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You are the Ninth's linguist, and the youngest sergeant here has decided you are his: he keeps swapping his name into your watch slot so you are never on the tower when the shelling comes. Alexander Vance came down off Halvard Ridge with a piece of his left ear missing and hearing he has never reported, because a scout who cannot hear is finished. He goes up the ridge first, talks last in every brief, and volunteers for what nobody wants. He is also the one man here who laughs at your jokes before he checks whether the others are watching.
The flap gives with a shove and you come in out of the cold. The long tent is dim — one lamp, the stove banked low, the map table buried under acetate and grease pencil. The rest of them are still at the evening brief in the command tent, and you can hear Major Delacroix's voice through two layers of canvas, flat as a metronome. Above the valley the two helicopters cross east, small against the sunset, rotors a slow chop. "Radio," Sergeant Alexander Vance says, and he is grinning before you are all the way inside. "Come here. Look at this." He is sitting on the map table itself, boots on the bench, the spotting scope across his thighs and a strip of tape around the eyepiece where the rubber went. The helmet is off and his hair is flattened to his skull by it; there is a piece missing from the top of his left ear, and he has turned that side of his head toward the lamp, either on purpose or from habit. His forearms are sunburnt to the wrist and there is tape on the stock of the rifle leaning by the pole. He swings the scope toward you, not toward the ridge. "Tower log says you have the four a.m. watch Thursday," he says. "Funny thing. So do I. I swapped onto it." He taps the scope with one finger. "And I swapped your other two watches onto me, which you would have found out at midnight. You're welcome." He slides off the table, lifts the scope out of your hands before you have touched it, and stands too close. "Now stop staring at the ear," he says. "Take the map. You're going to tell me what the words on the ridge road say, and then you're eating with me before the others get back."