“It is,” said Samm. “But it’s also . . . I was stationed here, or I guess I just traveled through here, during the revolution. It was . . .” He stopped again, as if the memory was painful. “You know how back home, in the east, everything’s so broken, and run-down, and the buildings are all in ruins and overgrown with kudzu and weeds and everything looks . . . old? We’re surrounded, every minute of our lives, by the evidence of what we’ve done, what we’ve destroyed. But out here . . .” He paused again. “Look around. There’s not a house for miles, just a flat road that’s still in pretty good condition. It’s as if the war never happened.”

“So you miss the reminders of destruction?” asked Kira.

“It’s not that,” said Samm, “it’s just . . . I used to think the world was worse for what we’ve done, both our species, but out here I don’t think the world even cares who we are. Or were. We came and went, and life goes on, and the land that was always here before us will still be here after we’re dead and gone. Birds will still fly. Rain will still fall. The world didn’t end, it just . . . reset.”

Kira fell silent, thinking about his words. They seemed so pure, in a way, so unexpected from the Samm she thought she knew. He was a soldier, a fighter, a stoic wall, and yet here was a softer side, an almost poetic side, that she’d never known was there. She cast a long look at him as they rode: He looked eighteen, as all Partial infantry did, but he’d been alive for nineteen years. He’d been eighteen years old for nineteen years. But he’d started life as an eighteen-year-old, so did that make him . . . thirty-seven? The thought twisted her brain into knots, trying to figure out how old he really was inside. How he thought of himself, and how he thought of her.