Mud first. Then the noise.
Lila didn’t know where her hands were until she felt them sink into something cold and thick — and even then, she wasn’t sure they were her hands. They felt borrowed, like she’d stepped into them half a second late.
Light strobed somewhere above her — not lightning, something harder, closer, arriving with a sound like the sky tearing along a seam it had been meaning to tear for years. A voice was shouting. Not words she knew. Not even a language, maybe — just urgency, stripped down to its rawest shape.
A face swam close to hers in the dark. Young. Terrified. Streaked with dirt. Mouth moving. And underneath the fear, Lila felt something worse: the sick, specific certainty that she should know this person. That she’d trusted him with her life before. That this wasn’t the first time.
She had never seen him before in hers.
Where am I, she thought. Who is this. Why do I already know how this ends.
Cordite. Wet earth. Something sweet underneath that she didn’t want to name.
A hand closed around her arm — and she felt the watch on his wrist before she saw it, a hard circle of metal digging into her skin as he hauled her down. And for one impossible half-second, under the noise and the mud and the world catching fire above her, she heard it.
Not a tick. Not the small, honest sound a watch is supposed to make.
A hum. Low and wrong, like something counting backward that had no business counting at all.
The world flashed white, then orange, then nothing.
She tried to breathe and couldn’t tell if the air even existed here, or if she was only remembering the shape of it.
Stay down, someone said. Or maybe she said it. She couldn’t tell anymore whose voice was whose.
The mud pulled her under, and the last thing she heard — closer than it had any right to be, closer than anything in a hundred-year-old war had a right to be — was a single word that didn’t belong in a trench at all.
Late.