The photo had a curled corner from living in Corey's helmet band for six weeks.
"Again," Jack said.
"You've seen it."
"I've seen it in daylight. Under red light, she might have your nose."
Corey Prewitt sighed like a man being robbed and pulled the photo out of the band anyway. He held it under the red dome light so all four of them could see a grey smear and a white curve that was supposedly a spine. The tech had circled one blob in pen and labeled it HEAD, because nobody would have guessed.
"That's a kidney bean," Rafael said from the turret. "Congrats, Sarge. You're having a legume."
"Eyes on your sector, Rafe."
"My sector is rocks. My sector has been rocks for four hours. I'm on a first-name basis with these rocks."
The truck lurched over a washout and the photo jumped in Corey's fingers. Jack caught the corner before it went into the dark under the seats and handed it back. Corey didn't put it away yet. He held it with his thumb on the edge, careful, as if it could bruise.
"Lisa says if it's a boy, it's Jack," Corey said.
"Lisa's a woman of taste."
"I said over my dead body. She said fine, then you're the godfather."
"She said that?"
"She said, and I quote, the medic can keep him alive till he's eighteen, and then he's on his own."
Jack laughed. His aid bag sat between his boots, and he kept a heel on it so it wouldn't slide when the truck tilted. "Somebody has to teach the kid to stop bleeding."
"That's the job, Doc."
Cedric was asleep against the door with his mouth open and his helmet pushed down over one eye. He was twenty-four and could sleep on a fence. Up front, Ainsley tapped the radio handset against her knee every time the static spiked. In ten years Jack had never seen that fix a radio.
"Anything?" Corey said.
"Same as an hour ago. Lead truck says the road narrows in two klicks."
"Tell them we copy."
"I told them we copy an hour ago. They know we copy. We're the most copying truck in the valley."
Corey put the photo back in his helmet band, slowly. Then he leaned to the narrow armored window and watched the slopes go by, black on black. They were close enough now for the headlights to catch the bottoms of the rocks.
Jack knew that silence. Corey went quiet when he didn't like ground, and in ten years since basic Jack had never once seen him wrong about ground.
"Cedric," Corey said. "Wake up."
"I'm awake."
"You're drooling on the door."
"I'm awake and drooling, Sarge. I can multitask."
The flash came from under the front wheel.
Jack didn't hear it. He felt it, a hand of air that picked the truck up and set it down on its side. The world turned over and something hit his ribs. Then he was lying on the door that had been the wall, the red light was gone, and everything smelled of diesel and burning rubber.
Smoke poured into the cab from the front, with orange light growing behind it.
"Sound off," Corey shouted. His voice was wrong, too thick. "Sound off!"
Rafael answered from somewhere above, coughing. Ainsley answered from the front.
Cedric didn't answer. He hung in his harness above Jack with one arm dangling and the buckle jammed by the twist of the seat. His left leg was bent where a leg doesn't bend.
Jack went for the buckle first. His fingers knew it in the dark, but the release stuck, so he hit it with the heel of his hand until it gave. Cedric fell on him like a sack of wet sand and groaned. Good. Groaning meant breathing.
The cracks started from the slopes. Green tracers punched the dark over the truck, and rounds slapped the armor beside his head.
He got his hands on Cedric's thigh. It was an open fracture, bleeding, but not the spurting kind. He reached for the bag between his boots, except his boots were somewhere else now. His side was warm and wet, and when he touched it his glove came away black in the firelight.
Shrapnel, under the ribs. Okay.
"Doc, talk to me!"
"Working," Jack said. Then he was coughing and couldn't stop.
The fire came through the cab wall and hit his face like an open oven. He could hear Corey kicking at the rear door, and he could hear that it wasn't opening. Rounds walked along the hull toward the sound.
Jack knew how this ended. He'd seen it on other men in other trucks, and nobody was getting out of this one.
He kept his hands on Cedric's leg anyway. That was the job.
Then the light came.
It came from below. It rose out of the steel under him, white and cold, and it went through his hands and the kid's leg and the smoke. The noise stopped. The heat stopped. For one long second there was nothing at all.
Then there was stone under his back, cold and flat and unburned.
Jack sat up and his side didn't hurt.
He put his hand where the shrapnel had been and found whole skin under a torn uniform. His aid bag lay against his hip, the strap still across his chest. Beside him, Cedric was sitting up too, staring at a leg that was straight again.
"Doc," Cedric said. "Doc, my leg."
"I see it."
"Did you do that?"
"No."
They were in a round hall built of pale stone, with light falling from windows high in a dome. Around them stood a ring of old men in white robes, very still, holding staffs. The floor under the five of them was cut with lines that still glowed, dimming like coals.
One of the old men stepped forward. He was the oldest of them, with a face like folded paper and a voice made for big rooms.
"Welcome," he said, "to Corrum."
Nobody answered him for a while. Rafael was on his knees, patting himself down. Ainsley held her own hands up to the light and turned them over. Corey was already on his feet, standing between the old men and the rest of them, because that was Corey.
"Where's the truck," Corey said.
"Gone, my son. You were dying in it. The Calling reached you first."
"The what?"
The old man smiled. He spoke about the Calling, the rite that had pulled them out of the fire. Corey listened with his jaw set, the way he listened to a briefing he already hated.
Then the old man spoke about the kingdom, at war with demons from across the marsh. He spoke about a church that had prayed for heroes. He said all of it in English, or Jack heard it in English, which was its own problem for later.
"Are we dead?" Ainsley said.
"You are the opposite of dead. You are chosen."
"That's not a yes or a no," Rafael said.
"This is the Calling Hall," the old man said, and spread his hands at the dome, as if the room were the answer to Rafael.
Then the backs of their right hands lit up.
Jack watched his own. A sigil of light burned itself into his skin in thin lines, a pattern he'd never seen, and it didn't hurt. It felt like warm water. A priest went around the circle reading the marks aloud like a quartermaster at an issue table.
"Hero," he said over Corey's hand, and the robes murmured.
"Knight," he said over Rafael's, and "Mage" over Ainsley's, and "Archer" over Cedric's.
The priest bent over Jack's hand and his mouth went small.
"Healer."
The hand-mark on Jack's skin lit brighter, and words rose off it in pale letters an inch above his knuckles. He looked around. Nobody else was looking at his hand. Corey was staring at his own, and the priests were staring at Corey.
```status The mark lit: HEALER ```
One word, in letters nobody else could see. The priests didn't even glance at it. Corey's mark had said Hero, and every robe in the hall was turned toward him.
The old man introduced himself next, as the High Prelate, once, as if the title answered every question in the room. The other robes bowed when he said it.
Then they gave Corey a sword. The blade was pale gold and it hummed when he lifted it, a sound Jack felt in his fillings. The priests called it Sunsteel, the Hero's blade, and said no demon born could stand its edge.
"Healer," Jack said to the priest. "So what am I for?"
The priest patted his shoulder. "You are a potion that walks, my son. The Hero will need you whole."
Rafael laughed so hard he had to sit down on the glowing floor.
Three weeks went by in a city of white walls and bells.
They ate at long tables and slept in beds with curtains. They learned that the marks leveled up, and that a Hero at level twelve could cut through a horse. They learned the church had a promise for them. When the Demon Lord died, the Calling could open the other way, and they could go home.
Corey said it every night at dinner, like grace. "We kill her, we go home."
"To what?" Ainsley said on the third night. "They've buried us by now."
"Then we dig ourselves up." Corey tore his bread in half. "Lisa's due in March. I'm going to be there. So are you."
The others trained with blades and fire and bows. Jack healed.
He healed blisters and scrapes, a squire's fever and a cook's burned hand. The mark showed him what was wrong with a body if he looked for three seconds. When he laid his hands on, the hurt went out of the other man, and a small echo of it settled into Jack: a sting across his own palm, a warmth behind the eyes. By morning it was always gone. It never took much, because Corey wouldn't let him near anything that could make a bad one.
"You stay back," Corey told him on the practice yard. "I need you alive, Doc."
"I'm not made of glass."
"You're made of sixty hit points." Corey grinned and slapped his arm. "Everybody else has a backup. You're the backup."
"Potion with legs," Rafael called from the sword line. "Hey, Potion. I stubbed my toe. Come kiss it better."
"Stub it again and I'll think about it."
By the third week the mark had more to say when he looked at it.
```status The mark lit: HEALER, LEVEL 4 Body 60 | Burden 0 of 48 Skills: Triage, Draw, Release, Steady Hands ```
Level four, after three weeks of blisters and fevers. The others were nine to twelve already; a fighter leveled faster than a man with a bucket. Body was the easy line. It meant hit points, sixty of them, and from the look on the priests' faces sixty wasn't much. Burden, he didn't understand, and nobody explained it.
Jack read his box a hundred times in those weeks. Release was the line he couldn't work out. Nobody would tell him, and Corey never let him near an enemy to find out.
The priests had opinions about that too. They crowded Corey on the yard and touched his sword hilt for luck, and they walked past Jack the way you walk past a supply crate.
The church assigned them a priestess in the second week. She was young, with copper hair under a white veil and a sun-sigil inked on her throat, the church's mark, gold lines in a circle. She blessed their blades in the mornings. Light ran down the steel from her fingertips while the sigil glowed.
She watched Jack work. She watched him splint a stable boy's arm by hand, without the mark, because the mark was slower for bones and the kid was crying.
She never spoke to him. Her hands moved while she watched, folding the hem of her sleeve, smoothing it, folding it again.
"She likes you," Cedric said.
"She's never said a word to me."
"That's how they do it here. Priestesses aren't allowed."
"Then how would you know?"
Cedric shrugged. "She watches you more than she watches Corey. Nobody watches anybody more than Corey."
The first raid Corey let him come on went into Redfen, the burned marsh between the kingdom and the demons. The others had been out twice already without him, and had come back laughing about something none of them would tell him.
Redfen was reeds taller than a man and black water to the knee, and its villages had been fires once. The kingdom wanted a burned village checked. The scouts said it was empty, and Jack waded in at the back with his aid bag high on his shoulder to keep it dry.
"Stay on my six, Doc," Corey said over his shoulder. "Anything happens, you're the last man out."
"I'm always the last man out."
"Then you've got practice." Corey looked at the reeds on the left, then the right, and didn't like either. "Rafe, tighten up. Cedric, eyes high. Ainsley, if I say fire, I mean everything you've got."
"Everything I've got is about four of those," Ainsley said. "Maybe five if I skip lunch."
Ahead, a gutted house stood up out of the water on charred stilts. Nothing moved in it.
The scouts were wrong.
They came out of the reeds on both sides, grey skin with iron lines running along it like the stripes on a tiger. They carried swords and short spears and made no noise at all until they were close. Arrows hissed through the reeds. Corey's sword lit gold and a grey man went down screaming.
Jack's stomach turned over. He had been shot at before, but never by something that looked at him like that, calm and patient, a hunter checking a snare.
"Fall back," Corey said. "Staggered. Go!"
They ran. Water sucked at Jack's boots. Ainsley threw fire over her shoulder, and the reeds behind them went up in a wall.
Cedric went down ten yards later. His foot found a hole under the water and his ankle folded with a pop Jack heard over the shouting.
"Doc!"
Jack was there before he finished falling. He hauled the kid over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and kept moving.
"I got him," Jack said. "Go. I got him."
He didn't have him. Cedric was a hundred and seventy pounds of archer and gear, and the mud took every step and kept half of it. The others pulled ahead. Behind them, through the burning reeds, came the splash of many feet through water, steady and unhurried. The demons knew the marsh.
"Put me down," Cedric said into his ear. "Doc, put me down, I can hop."
"You can't hop. Shut up."
Corey stopped. He turned around and looked back at Jack.
Jack knew every look Corey had. This one he'd only seen pointed at maps. It measured distance against time against men, and it came up with a number.
"Rafe," Corey said.
Rafael came back through the water fast. Jack thought he was coming to take Cedric, and he was half right.
The knife went into Jack's left thigh, quick and practiced, high on the outside where it would drop a man without killing him fast. Jack saw the wooden grip sticking out of his own leg before he felt it. Then his leg was gone from under him and he was on his back in the water, and two pairs of hands were lifting Cedric off him.
The pain came late, a white bar of it from hip to knee.
Corey stood over him with Sunsteel humming in his hand. His face was calm. It was the calm Jack had watched him use on a dying private once, to keep the kid from panicking.
"I'm sorry, brother," Corey said. "Four or five."
Four out, or five dead. Jack heard the whole sum in three words. He'd have done the same sum himself, about anybody else.
"Corey," he said.
Nothing else would come.
Corey turned away. Rafael had Cedric over one shoulder now, and Cedric had stopped talking. Ainsley stood a step behind them and stared at the reeds, at the water, at her own feet, anywhere but the man on the ground.
They went, four backs moving off into the reeds.
The priestess went last. Her veil caught on a broken reed and pulled, and she stopped to free it. She looked back at him once. Her fingers went to the sigil at her throat and pressed there until her knuckles went white.
She didn't say anything. Then she turned and followed them, and the reeds closed behind her veil.
Jack lay in the black water with a knife in his leg. Four backs and one veil, gone into the reeds.
Behind him, the splashing came on through the smoke, steady and closer.
