So, uh, it's been a year. I needed an emotional break from Spalko to work on something light and got caught up in real life and an original story I've been writing. So if you're still here, thank you so much for being patient.

Also, huge thanks to my beta reader Lini for sticking around in my twelve months of ignoring this story, catching my grammatical errors and giving great suggestions, and for validating my coffee addiction.

Spalko squeezed her eyes a bit tighter as the truck rolled through another pothole. Every rut in the dirt was a shell in her mind. She could not be sure of the exact moment she had decided she wanted to live. In the weeks before Karov died, they had toyed with the possibility that she could carry their baby to term. Somehow his death had made her infinitely more determined to do so.

She sat hunched in the back of the truck with other soldiers who had been granted a leave of absence due to injury—those whose wounds made them a liability in combat, but were minor enough that they could be transported back to Moscow.

The young man across from her sneezed, and it froze in the dark, a cloud of ice crystals falling to the floor. "I'm sorry," he mumbled weakly.

"No trouble." Even here, she held a certain authority. Her rank made her the officer of the hospice truck; the ill and wounded looked to her as their leader. Compared to the others, Spalko was quite well; she was the only person aboard the truck who didn't speak as if she had gravel in her throat.

"Captain Spalko." The young soldier croaked her name, sitting up on his elbows and leaning against the wall.

She lifted her eyebrow. "Yes?" she asked coldly. She had every intention of isolating herself from the other passengers. Her immediate goal was to bring herself and her child to safety. She had always found herself lacking in love and compassion, and she could not spare what she had for one more stranger who settled into her life. She had attempted to bond with strangers before—Natalya, Karov. She had always ended the encounters feeling hurt and grief, two emotions that could gravely impact her judgement.

In truth, she simply felt as sick as everyone else in this truck, although her sickness was more difficult to detect. She suffered from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; she was tired, hungry, cold, pregnant with a dead man's child, and, most of all, she felt betrayed by the universe. She wasn't one to put stock in fate, but she could not help but believe that the pitiful irony of her situation—that her baby's survival was a miracle, that she had beaten the odds and yet everything that could possibly go wrong seemed to go wrong, was the result of some grudge or punishment. Beating the odds left her more miserable than she had ever been, a victim of every battered wartime cliché on the planet.

"Captain Spalko, Damien Karov was your lieutenant, yes?"

She stiffened, as if in his absence Karov's name had lost its familiarity in her ears. Her own soldiers did not speak of him. Every soldier wanted nothing more than to be remembered, yet the fellows of every dead soldier would inevitably forget him, if only to cope with his passing.

"He was, before he died." If the boy didn't already know of Karov's death, she felt no guilt for breaking the news to him bluntly. He was in the back of a truck, sick and likely injured from battle. He had seen his fair share of death.

The boy's dark eyes hollowed, and his face fell, the hopefulness of youth beaten out of him. He looked perhaps fifteen years older than he was, weathered and war-beaten, his shoulders hunched with the care of a middle aged man. "I was stationed under him in Ukraine. I wondered where he had gone."

His words piqued her interest. Karov had said very little about his time in Ukraine, and she assumed that it was for the same reason she did not speak about the Petrov base. It was better for her to put those memories aside.

"Was he a good commander?"

"If he could, he buried the dead."

In a war like this one, the best commanders were remembered for two reasons: tactical brilliance and acts of humanity. Karov had been one of the best, clearly. She may have become a legend, but Karov had been a man, even when the war seemed to dictate they become automatons.

Spalko closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall of the truck. "That is something of a relief to me."

"Did you think anything less of him?" It was a challenge; this boy had obviously admired Karov. She wanted to ask his name, scour her memory for any mentions Karov could have made of him. She didn't ask.

"I was not under the impression that Karov had seen many battles."

"Our unit didn't see a lot of action in Ukraine. We had a lot more time to grow close, come to care about each other. So when one of us did die, it hurt much more."

No shit, she thought bitterly. She thought about Private Arman. She had left him gunned down in the snow and sleet, for winter to cover him up. She had left Karov in a field, still smoking like the barrel of a rifle after it's been fired. Part of her had come to assume the winter trees, standing like sentries over the dead with their branches bare as human arms, might bury them for her.

"Did you know him well?"

Too well, she wanted to say, and she couldn't decide whether it was the truth. They hadn't often spoken about their lives before the war; it was as if their childhoods had been no more than a hallucination brought on by chemical weapons, a dream that she had woken up from in the back of a truck, with a helmet and a gun in her hand. Yet she knew him as well as she knew herself.

"Well enough." She couldn't decide whether that was the truth either.

The boy coughed a loud hacking cough and lit a cigarette from his pocket. He pulled out another and tossed it to her with the lighter. She pushed the lighter back to him but stuck the cigarette between her lips for reassurance.

"Tell me a story?" the boy asked hoarsely. "About Lieutenant Karov."

"Why?"

"He was a good man, and there aren't many good men left in this war." He was right. Good was pushed out of them a long time ago to make room paranoid and alive.

"He once took a bullet for me. We were making our way to a new camp, and a German troop ambushed us. I would have died had Lieutenant Karov not been there."

"Is that how he died?"

"No."

"How did he die?"

She debated telling him the truth—the empty field, the unexploded shell, that single flash and how he had been reduced to ashes in half a second, all the intricate gears and wires that had once spun inside his head annihilated in the blink of an eye.

"We were on border patrol, doing the morning rounds. He thought he saw a flash coming from the tree line on our left. So we got out of the truck to investigate, and we found two young girls hacking through the bushes, the elder with a soldier's rifle in her hand. We decided to take them back to our camp until we could bring them home.

"Natalya, the older girl, told us that she had been playing in the forest when German troops bombed her town. She did not know if her family was alive. Her sister was too young to speak coherently. We were carrying them back to our vehicle when we came under fire from the small group of German scouts who were hunting them down. Perhaps three or four of them.

"Karov and Natalya were killed by a grenade. There was nothing I could do; they were dead in an instant. We killed the enemies, and I brought Natalya's baby sister back to camp. She will be home soon enough."

Spalko bit hard on the end of her cigarette and spat out the dry tobacco that seeped into her mouth. It was bloody—she hadn't noticed that she was gnawing on her lip as well.

"Did you bury Lieutenant Karov?"

"Yes. I buried him with Natalya." In the tall grass, at sunrise, their unborn child playing her like a drum as she kicked the embers around his body until she didn't have to see his scorched face.

The boy seemed content with her answer, his eyelids sagging. "Captain Spalko?" he murmured drowsily.

"Yes?"

"Do you believe in God?"

"You ask a lot of questions."

No. Not necessarily. She did not believe in anything, as the word believe itself suggested a leap of faith, taking something unproven as fact. She knew that unexplained events sometimes occurred, that sometimes the smallest of moments and the strangest of dreams took on a warped significance, like a coded telegram relayed into her head for de-encryption.

But she did not believe. She simply considered. The last thing she had believed in was the possibility that she and Karov might both survive the war.

No, she believed in nothing, and that was why she spun relentlessly, with nothing in this world to cling to.

The young soldier drifted into a troubled sleep, wincing between his snores. She was all too familiar with the nightmares that plagued every soldier who had seen the front. She shuffled across the truck and rested a hand on his forehead—he was fevered, dangerously so. She pulled his coat tighter around him.

She shrank back into herself, watching him shiver until she dozed off between bumps in the road.

"What did he say?" Karov's face was familiar, but she could see the changes it had acquired in her memory. After enough time not seeing him, his features slowly became more distorted, and though Spalko easily recognized him, she felt their time apart weigh on her shoulders. Karov had been working at the site where they had found Death, while she performed the necessary experiments. It had been a juggle, taking turns watching the baby when they could. Their work was so invaluable that their superiors could not terminate and replace them.

Spalko leaned against a pale grey wall, taking their daughter from him and cradling her against her chest. Across from her, Karov wore a hopeful expression. "What did the General say?"

"When the dissection and investigation of Death is complete, I have permission to search for its origin. It is believed that Death originated outside this planet, and its power can be harnessed as a political asset."

"Irina, humanity already has the power to kill; we've both seen it and we use it far too often."

Spalko shook her head. "Not the power to kill. The power to know when someone will die and be prepared for it."

The baby girl in her arms wriggled and laughed, her bright eyes flicking across the room with an innocent curiosity that only small children can possess. Her fist curled around Spalko's thumb, and she felt her lips part without her permission into a genuine smile.

"It won't prevent anything, though," said Karov, furrowing his brow. "Knowing when someone will die just gives you more time to agonize over its inevitability, wait for it to happen with the understanding that you can do nothing."

"During wartime, it could allow us to call in new troops in advance if we know how many soldiers we might lose."

Karov pursed his lips. "I don't like it. You're right—it would be a useful military asset—but I do not like this."

The baby in Spalko's arms whimpered, and Karov's eyes softened. "I hope she never chooses to be a soldier."

"My father said the same about me, when I was young. Then I grew up."

"What did he want you to do?"

She sighed. "I could have been a pathologist. I also could have worked at military archaeological dig sites. I could have skipped the war and done what I do now for four years."

"Why didn't you?"

The baby began to sniffle, and Spalko held her tighter, protecting her from the world they lived and worked in.

"Do you remember returning to Moscow when the war ended and feeling shocked at how people had gone on with their lives? Do you remember the glass wall that seemed to separate you from every person you passed on the street?" Some nights, falling asleep in their home, the war had seemed like a dream to Spalko. Other nights the war was the only thing that seemed real. Every thump was a shell, every creak an ambush.

The baby had become a grounding string. She was real; she had Karov's elfish features and Spalko's intense blue eyes. She was the vanishing point they had to build their lives around, and suddenly the wall had lifted. There was still a film, sometimes, that she looked through when she faced civilians. But at least the trees were no longer distorted, uprooting themselves to shoot at her.

Karov nodded. "Of course I remember."

"That is how I felt even before I enlisted." She was too calculating to build a life and relationships outside of war. Perhaps that was how she had fallen in love with her Lieutenant. In truth, the only people she had ever loved were Karov and their baby.

"You're going back to active duty one day, aren't you?" It wasn't a question.

"I am most useful there. I belong there; my skill sets and natural inclinations have dictated it since I was a child. When she is older," she pointed with her chin to the baby, "I will return."

"I truly hope she does not become a soldier."

Spalko only hoped that her daughter did not take after her. If she chose to become a soldier, that was that, but she hoped with all her heart it would be a choice instead of an instinct or an act of survival. Spalko hoped that her daughter was not born for the military, as she had been. She said nothing.

Karov pulled her close to him, his arm over her shoulders, and kissed her soundly. He was happy here, and so was she. Neither of them were settled, though, and she could feel it. Ever the romantic, the desperate need to be a hero again, to make a difference, would one day consume him. And she would feel the instinctual tug of battle, begging her to take back command and orchestrate a victory for her country. It was not simply duty, but she imagined it was the same feeling that tied house cats to lions. Right now it was simply overwhelmed by the unconditional love driving her to act only for the best interest of her child.

The floorboards creaked. It echoed like the click of a pistol in her ears. She stiffened and gripped Karov's shoulder to alert him, but it collapsed between her fingers. She pressed a hand to his chest, and it caved, sand spilling out the sleeves of his shirt. His eyes turned grey, his face sandy, and he crumbled before her eyes. She looked down at the baby she was holding only to find that wrapped in the pale blue quilt was only a pile of sand—it was softer than the sand at her feet where Karov had stood. Karov was beach-sand, that scratched her feet when she ran, and in her arms was a desert dune, soft and fine.

She woke with a start, her head snapping up, her hair wild in her face. Across from her, the sleeping boy had stilled. No coughs came from him. She scooted across the truck and lay a hand on his neck, finding no pulse.

He was only as dead as she had expected him to be by now. She wondered vaguely if her callused hands were poisoned, sucking the life from everything she touched. Natalya, Karov, and the young soldier with the infected wound.

This time, she shed no tears. She moved back to her corner, quietly enough that she did not wake the few others, who had somehow managed to find undisrupted sleep between the bumpy path and their own aches.

The baby kicked her, tapping on her from the inside, and, with a cautious glance around the truck, she smoothed a hand over her rounding belly. She glanced back at the corpse, its face slowly gathering frost in the winter night.

She was glad she hadn't asked his name.

Cheers, everyone! Hope Spalko made a worthy, appropriately sad return.