Don't Say It

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They ran so fast that the grass slashed at their skin like a thousand tiny whips. They ran so fast that the wind whipping past their hair was the only sound, drowning out all others. They ran so fast that the braying sirens and wailing of guards behind them couldn’t be heard.

They ran, hand in hand, across the clear-cut fields along the outskirts of the base, with no clear destination in mind, only that they must run. Under the dim light of the planet’s twin moons, their skin shone with a sheen of sweat, revealing angry pink scars. Both could be no older than six, and they were running at a dead sprint of nearly double that of the guards chasing them down.

Camilla’s vision grew blurry, and unfocused. Her eyes brimmed with moisture as the wind whipped her face and stung her eyes—she wasn’t crying. She didn’t cry. Not when they put her on the table, not when they sliced her open, not when she woke up screaming, and not when they froze her in a tube. She didn’t even cry when they thawed her out, and all the pain came back anew.

She didn’t cry when they told her she could never go home, because she had no home to go back to. She didn’t cry when they told her that seven of her friends that she had known a scant few months before the surgeries, didn’t make it. She didn’t cry when they told her that, if it weren’t for constant attempts to save her life, she wouldn’t have made it.

Camilla certainly didn’t cry when her best friend grabbed her hand, and told her to run, and leave everyone else behind, and she definitely wouldn’t cry now. They ran across the plains separating the base from the nearby forest, until they could run no more. Until the sirens and shouting faded, and they broke through the first hints of the treeline.

They kept running, jumping felled logs and ducking low-hanging branches, that scraped at Camilla’s skin with sharp stings. They broke through the next set of bushes with an explosive scattering of trees and branches.

Camilla stopped running. She couldn’t hear anything around them anymore, except for the chirruping of forest insects, and the swaying of the trees in the wind.

Carrie kept running for a while longer, before she felt Camilla’s hand slip from her own. She stopped, looking back, breathing heavily. Clouds of water formed in front of her, dissipating into the air.

Camilla shook her head. “We have to go back—” she started to say.

“No.” Carrie cut her off.

Camilla shook her head, and swallowed around a parched mouth. “We have to—” she tried to say it again.

“Don’t say it.” With a violent shake of her head, Carrie cut her off again. Silence descended on the both of them. Carrie sank down to the grass, crossed her legs and put her head in her hands. Her breathing hitched a little, and for a moment Camilla thought that she was crying. That couldn’t be right; neither of them cried.

She took her hands away and sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I know,” she said, wrapping her hands around her knees, and hugging them close. “I know, we need to go back eventually, but not yet.” She shook her head. “Not yet.”

Camilla approached her with tentative steps, sliding down onto the grass beside her. It was cold, tipped with clear droplets of dew. She looked over at Carrie, who was stroking up and down her arms. Her fingers ran over the scars—they were still an angry pink colour, with lines criss-crossing over them in places. Their white gowns flapped a little in the wind. They weren’t meant to be out at all.

Camilla put her hand on her friend’s back. She was cold, and sickly pale. Her eyes were sallow, and had bags under them. Camilla imagined that she herself didn’t look much better.

“Everything there is scary and weird,” Carrie said, looking over her shoulder, back at the facility. They couldn’t see it through the trees anymore, but if the wind turned just right, they could hear the faint insinuations of something whining, and calling out to them in the distance. Then the wind changed, and it was gone again.

“I just want some quiet,” the girl continued, closing her eyes to take in the sounds of the woods around them..

Camilla sighed. The night air was calm, and peaceful. There was a chill that she felt all over her body—the first thing she felt in a while that wasn’t pain, or the numbing sensation of the medication. She leaned closer to Carrie, putting her head on the other girl’s bare scalp. “Me too.”

The two friends continued to sit, down there on the grass, staring up at the darkened sky through the gap in the trees, until the guards and dogs found them the next morning, curled up together in a shivering ball in the rain..

The clearing hadn’t changed much, but the person standing in it had. Her scars were faded from angry pink to off-white with subtle fuschia undertones. If one looked closely, they could see where the skin rippled around it like fresh burns just starting to heal. There were lines on her inner elbow, denoting where they had cut a cross into her joint to get at the bone. The rest of her arms were hidden by a black shirt, emblazoned with the UNSC Logo on the front.

She stepped over a fallen branch and frowned. That wasn’t there last week. She bent to pick it up, testing its weight. It felt too light to her large hands. She was taller than she was years ago, by an order of magnitude, almost. She stood taller than the Major, even—it didn’t seem right to her that she would. She’d always looked up to him, now he would have to look up to address her.

Spartan Kennedy drew back her arm and threw the branch. It lifted itself into the air and sailed through the top canopy of leaves in a lazy, spiralling motion; it looked too slow. Before the branch had disappeared, she heard movement behind her. Faint, fleeting movement like the scurrying of a field mouse. She sighed and looked over her shoulder with a smile.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Spartan Lones said, parting the thick berry bushes with a casual swipe of her hand in front of her. Her feet crushed the grass without a sound. As she got closer, she saw Camilla’s face and frowned. “What did they tell you?” she asked.

Camilla shrugged. “That we won’t be deploying with the others. That, as assets, we’re of more use here,” she folded her arms. The rest of the Spartans weren’t like them, and so they were kept separate. Separated even when they got their marching orders, it seemed.

Carrie hummed, folding her arms too and looking off somewhere into the middle-distance, between two gnarled trees. “Fancy way of saying we’re lower on the priorities than the others,” she quipped.

Camilla let her arms fall and turned to face where they had come from. She could almost see the muted olive colour of the base’s outer wall from between the trees. “I don’t even know why all of the others get to deploy and we don’t.”

“We’re on separate programmes, for one,” Carrie said. “They don’t even know we exist.”

Camilla huffed. “I wonder if Halsey even knows we exist.”

“Maybe she does,” Carrie sat down on the grass, crossing her legs. Camilla looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. Carrie just shrugged. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to know.”

Camilla hummed in agreement, sitting down beside her fellow soldier. She idly toyed with a strand of grass, plucked it, and held it in her palm. It flitted up, flirted with the wind for a moment, before flying away. Camilla watched it go, tracking its every movement with superhuman eyes.

“I had a talk with Briggenshaw,” she said.

Carrie looked up from where she was digging in the dirt with a stick. “Oh yeah?”

Camilla turned to her with a raised eyebrow and a smile. “Do you know he had to fight, tooth and claw, just to get us approved for further training?”

“Really?” Carrie asked. She thought about it for a while, nodded, and hummed in thought. “So we were just gonna get dumped back on the streets?”

“Maybe,” Camilla said. “If he hadn’t stepped in.”

The other girl rubbed her chin for a moment, then furrowed her brow. “Why’d he tell you?”

Camilla shrugged. “I guess I’m the leader of the clown brigade.”

“Excuse you,” Carrie hit her on the shoulder. “I am a Jester, not a clown,” she said, making a twisted grin for a face and pulling her lips apart with her fingers.

Camilla laughed in reply at her use of the DI-given nickname. “Right, I forgot,” she said through a fit of giggles.

Their laughter subsided, and Carrie nudged her again. “Hey,” she said. “Take it easy. I’m sure the Office has something in mind for us to do while we pass the time.”

“Oh sure,” Camilla leaned back, supporting herself with her palms flat against the grass. “Washing the Warthogs, training, washing the Pelicans, training, and washing the floors.”

Carrie leaned back as well, flicking her head over to her comrade and chewing on her tongue. “Don’t forget training. I hear that’s important.”

“How could I forget.” Camilla rolled her eyes. “Hell, I’d take fighting Innies over doing nothing.”

“We all would,” Carrie said, leaning closer to the other Spartan. “The Nucleus was mean bush, though.”

They both looked up at the darkened sky, and the twinkling stars for a while. “What do you think’ll happen to the others?” Camilla asked.

Carrie looked over at her, brought back to the present. “Huh?”

“The others,” Camilla repeated. “What’ll happen to them?”

Carrie fidgeted, brimming with nervous energy. The kind that she almost always only got when she had a secret she wanted to tell Camilla. “I went snooping,” she said with glittering eyes.

Camilla sat up, very much paying attention. “Did you, now?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Carrie’s eyes twinkled like the stars above them, as mischievous and cunning as a fox’s, and twice as beady. She went into her fatigues, pulling out a long black square. “Check this out. I swiped someone’s Datapad and took a scan of what I found.”

Camilla scoffed, smiling despite the fact that she should’ve been reprimanding her. “You could get in trouble!”

“Only if they catch me,” Carrie said, and furrowed her brow. “This is why I came here.”

“Oh,” Camilla put a hand to her chest. “So it wasn’t just for me, then?”

“It can be for two things,” Carrie said, feigning hurt at the accusation. “Now shut up, and look.”

She switched the datapad on. The harsh boot-up lights stung their delicate eyes for a second before they adjusted, and text began to scrawl over the screen. The both of them scanned it as they scrolled through it.

“Procedure?” Camilla asked. “Surgery?” she grabbed it, pulled it closer, and went back for a second, more in-depth read.

“They’re gonna do the same thing to them that they did to us,” Carrie said. “Crazy, right?”

Camilla put the datapad down with a shocked expression. “Poor bastards,” she said, chewing on her finger. “Let’s hope they get it right this time.”

“Excuse you,” Carrie hit her—again. “I am perfection incarnate.”

Camilla hit her back. “To you maybe.”

“Oh, what, not to you?” Carrie shot in reply.

Camilla looked at her and arched an eyebrow. “Well—”

“Don’t say it,” Carrie held up a hand. “Last thing I need is you to make it weird.”

Scoffing, Camilla laid back down in the grass. “You did that yourself.”

Carrie joined her, and the two lapsed into a comfortable silence, staring up at the stars.

“I hope they make it,” Carrie said, breaking the silence as they watched something streak across the sky.

Camilla looked over at her, and smiled, before going back to stargazing. “Yeah,” she said. “So do I.”

The two comrades sat down on the grass, staring up at the blackened sky through the gap in the trees, their hands inches apart.

The doors to the barracks burst open, and seven people strode through them in various states of distress. The two at the front had their hands on each other’s shoulders for support. The leftmost woman had her other hand in the gold tresses of her cropped hair, while the other was chewing on the knuckles of her fingers.

They were flanked by the rest of their team, all of them in shock. Wide brown eyes, scraggly hair that stuck out from being pawed at, nervous fidgeting, all of it. The ten walked down the line of beds, breaking away from the group to sit down in their own cots and stare at the wall with blank stares.

They couldn’t fathom it. When they were called into a briefing, they didn’t imagine they would see Harvest on fire, the surface marked with furious orange infernos. They didn’t expect the death toll, and they didn’t expect to hear that the whole planet was now considered to be destroyed, and void of life.

Camilla Kennedy broke away from Carrie when they reached their bunks at the far end, near the secondary entrance to the small barracks room. She slumped down on her bed, back limp, shoulders slouched. Her eyes wore a vacant expression, and she shook her head back and forth with slow movements.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t.” She flicked her head and rubbed at her temples, groaning as a headache came on. A whole planet, destroyed, by a hostile alien species. “I can’t believe it!” she stood up, and slapped at the clocks on the shelving unit next to her cot. They scattered, dashed themselves on the wall, and dropped to the floor, utterly destroyed.

Carrie got up from her cot in time to duck under a stray piece of digital screen that shattered against the wall behind her cot. “Hey!” She stepped close to Camilla and grabbed her arms. “Just calm down.”

“No! What the hell do they mean?” Camilla struggled against the grip and started rambling. “What the hell is going on?! How can it just be gone?!”

“We saw the same vid as you did, alright?” One of the others said. The others walked over to try and calm her down, though they themselves were a strand away from buckling under the same strain.

“That sort of thing just can’t happen!” Camilla yelled.

Carrie shook her, and grabbed her face, turning it so they were eye to eye. “You saw it! You saw it yourself!” she held her there for a moment or two, neither of them blinking. Carrie’s eyes were hard, and firm, while Camillas were scattered, frantic, and darted about from one eye to the other.

“Oh god,” she said, going limp in Carrie’s arms, and resting her head on the other woman’s shoulder. “Oh god,” she said again. “It’s real, isn’t it?”

Carrie held her head in the crook of her shoulder and turned to the others. “Everyone get out.”

The others shared looks and frowned. “It’s after lights out,” one protested.

“I don’t care,” Carrie said. “Get out for a few minutes.”

They all filtered out of the door, while Carrie kept holding Camilla close, swaying back and forth. When the other Spartans movements came to a halt, and she was finally still, Carrie pushed her back and wiped a stray line of something away from her eye.

She made a decision, took Camilla’s hand, and dragged her towards the door. “Come with me.”

“What’re you—” Camilla started to protest, and tried to pry her hand out from Carrie’s grip.

“Shh,” Carrie put a finger to her lips and donned a wry smirk. “Don’t talk. Don’t say anything.”

“Hold on—” Camilla began to protest again.

“Shut it,” Carrie cut her off once more. “Come on!”

Carrie pulled her out of the barracks, past the five other Spartans, who watched them go with confusion etched on their faces.

She pulled Camilla out of the building, past the sentries and patrols, out past the perimeter wall, and into the grass plains beyond. Even then, she kept tugging, and the pair kept running, until they reached the edge of where the forest had been clear cut. They both disappeared into the furrow of trees, and still they ran, until they came to a small clearing—their small clearing.

Carrie stopped pulling, turned around, and faced Camilla, before collapsing into the grass and pulling the other woman down with her. Camilla gave out a yelp before she collapsed next to her friend, back down on the grass.

The night was cool, and the gentle winds sent a chill down their spines. Camilla took a deep breath and felt her racing heart calm, her heavy, laboured breathing cease. She felt calm again. Closing her eyes, she took another breath, filling her lungs with crisp air, held it for a while, then let it go.

“See those? Up there?” Carrie asked, pointing up at the clear night sky, and the twinkling dots like moth-eaten holes through dark fabric. “What are they?” she asked.

Camilla was brought back into the world from her calming breathing techniques, and followed Carrie’s motioning finger. She furrowed her brow, looking over at her friend. “C’mon, what is this—”

Carrie blinked, and gave her a pointed stare. “Answer the question,” she said. “What are those lights up there, huh?”

Camilla rolled her eyes. “Stars,” she said, then shrugged her shoulders. “Most of them. The rest are satellites, some might be ships and aircraft.”

Carrie blinked at the overly-perfunct answer, and nodded. “Stars,” she said. “How many of them are Human controlled?”

Camilla laughed and looked away from her.

Carrie laughed as well. “Answer it,” she said with a smile.

“Less than one percent,” Camilla said. “Less than less than one percent,” she added.

“Exactly,” Carrie said.

Camilla’s brow knitted itself together even tighter than before.

The other girl rested her back against the grass and let her head flop to the dirt. “Whoever these guys are, whatever they are,” she began, “they can’t own every star.” She squeezed Camilla’s hand and stroked a thumb over the back. Camilla looked down at it, having forgotten that they were still entwined.

“And if they do, well,” Carrie shrugged. “We’ll just have to kill ‘em all. Just like they killed everyone on Harvest, then ten times more,” she finished with a resolute nod.

Camilla smiled, and looked back up at the night sky. “You know, when it’s you saying it, I can almost believe it,” she said, looking over at the other girl.

“See?” Carrie grinned. “We got this. Aliens or not, we’ll come out okay.”

They lapsed again into silence, staring up at the night.

Camilla looked over at Carrie, and gave her hand a squeeze. “Hey, I—”

“Don’t say it.” Carrie said. “Just enjoy the moment.”

Camilla sighed, shaking her head. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

The two friends lay on the grass until morning, staring up at the night sky, and all the twinkling lights in it. Their hands locked together, and fingers interlaced.