The heat warning went up outside the aid station at 1900, a red flag on a metal clip that snapped in the evening wind like something impatient. I saw it on my way back from the chow line and made myself keep walking. If I stopped to read it, someone might notice me reading it, and someone noticing me was the thing I could least afford.
Ellis fell in beside me. He'd stopped pretending he didn't know me two weeks ago, which took a kind of nerve I hadn't seen in the others.
"They're saying it'll be ninety-eight by ten hundred," he said. "For the march."
"Then we drink our water," I said.
"Vega's put himself on the rear pace. I heard him tell Sergeant Ruiz he wanted to watch the stragglers." Ellis glanced at me, then away. "He means you."
"I know who he means."
We drew our routes and our numbers, and I went to lay out my gear the way I did every night, laces loose, socks flat, canteens topped and burped of air so they wouldn't slosh. The ritual of it kept my hands busy. Busy hands didn't shake. Busy hands didn't drift up to the collar to check it was still buttoned high.
That was where Doc Halden found me.
He was the senior line medic for our cycle, a lean man with gray coming in at the temples and the settled patience of somebody who had seen exactly how many ways the human body could fail in the field. He didn't announce himself. He just crouched at the edge of my bunk space, elbows on his knees, and watched me set my second canteen down.
"Mercer," he said. "You buttoned like that in this weather all six weeks?"
"Yes, Doc."
"Cadre let you?"
"There's no rule against it."
He nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something. "No. There isn't." He tipped his chin at my left hand. "Do that again."
I hadn't noticed I'd been doing anything. I looked down and saw my own fingers working, thumb pressing the tips of the index and middle, over and over, chasing a feeling that wasn't quite there.
"Just tired," I said, and stilled them.
"Give me your wrist."
I didn't want to. But refusing a medic outright would draw more eyes than complying, so I held it out and let him lay two fingers against the pulse. He was quiet for longer than a count of ten. Then he moved his fingers to the back of my hand, pressing along the tendons, watching my face while he did it.
"You feel that all the way?"
"Yes." The lie was small and even.
His eyes came up to the collar again. Not curious the way Vega's had been curious. Careful. Like a man deciding whether the ground under him would hold.
"I could pull you," he said quietly. "One phone call. Doctor's hold, heat category, whatever I want to write. Nobody would blame me."
For one bad second I wanted him to. The wanting was so sharp it frightened me more than the tingling had. I thought of the aid vehicle, the shade, somebody else's hands taking the weight off my chest. I thought of not walking twelve miles into a furnace with a man behind me waiting for me to break.
Then I thought of what it would look like. The small one, pulled the night before the march. Vega wouldn't even have to say it. The silence would say it for him — see, I told you, she was never meant to be here — and every recruit who'd shared their water with me would file it away as proof.
"Don't," I said. "Please."
Halden studied me.
"If you pull me, I go out on your paper, not on mine. And every man in this platoon learns that the way to survive is to be sick enough for a medic to notice, not strong enough to finish. That's not the lesson I came here to teach anybody."
"That's a lot of philosophy for a private."
"It's not philosophy, Doc. It's what I've watched happen for six weeks."
Something shifted in his face. He didn't ask me the question I could see forming — watched where, before this? — and I was grateful, because I didn't have an answer I was allowed to give. Under my shirt the ID chain lay flat and warm against my sternum, the stamped number pressing its edge into scar tissue that had learned, a long time ago, not to complain.
He let go of my hand.
"You march," he said, standing. "But you march at the back where I can see you. You feel that hand climb past the wrist, you feel your chest go tight or your vision narrow, you fall out to me. Not to Vega. To me. You understand the difference?"
"Yes, Doc."
"I mean it, Mercer. Pride's a fine thing right up until it kills you in front of witnesses." He looked at the collar one last time, and I saw him file it away — not solve it, just set it somewhere he'd remember. "I'll be at mile seven and again at ten."
He walked off into the dusk, and I sat with my topped canteens and my quiet hands and the red flag snapping out there in the dark, and I understood that the morning had already started watching me.
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