“Focus on the inside of the bubble,” I murmured. It had been almost ten minutes since I’d felt the need to stress it and felt reasonably confident we could whisper without being overheard. “Not the bubble itself.”

“I can feel them,” Rain responded.

I nodded, holding my finger to my lips.

It was hard to converse, because a patrol walked a route around the rooftop. The group that had been out prior had liked holding the high ground, there was a box-shaped section on the roof that was higher than the rest, encompassing the top of the stairs and the door that led from the building interior to the roof itself. The old group had liked to camp out up there for the view it gave of the surrounding fields and the road that our team was on.

The new squad was more prone to walking the perimeter of the roof. The tension of it had me feeling nauseous, because some of them liked to shine their flashlights down. I had to maintain a state of combat readiness. Anticipating the next person, then making a mental note of any habits or things to look out for. By the time I was done that, the next person was on the approach.

The squad that was up on the roof now had ten people, but only seven walked the rooftop. Two more smoked up a storm, and a third fiddled with a boom box or something, the volume barely audible. When they had everything balanced right, it played a sports match, which didn’t seem to make a lot of sense given where we were, or when the teams were listed as Brazil or South Africa. A recording of a game from years ago, possibly. I halfways suspected the interest was in fixing the machine and the recorded match was just to be a constant source of sound that told them if it was working or not.

From the snippets of conversation I caught, one of the smokers was the squad leader, the other his friend. The guy who fiddled with the machine had been injured in a combat a while back, so he didn’t patrol.

Much of the conversation came from two soldiers who walked as a pair. Constant complaining. Eins and Zwei, as I thought of them. Their chatter was usually a good advance warning.