Kaede surveyed Natalia's selection for her elite soldiers. There were thirty of them, all in their late teens, able-bodied, having come off the better in the recent attack. Kaede knew them all. Natalia had chosen well.
She stood in line with them, shoulder to shoulder with her family, people she'd grown up training with and fighting with and laughing with. There were weapons in her belt. Her eyes glowed. This was what she lived for, for these moments before the fight, when she was beside people she cared about and she knew that she was strong.
Kaede was proud to be chosen for this task. It wasn't surprising – she would have been a fool not to know herself to be one of the better soldiers in the youth corps – but nevertheless it was an honour to be selected for this most important of tasks, to be counted as the best.
She had seen people's faces when Natalia came round, delivering the news that there was to be a final push and the high command eliminated. People turned pale, white or green, bit their lips, looked away. They were all afraid. Everyone was afraid of what they were about to do.
But not Kaede. She was a killer now and it had felt like nothing at all, instinctive and effortless. It was in her blood. What difference did it make whether she was pointing a gun at commanders or soldiers? There was nothing to fear.
"Soldiers," Natalia said, not loudly but clearly, "today, we are to commit treason in the name of the greater good. We march with the same battle cry as those whose actions drove us down to Subterra in the first place. It would be wrong for us to forget that."
Kaede listened, drinking it in, letting all her inhibitions – though they were few – drop away like dead skin.
"We must do what we can to preserve lives inside there," Natalia continued. "We have questions to ask them, demands to make, and to kill them would deprive us of this chance. But understand that if that comes at the price of victory, you are to shoot to kill and not hold back."
They were orders Kaede liked: straight-forward, uncomplicated, impossible to misread. They were the kind she could follow without thinking, and Kaede loved orders. She loved knowing what she could and couldn't do.
"I will give the command to hold fire," Natalia added. "I expect you to obey."
As one, the contingent of soldiers saluted as a sign of their agreement and their understanding.
"As it is," Natalia dropped her head and gave a small, very human sigh, "we may all die today. If that is the case, die in the knowledge that you are fighting for a cause we believe in whole-heartedly, die in the knowledge that you were chosen as the best, die certain that we were not gambling your lives lightly. If any of you think you cannot do this, there is no shame in walking away now."
Nobody moved. Of course they didn't. Natalia had chosen those for whom the danger was outweighed by other factors. Nobody here would mind what happened to them. Death was the price you paid for following orders.
"It is an honour," Natalia finished, "an honour and a privilege to fight beside you now. Soldiers...follow me."
She turned and marched and they fell into ranks behind her, filling the corridors, walking in perfect time. Nobody said a word. Nobody made a sound. The hallways were empty ahead of them, all the way up to the field-marshal's office, except for three artillery soldiers who were waiting to blow the doors to smithereens and let them walk in.
Kaede's heart was quite steady in her chest, beating the same rhythm as her footsteps. She kept her eyes straight ahead. From behind cracked-open doors, she was aware of people watching them pass. She didn't look. She didn't have to.
They reached a crossroads several hundred metres from the anti-chamber of the office. Natalia held up her hand for them to halt. They waited. In the back of her mind, Kaede was counting.
Five...four...three...two...one...
Three figures, small and unarmed, came sprinting down the corridor, flying through the elite guard and vanishing out of sight. Behind them, an explosion rocked the world. Kaede fought not to choke as the ash and dust swirled up into her face, stinging her eyes and blinding her. It tasted foul and burning in her mouth.
"Forward!" Natalia ordered. "Go!"
Kaede broke into a run, long strides, keeping pace with the people around her. They rounded the corner, burst into the anti-chamber, and flew through the chaos of the clearing smoke and stinging air. Dust was raining down, sparks and shards of metal, bits of rubble. The walls were black. The air was hazy. From behind the remains of the door, Kaede heard panicked shouting.
She didn't hesitate. In one stride, she bounded over the wreckage of the melted door and the pitiful barricade of furniture beyond, landing on the charred floor of Field-Marshal Bone's office. Without a second thought, she opened fire. Someone screamed, and the fight began in earnest.
Kaede rolled behind a desk and sat crouched, firing out into the room. It was impossible to see from the leftovers of the explosion. She could make out the shadowy shapes of figures but knowing whether they were friends or enemies was a game of chance. She fired with caution, and accuracy.
The air was thick with bullets, pelting from all sides, pummelling her with the proximity of their passage. The smoke was clearing now, clearing and revealing the chaos of the room left behind. Bodies danced and spun, ducking and dodging and weaving. Some sheltered behind splintered furniture. Others took their chances in the open, advancing and advancing only to be cut down as though some puppet-master had severed their strings.
Kaede sprang out from her hiding place and sprinted across the room, firing into a man's back. He went down, alive but paralysed as her bullet severed his spinal cord. His scream was inaudible over the drumming of bullets, the roaring in her ears, the ringing airlessness of the room.
She nearly tripped over a body but there wasn't time to see whose it was. She took a woman down, trapping her in with a hail of gunfire, ripping holes in her arms and shoulders until she was helpless. A bullet whistled past Kaede's neck, streaking blood down her throat, just scratching her skin. She whirled, answering it with shots of her own.
It was a brief and bloody madness. There was no time to think. There was no time to make judgements. Dim light, smoky air, breathlessness, exhaustion, a fear that went beyond panic and straight through into brutality. Kaede was master of it all, the merest inch from death.
She lost her weapons in the melee, blown straight from her fingers, forcing her to retreat to a place of safety. From behind the shattered remains of a cabinet, she tried to judge whether she could risk a foray out into the battleground to seize a gun from the hands of a corpse, but even as she thought this, Natalia's order came.
"Hold! Soldiers, hold fire!"
In a few stumbling seconds, a semblance of calm returned to the scene that, only moments before, would not have looked out of place in hell. Kaede took a deep breath, letting her lungs expand for the first time since this began, hitting the sides of her head to clear the ringing from her ears.
"Hold," Natalia repeated, quietly.
The smoke was clearing at last and Kaede could take in the room in all its glory. There were three bodies, two of them her own soldiers. Everyone else was alive but scarcely anyone had escaped injury. The room had an unreal atmosphere to it, as though none of this could really be happening, as if it were some poorly-made fake.
"Field-Marshal." Natalia saluted. "Sir."
Field-Marshal Bone, weapon-less and nursing a wounded calf, looked up at her with a disinterested expression. Natalia held her gaze for a moment and it seemed like they were talking with their eyes.
Kaede's eyes lighted on something behind Natalia. Her muscles worked before her brain. She flung herself out of her hiding place, launching herself across the room, just as the man rising up behind Natalia brought his knife across to slit her throat.
Natalia twisted aside at the last second and the blade bit deep into her upper arm. The young commander let out a little gasp of pain as the man wrenched the knife out and she spun, reaching for her belt, ready to deflect his second attempt. But he never got a chance to try.
Kaede launched herself between the two, grabbing the man's wrists, pushing him away. He slashed out at her, flipping her off her feet, and for a moment the two of them were entangled, rolling, arms locked, faces close together, scrabbling to reach the knife that had flown out of his fingers.
"No!" Natalia yelled. "Don't fire!"
Kaede gritted her teeth and pressed the man down, pinning him beneath her. She leant across him to grab the knife but he reached up and took her ear in his teeth, ripping at it, tearing the flesh, swinging over and crushing her beneath him.
His fumbling hands found the knife and he brought it round to kill her but Kaede's hands were that, grabbing at him, tearing the skin of his knuckles, pressing her thumbs between his bones until, with a shout, he let the knife go. With a grunt of satisfaction, Kaede caught it and thrust up between his ribs. One heartbeat, two, and he was dead.
She climbed to her feet, glaring at Natalia.
"A little help," she gasped out, "might have been nice."
Natalia swallowed hard. "We couldn't shoot. We would have killed you. Kaede..."
"What?" Kaede asked. "Commander, are you alright?"
But all at once, Kaede became aware of throbbing pain in her hand and the heat of blood spilling down her wrist and dripping onto the floor. She looked down and the pain intensified to a fire. The little and ring fingers on her left hand had been sliced clean away, leaving scarcely a stump behind.
"He must have caught me," she murmured, amazed, "while I was trying to take the knife from him..."
Her severed fingers lay on the tiles like bloody quotation marks. Suddenly, the world felt far away, distant and numbing. Kaede stared down at her hand, waved her fingers vaguely through the newly-created space and laughed.
Natalia was saying something but Kaede couldn't hear her. The world tilted sideways slightly and somehow, suddenly, her face was lying against the tiles.
"I'm alright," she mumbled. "I'm alright."
Faces swam in and out of focus. It seemed far too much effort to remain looking at them. Kaede closed her eyes and disappeared.