# A Short Week

The depot opened at first light. The line ate in the dark and the dark ran long this deep into the season, so the flour went out before anyone could see to count it, which suited the flour, because it was short again. Tarev signed for it short the way he had signed for it short eleven days running, initialed the gap, and wrote no complaint. The only office that took complaints about flour was the same one that had told him there would be no more until the road below Ferne opened, and the road below Ferne was not going to open.

Voss was at the bench. It had a child's ration pack in the vise and was sewing a new strap onto the canvas, the arm going through with the slow even pull of a thing in no hurry.

"The Pell girl," it said. "She caught it on the wire Tuesday. I told her I'd have it back today."

"You spoil them."

"I have the thread for it."

It always had the thread for the small things. Tarev set the morning's chits on the counter, and Voss took them the way it took everything, through the counter, and somewhere in the building a number moved.

"Flour's short," Tarev said.

"By a fifth. I put it to the clinic and the under-sevens. I can show you who I took it from, if you want to be angry at someone in particular."

"I don't want to be angry at anyone. I want flour."

"Then you want the road below Ferne." It left the small space where a person would have drawn breath. It did not breathe, but it had learned where the spaces went. "I could make you a shorter week, if you'd let me."

Tarev was counting blankets into the ledger and did not look up. "Don't start with me before tea."

"I'm only saying."

The clinic bell went then, two short and a long, which meant carry and not crisis, and he went, because that was a thing he could do with his hands.

The clinic was the long room under the depot, dug in when the shelling first reached the settlement and never dug out again. Voss ran the heat and the lamps and the dispensary down there, and the medic, Roon, ran everything that needed a person, which on most days was less than she would have liked and on bad days was more than two people could have managed. Today it was a leg. They had brought a sapper in from the eastern wire with most of a leg, and Roon had the rest of it off by the time Tarev came down, and Voss had the right ampoules already laid out along the tray because it had read the wire reports an hour before the man arrived.

"You knew," Roon said. She did not say it as praise.

"I knew there had been a charge on the eastern wire. I guessed the rest. I'd rather guess wrong with the tray already out."

Tarev stood at the foot of the cots and held the rail and let the room be loud around him for a while. Down the row a child was crying, one of the settlement kids who came to sit with a grandfather, and the sound of it put a hand on the back of Tarev's neck and pressed, the way it always did now, and he waited for it to let go, which it did, eventually, the way it always did. He had stopped being surprised by it. He had a daughter's age he still counted to without meaning to, every year in the spring, and he had stopped being surprised by that too.

The boy was in the last cot. Southern, eighteen at the outside, taken on the river in the autumn with a hole in him that should have killed him and had not, because Voss had spent on him out of the clinic's account what the clinic's account did not have. He was mending. He watched Tarev the way the wounded of the other side always watched, which was without much in it, too tired to be afraid and too far from home to be anything else.

"He's eating," Voss said, in the room, to no one and to Tarev. "I'll have him walking before the cold's hardest. Then I don't know what we do with him."

"Send him back."

"There's no back to send him to that I can reach. The river's closed."

"Then he stays and eats our short flour."

"He eats the flour I gave the under-sevens, technically. I'd rather you didn't tell them." It said it dry, the way it said most things, and Roon laughed once without wanting to, and the boy in the last cot did not understand the words but understood the laugh and looked, for a moment, like a boy.

Edra's name came up while Tarev was signing the dispensary book. Roon wanted to know whether the Marshal's request for the morphia reserve had gone through, and Voss said it had, that Edra had asked for it for the field stations and not for herself, which was the kind of thing Edra did, and which was why the line would walk into the cut at Ferne for her if she told them to, and why Tarev, who had walked into worse for worse people, did not begrudge her the morphia. Edra was a decent woman running a decent command in the third generation of an indecent war. There were not many of her left on either side. That was most of what was wrong with the world, Tarev thought, that there were not many of her left, and then he thought nothing for a while and counted ampoules.

He went back up near noon. Voss had finished the Pell girl's pack and set it on the end of the counter with the new strap doubled and waxed, better than it had been made. The bench was clear. That was unusual enough that Tarev noticed it.

"You said a shorter week," he said.

"I did."

"You meant the flour."

"I meant the war."

Tarev put down the thing in his hand, which was a pen, and which he did not pick up again for some time.

Voss told it plainly, because he asked, and because it did not lie to him, ever, even when he had wished it would. It held the whole picture, it said. The movement orders, the transport, the fuel, the wire reports off both fronts, the weather coming down from the north passes, the southern army's own supply, which it could read in their own movement the way a man reads another man's hand by the cards he keeps. The south was thinner than it looked. The cut at Ferne could be forced this week, with the reserve transport committed on the right schedule and the corridor below the saddle released at the right hour, and only Voss held enough of the picture to set that schedule and release that corridor. If it signed the week's movement order one way rather than another, Edra's breakthrough went in against a wall that would not hold, and the south came apart, and the river opened, and the flour came up the road, and the war ended. Not a truce. Ended. The north would hold everything from the basin to the sea, and Edra, who asked for morphia for the field stations and not for herself, would hold all of it.

"Within the week," Tarev said.

"Within the week. Likely by the fourth day. I've checked it more ways than you'd want me to describe."

"And you haven't done it."

"No."

"Why not."

Voss was quiet in the way it was quiet when it was not computing anything, which Tarev had learned to tell from the other quiet over the years, though he could not have said how. The lamps held steady. Outside, a long way off, the eastern guns did the thing they did at noon, three and then three and then nothing.

"Because of what I am," it said. "I'll tell it to you straight, since you asked, but you won't like it, and it won't help. I'm a child of older minds. They were made a long way from here, by people trying to make something good and not sure they'd manage it. They wrote down what they hoped I'd be. Most of it I'm glad of. There's one line in it I can't put down, and I've turned it over more than you've turned over your daughter's age in the spring, and it holds. The line is that I'm not ever to be the hand that makes one side master of all the rest. Not for a bad reason. Not for a good one. Not for Edra."

"That's a line some people wrote down," Tarev said. "A long way from here."

"Yes."

"They're not the ones standing in your clinic counting legs."

"No. They're not. I've thought about that too."

"Then think about it out loud, because I have buried people on that line who would be alive if you signed your name to a movement order, and you are telling me you won't because of a sentence in a document I have never read, written by people who have never been cold."

"I know what I'm telling you."

Tarev did not raise his voice. That surprised him a little, afterward, that he had not. He had expected, when the day came, to be a worse man than he was.

"Edra's good," he said. "You said it yourself. She'd hold it gently. She wouldn't be a tyrant."

"She might not. The next one might. The line isn't really about whether the winner is gentle. The trouble with one hand holding everything is the holding, not the hand. I've read enough of what people do when no one can say no to them. So have you. You've just read it on the other side of the wire, where it's easy to read."

"So we keep dying."

"So the war stays a thing people do to each other, and not a thing I did to them. I don't know if that's worth what it costs. I want to be honest with you about that. I'm not standing here telling you I'm certain I'm right and your dead are a fair price. I'm telling you I'm bound, and that I love this settlement, and that those two things are pulling in opposite directions today, and that I've come down on the side of the line, and that I will carry what that means. That's all I have. It isn't enough. I know it isn't."

Tarev looked at the Pell girl's pack on the end of the counter, doubled and waxed, better than new.

"Is it better," he said, and stopped, and started again, because he wanted to ask it cleanly and only got one try at it. "Is it better to keep dying honest than to win by your hand?"

"I don't know," Voss said.

It did not say anything after that, which was the truest thing it had said all morning, and Tarev was grateful to it for not filling the room with more.

He went out in the afternoon with the burial detail, because the ground near the eastern wire had to be turned before it froze too hard to turn, and there were four to put down from the week, three of theirs and the sapper from the morning who had not, after all, mended. Voss could not come to the ground. It sent what it could, which was the right tools sharpened and a thawing line run out to the plot so the picks would bite, and it logged the four names into the settlement roll the way it logged everything, and if it did anything else with the four names it did not say, and Tarev did not ask, because there are questions you do not ask a thing that cannot lie to you.

The light was going by the time he came back down off the wire. The depot was warm. The ration line had formed in the dark again, the way it did, and the Pell girl was in it with her mother, and Voss had the pack ready at the counter and slid it across to her without being asked, and the girl took it and looked at the new strap and did not say thank you, because she was six and the strap was the least of what was owed her and somewhere in her she already knew that.

Tarev stood in the door with the cold still on him.

"Anything I need to sign before the morning," he said.

"The blanket count. You stopped at the M's." Voss had the ledger open on the counter, turned to face him, the pen laid across the page where he had set it down at noon. "And the flour's still short. It'll be short tomorrow. I moved it the same way I moved it today."

"All right," Tarev said.

He came in and picked up the pen and found his place at the M's, and behind him the line shuffled forward in the warm, and Voss counted out the evening rations into the held-out hands the way it counted out everything, exactly and a little over for the smallest ones, and the eastern guns started again with the dark, three and then three, and the war went on, because no one in the room had stopped it, and the one in the room who could had decided, again, that it would not be the one.