The ride out of Ragani ended the way most rides out of a battlefield ended: with silence, bruises, and paperwork waiting at the other end like a debt collector with manners.
The APC did not go straight as much as it bounced through broken routes, skirted active lanes, and took detours that suggested command still feared an Indie counterpunch. The engine noise stayed constant. The soldiers stayed quiet. Kinnear stayed busy. Adam stayed awake, which looked less like courage and more like a stubborn refusal to give anyone the advantage of catching him with his guard down.
By the time the vehicle finally rolled into Lakar, dust had dried into every seam of the SPI plates. Smoke clung to the armor like a second skin. I could smell emulsion on myself if I focused, faint but persistent, buried under the more acceptable odors of oil and metal.
Lakar Brigade Headquarters looked like what it was: a place built to survive a long war, not to impress anyone with architecture. Concrete blocks. Reinforced doors. Sandbag lines that had stopped being temporary months ago. Antenna arrays reaching up like desperate fingers. The kind of compound where you could feel eyes on you before you crossed the inner gate.
The ramp dropped. Soldiers filed out first. Two medics met us immediately, and the moment Adam appeared, his status changed from officer to asset that could not be allowed to leak out on the pavement. They moved with practiced efficiency, taking his weight, checking the bandage, asking Kinnear questions that sounded like they had been asked a hundred times that week.
Kinnear answered without ego. She gave them the facts, then stepped back half a pace and watched them take over. She looked tired in the way medics got when they kept winning small fights and losing the larger one.
The sergeant who had brought us in pointed at me and then at a waiting detail. He did not make a show of it. He did not need to. The rifles did the communicating.
"Command wants to see the anomaly," he said, voice flat.
I followed.
They did not march me in chains. They did not need to. The escort bracketed my sides at a distance that would have looked respectful if their fingers were not white around their grips. I walked with measured steps so nobody could claim I moved suddenly. The SPI armor helped with that. It made me look contained. It made them forget, briefly, that I could break their doors by leaning wrong.
Inside, the corridors smelled of disinfectant and damp concrete. The lighting was harsh and utilitarian. Somewhere deeper in the building, I heard the low groan of a generator and the sharp bark of a voice issuing orders to someone who probably did not want them.
They took me into a room with a metal table bolted to the floor and chairs arranged like a ritual. Two officers waited inside, both older than Adam, both carrying the sort of fatigue that made people stop speaking in complete sentences. A third man stood near the wall, not in uniform, with a clipboard and the expression of someone who believed himself immune to consequences.
The officers looked me over for too long. The non-uniformed man looked at my armor as if he could itemize its value in his head.
"You claim COG affiliation," the first officer said.
His voice carried the practiced neutrality of a command staff. It was not polite. It was procedural.
"Yes," I said.
"Unit."
I could have invented one. I could have tried to bluff a number and hope nobody checked. That might have worked for an hour. Then someone would have asked for a roster. Someone would have asked for a face. A lie would have become a problem, and problems became experiments in places like this.
"No unit," I said. "Not officially."
The second officer leaned back slightly. "So you are a mercenary."
"No," I said. "I fought Indie today because they were shooting you."
"That is not loyalty," the first officer said. "That is situational alignment."
The non-uniformed man finally spoke. "Armor does not appear to be COG standard. Rifle work suggests training. Physical scale suggests augmentation. Where did you get the suit?"
"Can't say," I said.
That earned me a look that was almost annoyed. Not because it sounded unbelievable. It sounded inconvenient. Unbelievable claims required more work.
The second officer tapped his fingers once on the table, a small sound that still landed like a gavel. "Name."
"Varmund."
"Family name."
"I do not have one you would recognize," I said. "Not from your records."
The first officer's eyes narrowed. "That is evasive."
"It is accurate," I said.
The non-uniformed man shifted his stance. He kept his distance, but his interest sharpened. "We have heard rumors," he said. "UIR experiments. Human trials. Emulsion exposure incidents in mines. You show signs consistent with extreme exposure, but you are walking and coherent."
The word walking carried its own accusation.
I kept my voice steady. "I was used. I survived. I am not here to join the UIR. If that is what you need to hear."
The first officer held my gaze. "What do you want?"
The bluntness surprised me. It should not have. War stripped people down to function.
"I want to live," I said. "I want to avoid being caged. I want to avoid being cut apart by curious men with clipboards."
The non-uniformed man's mouth tightened. He did not like being identified.
The second officer glanced at the first. "He is honest enough to be dangerous," he said.
The first officer ignored that and continued. "If we do not cage you, what makes you useful?"
The question carried no shame. It assumed everybody on Sera existed to be spent.
"I can fight," I said. "I can take hits that your men cannot. I can see farther than your scouts. I can carry wounded out of kill zones. I can do the work you need done when you do not have enough bodies left."
The first officer studied me as if trying to decide whether I was selling myself or warning them.
The non-uniformed man scribbled something. I wondered if it said asset or specimen. The handwriting would look the same either way.
A radio on the wall crackled. A voice reported casualty figures. Another voice argued about replacements. A third voice mentioned Ragani again, with the tone of someone speaking about a place they wished did not exist on any map.
The first officer turned his head slightly toward the radio, then back to me. "You arrived with Captain Fenix," he said. "He claims you saved his life."
"Yes," I said.
The second officer gave a small, humorless exhale. "That will complicate what we would prefer to do."
It was the closest thing to honesty I had heard since I woke in a pile of bodies.
They kept me there for over an hour. The questions changed shape but not intent. Where did I come from? Who made me? What technology did I carry? What did I know? Each time I refused to offer an origin story I could not support without sounding insane, the officers grew more convinced I was hiding something. Each time I insisted I was not UIR, they grew more convinced I was hiding something else.
At one point, the first officer asked the question I had been waiting for.
"Are you a creature from the hollow?" he said. "Or are you merely contaminated?"
I answered as carefully as I could. "I am human. Something changed me. Emulsion is involved."
The non-uniformed man's eyes brightened, and I watched the exact moment curiosity tried to become entitlement.
The second officer noticed it too. "We are not dissecting him here," he said, voice mild. "Not without a directive."
The non-uniformed man did not argue. He did not need to. He looked like someone who planned to write the directive himself.
They released me from the room without releasing me from custody. They moved me to a holding bay that had once been a storage space. A cot sat against one wall. A bucket sat near the other. Two guards remained outside the door, close enough that their breathing carried through the metal.
The SPI armor stayed on. They did not ask me to remove it. They did not have the authority to force it, or they did not yet. Either way, the suit became my only piece of leverage, and I resented how quickly I started thinking in terms of leverage.
Hours later, someone opened the door.
A lieutenant entered first, followed by Kinnear. She carried herself with the same controlled weariness as earlier, but her eyes looked sharper now. She had moved from triage to observation, and she disliked the assignment.
Behind them came Collins.
He looked less like someone who had just survived a battle and more like someone who had been told to keep surviving it, again and again, until the war ran out of patience. His gaze flicked around the room, then settled on me.
"They are still deciding what to call you," Collins said. "That seems to be their main talent."
Kinnear shot him a glance. "Keep it useful."
The lieutenant cleared his throat. "Captain Fenix is in surgery," he said. "He will recover. He asked that you not be… mishandled."
The lieutenant delivered that line like it had cost him something to say it aloud.
I kept my face still. "That is kind."
"It is political," Collins said.
Kinnear did not correct him.
The lieutenant continued. "Command is split. Some believe you are a mercenary. Some believe you are an experiment. Some believe you are both. None of them like the uncertainty. They want you out of the headquarters, preferably somewhere you can be watched without having access to sensitive facilities."
That sounded like exile with extra steps.
"What do they want me to do?" I asked.
The lieutenant hesitated. "There is an operation forming. A raid on Gralia. UIR staging and supply sites in the region. We need bodies that can take risks. You fit."
Kinnear's expression tightened. She did not like the idea of using the unknown as disposable muscle. She also did not have the power to stop it.
Collins watched me carefully. "This is how they solve the problem," he said. "They put it in a vehicle and point it at someone else."
"I figured," I said.
The lieutenant held my gaze. "You will deploy with the raiding element as an attached asset. You will follow orders. You will not leave the unit. You will not engage outside mission parameters unless directly threatened."
I almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it assumed control existed in a world that kept undermining it.
"I will not start fights," I said. "I will finish them if they start around me."
The lieutenant accepted that as close enough to compliance. He nodded once. "You will be briefed at dawn. If you attempt to flee, you will be treated as hostile."
Kinnear stepped forward half a pace, looking up at me. "If you go," she said, "do not make me regret stopping them from doing worse."
"I did not ask you to," I said.
"I know," she replied. "That is why it counts."
Collins shifted his weight, then spoke in a lower voice. "Fenix is not done with you," he said. "He will want answers. He will want to put you in a file he can open later. He thinks he can solve problems by understanding them."
"That is his job," I said.
"Maybe," Collins said. "Maybe it is his flaw."
They left me with that. The door shut again. The guards stayed outside. The lights in the corridor hummed.
I sat on the cot, armor creaking softly as weight shifted. The system stayed quiet. It did not offer me a menu for diplomacy. It did not offer me a purchase option for trust. It did not warn me about Gralia, because it could not. It only waited, like it expected me to keep moving forward until something died.
I thought about Ragani. About the potshot. About Adam's eyes never leaving me, even while Kinnear pulled the bullet. About the word deterrence and the way it had settled into the APC like a doctrine disguised as hope.
Adam would recover. Adam would leave the field. Adam would take his offer. He would go to the DRA and start building the Hammer of Dawn, because the war demanded an ending, and the people running it lacked imagination beyond escalation.
He would call it a deterrent. Others would call it salvation. The enemy would call it a reason to build something worse. The pattern would continue.
Command had decided what to do with me in the only way command ever decided anything. They had assigned me to the next fire.
Gralia at dawn.
I closed my eyes, not to sleep comfortably, but to rest the part of my mind that kept trying to map the future. The future did not need my help. It arrived on schedule.
When the door opened again, I would stand. I would crouch to fit through it. I would walk into another operation in another war, carrying a body that was not mine and a system that did not care.
If I wanted to live, I would have to keep being useful.