The order came down the communications trench on a morning the color of ash.
Gabriel was splicing a frayed run, his fingers moving by feel in the cold mud, Toby fumbling a spool of wire beside him — the Kansas boy white-faced and hollow-eyed now, the estaminet and the cracking hymn a lifetime behind them both — when the major shouldered down the line, his uniform caked, his eyes black-rimmed from too little sleep and too much dying. He pointed through the drifting smoke at the forward observation post — a smudge of sandbags and twisted iron out across the open ground.
"That line's got to reach the forward post," he said. "We're blind up there. Last kid didn't make the halfway mark."
Toby's hands had begun to shake so hard the spool rattled. And in that small dry rattle, with no warning at all, another field rose up in Gabriel — a North Dakota field gone gold with cut hay, a boy's laugh, a crooked drawing of a house under stars, the smell of seed and sun. Henry. The drawing was over his heart this minute, folded soft as cloth, and the boy who had made it would be a grown man now, somewhere far from all this, and the war had not yet found a way to make that boy's gift mean less. So you don't forget us. He had forgotten nothing. That was the trouble. He never would.
"I'll take it," Gabriel said, and rose, flexing his hands as though against the cold, though it was not the cold.
The major's eyes narrowed. "You're the best comms man I've got, Jones. You go down out there, I lose more than a wire."
Gabriel settled the helmet strap under his jaw. "That's exactly why it should be me." He did not say the rest of it — that of all the men in the trench, he was the only one the open ground could not truly take. He could not say it, and they would not have believed it, and so they read it as courage, which was easier and not entirely wrong.
The major held his eyes a long moment, something moving behind the grime. Then a single sharp nod. "Godspeed."
Gabriel looped the wire around his wrist, felt its weight, and gripped Toby once by the shoulder — steady, mind the connection — and nodded to the boy whose wide eyes followed him with a kind of stunned worship, and went up the wooden steps into the open with the line paying out behind him like a thread spun out over the edge of the world.
He ran. The morning came apart around him. Rounds whined past and punched into the mud with wet thuds, the machine guns on the far ridge stuttering their flat mechanical hate, and Gabriel leaned into it and drove his legs and felt, beneath the animal terror that was his body keeping the line open, the old grim purpose: get the connection made. He was halfway across, weaving through the black stumps of the dead orchard, when he caught movement to his left — worn canvas, a swinging camera case, a gray-mustached man hauling himself up out of the duckboards where no civilian had any business being.
"Jones!" Calder's voice came ragged across the noise.
Gabriel had half a second to understand all of it — that the hunter had found him, here, at the end of everything, and had followed him out into ground that killed men for sport.
Then a mortar burst to their right and the world turned to flung earth and singing metal, and through the ringing Gabriel saw Calder jerk and twist mid-stride, his arm thrown wide, a dark bloom opening high on his chest where the sniper's round went in. The old man went down in the mud with a sound that cut clean through the artillery.
Gabriel did not weigh it. He could have. There would have been a kind of cold sense in it — the one man alive who knew his secret, the patient hunter of nine years, lying in the open in a war that would happily finish the job for him. A wiser man, a colder man, would have let the ground take what it had already claimed and run on to the post and made his connection.
Gabriel dove for him. He hit the lip of a shell crater and slid down into it dragging Calder with him, his own ribs cracking against a buried beam, and got the older man into the meager shelter of the slope. Calder's hand fumbled at the wound and came away black with blood, his breath gone to a wet shallow tearing.
"Stay with me," Gabriel said, pressing down hard on the hole in the man's chest. "Hold on. You hear me? Hold on."
Calder's eyes, glassy with shock, found his face and fixed there. Even dying, the journalist in him would not stop working. "You're him," he rasped, blood at the corner of his mouth. "The photograph. Northwood. Twenty years, and you — you haven't —" A cough took him. "What are you, Jones?"
And then the ground itself growled — a deep rolling tremor — and Gabriel looked up and saw it coming across the cratered waste: a low yellow-green cloud, rolling and curling, fattening as it came, sinking into every hollow in the earth and finding theirs.
Gas.
He had one mask. He had one mask and there were two of them, and one of them could not die and one of them was already half gone, and Gabriel did not weigh that either. He tore the mask from his own face and forced it down over Calder's, working the straps with blood-slicked fingers as the first sweet-sharp wisps of it slid over the crater's rim and into his own throat. The world went to acid. His lungs seized. He got the last strap home over the gray hair, saw Calder's terrified eyes swim into focus behind the fogged glass — the man understanding, even then, what had just been done for him and by whom — and then the green closed over Gabriel like dark water, and the burning climbed up behind his eyes, and he felt himself go down into the mud beside the man who had hunted him, his last clear thought not of the war or the wire or the secret, but of a gold field and a boy's laughter, very far away.
Then nothing.
It was not like waking, because he had not been asleep. It was like a held note resolving.
The burning was gone. The stink was gone. The guns were gone. Gabriel stood — or did not stand; was simply present — in a warmth that had no source and a light that did not hurt to look at, and the first thing he understood was the silence, which was not empty but full, the way a held breath is full. The air smelled of earth after rain and cut grass and something underneath that he had no word for except the word home.
He looked at his hands. Whole. No blood, no mud under the nails, no tremor. The deep ache that had lived in his spine through every night of the war had lifted clean away.
And he was not alone.
They were there in the light — shapes, soft as candle-flame seen through fog, and he knew each of them before he could make out a face, knew them the way you know a voice through a wall. He heard, or felt, his brother Brady's bark of a laugh. The low thread of a lullaby that was Elizabeth, unmistakably Elizabeth, the tune she had hummed over two cradles. The dry scrape of his father's hand. The field opened ahead of him, gold to the far trees, the grass bending in long silver waves, and there — there — was Elizabeth, barefoot in the grass in a dress stirring at the hem, her head bent in the particular concentration she'd worn shelling peas on summer evenings sixty years and a whole life ago. His mother stood with her hands on her hips and her apron moving in the wind. His father looked out over the rows, saying something about how the planting should go.
Gabriel's voice broke out of him. "Elizabeth." He went toward her, and the going was effortless, and his eyes were streaming. "Pa. Ma. I'm here — I'm here —"
None of them turned.
They moved through the gold light in their own unhurried world, and he passed among them and they did not see him, not from cruelty, there was no cruelty anywhere in that place, but with a calm complete indifference, as though he were the wind moving the grass and not a man at all. He reached for Elizabeth's hand and his own passed through the warmth where it should have been, and the panic came up in him huge and childlike, and he shouted into the gold silence — "Why can't you see me? I'm here — let me stay —"
And the answer came. Not as sound. As certainty, settling into him as deep as the marrow of bones he no longer seemed to have.
Not yet. Your destiny lies elsewhere.
"No," he said. "No — I've waited — I told her I'd —"
But the warmth was already drawing back from him like a tide going out, and the gold was thinning to gray, and Elizabeth's bent head and his mother's apron and his father's hand were going to smoke, going to less than smoke, and the last of it he understood with a grief that had no bottom: that this was the one door in all of existence that was closed to him, that the dead he loved were there, just there, and that he was not permitted to join them — not now, not in his children's lifetimes, not in ten of theirs. He had told Elizabeth she would not have to wait long. He understood now, falling backward out of the light, that she would wait a very, very long time, and that he had not known, when he told her the lie, how cruel a lie it truly was.
He came back into the trench with a soundless heave of his whole body, the gas-stink and the cold mud and the distant screaming rushing in all at once, his lungs dragging air like a drowned man hauled back over the gunwale.
He lay still a moment, learning the unbearable fact of being alive again. Then he turned his head.
Calder was watching him.
The old man lay propped against the crater wall where Gabriel had left him, the borrowed mask still fogged over his face, his hand pressed weakly to the wound in his chest — alive, breathing, the gas thinning off above them now and drifting on toward other men. And his eyes, behind the glass, were fixed on Gabriel with an expression Gabriel had never seen on a human face before: not fear, not even wonder, but the terrible vindicated stillness of a man who has chased a thing for nine years and has finally, beyond any further doubt, seen it whole.
He had watched Gabriel die. Gabriel could see that he had — could see in those eyes the memory already being filed away with that flawless, merciless precision, the seizing, the stillness, the long minutes of a dead man in the mud, and then the impossible heave of breath. Calder had his story now. He had it the only way that would ever have convinced him, with his own eyes, at the cost of nearly his own life.
Neither of them said anything. There was nothing to say that the look did not already carry. Gabriel reached out and steadied the mask on the old man's face, gently, and Calder's bloodied hand came up and gripped his wrist — not to accuse, not to thank, just to hold on to the one solid thing in a world that had come unmoored — and they stayed like that until the stretcher-bearers found them.
They took Calder first; he was the one who could still be lost. As they lifted him, sodden and gray, onto the canvas, his eyes never left Gabriel's, and at the last, as they bore him back toward the aid station and whatever life he had left to carry the impossible knowledge through, he raised one hand, two fingers lifting in something that was not quite a salute and not quite a farewell — the gesture of a man marking a place he means to return to. Then the smoke and the bearers took him, and he was gone toward the rear, alive, and Gabriel understood that he had saved the one man in the world who could undo him, and that he would do it again, and that the doing of it was the only part of any of this he did not regret.
He got to his knees in the mud. The wire was still looped around his wrist, the spool still half full. The forward post was still blind, and men were still up there waiting on a connection that had not come.
So Gabriel rose, and pressed one hand flat against the breast of his coat, where the boy's drawing lay folded soft over a heart that would not stop no matter how he was made to use it — the crooked little house, the favorite star, so you don't forget us — and he climbed up out of the crater into the gunfire, and he ran the rest of the line, and he made the connection, because that was the one thing he had ever truly known how to do, and because the living, unlike the dead, could still be reached.