What they left out

Cinders, bound to the voiceless melody, sung with each exhale the atmosphere would dare present. Fluttered aimlessly along the skyline, set to rest in a temporary state until nature deemed them unworthy and claimed their delicate forms for rebirth. Condensed hydrogen rolled along the pristine azure, bearing diligently crafted crystalline that would soon join ashes and embers in their great descent for a brief, unpracticed choreography. However, their melody would cease to go unnoticed whether they were wary of such or not. It would be the snow fall’s empty steps that she would cling to like a drop of her own blood to keep her mind steady. That it was all indeed still very real no matter how far she sank into the twists and turns of a consciousness saturated in an intangible matter.

“Emotions… are such trifling tethers to the soul it should seem,” the clarity of the thought was startling in its own way, but it aided in pulling her further from the daze. She found herself paralyzed in, “the longer you try to retain passions, the easier it is for them to slip away and take flight with the flocks of avian lingering along the horizon. I found the longer I remain on the battlefield, the shallower I feel. And not time nor death can lay claim on the bits of my mind, that have been cast with the ashes that dance with souls. Long lost but situations such as this have become more normal than the mundane actuality of civilization back home.” Her fingers twitching, arguing against her command, but with another forceful encouragement from stunted nerve endings, her body hesitantly obliged.

All too suddenly, as if their awakening shocked the system, she felt pain lace through her chest and Catherine felt herself ripped out of the enticing trance. Delicate ash and calm white tumbled soundlessly onto her legs as she pushed herself upright with an agonized grunt. It would seem the world once again held the desire to make haste in ripping yet another soul from its home, yet somehow, she managed to dodge Death's synth. Judging by the lack of remaining structure around her, the Cartel she had been tasked against must’ve used explosives. How did they know I was here? As far as they were concerned, neither she nor Alexander had existed.The series of thoughts hung loosely, as she narrowly caught a glimpse of something that appeared to be catching the remnants of daylight. Given the mass of debris, she felt little need to investigate and began to get to her boots when she suddenly felt an aggressive sensation arise. So much so that she almost couldn’t bear it.Just when it seemed to envelope what little strands of consciousness she was dwelling on, it subsided. She became overwhelmed with a keen drive to carry forth toward the item. It was things like this that were hard to ignore and tended to lead to something pressing. She had learned that the hard way, during four long years of service, shorter than some for certain, but they too held many lessons. Catherine pulled herself to her feet, fighting against the pain that tediously lingered through a variety of bruises and scattered shrapnel entry ways.

The twenty-two year old made her way toward the object in question, eyeing both her surroundings, as well as what lay around it. The last thing she needed to do was trip on something. Upon arriving at the source, a plume of condensed mist left her nose with a steady exhale. “Through all of the training, preparation and time that saps the mind. It doesn’t make losing your best friend over an operation that should have been an in and out with low security any easier. We’re taught to take into account all the variables of a mission but even through all of that. Some things, you just can’t plan for.” She knelt close to an arm, caked in blood never to be oxidized again, it’s bare long cold before the snowfall. Catherine carefully peeled stiffened fingers open to collect the dog tags, she was certain he ripped off before the collapse. The look on his face right before the detonation separated them, as he tried to reach for her hand, still weighed on her even with the shallowness’ hold. Just as she began to stand, she noticed something peculiar beneath the snow she had absently disturbed whilst gathering the tags. It bore a linear accuracy far too coordinated to be sheer coincidence. With a small tilt of the head, she brushed the snow aside. One quiveringly inscribed character after the next became a word,back-to-back. “The..secret...lies...within...the...leaves.” Rose-hued lips uttered almost inaudibly.

The soldier sat back on her knees clearly befuddled . The secret lies within the leaves? Out of all the vegetation they had been through, she had never seen anything buried in their collective bodies. Alexander always had witty remarks to make, was it perhaps just a last minute play on life’s instabilities? A way to make an agonizing situation a bit easier? She couldn’t be certain and not having his intellect made it that much more difficult. Why did you have to be so cryptic, this could mean anything! She could almost see the smug look plastered across his face as she stood and unbuckled one of the several pouches strapped to an obsidian kevlar vest where she could tuck the tags away. Normally it was standard procedure to leave a tag with a fallen soldier rather than take both, however, having to remain under the radar; it would be best for her not to leave anything for the Cartel to come back and obtain when they felt safe enough to return to conduct a search.As she turned to leave she couldn’t help but feel drawn to the scripture long melded with tainted fibers. There was something about it that- she stopped abruptly. He’d been obsessed with carrying around some onyx book that he’d been decoding for almost three days.

Leaves! Paper is made from trees! She hurried back over to him and promptly began ripping split planks, drywall and other rubble she couldn’t quite identify off of him. She could narrowly make out the Union Jack on his sleeve as she progressed further, blowing bits of golden fringe away that dared to obscure her vision. The moment she hefted the last jumble of birch from the male’s body, she picked up the distant resonation of compressed gravel in tune with the huff of an engine. She halted all motion, readying to bolt when it faded no sooner than it did arrive.

Cursing under her breath, she needed to hurry. Catherine took hold of his vest and yanked him onto his back. Hazy russet briefly locked with cornflower irises, pale lips stained a hateful burgundy, she fought the urge to turn away. Patented leather glossed over his face with the gentlest of touches concealing his eyes beneath before making quick work of shuffling through his combat gear in search of the journal. The twenty-two year old SOF patted his vest, glancing up at every second that was torn away and sent into oblivion by Time’s ceaseless reign. She could practically see their delicate forms as He whisked them away.

The presence of the vehicle breathed over her shoulder with an unbearable weight despite it’s obvious distance. To her, the mere fire sequence of the cylinders within the engine alone warranted a feeling that left her on edge. There was a muffled thud. Elated, the woman removed a plain, worn, obsidian journal from beneath Alexander’s torn undershirt and for just a short moment, she hugged the object. Catherine turned the treatise over, revealing compressed fawn Cellulose fibers that were surprisingly intact. They almost seemed ancient, especially given the ink that had been used to scratch out the jumble of symbols that dotted the pages. She could clearly see Alexander’s notes but nothing that stood out to her...at least not within the first few pages. It wasn’t until she reached what she presumed to have been the twelfth, considering she was simply rapidly rummaging through, that she finally ran across something that had undoubtedly been another one of his riddles.She glanced up as yet another vehicle came and went The Wolf sees the brightest when lunar grace is at its highest. She glanced at the circular obsidian and navy blue stitching of a howling lone wolf patch on her shoulder and pondered if he had been referring to her. There wasn’t a soul around that knew he had often called her Wolf even to her lack of understanding. Not sure what you mean by seeing the brightest, I need a flashlight just like any other jughead. She felt rather stupid as she flipped to the next page and found it to be blank.

Catherine pulled apart the Velcro to a small pouch that ran the length of her index finger along the right shoulder strap of a worn black camo backpack. Slipped a small pen sized light from its contents, keyed the activation point and held it up to the paper. Lilac’s brilliant hue seemed to bring the dead back to life as Alexander’s very words stared back at her with a life of their own. Of course he’d use this method, they had used it many times when they left seemingly worthless sheets of paper to communicate with one another out in the open or exchanging documents. “Catherine… Wolf. If you’re reading this it means you understood my cheesy riddles and it also means I didn’t make it. Well obviously I didn’t or we’d be discussing this over whisky instead of me wasting my time disguising it for you to find in some artifact,” The Lieutenant chuckled, even in writing he found a way to snarky. “I preemptively wrote this because...we'll call it intuition if you will, I had a sneaking suspicion the mission would go south. That’s why I’ll most likely come out of the blue when you were supposed to be carrying this one out alone. They knew we were coming, Catherine.” The sound of tires skidding to a halt against rubble pulled her attention from the collection of words.She could faintly catch foreign exchanges among men as the facsimile of car doors slammed into place. Biting her lower lip, she began to skim through the contents, counting their footsteps with each syllable, suddenly leaving became the last thing on her mind as she pulled her knife.

“I started to have a bad feeling about things from the start, the amount of coincidences that played out during our missions, how often either would get lucky, how Command knew right where things would be or how the Cartel could track us so easily. It all came off wrong. I did some further digging while you were carrying out the mission and I found something darker about the people that hold leadership over us than the mere classified nonsense they continuously feed us. They are not who they say they are, do not trust them. They’re working together Catherine, they will not hesitate to kill you; either side now that they were unsuccessful the first time. If you have not yet, you have to get out of there, I have no next of kin, no family left. I left you what little I have in savings, please-” The vociferous clang of a bullet being snapped into the receiver caused her to ever so slowly gaze upward. Four masked men in all grey camouflage uniforms stared her down with an unforgiving aura, assault rifles at the ready. With the uttermost care, she rose, expression unwavering. As she did, hundred dollar bills began to tumble from within the pages and 21,000 dollars tumbled into the ruins. She found she lacked the care as her gaze met that of her pursuers. It was now or never.