“There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to know.”

Her voice filled my suit, clear as crystal. A soft, light tone, at odds with the two-meter axe and carnage she’d just created with it.

“Is it true the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of your meal comes free?”

The conductive sand spilling out of the fallen Mimic danced away on the wind. I could hear the distant cry of shells as they flew. This was a battlefield, the scorched waste where Yonabaru, Captain Yuge, and the rest of my platoon had died. A forest of steel shells. A place where your suit fills with your own piss and shit. Where you drag yourself through a mire of blood and muck.

“I’ve gotten myself in trouble for believing everything I read. So I thought I’d play it safe, ask a local,” she continued.

Here I am, half dead, covered in shit, and you want to talk about tea?

Who walks up to someone, kicks them to the ground, and then asks about tea? What was going through her fucking head? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but the words wouldn’t come. I could think of the words I wanted to say, but my mouth had forgotten how to work-a litany of profanities stalled at the gate.

“That’s the thing with books. Half the time the author doesn’t know what the hell he’s writing about-especially not those war novelists. Now how about you ease your finger off the trigger and take a nice, deep breath.”

Good advice. It took a minute, but I started to see straight again. The sound of a woman’s voice always had a way of calming me down. The pain I’d left in battle returned to my gut. My Jacket misread the cramps in my muscles, sending the suit into a mild spasm. I thought of the dance Yonabaru’s suit did just before he died.

“Hurt much?”

“What do you think?” My reply wasn’t much more than a hoarse whisper.