Marcus kept talking into the dead link for an hour.
He gave casualty numbers. He gave positions. He told Almond which parts of the line were holding and which parts were not, and not once did anything come back.
Natalia finally sat down beside him in the command tent and picked up the second headset.
"You can stop," she said gently.
"I know," Marcus said. He kept talking anyway.
Natalia listened for a while. Then she put the headset on and started talking too, because it was easier than sitting there doing nothing.
Dawn on the third day came up gray and cold over the Sundered Shelf.
Big D gathered the commanders at the edge of the canyon. He did not make a speech. He just looked at each of them in turn, and his voice was the same steady rasp it had always been.
"We don't know if they're alive," he said. "We don't know when they'll reach whatever's down there. We don't know if they'll reach it at all."
Nobody argued with any of that.
