The sand shifted in the cool night air as the Lieutenant passed through it.

  She shivered slightly and wished for the third time that she had brought a jacket with her. But she didn’t normally carry warmer clothes than the day required, out of habit. And the squad was in the desert.

  Enough conserving energy, she thought.

  She took a moment to focus on one of her skills.

  Emberflow.

  Instantly, warmth flooded through her core and radiated out to her extremities. This skill, like most of her abilities, was oriented toward combat—she could superheat her body and injure someone with a touch, using less mana than if she conjured actual flames—but fortunately, it was also good for this more mundane utility.

  Sperry tried to move a little quicker. She assumed no one back at camp could see her mana in action, but it was always possible someone had a class they had kept secret for some reason and would be able to see her using her skill. Normally that would seem like a paranoid thought.

  But her father’s old advice rang especially true lately: “Blood and marriage are the only unbreakable bonds. Outside of the family, everyone wears a mask.”

  Everyone else in the squad was complicit in something that had been deliberately kept from her.

  Or were they?

  Concretely, she only had Tybalt’s word on that.

  She shook her head.

  Stop going back and forth. You’re going to have a final answer to this in half an hour. The irrefutable truth, with your own eyes. That’s why you’re out in this cold.

  The Lieutenant pushed some mana through her legs and began to walk more energetically. It was best to get unpleasant things over with as soon as she possibly could.

  She ended up taking only a quarter of an hour to reach the area where the village had been, but then she saw the telltale signs of a sandstorm coming. Rippling waves of sand stirred up by wind gusts, just above the surface of the ground. A fine haze about the air that softened the edges of the outlines of the village just ahead. The grit suddenly stung her skin, and she knew she needed to get down.

  Sperry had been trained on what to do in this situation, like everyone else in the squad. She dropped to the ground, pulled her gambeson up and over her face and eyes, and tried not to breathe in sand. The sand grated against her uncovered midriff and lower back, but she ignored it as best she could. She had no other choice.

  In theory, she was more powerful than anyone else from the group she had come with.

  In practice, she was low level enough that she was as vulnerable to the whims of nature as any of them.

  She was forced to wait another ten minutes before she felt the wind-battered sand reduce its force, then another five before the grit stopped trying to work its way through her clothing and into her nose and mouth.

  Finally, Sperry could take a look at the ruins. A thin impression of sand lingered in the air, but it was nothing she couldn’t endure. Perhaps her eyes would be a little red in the morning, but no one would notice.

  She advanced, her shirt still held up around her nose and mouth, eyes squinted against the floating particles. She could see thin wisps of smoke rising from the ruined buildings of the village that she had burned.

  She was almost at the perimeter of the settlement—the remains of the exterior buildings were ten feet ahead of her—when she stepped on the first bone. There was a sickening snap under her heel, as if a dried up twig had broken. But there were no trees out here. She knew what it was.

  Her stomach did a little somersault as she looked down and confirmed that her foot had come down in a rib cage.

  What else is out here?

  With the darkness and the sand still suspended in the air, she couldn’t see much of anything. That was how she had stepped into the middle of a skeleton.

  But as she inhaled now, the Lieutenant caught a whiff of something sickly, disgustingly sweet. Rot.

  She heard something too, now that she held still. A gentle droning sound. It took her a minute to recognize it, but then it was unmistakable: the buzzing of flies.

  Sperry swallowed. She turned her head back to look for the outlines of the camp, just to gauge how far away she was. She couldn’t see anything in the direction she had come from, and she decided to take a risk.

  She churned her mana in the specific way that her mother had shown her when she was still only a young girl, class-less, and she made fire. It was just a little flare that would go out in under a minute, quickly enough that it would hopefully go unnoticed by whoever the squad had on guard duty. She threw it into the air—and then sucked in a surprised breath.

  The air brought a stronger hit of that faint, spoiling meat smell, but what she saw was more unpleasant than the odor itself.

  A field of bones.

  That was how her mind processed it for a moment, before she got a grip. A few seconds passed in which she tried to convince herself that some of the outlines were broken twigs, but the little flare lasted too long for that idea to hold water. It was the dead of the village.

  Much of the population of the village, it seemed, was out here.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I’m on the opposite side from where I was during the attack, she thought. That explained how she had missed this the first time. No, how it had been concealed from her…

  Interspersed among the bones, Sperry saw there were shapes of more intact bodies. She forced herself to take a step forward, then another, moving briskly toward the corpses. She had come here to know the truth. It was time to rip off the bandage. This would only hurt once, or so she told herself.

  As she walked into the corpses, she raised her shirt up again and kept her mouth and nose tightly covered. The smell wasn’t something she had gotten used to. This was more dead bodies than she’d seen in her whole life, all at once. But she never averted her eyes.

  She saw the skeletons, all of which bore some markings of her flames—her magic had kept the fire burning long after a normal fire would have gone out—and she looked more carefully at the faces of the more intact cadavers.

  She walked through the external group of bodies and kept going into the ruined village itself, compelled to know everything that she had been a part of.

  There were more skeletons, usually in the midst of the ruins of their huts—but also a surprising number of relatively intact corpses lying in the central path with faces she could read.

  The expressions showed fear, horror, and pain, in multiple shades.

  In a couple of cases, she could have sworn that she could tell the dead had been begging for their lives.

  And then there were the handful of beastfolk women and girls at one edge of the village, whose dresses were torn in places that made it obvious what had happened to them. One girl’s dress was gone completely, and Sperry stared at her corpse for a long time. The expression of abject horror and helplessness still frozen on the girl’s face. The stab wounds, so many of them—like someone took pleasure in tormenting her. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old.

  There was so much rage in this murder. It was incomprehensible to Sperry.

  If I had just walked through the village after everything, I would have known, Sperry thought. But she had followed the Commander’s directions and pulled back. He had claimed that it placed unnecessary pressure on the men to be directly under officers’ eyes all the time.

  Discretion was the order of the day—both in the sense of being tactful and in the sense of granting freedom to make decisions—or so Volusia said.

  To think, I listened to everything he said, and I just lapped it all up. Like an idiot.

  The odor of corruption hit the Lieutenant’s nostrils again, and this time, it felt especially sharp and repugnant.

  Hot liquid rose in her throat, demanding to be released. Sperry didn’t fight it. Her will was in tatters anyway.

  She bent, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and vomited.

  Sperry was only semi-aware of her body as she dropped to hands and knees and continued. She noticed the feelings in her face—hot, tight, and probably red—more than what was happening with the rest of her. The faint smell of salt on her cheeks, barely perceptible through the stench of vomit, told her that she was crying.

  How long had it been since she wept? Almost as long as it had been since the last time she threw up. Before she joined the Army.

  She kept going until she felt empty and weak—and somehow a little less contaminated. Not clean.

  Because she had been of assistance in this. She had been instrumental.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice came out a strangled whimper.

  I just followed orders. I didn’t know it would lead to this…

  Those words, she kept inside. They sounded too pitiful, too dishonest, to speak in the presence of so many dead.

  I can’t trust anyone anymore, she suddenly thought. Everyone in the squad was as complicit in this—or even more complicit—than me. Her mind was blissfully silent for a moment, then blurted, I can’t trust anyone except…

  His face sprang to mind, and she reflexively shook her head.

  No, he’s just as bad as the rest. He told me the truth about this, but—Her mind refused to complete the thought at first. It seemed idiotically insignificant.

  But something about his story before didn’t add up? Sperry finally made herself articulate it. Something-something switching shirts with Baldwin, some sort of lie to the squad, to the Commander? Who cares? What could be bigger than this?

  Maybe he was hiding some terrible secret.

  But a part of her wanted to go to Tybalt and ask him what she should do next, if she wanted to stop this from happening again. He had warned her not to report up the chain of command. Surely he’d had some reasons for that. Now that she had seen this, and she wanted to stop it, she needed to be cautious.

  The Commander was in on it, and he had implied that others of his rank suborned the same practices. Who was to say the next rank up would be interested in hearing about this? She could go to her father, but… it was hard to think of facing him with something like this.

  She slowly pushed herself up off the ground and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. Then she tasted the vomit in her mouth and winced at the sour flavor. Her hand went to her waist and found her flask. She uncapped the container, and careful not to touch her vomit-tainted mouth to the lip, she downed a quick gulp of red wine. The second mouthful, she swished around until the taste of stomach acid was washed out in the heady liquid.

  Sperry did not allow herself to drink any more. The wine she carried was strong, and her tolerance was only middling. It would not be wise to get drunk out here.

  Instead, she wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand and capped the flask again.

  It was worth the slight buzz the two mouthfuls gave her. She could look at the village with calmer eyes. She was still disgusted by what had happened, but she thought she knew what she could do in the moment to try and bring the victims a modicum of peace.

  The fire came to her instinctively, almost before she called it.

  Then it radiated from her core through her arms, and as she extended her hands into the air, the flames shot forward from the tips of her fingers, dancing to a tune that only she could hear. The still-low-burning flames, which had been meant to render the village uninhabitable, now surged up to join her fresh fire. Together, they made a bonfire that would erase all traces of this place that night, no matter how much mana it took. That was the closest to a proper burial that she could give these poor beastfolk.

  Destroying their homes and bodies, bones and all.

  Sperry did not step away from the fire until the thick, acrid smoke almost choked her. There was something about the sight of the village burning that almost brought a smile to her mouth—if the tears hadn’t gotten there again first.

  Maybe it was that sickeningly sweet smell, slapping her in the face as the slowly rotting bodies burned.

  The Lieutenant’s vision was blurry, and her gait slightly unsteady, as she walked back to camp from the site of the ruined village, but she felt… not good, but better. The bodies would not be eaten up by flies or picked at by vultures now. They had no more indignities left to suffer.

  It was a first stab at making things a bit closer to right.