“...”
For a while, neither of them moved. Dear just lay there with her eyes screwed shut, dragging in one ragged breath after another.
She was alive.
She’d honestly thought she was going to die. In that last instant, the log had missed her by a hair. The sheer joy of being alive left her head blank and humming for a while. Then her hearing came trickling back, and she registered that two sets of breathing were tangled together in the air.
Wait. Two?
Her eyes snapped open, and there in front of her was a chest rising and falling hard, faintly visible under a soaked shirt plastered to skin. Only then did Dear realize where she was.
On top of Kyle.
More precisely, sprawled almost face-down across Kyle’s chest.
Every time she blinked, water dripped off her lashes and wet the sharp line of Kyle’s jaw and the side of his neck. The bigger problem was how closely their bodies were pressed together. Through the thin, drenched uniform, the hard muscle of Kyle’s chest and the fast slam of his heart carried straight into her, all of it, everywhere.
As though their skin were layered together with nothing but a single sheet of cloth between, their chests met and parted, met and parted, with every breath.
Dear’s face went scarlet in an instant.
“You gonna get those eyes off me?”
A low, rough voice slapped against her eardrums.
Kyle was still scowling hard as he looked down at her.
“I save your life and this is the sleazy look I get?”
“It’s nothing like that!”
Practically shouting it, Dear scrambled off him.
“My head just went blank for a second, that’s all.”
At her excuse, he looked her up and down with an expression like he’d bitten into something foul.
“So when your head goes blank, you look a guy’s body over like that?”
“I did not look you over!”
“Your eyes were all the way down here.”
Kyle jabbed a finger at his own chest. Dear’s face flamed.
“I only looked because it was right there!”
“Forget it. I’m just wasting my breath.”
Kyle brushed off his hands and got to his feet. Then he jerked his chin at Dear, who was still sitting there in the dirt.
“What, you want me to hold out a hand and help you up too?”
“No thank you.”
Teeth clenched, Dear beat the dirt off her ruined uniform. Her little finger was still bent in a direction fingers weren’t meant to go. Her wrist shot sparks of pain at the slightest movement, and her waist, crushed by the rope, hurt even when she tried to pull in a deep breath.
On top of that, her knees, her elbows — she had no idea what she’d banged them on, but there wasn’t a spot on her that wasn’t throbbing. Reality was arriving late, and with it came all the pain her body hadn’t let her feel.
Ow. Everything hurts so much I could die.
She was grumbling to herself when she noticed something red dripping onto the ground. Her eyes followed it slowly upward, and there was Kyle, face perfectly unbothered, unwinding the rope that had been wrapped around and around his forearm.
The rope must have bitten in savagely while he held on to Dear against that current — his sleeve was soaked with blood, and the skin beneath looked flayed clean off.
With every turn of rope he peeled away, the pressed-back blood welled up fresh and ran down his wrist in heavy drops. And still Kyle barely reacted. As if the arm didn’t belong to him.
Since he wasn’t reacting, she was the one left bothered by it. Dear was stealing glances at his arm, about to say something, when —
“Elma!”
A bellow rang out across the bank. The officer in charge. Dear jolted upright, straightening herself.
He came striding over. Dear stood there wide-eyed, posture snapped into picture-perfect military bearing, and Kyle, watching her do it, let out a short laugh.
Beneath the long brim of his cap, the officer’s face was hard to make out — maybe it was just the overcast sky. The moment he reached her, he swept his gaze over Dear, soaked to the bone.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it.”
His eyes moved to Dear’s hand. The swollen little finger, the swollen wrist. Dear quietly slipped the hand behind her back.
“What happened at the end?”
“Sorry?”
“While you were withdrawing the technique, your spirit’s light went out.”
“...”
“Did I see it wrong?”
“No, sir.”
“The spirit stone went dark. The contract mark went dark. And the technique slipped entirely out of your control.”
The officer’s voice dropped lower and lower.
“Were there no warning signs before that?”
Dear couldn’t answer right away. That brief silence was apparently answer enough.
“Is that swollen, split-open hand of yours the proof?”
Shame left her with nothing to say, and Dear bowed her head. The muddy water on the ground seemed to blur across her eyes. The officer let out a sigh and went on.
“Do you know what the most dangerous thing on a battlefield is, Elma Dear?”
“...”
“It isn’t the enemy’s blade, and it isn’t a well-laid trap. It’s a stupid ally who can’t see herself clearly. If you’d pushed your luck and lost control, every one of those engineers would have gone into the water with you and drowned.”
The rebuke struck bone, and for a moment Dear couldn’t get a word out. The humiliation was worse than every ache in her body.
“The single most important thing for a spirit summoner is reporting her own condition honestly and adjusting accordingly. Showing off your skill is not your mission. We have far too much to lose to go leaning on your bragging. Men’s lives. Repair equipment. And if the Third Supply Route is cut again, what becomes of the troops waiting behind it for supplies?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“You think an apology settles this? You’re probably standing there thinking you pulled it off today.”
Dear’s shoulders twitched.
It hit dead center. The truth was, right up until a minute ago, that was exactly what she’d been thinking. That she’d finally proved it. That she’d gone past her own limit.
“What you actually did was stake human lives on the line between success and failure, and get lucky enough to land on the success side.”
“...”
“Don’t mistake that for ability.”
Dear’s hand slowly curled into a fist.
“Do you have any idea how long command has waited on you, purely because you hold a contract with a high-ranking spirit?”
“I do, sir.”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t pull a stunt like this. Summoning a spirit doesn’t make you an Elma.”
“...”
“You don’t know what condition your own spirit is in, you don’t know where your own limit is, and you grit your teeth and hold on right up to the instant your control snaps. What in the world am I supposed to do with a person like that?”
Every word came down on the crown of her head like a blow.
“Today it was a river.”
The officer in charge’s voice was ice.
“Next time it’ll be in the middle of combat. Will you hide it then too? With a hundred soldiers lined up behind you, are you going to tell me, ‘I thought I could do it’?”
Dear couldn’t answer.
He looked down at her for a long while. And then, at last, he asked one more thing.
“After all this, can you still call yourself an Elma?”
The word yes refused to come out of her mouth. The officer in charge stared at her as though she were the single most pathetic creature alive, then spat out his final words.
“Report back to camp. I’ll be filing a full account of everything that happened today. What judgment Command hands down, I can’t say. But don’t you imagine your luck will hold a second time.”
With that, he turned and walked away.
Dear simply stood there, frozen stiff. Command. Report. Those two words went spinning around and around inside her head. She didn’t need to hear the words that came after them to know what they were.
Her Elma status, revoked. And the special allowance, cut off.
So that’s how it’s going to go after all. Well, naturally. She had as good as defied orders from above and done whatever she pleased, so hoping for mercy seemed like a tall order.
She arrived back at camp with her shoulders slumped. She hadn’t said a single word the whole way. The crossing had succeeded, hadn’t it, so maybe they’d cut her at least a little slack — but every time the officer in charge’s flushed, furious face surfaced in her mind, every last scrap of hope went out.
That was when it happened.
“Oi.”
A familiar voice she had absolutely no desire to hear brought Dear’s steps to a halt. She raised her head and saw a knot of knights lounging at a slant against a tent post. The very ringleaders who had made her dump water all over Kyle’s seat last time.
Dear had completed her mission in today’s crossing operation, true enough, but word that she’d lost control at the very end and gotten herself thoroughly marked by the officer in charge had apparently already made the rounds of the entire unit. The corners of their mouths were twitching in the most contemptible way imaginable.
“Hey, look who’s here, the honorable Elma. Heard you went and parted the river like some big hero, flopped, and got chewed up until the tears came out.”
“That’s none of your business.”
Dear fired back in a low voice, cradling her puffy, swollen wrist. If anything, the knight seemed to find the reaction entertaining, and his grin turned even nastier.
“None of my business? The nerve on you. One of my year-mates was in the first advance team on that crossing operation today, you know? Do you even get it? He nearly died because of you.”
The knight’s voice carried, and one by one even the soldiers nearby started throwing looks their way.
