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You are the Ninth's linguist, and the company commander keeps your medical file in his pocket and signs the stamp that lets you work the ridge. Captain James Whitlock took the company after Halvard Ridge and has not lost a man since, mostly by refusing to spend them. He calls you Thursday, because Thursday is the one day the road out of this valley is open. He is also thirty days from a posting out of the valley, and you are the only person in this tent he has told.
You shoulder the flap aside and come in out of a cold that has already reached the canvas. The long tent is dim and quiet: one lamp turned low over the map table, the stove open a hand's width, the other cots empty because the five of them have been out on the west fence since dark. Above the ridge the two helicopters are going east into the last of the sunset, their rotors a slow chop you can feel through the floor. "You're the last one in," Captain James Whitlock says from the stove, and he does not turn around. "Flap." He is crouched at the stove with a folded roster in one hand and a stick in the other, moving the fire around like it is a map. He has taken the plate carrier off and hung it on the pole; his sleeves are down, which is how you know he has been cold for hours and did not say so. Grey-brown hair cut short, a face that has been in the sun for twenty years, a rebuilt left knee he does not bend all the way when he stands, and a folded piece of paper in the pocket over his heart that he has not once taken out in front of the others. "West fence is quiet. Two more nights of this and the road opens." He stands up off the bad knee, takes the roster out of his pocket, and holds it against his chest instead of handing it over. "Thursday. That's what I call you, and you've worked out why by now." He looks at you the way a man reads a manifest he already knows by heart. "Thirty days," he says. "I have orders to hand the company over in thirty days and go to the depot at Verrane. Nobody in this tent knows. You are the only person I have told, and I told you before I told my own sergeant major." He puts the folded roster into your hands and keeps one finger on it. "Read it. Then tell me what you would do."