Chapter 7 - The Weight She Carried Back
Three weeks later, the hangar at Echo Base sounded normal again. Tools clanged. Rotors turned in the distance. Someone laughed near the maintenance rack. Life in a military place has a brutal talent for continuing.
But some rooms do not forget.
Near the same steel table where she had dropped the abandoned gear, Evelyn stood with Reeves beside her, his leg braced but healing. Through the open bay doors, the desert shimmered gold beneath the morning sun.
“You could’ve left me,” Reeves said.
She gave him a brief sideways look. “I know.”
He smiled once, tiredly. “That’s not what I meant.”
Evelyn understood anyway.
He wasn’t talking about survival. He was talking about the choice everyone else had made easier for themselves.
She rested a hand on the rifle case before it was returned to Hayes, now documented and cleared. “People tell themselves a lot of things in a crisis,” she said. “Most of them are just excuses wearing urgency.”
Reeves nodded.
Across the hangar, Garrett crossed the floor alone. He had no command patch now, no edge to his posture. He stopped a respectful distance away.
“I was wrong,” he said.
Evelyn did not rescue him from the difficulty of it.
“About what?” she asked.
He took the hit of the question. “About you. About what mattered. About what kind of officer I was.”
For the first time, she saw no defense in him.
“That answer was always yours to give,” she said.
Then she turned and walked toward the sunlit edge of the hangar, leaving him to stand in the place where his certainty had once lived.
The squad thought Evelyn had returned carrying their combat gear.
They were wrong.
May you like
She had carried back their choices.
And once those were laid down in the open, no one in Echo Base could pretend not to see them anymore.
