Nowhere Land

She woke in the pre-dawn with the birds and lay still, listening, like she did every morning. If the birds weren't worried, then nor would she. Moving reluctantly in the chill, she drank a cup of water from her pack, then went to relieve herself.

When she returned, a man was standing by her tent. A young man, just verging on adulthood. She stopped in her tracks, hefted her rifle. "Who're you?"

"Who's asking?" he returned.

She took a minute to look him over. He didn't move under the scrutiny; despite his belligerence he didn't seem threatening. Maybe it was his youth making her soft, but she decided she could be the first to extend trust. "The name's Sally. You're hurt?"

He bristled, like a cat trying to make itself look bigger. "No."

Liar. "You should let me take a look. I'm a trained medic."

"I'm fine," he sneered, "I don't need help."

"You came down here to rob me, then?" He carried nothing with him but the clothes on his back. It would make sense wanting to rob her, but good luck to him if he tried. Sally still had her rifle.

He narrowed his eyes. She lifted her chin and returned the stare.

It might have turned into a standoff, but then a plane flew into earshot.

"Get down!" Sally shouted--tackling the idiot to the ground when he didn't immediately duck and cover. "Keep still," she hissed in his ear when he threatened to buck her off. She covered his head with her arm, none too gently. Reluctantly, he settled.

She turned her eye to the sky. Nothing to see, but she could hear the engine whine overhead. Probably a troop carrier, flying above the level of the clouds. It would be en route somewhere, not scanning the ground for strays. Still, she lay there until she couldn't hear it anymore.

"Well, now that we've gotten to know each other," she joked to break the ice when it had passed, "why not let me look at that leg?" She didn't give him time to protest, taking his foot and easing off his boot. He didn't flinch or make a sound as she probed the swelling and rotated the ankle back and forth. "How long have you been walking on this?"

"A day or two," he answered grudgingly. "Not long."

"It's only a sprain, but it should be elevated. You should keep off it for a couple of days, give it time to heal."

"You expect me to do that out here?"

She acknowledged the point with a crooked smile, sitting back on her heels. "It'll be okay with two people. I'll help. We can stay here til you're back on your feet."

"I'm not looking for charity." But he looked away first when she met his eye.

She grunted, satisfied. "You might not have been looking, but you've found it. You can always run off and get yourself killed tomorrow; I'll even promise not to mourn you if you like."

"I don't have anything," he warned her; she shrugged.

"I figured. Even so… It's better not to be alone out here."

*

The next day, they saw smoke in the sky. Sally's heart caught in her throat. They argued over whether they should investigate. "It'll be related to that plane from yesterday," she said. "We don't know what we'd be walking into."

"Do what you want," he replied, "I'm going."

That was the problem with healing people, she reflected: you couldn't stand to see them throw it all away afterwards. She sighed in resignation. "Not alone you're not."

Sally taped up the stranger's ankle, pleased to see the swelling down. They broke camp and set out. The sky overhead was clear and cold, the only cloud the ominous column of smoke that dictated their direction.

"Where were you headed?" she ventured to ask. "Before talking me into this fool's errand."

"Nowhere."

She snorted. "Nowhere, huh? Congratulations: you arrived."

She examined him as they walked. He didn't wear a uniform. (Neither did she. Yet she slept in a government-issue tent.) He didn't seem to carry a weapon, either. He might be someone displaced by the fighting--that would explain his lack of supplies--but she didn't think he had the air of a civilian. Despite his youth, she thought he might be a government soldier. They were recruiting young these days. A deserter, perhaps. That would explain his lack of uniform or weapon, as well as his reluctance to reveal anything about himself.

That night, still some ways off from their destination, they slept head to foot in her tent. It was cramped as anything, but no bad thing having another person's body warmth in there. "I'm trying to get home," she admitted. Saying it seemed to draw the itch of eyes between her shoulder blades. She fiddled with the locket round her neck, a silver heart-shaped thing. "When you came into my campsite, you weren't afraid?"

"Of some idiot woman camped all alone? You weren't gonna shoot me."

"You make it sound so complimentary." He raised his head to meet her eye; she smirked at him. For the first time, he smiled back. "Were you really gonna rob me?"

Solemnly, he shook his head. She counted it as progress.

*

It took another half-day of walking to arrive. They could smell it when they started getting close, the acrid smoke they'd followed all this way. It led them to a burned-out camp. The air felt muffled around them, eerie. No background chirp or whistle of birds calling, no drone of insects. Sally could hear nothing but their own footfalls.

She unstrapped her rifle and carried it at the ready, scanning and re-scanning the featureless landscape without pause. She trusted nothing about this place. Her young travelling companion appeared equally ill at ease.

Without needing to discuss it, they took stock of what remained. A couple of semi-permanent structures built from old shipping containers, presumably used to serve as command posts. Over there, dug-in defenses. No anti-aircraft guns that she could see, though. Stripped, presumably.

Everything useful, it seemed, had been dragged into the center of the camp and torched. Electronics, rucksacks, tents, rations. Maps. They probably would have been the first thing to go, she thought sourly.

Sally had been in a place like this, once. It had come to a similar end.

"No bodies," Sally observed. "Not even any blood. No sign of any fighting at all. Did the people staying here destroy this place themselves?"

"I wish I knew."

Or…perhaps there had never been anyone here at all. It wasn't unheard of, such propaganda. A fake rebel camp, built and destroyed by government forces to make it look like they were not only fighting, but winning. But you only created something like that to show it off. Uneasy again, Sally glanced over her shoulder. Nobody.

"There's nothing here," she insisted.

"We haven't looked that closely yet."

She glowered at the kid's back as he vanished into one of the trailers and turned her attention to the exterior. Round the back were the potable water tanks. For the first time, her hopes flared. She shrugged off her pack and went to unscrew the lid, praying she wouldn't find it empty.

Worse: fouled.

"Dammit!" She slammed the lid down in frustration.

At a sound behind her, she turned, expecting to find her young companion. Instead, it was a stranger--another one--in a uniform she didn't recognize. Stifling her shock, she raised her rifle. "Identify yourself," she demanded.

The man smiled. It was not a friendly smile. He said something in a language she didn't understand and took a step towards her.

"Stay back there," Sally warned him, ice in her voice. "I said identify yourself."

But from around the side of the building, the kid, her…comrade, erupted like a thunderclap. He and the soldier went down in a tangle of limbs. She didn't know what she'd been expecting--that he'd be helpless?--but it wasn't this, this savagery.

She shouted, moved in to pull them apart.

Too slow.

The glint of a knife jumped into the soldier's hand. The kid saw it, too, saw it coming for him. He grabbed the soldier's wrist, twisted. Then he was the one with the knife, and then it was buried deep in the soldier's neck.

"Move," Sally snarled, shoving the boy aside. She crouched at the dying man's side, tried to stem the bleeding. He gurgled up at her. She bent over him, let him see a friendly face. She took in the fear in his eyes with sympathy, the same fear she'd seen a hundred times in a hundred other people. His hand reached for her, briefly, before it went limp. The light faded slowly from his eyes.

She turned her gaze onto the kid. He stared back with a mix of anger and bewilderment. "That man was an enemy. He wanted to kill us, yet you still try to save him?"

"I'm a medic. I told you." He wasn't the only one who was angry. "How many people have you killed? This wasn't your first time, I don't think."

"You gonna banish me or something if you don't like my answer?"

She glared at him for a long time before deflating. "Let's just get out of here."

He shoved past her, knelt by the dead man, grasped something in his hand. "Let's."

*

"That man back there," said Sally, chewing on a ration bar once they'd set up camp, "he was foreign. You ever hear anything? About the government inviting foreign allies in, anything like that?"

The kid--she shouldn't call him that, he wasn't so many years her junior--shook his head.

Sally didn't like the implications. It lent another disturbing possibility to what had happened at that camp. She reached for the comfort of her locket only to find--it wasn't there.

Her lungs closed. She was at the bottom of a deep lake, green water closing over her head.

(A hand, grasping something in the dirt. A flash of silver.)

Before she knew it, she was on her feet, facing him. "Give it back."

He stared up at her, sullen, no pretending innocence. "Who are you working with?"

"No one. Give it back."

He withdrew the locket from his pocket, tore it open, cast its contents on the ground. "Who are you working with?"

"No one," she said again.

His face twisted. He surged to his feet, grabbed her collar with an angry hand. (A knife, in and out, blood staining his fingers.) "Do you think I don't know about the rebels and their suicide pacts?"

"I don't care about the damn pill," she choked, "I just want the locket. Please, it's mine." She touched his hand where it was bunched in the fabric of her shirt, as gently as she could. "Please."

His eyes continued boring into hers, until he let out his breath and something in him appeared to go out with it. He released her. Dropped the locket to the ground at her feet. She snatched it up, fastened it back around her neck. Found herself wondering again just who this boy was.

But it didn't matter. The people they'd been before, that didn't matter now.

"You said that you were going home. Was that a lie?"

"If I can find it." For all she knew, her home was gone. Just like her camp. Like her old comrades. "My family. My home. They're the only things I want to fight for, now."

"I didn't get to fight for my home." He seemed to hesitate. "If you'll let me…maybe I could fight for yours." Startled, she looked at him. For the first time, he seemed completely earnest: no bluster, no false machismo.

"I don't know if I can find the way."

"We will." He sounded certain.

She smiled, accepting this, drawing strength from it.

"My name," said the kid, quietly. "It's Hao."

"Hao," she repeated. "Thank you."