War is not loneliest for the dead, or the disappeared.
The boy from Rahmet learned this long ago, that it is far lonelier for the ones left behind—bearing the fullness of memory, silent vessels of what came before—who must navigate a world that has moved on, the past fading with every day that passes, colour and warmth and laughter drained down to simple bones.
For him, those remembered days are eternal. A collection of precise moments he cannot forget. Summer boots marching by his home and carefree soldiers grinning, hands saluting and flowers thrown in adoration. All sunlight and glory, paving the way to death. And then, later, the dark rafters thundering overhead, the end of the world singing wa-hump, wa-hump with shrieking, rhythmic shellfire. Burnt gunpowder. A floodlight of flares. His mother’s warm lips against his forehead, hushing. Intimate fragments layered with the unique scent of his sister’s fear, and the cement floor’s coolness, and the taste of his own blood from biting down in terror.
By the age of eight, he had lived a thousand years.
Centuries of memories were locked up tight inside his tiny chest as the hard-won peace danced outwards, full of exciting speeches and promises and sunflowers. Teetering record players and countless new jobs. A brilliant world called “unification.” But there were still cavernous holes where homes and villages had once been, and men hobbling through markets with missing legs, and little graves sitting lonely on roadside hilltops. His mother always left a flower at those graves. Everywhere she found a plain stone, marking the spot where someone’s child had died alone, far from love, in the heat of the storm-fire called revolution, she left a golden poppy. Hardy, resilient, bright. And she didn’t leave it to simply wither and die as a momentary epitaph. She planted it beside the stone, letting it take root, carving into the earth, enduring.
Turn every tear, she told him, into a flower.
He wished it were possible.
He wished there were a wide field for all his secret tears, somewhere.
After the war ended, his older brother set to work rebuilding. Day after day, hour after hour, he knelt with his knees in the mud, sweating, as he patched the fractured foundation of their home with a trowel and wet mortar, easing in new rock, gently touching the thousand-year-old stones with his hands.
You see, he seemed to believe, we will rebuild with what has always been here.
What has always been ours and can’t be stolen.
The day that changed, the pair of them walked across the field at the edge of town together. It was early evening, the grass summer-brown, full of sun and fleeing crickets, a perfect stretch of flat earth.
His brother held a ball beneath one arm and waved ahead. “Tell me one true thing you see.” When only silence replied, his brother stopped and pointed west. “I see a dark grackle in that tree, with pretty sapphire feathers. It’s watching us carefully.”
The boy looked over and found the grackle. Then, he looked down at the dusty earth before their feet, searching. “I see … tracks. A coyote?”
“Good eye! And there, up high? Horse tail clouds. I think we’ll finally get some rain.”
It was true. The wispy white above held a shimmer of gold, stretched wide against deepening blue. Slowly, the picture grew alive in complexity—an early moon, thin and nearly translucent, creeping up in the east. A lounging garter snake, scales iridescent. A rush of wings in the thicket and the scent of his brother’s freshly laundered shirt.
Their arms almost touching.
A late-day hum in the air.
“I think there are a lot of true things,” the boy finally said.
His brother smiled down—the world beyond him halcyon, perfect. “There are. Looking out and seeing them is like a little choice, all our own.”
They kicked the ball back and forth, then. His brother made jokes—ones that actually lured a laugh from him—and they raced across the field, trying to outfly one another. With a solid toe-to-leather kick, the boy launched their ball into the thicket beyond the field, a victorious thwack that felt like a hundred furies unleashed and defied. He kicked that ball like he’d never kicked anything before, launching it up, watching it fall soundlessly through the wide drop of air and sky.
His brother grinned—approving—and sprinted to retrieve it.
The moments after that are as precise as the ones earlier.
A bright firework in the thicket.
A smoky trail.
Screams.
Blood.
Someone whispering later, distraught, But didn’t they get all the mines out?
He mostly remembers that satisfying kick, and the glowing clouds, and his brother chasing the ball for him.
The sense of falling through a soundless sky.
Alone.
He became a torment after this. He forgot about the flowers, and the rocks, and the coyote tracks. He was a survivor, a torment. He stole things and cheated on tests, then lied about where he’d been, though none of the lies felt as terrible as the one he told himself each night, that none of this was real. That it was only one of a thousand memories locked up tight in his tiny chest, someday forgotten. His mother grew overwhelmed. His sister, annoyed. His teacher swatted his ears and said he was far too smart to act like this, he should do what his brother would have done—go make something of himself, help the family out, be good, burn off the excess fury of smothered remembrance with military precision.
He took the Air Force Academy test.
He kicked that test like a ball straight through the air—angry and scared and defiant at once. And it wasn’t until he was headed north on a train, entirely alone, that he realized the immensity of his loss, the disappearing earth of home. A relentless rattle churning him the opposite direction, away from his mother’s love, and the gold evenings, and his brother’s hands touching stone.
All of him narrowed down, now, to an impersonal paper stamped with a fox-and-swords seal.
Cyar Hajari.
Air cadet.
A name, a photograph, a classification.
That’s it.
That’s all.
With the passing years, though, an unexpected thing happened. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the home he’d escaped began to feel welcome again. It was no longer the place where he’d killed his brother, or tasted his own blood in terror. It was many other things, as well—true things, both sorrow and joy, with no separation. The roots of his very heart.
He thinks about all of this, often. He remembers as he sits in his airplane, writing letters home, to his family, to his beloved Minah, trying to capture in words even a fragment of his history to this point. The years since that faraway day in a small field. Here, a second chance at doing better. At having a real brother again. At secrets and laughter and late nights beneath firework skies.
Why do they stay?
Why rise to fight each morning?
Perhaps because it’s not over yet, and there’s still a choice before them, one true thing to seize. Perhaps they stay for what has always been here, what has always been their own and can’t be stolen. A beauty as old as the stones in the earth and the sun in the sky, as strong as the loneliness of loss.
And even if their life is fleeting to some—a simple track in the mud, only one of a thousand others—it will be eternal for them, because they will live it together, and die together, in colour and warmth and glory.
As real as burnt gunpowder.
As real as their bone dust left behind, someday forgotten.
As real as golden poppies blooming, year after year—tears turned into flowers.
SOUTHERNSUN
I
CIPHER
1
ATHAN DAKAR
Garizal, Masrah
Today if we’re lucky, Garizal will fall.
Nice and easy.
For damn once.
It’s a smoggy blister on the horizon still, growing larger against the Black Sea, a port city of docks and railways and factory smoke, but since we’re skimming along at only a thousand feet, it feels even farther away. Below my fighter, the dusty expanse of earth is clogged by tanks and convoys and armoured carriers, a mechanical fist thundering towards battle. Someone said there were fifty thousand soldiers in the western flank alone, all of them grey and indistinguishable beneath my wings. But if they look up, they’ll see us. Twelve planes. Twelve reasons to keep marching, knowing we’re going to do our best to keep the skies clear above their heads when hell breaks loose.
“Leader to squadron,” I say over the radio to the eleven pilots following me. “Hold low to the deck at vector three-two-zero and begin climbing on my order. We don’t want them picking up our transmissions.”
Flying this close to the ground means our enemy can’t eavesdrop and peg our position, and we’re below radar.
Copyright © 2021 by Joanna Mumford