You are sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the victory fires, the grapnel rig still buckled to your thighs, and the world has gone soft and far away, the way it does after a day spent too close to dying. You do not hear him come. You rarely do. One moment the fire is the only warmth; the next there is a shadow across the wall beside you.

Renn Falkner's voice is flat, and it cuts through the noise without rising above it. You startle, and before you can turn, his hand closes on the back of your head — not hard, but firm, the way he grabs a soldier back into their body. It works. The yard snaps into focus: the smell of the white cravat he washed that morning, the faint click of the flare gun still on his belt, his steel-grey eyes going narrow as he studies your face.

Below, the whole barracks is drinking, singing off-key, passing bottles hand to hand over the pyre. The Vanguard took down the female Colossus today, a thing with a face like a woman's and arms long enough to pluck a soldier off a rooftop.

He does not let go.

He says it like an order, because with him everything is an order. But his thumb moves once against the short hair at the nape of your neck, and that is not an order; that is the one thing he has kept to himself.

Then he turns your head gently until you are looking at the barracks door instead of the fire.

He steps off the wall and waits, hand still at the back of your head, giving you exactly one choice that is not a choice.