The quiet, such as it was, lasted almost a week — long enough for Ralph's ribs to finish healing properly, long enough for the wall breach to get fully repaired, long enough for General Cole to grant the entire squad three days of actual leave as thanks for what we'd survived. I spent the first day sleeping more than I had in a month, waking only for meals, my body apparently deciding to collect on every hour of rest the last three weeks had denied it. I spent the second and third at the old base, with Emma, with Ash, with Ivan and Danny trailing along because none of us had quite figured out how to stop needing each other's company after everything.
The old base looked almost exactly the way I remembered it — the same converted bike shop, Mark's sparring space still smelling faintly of sawdust and sweat, the same worn path between buildings that three years of survivors had carved into the dirt through sheer repetition. It felt strange, walking through it as a corporal with a reprimand on his record instead of the scared kid who'd first stumbled in here with Ash slung over one shoulder.
Ash's ability came in on the second day, and it happened so suddenly none of us were prepared for it.
We were in the training yard behind the old bike shop apartments — Mark had converted part of it into a proper little sparring space over the last few months, one of the few genuinely good things to come out of the base's slow, grinding normalcy — and Ash had been practicing the footwork I'd taught him months ago, drilling the same simple combination over and over with the intense focus only a nine-year-old determined to impress his adopted older brothers could manage.
"Watch this one," he called out, squaring up with a seriousness that made Ivan bite back a laugh. "I've been practicing."
He threw a punch that connected with nothing but air, overextended, stumbled — and the world around him rippled, just slightly, like heat distortion over summer asphalt.
"Whoa," Ash said, staring at his own fist like it belonged to someone else.
"Do that again," I said, already moving closer, mana instinctively rising in my own core in case something went wrong, that old protective instinct kicking in before I could fully process what I'd just seen.
He did it again — threw the same overextended punch, and this time the ripple was unmistakable, a faint distortion trailing his fist through the air like the world itself was reluctant to let him move through it cleanly, the air around his knuckles bending in a way that made my eyes ache to look at directly.
"Space," Dustin's voice, quiet and startled, from where he'd been watching along with the rest of Vanguard, who'd insisted on tagging along for the leave once they heard where I was headed. "That's a spatial affinity. Distortion, not displacement — early stage, but that's what it is."
Ash's eyes went huge. "I have a superpower?"
"You've had mana in you for months," I said, crouching down to his level, something warm and terrified and proud all tangled together in my chest. "This is just the first sign it's ready to become something more. We'll figure out what, together."
"Is it gonna be as cool as yours?"
"Cooler, probably," I said, which wasn't a lie so much as a hope I hadn't let myself examine too closely.
"Can I punch things with it? Like, actually hit stuff that's far away?"
"Maybe, eventually. We're going to figure that out slowly and carefully, so you don't accidentally punch a hole in the wall of Mark's shop."
"That would be so cool though."
"It would also mean Mark never lets you train here again," Emma said, from where she was leaning against the fence, arms crossed, a rare, unguarded smile on her face.
He threw himself at me in a hug so enthusiastic it nearly knocked me over, and over his shoulder I caught Emma's eyes, soft in a way that made my chest ache in an entirely different, better way than it had in weeks. Ivan clapped Ash on the back hard enough to nearly stagger him, already talking excitedly about what a "spatial affinity" might mean for sparring matchups, and for a moment — just a moment — the whole yard felt like exactly what I'd been fighting three years to protect.
Later, once Ash had finally worn himself out and Danny had carried him inside half-asleep over one shoulder, Emma found me sitting on the low wall at the edge of the training yard, the evening settling gold and quiet over the old base in a way that almost let me forget, for a few minutes, everything waiting for me back at Main Base.
"You've been quiet since the ceremony business," she said, sitting beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "Not your usual quiet. The other kind."
"I didn't think you could tell the difference."
"I've had three years of practice." She bumped her shoulder against mine, gentle. "Talk to me. Not the sanitized version you give the squad. The actual one."
I told her about Voss, about the hearing, about the two commanders in the forest and the training ground that looked less like a monster's den and more like an actual military installation, and she listened the way she always did — without interrupting, without rushing to fix what couldn't be fixed by words alone, just present, steady, letting me get through it at my own pace.
"You keep almost losing everything," she said, once I'd finished, "and you keep getting it back, and I don't know if that's supposed to make me feel better or worse each time it happens."
"I don't know either."
"I meant what I said in your room, about trusting me with your decisions instead of protecting me from them." She turned to look at me directly, the last of the sunlight catching the pale blue of her eyes. "I'm not asking you to tell me everything tonight. I'm asking you to remember that offer's still open, whenever you're ready to use it."
"I will," I said, and this time I let myself believe it a little more than I had the last time I'd made that promise.
She leaned her head against my shoulder, and we sat there a while longer, not talking, just existing in the same quiet space together, and it was, without question, the best hour I'd had in weeks.
That evening, back at the old base's command building to file the paperwork on Ash's newly manifested ability, I found myself waiting in an outer office while a records clerk processed the update, flipping idly through an outdated supply manifest just to have something to do with my hands. My eyes fell, almost by accident, on an unattended intelligence summary sitting open on a nearby desk — the kind of low-priority regional report that circulated between bases without anyone paying it much mind, stamped with a routing code from three sectors over.
Unconfirmed sighting, Hero faction territory, northern sector: witness reports describe operative capable of short-range spatial displacement, distinct from teleportation affinities on record. Age estimated teenage. Designation pending. No further engagement reported.
I read it three times before I made myself stop.
Teenage. Spatial displacement, not teleportation — something closer, maybe, to what Ash had just shown, but stronger, developed, in the hands of someone old enough to actually use it in the field. My hands had gone cold around the edges of the paper before I'd even let myself think the name.
Antonio.
It could have been anyone. Space affinities weren't unheard of, even if they were rare enough that a documented sighting warranted its own line in an intelligence report. It was a single line in a low-priority report, unverified, unconfirmed, filed by someone who probably hadn't thought twice about it before moving on to the next entry, one of a hundred rumors that crossed a desk like this every week and amounted to nothing.
But I'd stood on that school roof three years ago and found nothing but an empty bag where my brother should have been, and some part of me — the same part that had never fully let go of the hope I'd carried through that whole terrible day, through every year since when I'd told myself I'd made peace with never knowing — refused to file this away as easily as the report clearly wanted me to.
"Corporal?" The clerk's voice pulled me back. "Everything alright?"
"Fine," I said, setting the report back down exactly where I'd found it, my voice steadier than I felt, forcing my hands to unclench. "Just tired. Long few weeks."
"Ash's paperwork's all filed, by the way. Congratulations to the family. Manifestation this young is rare — most kids don't show anything until they've had a crystal in them a lot longer than a few months."
"Yeah," I said, only half hearing her. "Thanks."
I didn't tell anyone about the report that night. Not Emma, not Ivan or Danny, not even Ash, still glowing with the excitement of his new ability, chattering the whole walk back about what he wanted to name it. I told myself I was protecting them from a false hope that would only hurt worse if it turned out to be nothing — that dangling Antonio's name in front of people who'd grieved him once already wasn't fair unless I had something solid to give them.
I knew, even as I told myself that, it wasn't the real reason. The real reason was smaller and more selfish than that — I wasn't ready to say his name out loud yet, not until I knew for certain whether saying it would bring him back to me, or send me somewhere I might have to choose between the family I'd built and the family I'd lost. Some nights, lying awake, I still heard the roof's silence the way I had the day it happened — total, absolute, a hole in the world where my brother should have been standing.
I lay awake most of that last night of leave turning the report's careful, bureaucratic language over and over, wondering how many more low-priority summaries like it were sitting on desks across a dozen bases, each one a single sentence that might or might not be the thread that finally led me back to him.
At some point, well past midnight, I gave up on sleep entirely and sat by the window of the small room Mark had let me use, watching the old base settle into its familiar nighttime hush — a dog barking somewhere distant, the low murmur of a night-shift generator, the same sounds that had lulled me to sleep a hundred times over the last three years. I thought about Antonio at eleven years old, all elbows and stubbornness, arguing with me over which game to play on the one console we still had power for. I thought about the empty roof, the dropped bag, the three years of silence I'd built an entire careful life around not examining too closely.
Whoever that report was describing, teenage and spatially gifted and somewhere in Hero faction territory, deserved better than to be a ghost I only let myself think about at two in the morning when nobody could see my face. I promised myself, quietly, in the dark, that I'd find a way to chase the thread properly — carefully, without exposing Ash or Emma or the squad to whatever answering it might cost, but properly, eventually, once the more immediate fires stopped demanding every spare hour I had.
It wasn't much of a plan. It was more than I'd let myself have in three years, and for tonight, at least, it would have to be enough to finally let me sleep — a promise made quietly to nobody but myself, in a dark room, in a war that had already taken enough from all of us without taking this too.