Firewall (Magic Born) by Sonya Clark

he hadn’t known her so well, he would have missed it, the look on her face that said she’d been caught unawares. The reward was news to her. “So you think I should surrender and make your job easy? Is that it?”
    “There’s nothing easy about this, believe me. Just being here with you right now, I’m going against my orders. That means I’m going against my oath as an officer. Laugh all you want but that actually means something to me.”
    “I’m not laughing,” she said softly. “It’s why you didn’t come with me. I could never make light of that.”
    The admission hung between them, weighting the air and adding to his resolve to figure out the right thing to do. There might have been ten feet between them but it felt like miles. An endless chasm with no way across. He huddled deeper into the blanket and refused to look at her. “I know how bad Gehenna was for you. The hell I climbed out of may not have been as bad, but it was still hell to me. The service made me who I am. I got an education, I traveled, I’m a better person because of it. Being a Ranger was the pinnacle of that. From the minute I heard of them, it was all I wanted.”
    “Dale.”
    He squeezed his eyes shut at the hated name and shook his head. “Don’t call me that. And hear me out. You owe me that much.”
    “Okay.” She dropped her arms to her sides, resting her hands on the counter.
    Everything he’d wanted to say for the past three years slammed into his head all at once. He tried to untangle it, put it in order so it would make some kind of sense to her. This was probably the only chance he’d get, so he had to make it count.
    “The service made me a better person,” he continued. “It made me believe in something bigger than myself too. That I could contribute to something meaningful. The way I grew up, there was no room for meaning. Just backbreaking work for shitty wages. You might make it to the eighth grade if you were lucky. Forget about getting out. Your world was the wastelands.”
    He stood, securing the blanket around him, and began to pace. “My dad was a mechanic and he could work on the big biofarm machines, so we even had it better than most. I know that. But he was sixty-three years old when he died and he never once set foot out of the wastelands. Never saw a city. He never saw anything. He worked and he drank and he watched TV and that was it.”
    “You wanted more.”
    “I ran away when I was sixteen. Did I tell you that? I know we talked about some of this before, but I don’t remember how much detail I went into.”
    “I knew you ran away but you didn’t say how old you were.”
    “Sixteen. I worked odd jobs, I stayed out of trouble. Enlisted as soon as I could. I had to work harder than everybody around me. I was skinny, malnourished. When they tested me they said I read on a fourth-grade level. But I could take anything apart and figure out how it worked, how to fix it. I had to fight to keep from being stuck in an engineering unit.”
    Tuyet left the kitchen area to sit on the floor close to the boarded-up window. “You know what I always thought about you?”
    He stopped pacing and sat next to her, barely a foot between them. “Should I be scared?”
    “I knew you believed in what you were doing. That a meaningful existence was important to you. That taught me more than you’ll ever know.” She canted her head toward him and grinned. “But you liked the fun parts too. You liked having a security clearance and knowing things other people didn’t. You liked the gadgets, the crazy assignments in places you couldn’t find on a map before getting orders.”
    He laughed. “My geography got better over time. Just like my spelling.”
    “You liked the prestige of that Special Forces badge on your uniform. The mystique. Having to tell people you couldn’t tell them what you did in the service, but giving them this big wink and a smile. I saw you do that a few times, when we’d be in