USS Iowa, as a matter of principle, did not believe in theft.

  This was not because she possessed especially delicate morals about property.

  It was because theft implied wrongdoing.

  And in Iowa’s experience, most things people called theft were actually one of three much more respectable activities:

  salvage,

  improvisational logistics,

  or tactical relocation of material into the custody of someone less likely to waste it.

  Today, naturally, she was engaging in the third.

  The evening had deepened into that soft gray-blue hour where Horizon’s surviving lamps came alive one by one and the drizzle made every light look more expensive than it really was. The base remained busy in the post-battle way it always seemed to be now—never frantic, but never still either. Hammering from one construction line. A transport truck coughing along the inner road. The distant metallic complaint of cranes being made to work harder than their designers had intended. Repair crews still moving beneath tarps and scaffolds. Voices low. Fatigue in all of them.

  And through all of that, Iowa moved like she had somewhere very specific to be and absolutely no intention of explaining herself to anyone with less than four stars or a wrench.

  She had a cart.

  The cart did not officially belong to her.

  This was acceptable because, in her opinion, it also did not officially belong to the idiots who had parked it unattended outside a partially secured stores annex while several highly desirable pieces of military hardware were being sorted according to priorities set by people who had never once had to hold a wall under live bombardment.

  The cart was loaded.

  Not extravagantly. Iowa was many things, but stupid under load was only one of them and today she was making the conscious choice not to be.

  On the cart sat:

  two sealed cases of advanced signal relays,

  one crate of fresh-weather insulation plating sized almost perfectly for a future auxiliary support lane,

  a stack of boxed precision tools nobody on a base like Horizon should ever have had to request twice,

  three bundled lengths of reinforced cable,

  and—her personal favorite—one tarped package of radar-adjacent fire-control components marked for regional allocation review.

  That last phrase had offended her so badly on sight that she had decided immediately it meant would be lost in transit if not rescued by a stronger moral character.

  Which was how she found herself now, pushing the cart through a side service lane with the broad confidence of a woman who had not yet been caught and therefore considered herself vindicated by fate.

  She was not hiding.

  Iowa never really hid.

  She simply chose routes where people with questions were less likely to exist in useful concentrations.

  The lane curved behind a half-repaired storage row and opened near one of Horizon’s secondary support structures, a long prefab shell that had survived the siege mostly because the enemy had apparently considered it too boring to bomb and too annoying to finish later. Kade had marked the structure for future conversion into one of the interim coordination and maintenance hubs once the larger residential and repair projects truly got underway.

  In other words, exactly the sort of place where useful things ought to mysteriously accumulate.

  Iowa stopped the cart near the side entrance and tilted her head, gauging line of sight, foot traffic, and the nearest likely sources of interruption.

  So far so good.

  She was midway through shifting one of the relay cases off the top when voices drifted from around the far corner of the prefab.

  Coalition officers.

  Two of them.

  Possibly three.

  Iowa froze, not out of fear, but because even she understood that being discovered in the middle of morally educational procurement reduced the number of graceful explanations available later.

  She eased the relay case down silently and moved just far enough around the edge of the stacked crates beside the prefab wall to catch the conversation without immediately being seen.

  The officers were on the other side of the structure near a lamped lane where the drizzle made the ground shine in pale streaks. Fresh uniforms, if the stiffness in their posture was any indication. She recognized none of them by name, which already made her suspicious.

  One of them—thin, sharp-nosed, trying far too hard to sound worldly for someone whose boots had not yet learned Horizon mud—was speaking first.

  “—I’m telling you, this place has gone strange.”

  Another answered, lower, skeptical. “Strange how?”

  The first man made a small dismissive sound.

  “Compared to the island stations I’ve been posted through? Everything’s… blurred.”

  Iowa, crouched just enough to keep herself unadvertised, rolled her eyes so hard the motion nearly qualified as training.

  Blurred.

  That was one way to phrase people stopped being idiots while under shellfire.

  A second officer—older, perhaps, or simply more careful with how he chose his words—said, “It survived a siege. You expect normal?”

  “I expect structure,” the first snapped. “Instead I’ve got deck girls walking into admin corridors like they own them, enlisted marines talking back to officers over classification protocol, and every other person on this island acting like the chain of command is some kind of group suggestion.”

  That got Iowa’s full attention.

  Not because the words were surprising.

  Because they were familiar in the worst way.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  There it was.

  The old voice.

  The one that always came back after miracles. The one that looked at living proof that the prior arrangement had been rotten and decided, somehow, the solution was to rebuild the rot more neatly this time.

  She felt it in her jaw first.

  The urge.

  The lovely, clean urge to step around the corner, smile with all her teeth, and ask the man exactly how much of Horizon’s wall he had personally held while its command structure “blurred.”

  She did not.

  Not yet.

  Instead, Iowa slowly reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled free a compact recorder.

  Not standard issue exactly.

  Then again, Iowa often treated standard issue as more of an opening argument than a final boundary.

  She thumbed the device on and held it low.

  The first officer kept talking, which in Iowa’s experience was the most reliable feature of men who should have been slapped in youth and weren’t.

  “I’m just saying, if command doesn’t reassert itself properly, this base is going to become a precedent.”

  The second officer said, “A precedent for what?”

  “A precedent for every damaged holding station in the theater thinking local sentiment outranks central order.”

  Iowa had to physically tighten her hand on the recorder to stop herself from laughing out loud.

  Local sentiment.

  That was a very pretty phrase for “the people who were here when it mattered.”

  A third voice joined in then—this one uneasy rather than eager.

  “Maybe we don’t want to pick that fight right away.”

  The first man scoffed. “If not now, then when? They’ve been indulged because they bled. Fine. But that doesn’t mean we let a support base rewrite operating culture just because it got lucky and put a monster down.”

  Iowa’s expression changed.

  That did it.

  Not visibly, perhaps.

  But inside her, something old and knife-bright turned over with dangerous grace.

  Lucky.

  That word.

  That stupid, clean, insulting little word.

  Lucky, as if Fairplay hadn’t nearly been blown apart.

  Lucky, as if the wall hadn’t held by salvage and blood.

  Lucky, as if Kade hadn’t driven himself unconscious, as if Vestal and Arizona and Nagato and Tōkaidō and every single battered soul on the island had somehow tripped backward into survival by accident.

  Iowa breathed once through her nose and kept the recorder steady.

  The uneasy third voice tried again. “I’m not defending laxity. I just think maybe there’s a reason the old guard is so protective.”

  The first officer answered, “Sentiment. Trauma bonding. Hero worship. Pick your poison.”

  At that, Iowa’s fingers flexed once on the recorder hard enough to make the casing creak.

  She was fighting everything in her body not to get involved.

  That was the exact phrase for it.

  Everything.

  Her shoulders wanted movement. Her mouth wanted violence. Her boots wanted to step around the corner and introduce these men to the concept of learning through impact.

  Instead she stayed put.

  Because one of the few things Iowa respected more than her own temper was useful evidence.

  Let them talk.

  Let them damn themselves cleanly.

  She would decide what to do with the recording later.

  Possibly after showing it to someone with a dry mean streak and more patience than she had.

  Possibly Kade.

  Possibly Bismarck.

  Possibly Atlanta, if she wanted the problem solved in a way involving tools and regrettable dental outcomes.

  Eventually the officers moved on, their voices fading down the lane toward the administrative housing block.

  Iowa stayed where she was until the sound was truly gone.

  Then she clicked the recorder off, slipped it back into her pocket, and exhaled very slowly.

  “Well,” she muttered to the crates beside her, “that was educational.”

  She stood again and returned to the cart.

  The radar package still needed relocating.

  If anything, the conversation had made the work feel holier.

  “Congratulations,” she murmured while hauling the covered unit into the prefab doorway, “you now officially belong where competent people can find you first.”

  The equipment, being equipment, did not thank her.

  Which was rude.

  On the other end of the island, Wilkinson found Reeves by accident.

  Or perhaps not entirely by accident.

  He had the look of someone who often took paths that passed through useful corners on purpose and then pretended surprise when usefulness appeared there. The drizzle had picked up just enough to make the smaller support lanes slick again, and one of the newly assigned destroyer escorts had apparently been tasked with carrying a stack of inventory slates and wrapped ration supplements from one receiving row to another.

  Reeves was doing her best.

  That was visible from fifty feet away.

  Her best was simply colliding with Horizon’s terrain.

  She was moving too quickly for the state of the ground and too carefully for the load she’d been given. The slates were tucked under one arm, the ration bundle balanced awkwardly against her chest, and her expression carried the desperate focus of someone trying very hard not to be in the way ever again after having already become the center of one ugly intake argument.

  Which was exactly why, when one boot slipped on the wet concrete seam between two service lanes, the whole arrangement started to come apart at once.

  The top slate slid first.

  Then the ration bundle shifted.

  Then Reeves made the universal sound of someone realizing disaster had become physically committed.

  Wilkinson, coming around the corner with a small toolbox under one arm and an expression of perfectly ordinary destroyer attention, moved before she had time to fully panic.

  He caught the slates with one hand.

  The ration pack with the other.

  And, with the calm efficiency of a man who had definitely done this sort of thing before in rougher seas and with worse consequences, steadied the whole collapsing arrangement back into something manageable without so much as breaking stride.

  Reeves stared at him.

  Wilkinson stared back for half a second, then looked down at the slates in his hand.

  “Your paperwork attempted desertion.”

  Reeves blinked.

  Then, despite everything in her clearly still urging her toward apology and alarm, a tiny startled laugh escaped.

  “I—sorry.”

  He handed the top stack back to her. “No damage. Yet.”

  She took the slates carefully, cheeks faintly pink.

  “Thank you.”

  Wilkinson shifted the ration bundle more securely onto the top of the stack with an eye for balance that suggested escort duty had long since trained him to mistrust gravity on principle.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Support annex three,” she said. “Then intake relay.”

  He looked at the load.

  Then at the lane.

  Then at her.

  “That route floods at the lower dip.”

  Reeves’s expression fell just enough to betray that she had, in fact, not known this and had already mentally committed to discovering it the worst way possible.

  Wilkinson turned half-left and jerked his head toward a side lane.

  “Come on.”

  She blinked again. “Sir?”

  He started walking at a pace that made it clear he expected to be followed but was leaving her enough dignity to imagine it was optional.

  “Alternate path,” he said. “Shorter. Less stupid.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Reeves hurried after him with the recovered stack held much more carefully this time.

  He did not try to make conversation right away.

  That helped.

  The lane he’d chosen cut behind one of the newer supply rows, passed a reinforced water point, and sloped more gently toward annex three without the slick low section that would have sent Reeves and half the rations into the mud.

  After a minute or so, she risked, “You’re Wilkinson, right?”

  He glanced at her.

  “That’s usually how names work.”

  That should have sounded cutting.

  Instead, coming from him, it sounded almost dry enough to be kind.

  Reeves nodded quickly. “I’m Reeves.”

  “I know.”

  That startled her enough that she looked at him properly.

  He shrugged one shoulder.

  “Whole base knows, after yesterday.”

  Her face did something complicated then, embarrassment and lingering shame trying to meet relief and not knowing which was allowed to win.

  “I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

  “No,” Wilkinson said. “You meant to carry boxes.”

  She made a helpless little sound that might have become a laugh or a groan if she’d had more practice being less tense.

  He seemed to consider her for another moment.

  Then added, “For what it’s worth, it was the correct instinct.”

  Reeves went very still.

  That sentence meant more to her than he likely intended and less than it should have had to. On another base, perhaps, such a simple validation would not have hit so hard.

  On Horizon, after what she had already run into?

  It mattered.

  She swallowed once. “Thank you.”

  Wilkinson grunted softly, as if gratitude was a slightly oversized coat he didn’t know where to put.

  They reached annex three without further disaster.

  He held the door open with one boot and shifted the lower corner of the ration pack so she could get through cleanly.

  Reeves paused in the doorway, then looked back over one shoulder.

  “Um.”

  Wilkinson raised one brow.

  “If you ever need help carrying something,” she said in a rush, “I’m actually pretty good at not dropping things when no one’s trying to arrest me.”

  There was a beat.

  Then Wilkinson’s mouth twitched in what, on a man like him, counted as a smile visible only by treaty violation.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Reeves ducked inside before she could become more embarrassed than physics allowed.

  Wilkinson stood there for a second longer than the exchange strictly required.

  Then he adjusted the toolbox under his arm and continued on his own errand with the expression of someone who had not at all just acquired the first faint outline of a new friendship.

  The drizzle continued over Horizon.

  Iowa continued her righteous logistical crimes.

  Fresh officers kept arriving with old ideas and found the island far less welcoming to them than their paperwork had promised.

  And somewhere inside the base, without fanfare and while the larger war still turned all around them, small new loyalties were already being built in the spaces between recovery and irritation.