was your mission, wasn’t he? Scrub on the ground on the front lines. This was spring. You were trying to stop him.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I scrape at a spot on the table.
“And—’’
“And I didn’t find him. Nothing. I found nothing for all that. For all the suffering. He wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t where?”
“Cornice! He wasn’t in Cornice! Let me be!”
The room’s quiet and the spot came off the table a long time ago and I’m still not looking at Hark.
Out of the side of my eye Flood looks up from his letter.
“You went all the way up into Turvia,” he says.
“Yeah.” The silence after the word is broken by the miner my age, saying something that’s not very polite. It means he’s impressed. That’s what the silence is about. They’re impressed and I just told them about the boys in the scrub. I’m done here. I get up and I don’t smash into Hark but I don’t avoid him either, and I stop and make sure I close my door really, really softly, because I don’t like it when I lose control.