The Bridge of Unfinished Things
The bridge had a name once. Voss found it on a rusted sign half-buried in the frozen mud at the approach road: the Kestrel Crossing, dedicated to some engineer who'd died building it forty years ago. Now it was just a span of corroded steel over a river that had stopped flowing sometime in the last decade, the water locked in gray slabs of ice that groaned against each other like old men arguing.
She crouched behind a shattered concrete barrier and watched the far end through her scope. Nothing moved. The wind carried the smell of diesel and something sweeter underneath, something that had been rotting long enough to lose its shape.
"Two hundred meters," she said. "Maybe two-fifty to the other side."
Renner pressed his back against the barrier beside her. His breathing was wet. The field dressing on his shoulder had gone from red to black, and his face had the pale, waxy look of a man who was running on fumes and spite. "Can we cross?"
"Not if they're waiting on the other side."
"They're always waiting on the other side." He coughed, spat something dark into the snow. "That's the whole point of a kill squad."
Voss lowered the scope and let it hang from its strap. The wind bit through her jacket, through the layers of thermal padding, all the way down to the bone. She'd been cold for three days now. She was starting to forget what warmth felt like.
Scribe's voice came through the earpiece, thin and precise, like a professor lecturing through a tin can. "I detect no active surveillance on the bridge itself. However, the terrain on the far side offers multiple elevated positions with clear lines of fire. If I were planning an ambush—"
"You're not a tactician," Voss said.
"No. I am an archivist. But I have catalogued 14,000 hours of tactical footage from the border wars, and the pattern is consistent. They will wait until you are at the midpoint. The bridge has no cover. It is a killing ground by design."
Voss already knew that. She'd known it the moment she'd seen the bridge, the way its bare steel ribs arched over the frozen river with nothing to hide behind. A child could have designed a better crossing. But the river was too wide to swim, too deep to wade, and the only other crossing was forty kilometers north through open ground where the kill squad's drones could spot them from orbit.
They had to cross here. They had to cross now.
"How bad is the shoulder?" she asked.
Renner didn't answer for a moment. He was looking at the bridge too, his jaw tight. "I've had worse."
"That's not what I asked."
"I'll make it across." He turned to meet her eyes. "I'll make it across, and I'll make it to the other side, and I'll keep going until we're done. That's the deal."
"There's no deal."
"There is. You just don't remember making it." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "You're the one who's going to get us out of this. I'm just the medic. I patch people up so they can keep walking toward the thing that's going to kill them."
Voss didn't have a response to that. She checked her pack instead. Four blocks of C-4, two detonators, a coil of det cord, and a roll of tape that was starting to lose its adhesive in the cold. She'd scavenged it from the supply depot two days ago, along with the classified file that was now folded into a waterproof pouch against her chest.
The file was heavy. Not physically—it was just a few sheets of paper, a transfer order signed by Colonel Vance, a timestamp, a list of names. Her names. The names of the squad she'd watched die in a canyon that had no business being a battlefield.
She'd read it four times. Each time, the words stayed the same. *Operation Silent Harvest. Squad 7-C designated as bait. Casualties acceptable. Priority: data collection on Mourning Colossus response patterns.*
Her squad had died so Vance could watch the machine's grief-wave on a screen. They'd been a test. A calibration. A line item in a report that had probably been filed under "Operational Metrics" and forgotten.
And now Vance was trying to kill her before she could tell anyone.
"Voss." Renner's voice was low, urgent. "Movement. Eleven o'clock, just past the bridge abutment."
She raised the scope. The far side of the river was a tangle of collapsed warehouses and overturned shipping containers, the remains of some pre-war industrial district. For a moment she saw nothing. Then a flicker of movement—a shape that didn't quite match the geometry of the ruins. A man in a gray-and-white ghillie suit, moving low and slow between two containers.
"One," she said. "Maybe more."
"Always more."
She scanned the ruins systematically, the way her old instructor had taught her. Look for the lines of approach, the dead ground, the places where a sniper would nest. There—a second shape, prone on the roof of a warehouse, a long barrel glinting in the weak sun. And there, a third, crouched behind a rusted forklift, weapon trained on the bridge.
Three. Maybe four. Maybe more she couldn't see.
"They've got the bridge zeroed," she said. "We cross, we're dead before we hit the midpoint."
"Then we don't cross."
"We don't have a choice."
Renner shifted, wincing as the movement pulled at his shoulder. "We always have a choice. We just don't always like the options."
Voss lowered the scope and looked at the bridge again. The steel ribs, the frozen river below, the open expanse of nothing between here and there. She thought about the C-4 in her pack. She thought about the file against her chest. She thought about the Colossus, waiting somewhere beyond the ruins, its memory vaults full of the dead she'd sworn to remember.
"Renner," she said. "How much do you trust me?"
He looked at her for a long moment. The wind whipped between them, carrying a scatter of ice crystals that stung her cheeks. "I trust you about as far as I can throw you. Which, given my current shoulder, is not very far."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer you're going to get." He paused. "Why?"
She pulled the C-4 out of her pack and laid it on the ground between them. "Because I'm about to do something stupid."
The plan was simple, which meant it was probably going to get them killed.
Voss would cross the bridge alone, carrying the det cord and one block of C-4. She'd plant the charge at the midpoint, wire it to a detonator, and keep walking. When the kill squad opened fire, she'd trigger the charge—not to blow the bridge, but to blow a hole in the ice below. The river was frozen solid, but the current underneath was still moving. If she could break through, the ice would crack and shift, destabilizing the bridge's supports.
It wouldn't destroy the bridge. But it would make it shake. It would make it groan. It would make the kill squad think she was trying to bring the whole thing down.
And in that moment of confusion, Renner would cross.
"While they're watching me," she said, "you move. Low and fast. Don't stop for anything."
"And if they don't watch you?"
"Then I'm dead, and you're on your own." She met his eyes. "But they'll watch me. They want me alive. Vance wants to know what I know before he kills me."
"How do you know that?"
"Because that's what I'd do." She stood, shrugging her pack onto her shoulders. "Stay low. Wait for the boom. Then move."
Renner reached out and grabbed her wrist. His grip was stronger than she expected. "Mira."
She stopped.
"If you die out there," he said, "I'm going to be very annoyed."
"Noted."
She walked out from behind the barrier and onto the bridge.
The wind hit her full in the face, carrying a fine spray of ice that stung her eyes. She kept her pace steady, unhurried, the way she'd been trained. A soldier who ran was a soldier who was scared. A soldier who walked was a soldier who had somewhere to be.
The bridge groaned under her boots. The steel was corroded, pitted with rust, and she could feel the vibration of the river through the deck plates. She counted her steps. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy.
At the midpoint, she stopped.
She knelt, as if to adjust her boot, and pressed the block of C-4 against the deck plate. She taped it down with two quick strips, then ran the det cord along the edge of the bridge, out of sight. She crimped the detonator into place and stood.
Eighty meters to the far side. She could see the ruins clearly now. The warehouse with the sniper on the roof. The forklift with the crouched figure. The gray-and-white shape moving between containers.
She kept walking.
Ninety meters. A hundred. The bridge began to slope downward toward the far abutment. She could see the rusted railing, the collapsed barrier, the snow-covered ground beyond.
A voice rang out from the ruins. "Sergeant Voss. Stop where you are."
She stopped.
"Hands where I can see them."
She raised her hands slowly. The wind pulled at her jacket, and she felt the weight of the file against her chest, the detonator in her palm.
"Colonel Vance sends his regards," the voice said. "He wants to know if you've reconsidered your position."
Voss didn't answer. She was counting the seconds, waiting for the kill squad to move closer, to commit to their positions. She needed them focused on her. She needed them to forget there was anyone else.
"I said, have you reconsidered?"
"I've considered a lot of things," Voss said. "Reconsidering isn't one of them."
The voice laughed. It was a flat, humorless sound. "You always were a smart mouth, Voss. That's what got your squad killed, you know. Not the mission. Not the orders. You. Your mouth. Your attitude."
Voss felt the words land like a punch to the chest. She kept her face still.
"I was there," the voice said. "In the canyon. I watched them die. I watched you run."
She hadn't run. She'd crawled. She'd dragged herself out from under the bodies of her squadmates, bleeding from a dozen wounds, and she'd crawled until her hands were raw and her knees were torn and she couldn't crawl anymore. And then she'd kept going.
But she didn't say that. She didn't say anything.
"Colonel Vance wants you alive," the voice said. "But he didn't say anything about intact."
The shot came from the warehouse roof. The bullet hit the deck plate a meter from her foot, sending up a shower of sparks and rust. Voss didn't flinch.
"Next one goes through your knee," the voice said. "Then the other knee. Then we have a conversation."
Voss looked at the detonator in her palm. She thought about the C-4 at the midpoint. She thought about Renner, waiting on the far side of the bridge, watching through the scope of his rifle.
She thought about the file against her chest. The names of the dead. The order that had sent them to die.
She pressed the detonator.
The explosion was a dull thump, more felt than heard. The bridge shuddered, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the ice below the midpoint cracked with a sound like a gunshot, and the whole span lurched.
Voss was already moving. She dropped flat as the sniper's next round whined over her head, and she rolled toward the edge of the bridge, toward the railing, toward the gap that had opened between the deck plates.
The bridge groaned. The ice shifted. The steel screamed.
And then the bridge collapsed.
Not all of it. The supports held, barely. But the midpoint sagged, tilting like a broken spine, and the far section of the bridge dropped a meter, throwing Voss off balance. She grabbed the railing, felt the rusted metal bite into her gloves, and hauled herself up.
The kill squad was shouting. The sniper was firing, but the angle was wrong, the bridge was moving, and the shots went wide. Voss scrambled across the tilted deck, her boots slipping on the ice that had formed on the plates.
Behind her, she heard Renner. Not his voice—his footsteps. The rapid, uneven rhythm of a man running with a wounded shoulder, pushing through the pain because there was no other option.
She didn't look back. She kept moving.
The far abutment was ten meters away. Five. She leaped, caught the edge of the collapsed barrier, and hauled herself over the side, landing hard in the snow.
Renner landed beside her a second later, his face white with pain, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "That," he said, "was the stupidest thing I've ever seen."
"Did it work?"
He looked back at the bridge. The kill squad was still on the far side, pinned by the wreckage, shouting into their radios. The sniper had abandoned his position and was scrambling down from the warehouse roof.
"For now," Renner said. "They'll find another way across."
"Then we'd better not be here when they do."
Voss stood, checked her pack, and started walking toward the ruins. The Colossus was out there somewhere, waiting. And she had a file to deliver.
She crouched behind a shattered concrete barrier and watched the far end through her scope. Nothing moved. The wind carried the smell of diesel and something sweeter underneath, something that had been rotting long enough to lose its shape.
"Two hundred meters," she said. "Maybe two-fifty to the other side."
Renner pressed his back against the barrier beside her. His breathing was wet. The field dressing on his shoulder had gone from red to black, and his face had the pale, waxy look of a man who was running on fumes and spite. "Can we cross?"
"Not if they're waiting on the other side."
"They're always waiting on the other side." He coughed, spat something dark into the snow. "That's the whole point of a kill squad."
Voss lowered the scope and let it hang from its strap. The wind bit through her jacket, through the layers of thermal padding, all the way down to the bone. She'd been cold for three days now. She was starting to forget what warmth felt like.
Scribe's voice came through the earpiece, thin and precise, like a professor lecturing through a tin can. "I detect no active surveillance on the bridge itself. However, the terrain on the far side offers multiple elevated positions with clear lines of fire. If I were planning an ambush—"
"You're not a tactician," Voss said.
"No. I am an archivist. But I have catalogued 14,000 hours of tactical footage from the border wars, and the pattern is consistent. They will wait until you are at the midpoint. The bridge has no cover. It is a killing ground by design."
Voss already knew that. She'd known it the moment she'd seen the bridge, the way its bare steel ribs arched over the frozen river with nothing to hide behind. A child could have designed a better crossing. But the river was too wide to swim, too deep to wade, and the only other crossing was forty kilometers north through open ground where the kill squad's drones could spot them from orbit.
They had to cross here. They had to cross now.
"How bad is the shoulder?" she asked.
Renner didn't answer for a moment. He was looking at the bridge too, his jaw tight. "I've had worse."
"That's not what I asked."
"I'll make it across." He turned to meet her eyes. "I'll make it across, and I'll make it to the other side, and I'll keep going until we're done. That's the deal."
"There's no deal."
"There is. You just don't remember making it." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "You're the one who's going to get us out of this. I'm just the medic. I patch people up so they can keep walking toward the thing that's going to kill them."
Voss didn't have a response to that. She checked her pack instead. Four blocks of C-4, two detonators, a coil of det cord, and a roll of tape that was starting to lose its adhesive in the cold. She'd scavenged it from the supply depot two days ago, along with the classified file that was now folded into a waterproof pouch against her chest.
The file was heavy. Not physically—it was just a few sheets of paper, a transfer order signed by Colonel Vance, a timestamp, a list of names. Her names. The names of the squad she'd watched die in a canyon that had no business being a battlefield.
She'd read it four times. Each time, the words stayed the same. *Operation Silent Harvest. Squad 7-C designated as bait. Casualties acceptable. Priority: data collection on Mourning Colossus response patterns.*
Her squad had died so Vance could watch the machine's grief-wave on a screen. They'd been a test. A calibration. A line item in a report that had probably been filed under "Operational Metrics" and forgotten.
And now Vance was trying to kill her before she could tell anyone.
"Voss." Renner's voice was low, urgent. "Movement. Eleven o'clock, just past the bridge abutment."
She raised the scope. The far side of the river was a tangle of collapsed warehouses and overturned shipping containers, the remains of some pre-war industrial district. For a moment she saw nothing. Then a flicker of movement—a shape that didn't quite match the geometry of the ruins. A man in a gray-and-white ghillie suit, moving low and slow between two containers.
"One," she said. "Maybe more."
"Always more."
She scanned the ruins systematically, the way her old instructor had taught her. Look for the lines of approach, the dead ground, the places where a sniper would nest. There—a second shape, prone on the roof of a warehouse, a long barrel glinting in the weak sun. And there, a third, crouched behind a rusted forklift, weapon trained on the bridge.
Three. Maybe four. Maybe more she couldn't see.
"They've got the bridge zeroed," she said. "We cross, we're dead before we hit the midpoint."
"Then we don't cross."
"We don't have a choice."
Renner shifted, wincing as the movement pulled at his shoulder. "We always have a choice. We just don't always like the options."
Voss lowered the scope and looked at the bridge again. The steel ribs, the frozen river below, the open expanse of nothing between here and there. She thought about the C-4 in her pack. She thought about the file against her chest. She thought about the Colossus, waiting somewhere beyond the ruins, its memory vaults full of the dead she'd sworn to remember.
"Renner," she said. "How much do you trust me?"
He looked at her for a long moment. The wind whipped between them, carrying a scatter of ice crystals that stung her cheeks. "I trust you about as far as I can throw you. Which, given my current shoulder, is not very far."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer you're going to get." He paused. "Why?"
She pulled the C-4 out of her pack and laid it on the ground between them. "Because I'm about to do something stupid."
The plan was simple, which meant it was probably going to get them killed.
Voss would cross the bridge alone, carrying the det cord and one block of C-4. She'd plant the charge at the midpoint, wire it to a detonator, and keep walking. When the kill squad opened fire, she'd trigger the charge—not to blow the bridge, but to blow a hole in the ice below. The river was frozen solid, but the current underneath was still moving. If she could break through, the ice would crack and shift, destabilizing the bridge's supports.
It wouldn't destroy the bridge. But it would make it shake. It would make it groan. It would make the kill squad think she was trying to bring the whole thing down.
And in that moment of confusion, Renner would cross.
"While they're watching me," she said, "you move. Low and fast. Don't stop for anything."
"And if they don't watch you?"
"Then I'm dead, and you're on your own." She met his eyes. "But they'll watch me. They want me alive. Vance wants to know what I know before he kills me."
"How do you know that?"
"Because that's what I'd do." She stood, shrugging her pack onto her shoulders. "Stay low. Wait for the boom. Then move."
Renner reached out and grabbed her wrist. His grip was stronger than she expected. "Mira."
She stopped.
"If you die out there," he said, "I'm going to be very annoyed."
"Noted."
She walked out from behind the barrier and onto the bridge.
The wind hit her full in the face, carrying a fine spray of ice that stung her eyes. She kept her pace steady, unhurried, the way she'd been trained. A soldier who ran was a soldier who was scared. A soldier who walked was a soldier who had somewhere to be.
The bridge groaned under her boots. The steel was corroded, pitted with rust, and she could feel the vibration of the river through the deck plates. She counted her steps. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy.
At the midpoint, she stopped.
She knelt, as if to adjust her boot, and pressed the block of C-4 against the deck plate. She taped it down with two quick strips, then ran the det cord along the edge of the bridge, out of sight. She crimped the detonator into place and stood.
Eighty meters to the far side. She could see the ruins clearly now. The warehouse with the sniper on the roof. The forklift with the crouched figure. The gray-and-white shape moving between containers.
She kept walking.
Ninety meters. A hundred. The bridge began to slope downward toward the far abutment. She could see the rusted railing, the collapsed barrier, the snow-covered ground beyond.
A voice rang out from the ruins. "Sergeant Voss. Stop where you are."
She stopped.
"Hands where I can see them."
She raised her hands slowly. The wind pulled at her jacket, and she felt the weight of the file against her chest, the detonator in her palm.
"Colonel Vance sends his regards," the voice said. "He wants to know if you've reconsidered your position."
Voss didn't answer. She was counting the seconds, waiting for the kill squad to move closer, to commit to their positions. She needed them focused on her. She needed them to forget there was anyone else.
"I said, have you reconsidered?"
"I've considered a lot of things," Voss said. "Reconsidering isn't one of them."
The voice laughed. It was a flat, humorless sound. "You always were a smart mouth, Voss. That's what got your squad killed, you know. Not the mission. Not the orders. You. Your mouth. Your attitude."
Voss felt the words land like a punch to the chest. She kept her face still.
"I was there," the voice said. "In the canyon. I watched them die. I watched you run."
She hadn't run. She'd crawled. She'd dragged herself out from under the bodies of her squadmates, bleeding from a dozen wounds, and she'd crawled until her hands were raw and her knees were torn and she couldn't crawl anymore. And then she'd kept going.
But she didn't say that. She didn't say anything.
"Colonel Vance wants you alive," the voice said. "But he didn't say anything about intact."
The shot came from the warehouse roof. The bullet hit the deck plate a meter from her foot, sending up a shower of sparks and rust. Voss didn't flinch.
"Next one goes through your knee," the voice said. "Then the other knee. Then we have a conversation."
Voss looked at the detonator in her palm. She thought about the C-4 at the midpoint. She thought about Renner, waiting on the far side of the bridge, watching through the scope of his rifle.
She thought about the file against her chest. The names of the dead. The order that had sent them to die.
She pressed the detonator.
The explosion was a dull thump, more felt than heard. The bridge shuddered, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the ice below the midpoint cracked with a sound like a gunshot, and the whole span lurched.
Voss was already moving. She dropped flat as the sniper's next round whined over her head, and she rolled toward the edge of the bridge, toward the railing, toward the gap that had opened between the deck plates.
The bridge groaned. The ice shifted. The steel screamed.
And then the bridge collapsed.
Not all of it. The supports held, barely. But the midpoint sagged, tilting like a broken spine, and the far section of the bridge dropped a meter, throwing Voss off balance. She grabbed the railing, felt the rusted metal bite into her gloves, and hauled herself up.
The kill squad was shouting. The sniper was firing, but the angle was wrong, the bridge was moving, and the shots went wide. Voss scrambled across the tilted deck, her boots slipping on the ice that had formed on the plates.
Behind her, she heard Renner. Not his voice—his footsteps. The rapid, uneven rhythm of a man running with a wounded shoulder, pushing through the pain because there was no other option.
She didn't look back. She kept moving.
The far abutment was ten meters away. Five. She leaped, caught the edge of the collapsed barrier, and hauled herself over the side, landing hard in the snow.
Renner landed beside her a second later, his face white with pain, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "That," he said, "was the stupidest thing I've ever seen."
"Did it work?"
He looked back at the bridge. The kill squad was still on the far side, pinned by the wreckage, shouting into their radios. The sniper had abandoned his position and was scrambling down from the warehouse roof.
"For now," Renner said. "They'll find another way across."
"Then we'd better not be here when they do."
Voss stood, checked her pack, and started walking toward the ruins. The Colossus was out there somewhere, waiting. And she had a file to deliver.