A BURST OF LIGHT
The Veruva tunnels were older than any nation on earth.
Some of the caves were carved by water, but others were carved by human hands, decorated in places with careful engravings. These passageways formed a network which spread deep into the mountain, connecting settlements in the Veruvan valley and even housing long-abandoned ones of their own. But despite being of great interest to archaeologists, no one had been able to get inside for many years. Idaira felt honored to be there, even if the rest of the world now thought of these ancient tunnels only as a close-quarters battleground, and one of Daybreak’s bloodiest.
She was a fighter with Eastern Sun, a group centered in the valley who wanted to liberate the world of borders. Attacking from the other side of the tunnels were the Korvarian Ascendancy, desperate for any way to get behind ES lines and take control of mountains they viewed as rightfully theirs. Neither side showed any signs of backing down.
Just past the next barricade, in a darkness that her flashlight couldn’t penetrate, the enemy was waiting. Although the passage was only wide enough for a couple of people to walk comfortably side-by-side, sandbags and improvised steel defences provided cover at regular intervals. Both sides hid behind these and fired at each other, hoping to gradually push the front forward to the next areas of cover.
They swapped out fighters regularly. Nobody could stay at the forefront of this battle for very long. Every fighter who went into the tunnels came out with some kind of damage.
“How much longer on this rotation?” asked the girl next to her, who was passing Idaira a plastic canteen while trying not to blind her with her headlamp.
“Just ten more minutes,” replied an older man crouched behind the barricade in front.
Idaira took a sip of water and swallowed some grit with it. The air was thick with rock dust, and gravel found its way into her mouth so often that it felt like she must be breathing in more stone than air. She handed the canteen back.
“It’s been quiet, all things considered,” Idaira said.
As though she had summoned it, a gunshot cracked off the wall next to her. It returned twice as an echo before fading, and before she noticed how loose chips of rock had cut into her already ragged uniform.
“Speak of the devil,” said the man in front, already returning fire.
Idaira and the girl next to her raised their submachine guns and joined him. Although she had stuffed foam plugs in her ears before the fight, they weren’t doing much. Every gunshot was like the mountain moving, retching, and churning the fighters into vomit. It was auditory torture. After a while, her ears no longer registered individual shots. They just became one, continuous pressure in her skull.
Eventually, the KA fighters stopped firing back, but there were no cries of pain or any clues to indicate Idaira and her comrades had actually hit anyone. They seemed to have retreated, and they didn’t seem to have sent replacements either, but it was too risky to do anything more than peek from a distance.
The man in front had a lantern next to him which painted him as a huge flickering shadow on the wall, but beyond that was just darkness. Even as he lifted his gun above the barricade and shone its torch down the passage, there was no sign of the enemy.
“Thank god,” said the man, invoking his religion’s other deity.
Then something loud and mechanical started barrelling towards them. Sandbags fell and metal barricades buckled like they were putting up no resistance at all.
Painted dark green with a black vine-like pattern, it moved on treads and had a silvery steel plow welded to its front for ramming through obstructions. Two guns were attached above. It could have been mistaken for a kind of tank, but it seemed to use mech technology. Pivots and folded-down parts suggested it had a level of adaptability she was only seeing one side of.
Muzzles flared as both sides opened fire on each other. The bullets of Idaira’s comrades rang impotently against the mech’s hull with ugly clangs, while the mech’s machine guns quickly shredded them to pieces.
The red mist looked pink in the mech’s blaring headlights. Idaira immediately ducked down and ran, but the blood echoed in her vision as the shots echoed in her ears.
She had to escape. Nobody had been expecting a mech this deep in the tunnels, where so many passageways were incredibly narrow or fragile, but it was an extraordinarily small mech. Even after having seen it with her own eyes, seen her comrades die to it, she found it hard to believe it was here.
Idaira had long since stopped being able to track which passages led deeper into the mountain or closer to an exit. Every direction felt the same. Quite often, every direction looked the same too. You just had to make sure you knew where your comrades were relative to yourself, or otherwise, where the forward operating base was. The rest was near impossible.
When the path ahead of her forked, Idaira made sure to take the road she was certain didn’t lead back to her base. It meant that she was entering unknown territory, but she couldn’t risk bringing the mech back home and getting everyone else killed along with her.
This new tunnel narrowed and widened like something that was breathing, but still never got quite so tight that the mech couldn’t force itself through in pursuit. Even as its metal hull scraped against the walls, it kept coming.
Idaira was panicking, starting to feel nauseous. The idea that a powerful machine like that could care so much about an individual kill was sickening.
There was another fork, this time giving her the option of a route that looked more like a slim, jagged seam than a walkway. Anyone too much larger than Idaira might have needed to move through it sideways. The mech wouldn’t be able to enter.
Idaira slid into it, cutting her shoulder on the raw rock in her haste to get inside. Minor, she told herself. She just needed to get away.
But she had run into a dead end. Idaira had only half a second to understand that before the mech swiveled around to face her.
It didn't fire a bullet. Instead, a metal canister arced into the seam with a pop and then bounced off a brick-shaped rock that was sticking out from the wall just a meter away from Idaira’s head. It burst into a spray of burning phosphorus which scattered through the passage and caught Idaira in the face before she could turn away.
She collapsed into the wall behind her and screamed. She didn’t decide to, her body just forced her to. The pain was unbearable, and her gun slipped from her grip somewhere during it. As she slid to the floor, the entrance to the passage collapsed in front of her.
The smell of burnt matches pervaded everything, overpowering the damp earth and disturbed rock before it had even stopped falling. But she was alive, she told herself, not blown up or crushed to death. She’d been burned, but she could still move.
The flashlight taped to her gun threw a cone of white light across the rubble on the ground in front of her, illuminating the dust that was thick in the air. Everything outside of the cone was pitch-black, and there were no other light sources. It was hard to tell how bad the collapse had been.
She wanted to touch her face, which still felt like it was still burning, but she knew not to. Instead, she distracted herself by running her hand across the wall. It was smooth in places, and it made her wonder if this ‘dead end’ had a purpose once. She imagined all the palms that must have run across the rock before hers.
Then the rubble in front of her started moving. Two pairs of strong arms came into view before Idaira saw the fighters they belonged to. They were guys from her base, clearing her a way out. She didn’t know either of them well, but she’d never felt so happy to see anyone in her life.
The guy on the left was Sami. His curly hair had come loose from the tie that usually held it back, and there was a streak of someone else’s blood drying on his sharp jawline. She’d talked to him a handful of times, but only briefly. He was the kind of person who knew everyone and moved effortlessly from conversation to conversation, like society’s connective tissue.
The one on the right was Ajax, though she wasn’t sure if that was just a nickname or not. He was massive, with well-toned muscle all over his body, and his gray tank top was cut short enough to make sure everyone knew it. He had a shrapnel helmet over his buzzcut that looked like it’d come from a different war. She’d never spoken to him before, but he always looked like he was making himself busy.
Sami looked disturbed as he helped her out of the seam and to her feet.
“Oh crap, you’re hurt. We’ve got to move,” he said.
“Your gun,” said Ajax a moment later, picking it up from the floor and handing it to her with a nod.
Idaira took her gun into unsteady hands. Her face throbbed, like it was constantly reigniting, but her legs worked. That was enough for now.
They retreated back down the same path she had taken when fleeing from the mech, back to where Idaira had first seen it. Ajax led with the others close behind, and nobody said a word. Their haste was everything.
KA fighters had already used the mech’s push through the tunnels to advance, and Idaira spotted them crouched low behind reassembled barricades in a place that had safely belonged to Eastern Sun just an hour ago.
The three of them opened fire together, not to hit anyone in particular, just to force their enemies to seek cover or duck down. Their shoulder lamps swept the passage in snappy, agitated arcs, crossing and uncrossing with a disorienting effect.
It worked. Nobody stood up to return fire while they ran past, and then they were already around the next bend. They didn’t slow their sprint until they were sure they were approaching ES territory.
“Vulture,” yelled Ajax, louder than Idaira was expecting.
“Merchants!” replied someone up ahead, answering the countersign.
■
A makeshift infirmary had been put together in a small passage to the side of the main area of the base. There was a simple curtain between it and the central cavern that could have been extended for a small amount of privacy, but Sami stood there instead, keeping Idaira company as the medic cleaned her wounds. The medic did his job in the orange glow of a single oil lantern hanging from an iron peg overhead. It didn’t seem like enough light, but he made it work.
“Hold still,” said the medic, tilting Idaira’s face up towards the lantern and plying something small and gritty out of her cheek using the edge of a scalpel. “This is the last of it, which makes you honestly pretty lucky.”
“She was brave, doc. She went one-on-one against a mech!”
“That’s one way to put it,” Idaira said. “I was just running for my life. I didn’t– I couldn’t do anything to that monster.”
“Ah, you could have taken it. You just got unlucky!” Sami joked.
“Yeah, I’ll get ‘em next time for sure.”
“Next time?” asked the medic. “I hope you’re not thinking of ever seeing that mech again in your life.”
“Yeah, it’s not a good idea to go back out there,” said Sami.
“I can still be useful to everyone.”
“You know,” said the medic, now dabbing on an ointment as he spoke. “I heard that the pilots, of those mechs, they’re all insane. They’ve got, like, computer systems inside their cockpits. They talk to them and drive them crazy.”
“Why?” asked Idaira.
The base had a computer in it, a laptop. It was an ancient one, but apparently it was still very useful. Idaira didn’t know all the ins-and-outs, but Eastern Sun’s resource networks were heavily dependent on those things. Whenever someone took or returned equipment from the collective, it had to be marked down. It was what kept scarcity manageable.
“It keeps them in line. Computers, they’re not just tools, I think. They use you as much as you use them, and it changes your way of thinking.”
“Sure,” said Idaira. “Where are you going with this?”
The ointment was helping. The burns were already much less painful than when she’d first arrived in the infirmary.
“Well, they mold the computers to mold the pilots. The computer can be your mother, your lover, your god, and you’re going to do what it says. You’re going crazy in exactly the way they want you to go crazy.”
“Are our pilots like that too? We have mechs, but that doesn’t really sound like our style,” wondered Sami.
“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met any of our mech pilots. I mean, we’ve hardly got any compared to any of the other factions! Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least a few of them are wackos. Mech pilots aren’t exactly our ‘style’ to begin with, so the mech collective could be up to all kinds of messed up things.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Sami. “They rely on the rest of us just as much as we rely on them. So no matter what, they’ve got the same responsibilities as everyone else.”
“I’m just not going to trust any mech stuff until I meet a pilot and they prove to me, face-to-face, that they’re not insane.”
“I don’t think ‘insane’ is the right word. It’s reductive. They’re not broken, they’re just being manipulated, and that’s something that– I guess everyone’s being manipulated, to varying degrees. ‘Wacko’ is just insulting. Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?” asked Idaira.
“No, actually,” said the medic, now applying bandages to Idaira’s cheek. “Doctors are a totally different thing. Medics are really only for emergency care. I just get giddy when people call me ‘doc’, so I don’t like to correct them.”
“Hey, doc! Sami, Idaira,” said Ajax, who had somehow arrived unnoticed. For a big guy, someone who often had to duck to avoid the cables and lamps hanging from the base’s ceiling, he moved quietly.
“Is it time?” asked Sami.
“Time for what?” replied Idaira.
“We’re going to make some of the tunnels narrower. The mech from earlier was small enough that it might be able to find its way here. We haven’t had to deal with that risk before. Shrinking down some of the passages will mean we can actually sleep at night,” Sami explained.
“Yep,” said Ajax. “It’s time.”
“See you around, Idaira,” said Sami, waving her goodbye.
He left with Ajax. It felt like a kind of blasphemy, cutting into a place with millenniums of history just for their own small purpose of survival, but Idaira couldn’t think of a better way of keeping the mech out. Nowhere got to stay ancient forever.
By the time the medic was finished, Idaira’s left cheek, jaw, and temple were entirely bandaged up. The rest of her felt fine, save for a few scrapes and bruises, but she was still covered in more than enough gauze to draw attention. She wanted to avoid looking in any mirrors, but even more than that, she wanted food.
The canteen area was small, just empty crates for tables with a scattering of plastic chairs around them. A single cook maintained three or four electric cooking pots all by himself as the base’s impromptu field kitchen. He’d marked out his area by hanging up colorful fairy lights on a green cord, which was just about the only decoration Idaira could see. Almost everything else in the base was purely practical.
She walked up to the cook and he gave her a few ladlefuls of lentil and chickpea stew along with some flatbread to scoop it up with. She wondered if he’d given her a larger portion because of her bandages, but she wasn’t complaining. The food was good. It had a slick of olive oil on top and flavors of cumin and coriander. She was wolfing it down.
“Idaira, hey! How are you feeling?” someone shouted, warm but concerned.
She knew who the voice belonged to. It was Daim, her delegate. Daim worked as an in-base liaison with the other groups in the tunnel network and with the committees outside of it. Their many years of experience with Eastern Sun were visible as lines on their face and rough marks on their skin, although their hair was still more red than gray.
“Hey, Daim, I’m feeling okay. What’s up?” Idaira asked.
“I’m glad you’re up and about.”
“Yeah,” she swallowed another mouthful of flatbread. “I’m really doing much better than I look. Promise!”
“That’s good, that’s good, but you should take it easy.”
“We’ve got a mech in the tunnels. It’s got to be all hands on deck, right? There’s no time to sit and lick my wounds, but it’s okay. I can still fight. I’ll be fine,” she tried to reassure them.
“No,” Daim started firmly. “You got hurt. You should go back to Etri. Rest up. That’s my request.”
“I can’t leave you guys a fighter short just because of an injury that isn’t debilitating,” Idaira argued.
“Honestly, I’m sure everyone would be okay with you leaving right now. Sami and the doc talked to me earlier and they were both pretty worried about you going out there again.”
“It would be wrong to abandon you all.”
“I just told you, nobody would mind,” Daim said, sounding slightly annoyed now.
“I would mind.”
“Okay,” Daim said. “Look, there was a guy in one of the other squads who went home just for a couple of blisters. He said they were making it hard to walk around. Some people grumbled about it, might even hold it against him, sure. He could have been exaggerating how much they hurt, could probably have found something else to do, but we’re better safe than sorry. The tunnels are too tight for slip-ups, they’ll kill you if you’re not one-hundred-percent here for it all. See what I’m saying?
“You’ve got bandages all over your face. You say it’s okay, but I still don’t believe you, and I don’t think anyone here sees you all wrapped up like that and believes you. Maybe you’re right and we’re wrong. I’ll own that if you go back to Etri and tell me in a month that you could have fought. I won’t own you sticking around here and getting yourself killed.”
“I’ll own it myself. It’s my choice.”
“Shit,” Daim huffed.
There was nothing else they could do. Daim could think Idaira was acting foolishly, but they weren’t really an authority, they just communicated with people and tried to gauge consensus. No one was going to refuse to work with Idaira, even if they thought she deserved some rest, so she’d be able to stay regardless of what Daim wanted. Pushing the point wouldn’t go anywhere.
“Alright, just take care of yourself,” they said, after a pause.
Idaira went back to her stew. Her burns were stinging underneath her bandages, but she really did believe they wouldn’t be a problem. Besides that, she just didn’t want to think about them.
■
They were back in the depths, firing on KA again. Idaira wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been since she was last in combat, time was slippery in these tunnels, but her face was still tender.
News of the mech had brought more fighters than usual to the forefront of both sides of the fight. Muzzle flash lit the passage white for a fraction of a second, and then again and again. Between the shots, the darkness was stark. It was a chiaroscuro of violence.
Rounds were sparking off the rock around her, throwing chips of stone in every direction. She fired back at the general idea of the enemy without a clear line of sight on anyone. The fight felt spiteful and bickering. Neither army actually believed that the shooting would help them to advance through the wall of enemies ahead, they just hoped to score hits against each other anyway.
“Come on!” a man shouted, but she couldn’t tell from where.
The way sound echoed this deep, a shout from thirty feet away sometimes seemed like it was coming from someone right next to her, but this voice was urgent in a specific way that cut through the general noise of the fight. There was a plan in motion, one that put Idaira and her group in a position that others had refused, and she was more than ready for it.
“The mech! The mech! Word’s just come down that they’ve spotted the mech! They’re bringing it this way.”
More fighters spilled out of a side passage, their boots pounding the dirt below them with a dozen different rhythms. Their faces also contained multitudes. Some looked like they were about to burst into tears, others like they wanted to yell battle cries.
“Come on, come on!” they shouted, sweeping Idaira along.
They picked up their pace, a jog in tension with a sprint. The mech would be chasing close behind, and its threads rumbled through the floor below them before their echo hit anyone’s ears.
They took a fork into a passage with a sagging ceiling. Wooden beams lined its walls, just barely offsetting enough of the mountain’s weight to allow them through. Somewhere behind her, someone was stumbling with the arrhythmic clap of boots that told her they were injured. She hoped they were able to keep up.
When her comrades stopped, she stopped too. It would just be a few seconds more. Idaira counted her heartbeats and clutched the pistol grip on her submachine gun. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing the mech again after what it had done last time.
A beat later, the vehicle emerged.
For a few seconds, almost everyone was completely still. Only Ajax and the injured soldier were moving. He was trying to support her weight and stop her from toppling over. Sami stood next to them, quietly surveying the state of the group. Everything was about to fall into place.
“Now!” someone screeched.
Small, sequential explosives detonated along the length of the tunnel. They weren’t anything that could harm the mech’s advanced armor, but they were perfectly in place to tear apart the supports that were holding the tunnel together.
The timber shattered and sections of the ceiling collapsed in a cascading wave. Rocks tumbled down and slammed into the mech’s frame. They pounded it into the floor, pinning its treads and trapping it in a position where it was unable to aim its weapons. Dust blasted out towards the ES fighters.
It was an agonizing moment before the air cleared up enough for Idaira to see again. It hadn’t been a total collapse, the tunnel was actually still navigable, but it had been remade. Fractured stone piled up on the floor while more balanced precariously between it and the ceiling, leaving just a small triangle of space for someone to ditch their gear and squeeze through. Maybe not someone like Sami or Ajax, but someone small.
The cockpit of the mech hissed and popped open.
The pilot began climbing out of her struggling vehicle to a soundtrack of fast-paced electronic beeping. She wore a sleek black pilot jumpsuit with a full-face protective helmet. It no doubt came with its own night-vision and breathing apparatus to make navigating the tunnel system effortless. The pilot still moved gracefully, uninjured in the crash.
Idaira raised her gun and fired a couple of haphazard shots, her hands too fast for her aim to catch up.
They had stopped the mech, but if she was unable to kill the pilot right here and now, she would have no trouble getting away and back to wherever her base was.
Idaira needed to get closer. She started scrambling over the fallen rocks and preparing to squeeze herself through a gap that separated her squad and the mech.
Then someone grabbed her fatigues and yanked her back.
It was Sami, looking frenzied. He wrapped his arm around her and violently tore her away from the debris before diving into the ground.
They crashed into the rocky earth with enough force to stamp their bodies with bruises.
“What the hell are you doing?” Idaira shouted at him.
And a huge explosion rocketed through the tunnel seconds later, a self-destruct protocol activated by the fleeing mech pilot. Idaira, her body pressed hard into the mud, only saw the light.
Sami’s breath was warm on her face.
■
“You’ll never amount to anything,” Idaira’s father had once told her, as the sweltering afternoon sun tanned her bare shoulders. “You’ll waste away here, in this desert, just like everyone else. You’ll get a dead-end job and marry some smug piece of shit. Probably become a junkie.”
Idaira, then still a child, had been relaxing outside of their house on the hood of a junk car with no tires or engine. She wore a discount store pair of shorts and a tank top with a goofy mascot on. Her bony legs were stretched out in front of her. Before her father had showed up with disgust audible in his voice, she had just been lounging there, minding her own business.
Going into the front yard had been her way of avoiding her father while he was drinking, but it hadn’t worked. He got lonely when he was drunk, and he liked to pick fights. Idaira was usually the most available target.
“That boy you were watching on the TV earlier, the ballerina,” he slurred. “You can’t do anything like that.”
“What are you even talking about?” Idaira asked, annoyed.
“He wasn’t much older than you. He could do it. It was beautiful. It was special. People all across the country, watching him. You couldn’t do that in a million years, could you? No, you couldn’t.”
“I’m literally just sitting here?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
In Puratova’s southern deserts, there wasn’t really much else to do. She had read that this area had once been part of the Veruvan homeland, an ancient valley civilization responsible for marvellous pyramids and carvings, but that meant nothing for what she saw in the present. The town’s only purpose was to exist in the space between other towns, acting as a hub for border patrol agents and little else. It wasn’t large enough to have many amenities, and it wasn’t small enough for the people there to feel like family. Every building and every person was tired and lacking in life. Either you eventually got up and left, like Idaira’s mother had, or you ended up like her father. He, and many others here, worked along the border to catch refugees and drug traffickers trying to enter the country from Daybreak, Puratova’s war-town neighbor.
“What do you want from me? You’re just being an idiot.”
“I never wanted much… in my life. I thought it’d work out. I didn’t do anything to deserve otherwise.
“I wanted your mother, but she was a whore. I wanted some fucking money, but I guess there’s none to be made. I wanted to live somewhere that felt like home. What I want from you?”
Idaira’s father mumbled to himself incoherently and started laughing. It didn’t sound like a real laugh so much as an expression of pain, or an attempt to mock her for things he was unable to articulate.
“I thought you’d make something of yourself,” he said, “but you’re just a brat. I’m seeing it now. It’s all for nothing. I’m going to work, feed you, and pay rent on our shitty house, and I’m just stuck with that. What a life!”
He trailed off and then went back to his twisted laughing. He wasn’t coherent. For one thing, Idaira prepared practically every calorie he consumed that didn’t come out of a bottle. There was no reason to engage with his rambling. Even so, she knew what he was trying to say, and she knew that he meant it all.
With the front yard now off-limits along with the rest of the house, Idaira jumped on her bike and rode off. It was a bike he had taught her to ride, long ago, when he was sounder of mind. She spent the rest of the day riding around town and looking for quiet spots to think in. Nobody spoke to her, but that was probably for the best. The town was full of impotent drunks like her father, as well as many people who were worse.
As the sun set, casting a golden glow over the desert sands, she returned home. She was relieved to find her father passed out on the couch, and relieved moreover that he didn’t seem to have pissed himself or broken anything. She retired to her room where she listened to music on her headphones until she was tired enough to sleep. Her dreams that night were of her mother coming back.
Just a couple of weeks later, while her father was out on patrol, he was shot dead by insurgents from Eastern Sun. Their group didn’t respect hard borders, nation states, and the institutions that make those possible. They actively rejected whatever kind of peace they could gain by compromising with those things, so were often out in the desert helping to escort refugees into Puratova and away from Daybreak’s state of endless war. Border patrol were a natural enemy. Eastern Sun never hesitated to fire upon them, and despite their alleged disorganization, they were far better trained than any small town drunk like her father.
Idaira didn’t cry when she got the news.
Instead, as refugees streamed north through the corridor opened up by ES, she climbed on her bike again and rode it south. She crossed the border into Daybreak as a sandgrouse might, not thinking for a second about the war or its reality.
When she ran into a group of fighters, they gave her a ride in the back of their truck. They were nice to her, so she lied. She exaggerated her age, pretended she just looked a lot younger than she really was. She told them she shared all of their ideals, that she was an internationalist fighter who was there to help. She repeated these lies over and over until she believed them, and until they gave her a gun.
■
Her deployment in the Veruva cave system was over, though the echo of gunfire in those tight passages had stuck around as a phantom in any moments that got too quiet. Idaira was back in Etri, the de facto capital of Eastern Sun’s operations. There were plenty of larger cities in Daybreak, but she’d never been to any of them. Etri was the largest city in the Veruvan valley, so it might as well have been the largest city in the world.
She sat by the river eating some bread she’d grabbed from the local distribution subcenter. She could have asked for a side to go with it, but it was kind of nice on its own. Although the food in the caves had never been bad, the flatbreads were always slightly stale. It was satisfying to finally eat something that was freshly baked.
The day was bright and Idaira’s image was reflected in the clear river in front of her, distorted by the flow of the water. All of the bandages were gone from her face and her burns had turned into red scar tissue that seemed to branch and scatter across her cheek from a dense central cluster of marks. She couldn’t help but stare at it and think about how it was all the result of a single moment, a moment that could have gone much better or much worse with the most minute of changes.
Sami’s face appeared in the river next to hers as he sat down beside her. He had a broad smile on his face that was instantly contagious. Idaira didn’t need to look for Ajax to know he’d also be nearby, providing a silent, comforting presence.
“Hey,” Idaira said, barely louder than the river.
“Hi,” Sami replied, matching her tone.
They sat there for a while, the three of them, just eating, watching the water, and enjoying the weather. It had been a long time since any of them had gotten to do this, and the caves made you miss the light, the wind, and air more than you realized. They were amazed to just soak in the world around them.
“I look horrible,” Idaira said, finally breaking the peace.
She felt instant relief. Even since leaving the tunnels and seeing her face in good lighting, the insecurity had been nagging at her.
“Don’t say that. Nobody thinks you look horrible.”
“You know what I mean,” she replied. “The scars are horrible.”
“No, they’re like–” Sami paused to find the right words, his eyes tracing the red lines reaching across her cheek. “They look like the sun. Like a sunburst.”
Wordlessly, with Idaira still watching their faces in the water, their hands connected.