Cameron

There was a crowd waiting for them, as Cameron marched alongside Hendricks and Gwendolyn. They waited at the edge of their little town, in the shadows of the buildings, just inside of the pilot lights. There were dozens of people, perhaps over a hundred, with weary smiles and bright eyes, emotions so close to the skin it seemed to come through their pores and stretched their eyelids opened and their mouths wide.

It was both a familiar, and harrowingly foreign sight for Cameron.

Cameron had seen crowd gather over his work before. Folk in their hundreds gathering at the sight of an unpleasant event, gawking from a polite distance as if at an exhibit of relics gathered from before the Gloam. They would cling together, fear and anger barely holding themselves in check, as he stood alone with a knife covered in frozen blood. Each time he would scrape a small stick of wood along the blade, the quiet wick would ripple that anger, that disgust, through them in their hundreds. That anger stained him in their eyes even as the blood melted again when it fell from his knife and onto the cobbles.

So Cameron had seen them gather before. But he had never, in all his years, seen so many people so happy.

They were already celebrating. The farmers and labourers from the field had been the first to arrive, and their return had sparked a chorus of astonished joy that set a constant, cacophonous roar through the air, as constant and thunderous as the cackling roar of a train. Hands were waving in the air, and near half of everyone Cameron could see were entangled in an embrace.

It was so familiar, and yet so different, from anything Cameron had lived through as a shadow, that it twisted at his stomach like one of his own knives had been shoved into him. Fauth, just in front of them, was pulled into the celebrations by a woman who had only just detached herself from a pair of very dirty, weary looking young women. Cameron recognized the pair, sisters who were fighting with Corporal Decklan in the field, and he suspected the older woman was their mother.

They pulled Fauth into their little group, and hugged him as if he were a long-lost brother returning to complete their cathartic reunion.

"I swear those things out there just fell down dead again, once they got a good look at their white scarves," one of them said to their mother, holding the end of Fauth's ranger scarf in the air. "Gloamtaken start popping out in their hundreds, and the rangers walked right through them like fire in dry grass."

Gwendolyn tilted her hat up a little, seemingly immune to the infectious joy of the crowd around her, and tapped Fauth on the shoulder. "Remember, we're mustering at the fountain in twenty minutes. Do not make me look for you."

"Aye, ma'am," Fauth replied, quick and smart, like he was just a little afraid of her.

Which, to Cameron, seemed somewhat sensible. Since Gwendolyn Aranhall reminded Cameron, more than anyone else in the City, of Mack.

Gwendolyn turned a little, and pointed her finger at one of the sisters. "Beatrice. Two hours. Find me for the second dose of the blue tincture. And like Fauth, do not make me come looking for you."

"Right, scary ranger lady," Beatrice replied. The sister with two eyes, not that Cameron was going to spend a lot of time trying to remember names.

Gwendolyn lead them on, and Cameron followed without really thinking about why. A part of him, untrusting of crowds from years as a shadow, disliked being surrounded by so much emotion. But another part, which saw the smiles, and the tears so astonishingly different from all the others shed in his wake, rejoiced in being pulled into it, to be a part of it.

A group of people broke out of the crowd just up ahead, and spread out to encircle and ensnare them. A trio of young adults, following a child barely older than ten years old, pulled Hendricks from them and coaxed him into the crowd. An old man, lean and wizened, with skin as tough as the outer layers of a soldier's padded coat, and a face that looked so granite-like that Cameron wondered if the man had smiled in years, wrapped Cameron in an embrace so tight he was frightened of it for a heartbeat.

"You bought my sons back. You brought my sons back," the man kept saying, like a desperate prayer. As if this good fortune might be snatched away from him if he didn't keep believing in it.

Cameron said nothing in response. He tried, but whatever he thought of to reply felt glib, petty, like an insult compared to everything the man was going through now. And so he stopped, and let himself be held by an old man who, likely, hadn't held anyone this long apart from the children he wept for.

Other hands clapped him on the back. Cameron could barely hear the individual voices in the chorus of cheers, thanks, and congratulations that blended together into something he could barley understand. The old man pulled away a moment later, and patted him on the shoulder as the crowd pulled him along.

A pull on Cameron's arm, gentle but insistent, turned him around. He caught little more than a smiling face, young, curtained by black hair that nearly mirrored the sun and the Spire. One hand left his arm as she stepped up close, set itself firmly on the back of his head, and pressed her lips again his.

Cameron froze in place, hands at his sides, warmth rushing through him as he embraced the moment. Slowly, gently, as if he would frighten her away by doing any more, he rested his fingertips against her jaw, and deepened the kiss for just a moment, before she pulled away. She was smiling, a strange smile that seemed to suggest everything and promise nothing, a challenge to him even as her friends surrounded her and pulled her away and into the crowd.

His mouth stuck in a bemused smile, Cameron moved to follow, but stopped when a tap on the shoulder brought his attention around. Gwendolyn leaned close, putting her head almost next to his, and said, "Remember, we muster in twenty minutes. Barleybarrel is still under siege."

That fact was astonishingly difficult to see, while Cameron was surrounded by this ongoing jubilation. He was surprised to find that he had forgotten. "Suppose that isn't enough time to chase after the girl," he mused.

"It's possible. She certainly seems like she'd be happy to get knocked-up," Gwen said.

Cameron blinked, the warmth he felt ripped away by that statement. "She wants to get pregnant?"

"I doubt she's thinking that far ahead." Gwnedolyn slapped him on the shoulder. "But the city planners are always encouraging people to have babies. You really think you'd hate being a father?"

"No," Cameron said. "Just, almost no one in my line of work has kids. Being a shadow is an ash-bitten terrible job to bring home to a family."

"Funny," Gwendolyn said, as she frowned and looked pointedly at the scarf around his neck. "You don't look like a shadow right now. And that bar on your shoulder says you're in a different career."

Cameron tried to deny it. "That's just the invasion."

"And what is there after the invasion, if we lose?" Gwendolyn asked. "And even if we win, you think what we're doing now won't mark us for the rest of our lives? Hang on to a bit of happiness. Because that," and as she spoke, she gestured around them, as the impromptu celebrations continued.

It took Cameron a moment to see, though, that Gwen wasn't gesturing. Her finger was stretched out, pointing straight down the street, where the crowd was thinner. Cameron looked that way, to see a woman apart from the crowd, as distinct as a plant growing through the cobbles of a road. She was crying, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, as she spoke to a pair of soldiers. One of them was Valen, hands folded in front of him, all quiet solemnity. Beside him was the corporal who had lead the refugees into the field, her own eyes wet, as she told some kind of story.

"That's the other side to what we're doing here," Gwendolyn said.

"Aranhall," someone said from behind them. Cameron and Gwendolyn both turned around, just as Mackaroy stepped through a crowd of people to join them.

"What is it, Mack?" she asked.

"Do you know where Saval's sword is?" Mackaroy asked. "The coldstone one."

"It's in with our squad's supplies. I can get it, if you don't know where that is."

"I'd appreciate it. Apparently the captain wants the ash-bitten thing."

"Someone's getting promoted?" Gwendolyn asked, as she tilted her hat forward until the shadows came over her eyes again. She looked back at where Valen and the corporal were speaking to the weeping woman, and nodded thoughtfully. "The City could do much worse."

Gwendolyn disappeared into the crowd, leaving Cameron gawking in her wake, still trying to reorient his thoughts. He turned to Mack, and asked, "So, Valen's getting the nod? He's going to be Lord Captain by the time the invasion's over."

Mackaroy looked like he was about to say something, was even opening his mouth to do it. But he raised a finger, and fished in his pocket with his other hand. "Have any lottery tokens to put on that prediction of yours? My two against your one. I'll write my guess on a piece of paper, just don't look at it for another half-hour or so."

"I'll take those odds," Cameron said, just as Mack wrote something with a small charcoal stick. "Wonder if there's a place to spend those around here."

"Out here? Barter is probably the way, if you're looking to get a pint of some farmer's basement brew. On that subject, being drunk on the job as a Ranger is likely to get you put to a firing squad." Mack finished writing as he spoke, folded the paper in half, and tucked it away in Cameron's coat pocket.

Cameron tapped his pocket. "Happy to drink at your expense," he said, and then glanced over his shoulder, in the direction the young woman had disappeared to. "Hey, Mack?"

"What is it, kid?"

The insult didn't sting as deeply as it might have, a few hours ago. In fact, if Cameron squinted, and stretched his imagination to put a smile on Mack's face, it might have been endearing. "Do evaluators ever have families?"

Mackaroy looked to his left, raised an eyebrow, and shook his head. "No. Considering the casualty rate in our bureau, hardly anyone does. Only exception I can think of are the Cartwrights, Dylan and Tess."

"How do they handle having kids?"

"Tess keeps having babies. Any time they're not on paternal leave, Tess is stuck in headquarters doing paperwork, and Dylan helps run the gauntlet. Not that I see much of either of them at work, Tess is pregnant again, and I think it's her eighth."

"Burn me."

"City wants babies, to help the City make room for more babies. Also, to help fight whatever the Gloam throws at us next," Mack said. He glanced one more time in the direction Cameron had last seen the woman who kissed him. "Can't say that will last, though. City's already lost a third of its farmland. We're in for some lean years, even if the granaries are full to bursting. Also, this talk of a future might still be premature. So I won't judge you, kid, if you go throw yourself in the moment."

Mack turned and slid into the crowd without another word, disappearing with that same strange swiftness Cameron knew the man hadn't learned from the bureau. Cameron watched the spot where he disappeared for a moment. Then his thoughts turned back to a pair of warm lips on his own, and wondered if he couldn't at least learn the name of the woman with hair that seemed to capture the light.