CHAPTER 2: SALVAGE

  The march was endless.

  My feet stopped hurting after the first mile. Or they hurt so much that the signal overloaded and my brain stopped processing it. The distinction didn't matter. What mattered was putting one foot in front of the other, staying upright. Because the man who fell got kicked. And the man who didn't get up after being kicked got left behind.

  I didn't look back to see what happened to the ones left behind. First there were groans, then there weren’t.

  The rain had eased to a steady cold drizzle that soaked through to bone. My hands were numb where the rope cut my wrists. I'd tried pulling against it at first, animal instinct, but the rope just bit deeper and a soldier had noticed and shoved me hard enough that I'd nearly gone down.

  I stopped pulling after that.

  Twenty prisoners. Maybe thirty. My brain felt wrapped in cotton, thoughts coming slow and thick. Shock, probably. I'd seen it before. Guys at the factory after accidents, walking around like they were underwater. Moving without being present.

  That was me now. Except I was very present in the cold and the pain and the absolute wrongness of everything.

  The landscape rolled past in grays and browns. Hills. Mud. No trees. No buildings. No roads except the churned track we followed, wide enough for horses and marked by old wheel ruts filled with water. In the distance, black smoke rose. More battlefields, maybe. Or villages burning.

  I tried the man beside me. Young, maybe twenty, with a gash across his forehead that had dried in crusty brown streaks down his face. "Do you speak English?"

  Nothing.

  I tried the man on my other side. Older, maybe forty, limping on a bad knee. "English? Can you understand me?"

  He looked at me. Actually looked. Then shook his head and turned away.

  I gave up. Even if someone understood, what would I say? Hey, I died in Ohio and woke up here, any idea what's going on? I'd sound insane. I probably was insane.

  My feet were bleeding. I could feel the warmth between my toes. The ground was rough. Stones, roots, things I couldn't see in the mud. I'd stepped on something sharp a while back and felt it open the skin. No way to check. No way to stop. Just walk.

  The cold was worse than the pain. It had sunk past my muscles into something structural. I was shivering constantly, whole body trembling in a rhythm I couldn't control.

  I thought about the warehouse. The fluorescent lights. The heat near the machines. I'd complained about that heat. Funny, the things you don't appreciate until you're naked in the rain being marched through a country that shouldn't exist.

  I thought about my apartment. The bed. Blankets. The heat that worked most of the time. I'd never once been grateful for any of it.

  I thought about Sarah and Michael. Wondered if they knew yet. Wondered how Rachel would tell them. Your father had an accident at work. He's gone. Clean. Simple. True enough.

  Except I wasn't gone. I was here. Wherever here was.

  And my arm was healed.

  I flexed my fingers again. Watched the muscles in my forearm respond. The machine had crushed that arm. Gears had ground through bone and flesh. I'd bled out on a concrete floor watching forty-seven fluorescent lights go dark.

  But the arm worked. Healed like it had never been broken. Like the injury hadn't happened at all.

  That was impossible. But so was everything else about the last few hours, so impossible had lost most of its punch.

  Ahead, through the rain, structures emerged. The camp opened around us. More tents than I could count, arranged in a grid. Straight lines, right angles, streets cut through the mud with the precision of a ruler. A ditch and timber palisade ringed the perimeter. Standards planted at intersections, dark shapes against the gray sky. Fires burned despite the drizzle, controlled, organized. Smoke rising cleaner than the black columns in the distance.

  A military camp. Massive.

  The soldiers herded us toward it. We passed between wooden posts driven into the ground. Guards watched us pass with the same indifferent attention you'd give livestock at auction. One said something to the soldier leading us. They both laughed.

  I didn't need to understand the words.

  We didn't belong. We were mud-covered, naked or nearly so, bound and bleeding. We were the defeated. The captured. The raw material.

  They marched us toward an open area where canvas awnings had been erected. Shelter from the rain. Under the awnings, other prisoners were being sorted. Examined. Marked.

  Like cattle at a processing plant.

  I almost laughed. Eleven years working a sort line in Ohio, and I end up on the wrong side of one.

  The line moved slowly.

  We stood under the awning, water dripping from the edges, and waited. Ahead, the prisoners were examined one by one. A robed figure, old, thin, exhausted, would gesture each one forward. Place a hand on their chest. Close his eyes. Concentrate.

  Then he'd mark them. White chalk on the arm. Symbols I didn't recognize. Numbers or letters in a language I couldn't read.

  After being marked, each prisoner was shoved to a different group. Left or right. Sometimes straight ahead. I couldn't read the system, but it was clearly a system. Organized. Efficient. Military.

  A soldier in a crested helm watched the line from a raised platform. His armor was different from the others. Bronze chest plate over leather, greaves on his shins, a short red cloak pinned at the shoulder.

  I was beginning to understand where I was, even without understanding how. This was an army. The battlefield I'd woken on had been an actual battle, and we were the survivors being processed.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Sorting. Assignment. The same logic as any warehouse: identify, categorize, distribute.

  The man ahead of me stepped up. The robed figure touched his chest. Paused. Nodded. Marked him with chalk. Shoved him left. Next.

  Another. Touch. Pause. Mark. Right.

  Quick. Routine. Whatever the old man was checking for, it was straightforward.

  My turn.

  The soldier behind me shoved me forward. I stumbled, caught myself. The robed figure looked up. His face was lined with exhaustion, eyes sharp but hollow. Ink stains on his fingers. This was a bureaucrat. A man who'd done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more.

  He gestured impatiently. I stepped closer.

  He placed his hand on my chest. Right over my heart. His palm was cold against the mud and blood coating my skin.

  He closed his eyes.

  I waited. Counted heartbeats. One. Two. Three.

  His eyes snapped open.

  The blood drained from his face so fast I thought he was going to faint. His hand jerked off my chest like he'd touched a hot stove. He stared at the spot where his hand had been.

  He reached out and touched me again. Same spot. His fingers were shaking. His breathing had gone fast and shallow.

  "What?" I said. English. Useless here. "What's wrong?"

  He didn't answer. Touched me with both hands. Pressed hard, searching for something beneath my skin. His palms slid across my ribcage, up to my collarbone, down to my sternum. Searching with increasing desperation. Finding nothing.

  He grabbed my arm. His fingers dug into my bicep with surprising strength and he dragged me around the side of a tent, out of sight of the other processing stations. My feet skidded in the mud. I tried to pull back.

  "Wait, what are you—"

  He shoved me against the tent canvas and spoke. The words came too fast, too urgent. I caught nothing.

  Then he made a decision. I watched it happen. The panic crystallizing into resolve. He reached into his robes and pulled out a metal rod. About six inches long, narrow, covered in carved symbols.

  The rod began to glow. Faint, then brighter. Heat poured off it.

  "Wait," I said. "What are you—"

  He pressed the rod against my chest.

  The pain was blinding. Searing. The stink of my own flesh burning filled my nose. I tried to pull away and his other hand held me in place, stronger than a man that thin had any right to be. The rod burned into my skin. One second. Two. Three.

  He pulled it away.

  I gasped. Looked down. A symbol had been seared into my chest, raised and red and angry. Geometric lines radiating from a center point.

  He was already reaching for chalk. His hand shook so badly the symbols came out crooked on my arm. But he wrote them carefully. Deliberately.

  Then he spoke again. Slower. And somewhere in my brain, in a place I didn't understand, the words started making sense. Not English. But I could feel the meaning forming, like a picture developing in chemical solution.

  "Low Quartz." The words resolved from noise into language. "You are Low Quartz. You understand? Low Quartz. If anyone asks. If anyone tests you. Low Quartz and nothing else."

  I stared at him. I understood him. I was understanding a language I'd never heard before.

  "What did you—" My voice came out rough. "What did you do to me?"

  "They would kill you." He cut me off. His voice was barely above a whisper. "What you actually are. They would never let you live. Do you understand? You are Low Quartz. That is all you are. That is all you can ever be."

  He shoved me back toward the processing line. I stumbled against a tent pole. The brand on my chest throbbed with every heartbeat.

  The robed figure watched me go. He looked like a man who'd just found a live grenade and decided to bury it instead of calling the bomb squad. Terrified. But committed.

  He'd given me a false identity. A lie that might keep me alive.

  Or keep himself safe from whatever I was.

  I rejoined the line. Nobody noticed. The system continued without me. The next prisoner was already being examined, touched, marked, sorted. Machinery that processed bodies the way my old belt processed boxes.

  I touched the brand on my chest. Still hot. Still tender. Already permanent.

  But the old man's terror told me one thing clearly: whatever I was, it scared him enough to commit fraud in the middle of a military operation.

  That was worth remembering.

  They sorted us like cargo.

  A soldier with a ledger called out the symbols from our arms. The language was still resolving. Coming in clearer with each minute, like tuning a radio. I caught more now. Words. Phrases. Structure.

  When he reached me, he read the chalk on my arm, glanced at the brand, grunted. "Low Quartz. Fourth Legion, Ninth Cohort."

  He wrote something in his ledger and moved on.

  Fourth Legion. Ninth Cohort. I was being assigned to a military unit.

  The realization landed heavy and cold. This wasn't a prison camp. It was a recruitment center. The battlefield had been a harvest. The dead were waste, and the living were raw material. We weren't prisoners. We were soldiers now.

  Whether we wanted to be or not.

  The irony of it was almost funny. I'd spent eleven years being sorted by machines. Now I was the thing being sorted.

  We were herded toward our section of the camp. The tents were older here, patched and stained. The ground was churned mud with no planks or gravel. Fires burned in metal drums, smaller and less tended than the ones we'd passed. This was clearly the bottom of whatever hierarchy this army ran on.

  Another clerk checked marks. Read mine. Made a note. "Low Quartz," he said. Not to me. Just cataloging. "Means you're weak. Means you're expendable. Means you die first."

  He moved on. I stood there, the language fully sharp now, every word landing clean, and processed what he'd said.

  A voice beside me. Young. Bitter. "Low Quartz. Shit."

  I turned. Thin face, hollow eyes. Maybe twenty-two. He saw me looking and laughed.

  "Welcome to the Legion. You fight or you die." He touched the chalk on his own arm. "Low Quartz means we're the first line. We're the ones who die so the real soldiers can advance."

  "Real soldiers?"

  "The ones with actual power. Cores worth a damn." He spat into the mud. "We're bodies. That's all. Bodies to fill the line."

  A soldier shouted. We were moving again. Someone threw a blanket at me. Rough wool, scratchy, stained with things I didn't want to think about. I caught it and wrapped it around my shoulders. First covering since waking. The warmth was almost nothing, but after hours of bare skin in the rain, it felt like mercy.

  We reached a communal tent. Rows of cots inside. Wooden frames, thin straw mattresses, no pillows. Other men already there. Some sleeping, some sitting, some staring at nothing. They looked up when we entered, assessed us with tired indifference, and went back to whatever they'd been doing.

  I found an empty cot near the back. Sat down. The straw mattress was thin enough that I felt every slat. The blanket smelled like mildew and the sweat of whoever'd had it before me.

  But I was covered. Dry. Out of the rain.

  I looked down at the brand on my chest. The circular symbol. The radiating geometric lines. Low Quartz. The lie that kept me breathing.

  The robed figure had been searching for something everyone else had. A thing he expected to find. Routine, mundane, the same as every other prisoner. And when he'd pressed his hand against my chest, he hadn't found it. Nothing. An absence where something should have been.

  That absence had terrified him.

  And the brand, the false mark, was his solution. A containment measure. Something to keep whatever I was buried and invisible.

  Around me, voices filled the tent. Men talking quietly. The language came in clear now, every word resolved. Talk of the war. The enemy, someone called the Ash March. The Legion's losses. Training that started tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. I'd be trained. Given a weapon. Pointed at something and told to fight.

  I lay back on the cot and stared at the tent ceiling. Canvas and wooden poles. Rain drumming softly outside.

  The quiet didn’t stay empty.

  Sarah and Michael. The drawing on my fridge. The ten-minute phone call and soccer practice and the father-shaped hole I'd been leaving in their lives for years.

  That should have wrecked me. Should have torn me apart. But the grief was somewhere deep and muffled, buried under exhaustion and shock and the sheer impossibility of the last few hours.

  Maybe later. When I wasn't just trying to survive the next five minutes.

  I flexed my fingers. The healed arm. Still perfect. Still impossible.

  I touched the brand. Still hot. Still pulsing with my heartbeat.

  I closed my eyes. Sleep didn't come. Just a half-conscious drift, awareness without rest. The breathing of exhausted men around me. Fires outside. Rain on canvas.

  Tomorrow would come whether I was ready or not.

  And whatever I was, whatever the robed figure had found missing inside me, I'd have to figure it out while learning to be a soldier, fighting a war I knew nothing about, wearing a brand that was a lie.

  Not exactly the career change I'd been avoiding for eleven years. But at least the commute was shorter.

  I didn't sleep. But I rested enough.

  And when the horn sounded before dawn, I was already awake.