Big D read the names himself.
All two hundred and eleven of them, standing at the edge of the eastern camp in the dark, while the canyon behind him glowed faintly with whatever was breathing at the bottom of it. He did not rush a single one. He did not skip one to save time, and he did not read them off a list, because somewhere in the last three hours he had memorized every name on it.
When he finished, nobody moved for a while.
"They held," he said finally. "Every one of them held the line they were given. That's what I want remembered. Not how they died. That they held."
Then he went back to work, because there was nothing else to do with grief that big except carry it.
---
The Six confirmed Maya's finding before midnight.
It came as a joint posting again, the second in two days, and it read like something written by people who had spent the last several hours trying very hard not to panic.
