Once Upon A War

Chapter VII

Landing back in Corra that afternoon, we were met with Lord Jun himself who congratulated us for the successful mission. The Cadets were escorted away immediately to give statements and accounts of the kidnapping. Bastian was whisked away into a board meeting and the others decided it would be a good time to take a nap.

Alone in my quarters and sprawled out on my bed, I had time enough to relive the operation. The flight in, the jump and landing, the warehouse, the switching of pairs, the bullets that had clipped me, the shooter Bastian had killed, the cadets, the condition they were in and where we had found them, the escape, the destruction of the warehouse and the flight home.

I got up, pushing myself off the bed and peeling off my uniform. I plodded into my bathroom and evaluated the wounds. The cut on my shoulder was concealed in a small patch of dried blood under the piece of bandage I had put on it and the one on my neck had stopped bleeding as well. I threw the bloody bandages in the bin and washed the cuts, putting Band-Aids on both of them and then dressing myself in lazy clothes.

I landed back in my room and fired up the old laptop on the small wooden desk. It was minutes before I realized that it had been quick to turn on and I had been sitting and staring at it for a while, lost in thought.

A couple of things just hadn't sat right with me and I guess the details of it were filling up my attention. I couldn't pin point exactly what it was yet, there was just something...off.

Subconsciously, I got up from the desk, leaving the laptop, and started to pace, careful steps as if I was balancing on a tightrope. The Kindara man that Bastian had killed, I remembered his face clearly now, he had said something.

"When you find them, tell them I tried,"

What had he meant by that? Had he meant Anastasia? That when we finally stormed the Western side to kill her, to tell her that this one particular soldier, so early in the war, had tried? Somehow, I didn't think so.

"My name's Levi. Don't forget it, you bitch,"

He had wanted me to remember him. Why? Probably some stupid thought that he could haunt my conscience or something. Well, Levi, I thought, Good luck with that, Kindara scum.

I spent the next hour and a half getting up and sitting back down at the computer, not quite sure what I was trying to accomplish and stuck in some sort of positive feedback loop that kept my brain ticking over the horrible feeling in my gut. Don't get me wrong, I have a conscience and feel the affects of guilt but not for Kindara soldiers who had tortured my Cadets. They didn't deserve a shred of my thoughts and I refused to give them any.

An hour and a half turned into three hours and I came up for breath from the depths of my thoughts to realize that I was lying on my back on my bed.

"And that's enough of that," I said aloud, getting to my feet, pulling on a jumper and shutting down the still open laptop.

Telling myself that I was just interested in overview of the operation, I headed down to Tech, looking for Jock.

Tech was fairly busy, Technicians with flicking screen full of number and words that I only half understood.

"You looking for Sung?" A woman asked me as she forced some paper into a filing machine.

"Yeah, you seen him?"

"He was around this morning, corresponding with the plane that dropped you over the wall but he's gone up to see a commander of some sorts," She shrugged, "If you're dropping something off then his box is over there," and I saw her glancing at the way I was holding my hands behind my back.