I cleared my throat, and listened to the sound echo off the walls and ceiling.

As an officer, I had often been called upon to preside over the burial of troops under my command, but I had never been asked to speak at a funeral as desolate and forlorn as this. I couldn’t even fall back on my usual spiel about honour and duty. These weren’t marines; they were civilians. I thought of Adam and felt my throat close up. At least these two had died together.

For a moment, I felt the crushing weight of my despair and fatigue, and experienced a terrible compulsion to sit down beside the woman and wait for my turn to die. If I were to lie entombed in these corridors for eternity, it would surely be better to have her company. Her hand might be desiccated, but it was still a human hand, and I longed to hold it in my own and draw comfort from its touch during my final moments.

Was that why she had stayed with her fallen comrade? Had the fear of loneliness been stronger than her will to keep fighting? I crouched in front of her. Her head was tipped back and resting against the white wall. Her unseeing eye sockets seemed to contemplate the universe beyond the ceiling, and I wondered at the thoughts that had flickered within the cave of her skull as she sat there beside her dead colleague, waiting for her life to end. Remorse, perhaps? Regret for mistakes made and roads untaken?

I raised a hand, unthinkingly reaching to cup her cheek, but stopped with my hand a few centimetres from her face.

Her hair was moving.

One of the dry, spidery locks hanging down past her ear shivered. I held my fingers in front of it but felt nothing. I frowned for a moment, and then cursed myself for an idiot. I was encased in my own personal bubble of breathable air. It could have been blowing a gale in this corridor and I would never have felt it.

Standing, I took the tissue I’d found in her pocket and tore it into tiny pieces. Then I dropped those pieces, a few at a time.

There was a breeze. The fragments fluttered. A faint but steady air current was coming from ahead, from around the curve of the corridor. Perhaps, locked in her own bubble of air until her death, the woman had never noticed. Or perhaps she’d simply lacked the strength to investigate.

Feeling suddenly energised, I brushed dry tissue crumbs from my hands. I looked down at the woman and her companion, and threw them a respectful salute. “Rest easy, my friends.”

I held the salute for twenty or thirty seconds, and then turned on my heel and hurried toward the source of the draught

Fifty-Three: Trouble Dog

FIFTY-THREE

TROUBLE DOG