Amphylon was an old man of thirty when he felt his oar beetle bite.

He woke with a start.

His comrades woke with him, guns ready. The frown on Amphy’s face told them something was wrong. Their unit was under silence discipline so they couldn’t speak. Any sound would attract the preternatural hearing of the enemy snipers, and then enliven a night that had promised to be quiet and restful.

Amphy ripped the oar beetle off his hand and threw it out of the trench. Jagra stared at the wound and bit his fist. Japhie was smarter. He checked the ground for more oar beetles.

Jagra and Japhie were twins, but twins were common. Amphy had been a twin himself until last year, when his brother caught ill. The four of them—now three—were an odd family that shared protection and concern, but never comfort. Sympathy engendered self-pity, and pity only made the war harder to endure. The twins struggled not to look at Amphy’s oar bite, but they could not hide their short bursts of grief.

Amphy tried to smooth the fragment of tarp that was his bed. A narrow, tired part of him rebelled against all superstition. He was a veteran, and after a lifetime in the trenches he knew there was really no predicting when death would come. Amphy was very far, he hoped, from being a superstitious trench simpleton.

As it turned out, he wasn’t very far after all. The quiet dread took hold of him. He wondered how he could possibly die on such a quiet night.

Three breaths later, the night spasmed to life as if bitten by an oar beetle of its own.

It began with rain. Then distant thunder announced an artillery barrage. The shells landed five minutes after. Earth geysered beyond their trench.

They grabbed each other’s shoulders and dragged themselves deeper into the trench network where they might be safe.

The enemy walked their barrage up and down the line. The rain and the shells pounded the setbacks, traverses, and communication channels into little more than dimples in the black mud.

Then the shelling relented but the rain picked up.

Then the shelling returned.

Amphy and the twins huddled at the bottom of their trench in eight inches of water. With no light and a cloudy sky, they leaned against each other for reassurance.

At the height of the bombardment, the lacerated sandbags above them gave away. The walls pinched shut and then collapsed. Their shelter became a sump of claylike mud.

They clawed to the surface. The rain sluiced other soldiers into their pit, and their jackets, heavy with water, became entangled. What followed was an agonized, wordless, dream-like struggle to keep their heads up, to keep breathing, and to unravel themselves from the writhing, clawing limbs around them.

When Amphy reached stable ground it was because Jagra and Japhie pushed him from below. He pivoted on his stomach and pulled them up one at a time. The oar bite pulsed on his hand.

When they were out of the mud, Amphy tried to move but he was too exhausted. He watched Japhie clamber away, and then spiraled into a desperate sleep despite the shelling and the rain.

He awoke in seconds, or perhaps hours. Jagra was pulling him across the mud—the duller of a pair of twins was always stronger as well. The barrage walked over them again, near misses.

Japhie reappeared from the gloom.

“Shelter,” he said, his voice rough.

He led them past the dead and dying soldiers of their unit. Where the shelling hadn’t burst the men, the rain and mud smothered them. Hands of submerged soldiers clawed the air. They looked weak, but they had frantic strength and would pull you under if you brushed against them.

Japhie’s shelter turned out to be a full-sized crate for oggie-gees—offensive grenades. The three of them shed their coats and squeezed in, knees interlocked, shoulders braced, and arms clasped.

“We’re like a man chair from ancient history,” Japhie said.

Amphy snorted. In the distant past, before guns, artillery, trenches, and the Haphan overlords, the bodies of defeated soldiers would be woven into thrones for the victorious. To Amphy at the moment, the distant past sounded almost idyllic.

Jagra was less sanguine. He buried his head in Amphy’s neck and sobbed. “Amphylon is bitten. He is gone-gone!”

“Hush, Jagraphan,” Amphy murmured.

When Amphy woke he was no longer in a munitions crate, but propped against a dry wall in a fresh trench. Jagra had moved him again, but let him sleep. Now he was awake and alone.

He wasn’t alone.

Dust fell through the air like dead smoke, coating everything. Amphy had no color but gray with which to distinguish nearby shapes. He pieced together the scene in front of him.

The men of his unit were scattered in pieces, and not the regular fillets and cross-sections. This barrage had been whimsical with the dead. Old trench soldiers attributed these accidents to a minor trench god, Brutal Butcher. Last night, the butcher had contrived to split all the nearby legs open—lengthwise. Butcher’s cleaver sheered off faces and set them where the sun could glow through the eyelids. He created corpses that opened like travel trunks, hinged on one side and scraped clean. He de-gloved arms—pulling the skin off like a Haphan Overlord’s dress glove. And wherever Amphy’s eyes landed, the corpses were covered by a finger-thick pulsing gelatin of oar beetles.

Despite every expectation, Amphy was alive.

But not my boys.

The twins laid with affable, open-mouthed expressions. Their eyes were fixed on the sky.

They were dead. Dead.

A pang of sorrow flooded Amphy, and evaporated. He didn’t know when in the night they had died. Twins to the last, they had both been shot at close range in the forehead.

Sorrow surged inside him, but then it shrank away.

My dear young friends.

The sorrow returned, raw and austere. Then it was gone.

He was not able to mourn, even when he wanted. His people, the Tachba, called it sadlessness. Rage flashed through him: He wanted his anguish. My poor boys…

His anger melted into angry cheer and determination. The sensation was nauseating. It felt like a floor collapsing beneath his feet.

When Tachba arrive at heartbreak, the artificial switches in their minds shunt it into something productive. By convention, soldiers say that a young woman, Pretty Polly, has changed their hearts. But they all know that Pretty Polly is a facet of the Pollution. Pretty Polly is something that was done to their people in the distant past. Pretty Polly, the Pollution, was simple genetic meddling that had since veered off course for lack of guidance.

The Tachba were a race of twisted. An abandoned experiment.

Amphy knew one way to defeat the ancient servitor controls. He began to think small. He found the quiet space in his mind. He stared out from his skull as a corpse might, letting his cares untether from his earth-bound body. Amphy matched the boneless posture of the twins, and made himself thoughtless and serene, like them.

Think small.

With his quiet mind, Amphy let himself remember inducting these boys six years ago, as mere frightened squeakers of twelve.

He remembered the day because of their mother. She was a dark, pretty trencher’s dream, young to have such grown-up boys, but fiercely protective. She was sharp-tongued, too, but Amphy saw through that. It was the simple onset of a broken heart. Her vivid features were already beset by that pinched mien that ultimately blighted every woman.

The first twins were the most heartbreaking to give up. The young mother learned the pain while Amphy pretended not to watch. This pretty young creature might surrender up to eight pairs of boys to the front. Pretty Polly, the Pollution, made men disposable—but it turned the women into child factories. So while young Jagra and Japhie were indifferent to the future, by the end of her life their mother would be a husk.

It was young Captain Sethlan Semelon who wrote the receipts for the boys. The unit’s new captain, pressing new soldiers into the ranks. Amphy remembered feeling glum about the future. Semelon was sensitive to the mothers and their pain. Too sensitive. Something was off about the captain. A soldier never likes to realize that.

At the end, Captain Semelon held the papers out to the mother, but she would not take them. Instead, she raised her pretty chin to wail.

And now, Jagra and Japhie had stumbled together into the fire of the next world. Amphy pictured their souls mixing into the eternal flames that blazed just beyond the flimsy walls of this abysmal reality. Perhaps he would hear them whispering and popping in the next fire he built. He hoped so. It was truly…shabby that they were gone.

He could not feel himself more sad than that.

The sound of scrabbling in the trench nearby. Someone approached. Amphy wondered if it was a fellow northerner, or an enemy southerner. The steps slowed.

Without opening his eyes, Amphy said, “We’re not having the regular war today.”

“Where are you? Emperor’s service. Where is Captain Semelon?”

Amphy cracked his eyes and found a messenger from HQ standing above him. The messenger eyed the bodies spread across the landscape by the giant trowel of the barrage, hunting the source of the voice. He jerked when Amphylon came to life at his feet.

“Who is anywhere these days?” Amphy said. “Look at this mishmash.”

“Captain Sethlan Semelon must present to the colonel.”

“No captain in sight. Return with the sad news.”

The messenger disbelieved him. “Which I have it from a reliable source that the captain was seen in this trench only an hour ago.”

“Yet, me’em telling you otherwise.” Hardness entered Amphy’s voice. He climbed to his feet, letting the twins slide away, and sized the messenger up. This was not one of those ten-year-olds who fanned through the trenches with minnow-like redundancy and a breathtaking mortality rate. This was one of the rare older messengers, sixteen if he was a day, who could home on a scattered unit and deliver his message regardless of the confusion in the trenches.

The messenger opened his mouth to reply, but then a third voice rang out. “The captain is not here.”

Tejamadon, the captain’s aide de camp, strode up self-importantly. He had somehow found the time, energy, and resources to wash his face and wipe his boots down. His cleanliness gave him a brief moral advantage over the messenger, but it evaporated when he stepped into an open-topped corpse and dragged it a step.

“Joeph, you fucking scrag, you’re always underfoot,” Tejj snapped.

Amphy wasn’t alone in liking the dislikable Tejamadon. The boy was somewhere between a pet and a mother for the unit. Everyone called him Tejj because it irritated him to no end.

“Colonel Shoppha wants your Captain Semelon,” the messenger said. “You’re an aide, which means he’s close. Take me to him.”

“The captain is not found,” Tejj said, in a tone that relayed the captain was not even sought. “We know HQ’s brilliant plan. We’ve been sent out every night this month to fight the Southies. We’re being sent out again tonight. Repeat until we’re all dead. It’s madness.”

“You’re claiming the war is mad?” The messenger raised an eyebrow.

“Here’s what happened,” Tejj said. “You didn’t find us. Report that back. Colonel Shoppha will send out another unit in our place.”

Amphy winced at the idea of sending a lie up the chain of command, it was wrong in its core. It tweaked at Pretty Polly. The messenger’s hand jerked toward his side-arm and Tejj was too young to pretend he didn’t notice. Instead, he palmed his own pistol.

Amphy was the veteran here. He was expected to keep the younger men on task. The next few seconds could produce blood. He’d seen it spilled for less. He’d spilled it for less himself, in his younger years. Now he racked his mind for common ground.

“Messenger!” He forced a smile. “Messenger. Tell us about your pretty mother, messenger.”

The messenger’s face went still. “My pretty what?”

Amphy bulled onward. “Your pretty mother. Surely you had one?”

“I had a mother in my past,” the messenger allowed.

“La, and how pretty was she?” Amphy gave a friendly leer, but his heart wasn’t in it because the twins had pierced him again. Captain Sethlan Semelon would write their pretty mother a personal letter, and he would no doubt ask Amphy to dig out a gentle word or two of his own.

Amphy’s artificial smile cycled into a frown, then into truculence, then sadness. The messenger, following, became perplexed and then irritated.

Of all the times to be polluted, Amphy thought. Talking about a young man’s mother! Is this how I get killed?

He tried a shrug next but the messenger no longer cared. The muscles on the messenger’s face ticked. The ticks grew into grosser distortions. Pretty Polly, the Pollution, playing in his mind too. Then the messenger finally went still.

“I should have shot you by now,” the messenger said, sounding surprised. “My mother, and how pretty, she? Yes, I think I will shoot you.”

“No need—” Amphy started.

“Yes shoot you. Then I will return with the message that your Captain Semelon is circling. Worse than circling. He is rejecting orders! I’ll report that he’s lost command. His soldiers are off the leash and pissing themselves and criticizing the war.”

Amphy felt glum and shut his mouth. Forget that the messenger ranked him and held the moral high ground. Amphy simply didn’t want to have to shoot a messenger to keep his unit safe. The Haphan Overlords put mutinous units against the wall and lasered them to shreds. It was tough discipline, but discipline the Tachba could easily understand.

If Amphy’s intervention had achieved anything, it was to finally make Tejj alert.

Tejj said, “We’re receiving orders with open ears. Your question is whether the captain is available. We don’t even know if he’s alive.”

“If he’s dead, I want to talk to his body.”

Tejj spread his hands. “I can only say that his figure has been witnessed drifting through the trenches this morning.”

“You’re either stalling again, or you’re saying he’s a ghost.”

“We called to him but he seemed not to hear.” The aide’s voice cracked.

The messenger frowned. “You concede that the apparition of the captain may be wafting nearby?”

Tejj gave a humiliated nod.

“In which direction is he wafting?”

Tejj expelled his breath explosively. “Well…none. None direction.”

Because he had noticed Captain Sethlan Semelon himself looming behind the messenger. The captain stood silently in the smoke while they all perforce sensed his presence, and then strained not to acknowledge it.

Neither Tejj, Amphylon, nor the exasperated messenger could simply turn to the captain. If the captain was indeed dead, then the first one to see his ghost would be damned as a trench simpleton. The Haphan Overlords claimed it was childish to imagine real-life ghosts walking the trenches.

It was much more likely that Captain Sethlan Semelon had simply gone mad during the barrage last night. After all, who but a questionable eccentric would just float quietly behind their argument like a bad smell? Amphy’s people called it circling. The Haphan Overlords called it “out of sorts.”

The captain stood above a heat pocket in the ground, where an unexploded shell slowly burned itself to pieces. In the shimmering air, the captain created too much doubt for them to take any decisive action. He had them frozen, with his shredded uniform, his severe frown, and that unsettling alertness in the eyes. Very like a dead man.

They waited in silence.

“I believe the Captain is nearby,” the messenger finally muttered. “I don’t think I’m going too far in saying it.”

Captain Semelon was seen to roll his eyes at them. This was either promising or ghastly, depending on whether he was alive or dead.

“Let’s ask the ancestors in the next fire we build,” Amphy suggested. Nobody laughed at that, but the captain’s figure reacted again. It gave the appearance of a smile. Next, the captain tried to speak. The first word turned into a prolonged, unspectral cough from dirt-clogged lungs.

“Why, look!” Captain Semelon finally managed. He raised his hands, dripping dirt like a corpse. “Here I am, alive again! Back on the front!”

The younger men were puzzled and stayed silent. Amphy wasn’t puzzled, but he knew the captain well enough not to provoke his humor. The captain could be inappropriate at times. The captain could be utterly soft and understanding and distracted. The captain was an emotional wretch, and there was none better on the entire front. Amphy waited with silent relief.

Captain Semelon finally frowned and shrugged. “So, then. The colonel wants to see me?”

“Yes, sir.” The messenger was too experienced to salute in the open. He merely indicated a direction, and the captain limped off. The messenger gave Tejj and Amphy a final disgusted look and followed.

“Tejj, boy,” Amphylon said. “I’ll give you one guess what Colonel Shoppha tells the captain to do.”