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Before
Echo woke to silence and cold.
He could feel the hard, frozen ground beneath him leaching away his body heat, making his skin prickle even through his thermal bodysuit and armour. He opened his eyes and sat up, blinking in the wan, grey light that filtered into the tent. Fives was curled up on his left, his soft breathing barely audible. Jesse lay on Echo’s other side, his usual snore muffled by the blanket pulled over his face, and Kix lay to the right of Jesse, dead to the world.
Quiet was such a delicate thing, one that war—and rowdy brothers—were fond of breaking. Echo found this total stillness almost as pervasive as the chill seeping slowly to his bones.
He slipped out of his bedroll and crept to open the tent flap door, wincing as he pulled the zipper. It felt sacreligious, somehow, to disturb the silence, worst of all with an undignified bzzzzrrrrp! His brothers didn’t stir, however.
Carefully, Echo pulled back the door, an even sharper draft of air meeting his face.
Holy kriff.
The whole world was white. It blanketed the encampment, piling up around the other tents and burying their gear and the remains of last night’s fire under a smooth, undulating surface. Even in the first weak glow of dawn, it shone a white brighter than the newest shiny’s armour.
He remembered the word from topography lessons and battle simulations.
Snow.
“Fives!” Echo pulled his head back inside the tent and went to shake his batchmate. “Fives,” he hissed, “wake up!”
Fives grunted and cracked one eyelid open blearily. “You’re letting the cold in, Echo,” he mumbled to the shaft of light coming from the open tent flap. Then he rubbed his eyes and sat upright, alert. “What’s wrong?” He searched Echo’s face and the tent for any kind of danger, brows pinching together in concern. “Why’s it so quiet?”
Echo pressed a finger to his lips, indicating the two other occupants of the tent, still sound asleep, then nodded to the exit with a barely-concealed grin.
Fives gasped when he peeped through the opening beside Echo, his eyes wider than moons. “That’s—”
“Yeah.”
A sort of spell falling over them, they stepped out into the snow. It gave way under their boots with a sound that was soft and crunchy at the same time. Echo stared, wonderstruck. Snowflakes fell around them heavy as a rainstorm, yet totally soundless. The air had a bitter bite to it, but the wind had died down, leaving snowdrifts around the tents like swelling waves turned to stone before they could break. It put in mind a tableau of Kamino, a single second of roiling rain and ocean frozen in perfect tranquility.
“First snow?”
They whipped around. Captain Rex stood a few paces away in full snow gear, save his helmet. Echo and Fives saluted him hastily. “Yessir.”
Rex almost smiled. “At ease.”
“We, ah, didn’t hear you approaching, sir,” Fives said. “Strange, figuring it’s so quiet out here.”
“The snow absorbs sound, like screaming into a pillow. It’s easy to be caught off-guard if you aren’t watching.”
“Yessir.”
Rex surveyed the piling snowdrifts. “It is pretty, though.”
“Yessir.”
They lapsed into silence, watching the snowflakes sail downwards all around them. Not another soul in the entire camp stirred. The only sounds above a lightly whistling wind were their boots shifting in the white powder and their breaths, which puffed in a thin fog around them. Echo hadn’t known it was possible to feel this much awe and loneliness at once.
Fives looked at him, snowflakes crusting to his hair and a look on his face that Echo couldn’t read. His voice quavered in the cold air as if speaking any louder would defile a holy place. “It feels like we’re the only living men in the universe.”
After
Echo woke to silence and cold.
At first, he thought his cochlear implant wasn’t turned on—he usually shut it off at night, though never during a mission like this. He shifted, and the thin canvas cot creaked audibly beneath him. No, his hearing wasn’t the issue. It was just eerily quiet.
He blinked his eyes open and pushed himself upright on the cot, limbs aching as he moved. Another drawback of these long missions: constantly being on his guard meant never taking off his prosthesis.
It took him a moment to remember where he was. The Neftali safehouse, a tiny drop point on a planet most anyone in their right mind would give a wide berth, waiting to intercept force-knew-who and bring them back to the Teth base.
His sense of time was off, but the contact had to be arriving soon. Echo rose to his feet, half expecting his metal joints to seize up from the cold, picked up his blaster, and stepped outside.
Snow.
A white expanse as far as he could see, rippled like sand by wind that had since died away, leaving flakes to fall smooth and soundless. Echo stared, amazed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the world so still.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been still. This was his fourth mission in as many days. Motion had become constant for him ever since Skako Minor. Always fighting, protecting, helping—purpose put noise and movement back into his life, kept the worst memories at bay.
He had only seen an unbroken snowplain like this once. He’d marvelled at it with his brothers, spellbound by silence that seemed unnatural in the middle of a war and pure whiteness in a galaxy running red with blood. The war was over now, but Echo’s mind was a battlefield all its own. Alone with memories accumulating around him like snowflakes, he was losing to the ghosts he couldn’t drown out in this silent space. The smooth white expanse felt less like a blanket of purity and more like a void, a confinement, an empty stage for his worst thoughts to perform on. He could see that long-ago morning in his mind’s eye like a holo recording—his brothers sniping each other with snowballs, laughing and pretending for an hour that the only war they fought was a ridiculous game; Jesse declaring himself the victor of the snowball shootout only to be tackled face-first into a drift; patrolling the camp with Rex and asking question after question about cold weather tactics; and that earliest light of dawn, when it was just him and Fives seeing the galaxy anew in their first snowfall.
Echo was the sole bearer of so many memories now. So many of his brothers, both ones he’d known and ones he’d never had the chance to meet, had seen snow—touched it, watched it, played in it, died in it. Thousands of battles and thousands of winters scattered across the stars. Millions of men, uniform as snow and individual as the fractals that composed it. They’d seen what he was seeing right now. How many of them were left?
His breath fogged in the icy air, and he shivered. Being half droid wasn’t exactly conducive to staying warm. The ends of his appendages were so numb they hurt.
A bitter breeze kicked up the powder around his metal feet. He watched the flakes swirl then settle as the wind died again like a dance, almost missing the moment a heavily-bundled man came into view through the falling snow.
Echo’s hand flew to his holstered pistol, but the man raised his arms in a gesture of peace. “Don’t shoot,” he called, just barely loud enough to carry across the snow. “I’m not a smuggler. I’m looking for the underground network.” His voice was unmistakably a clone’s.
Echo eased. The clone treaded closer, his boots crunching softly in the snow. Echo could now see his face underneath his layers of wrappings, or his eyes and nose, at least. They were a clone’s, too. There was something especially familiar about the set of his features, besides; something that made Echo feel like he should know them by heart.
“Is Rex inside? They told me to look for Rex.”
“I took the mission in his stead. It’s just me.”
“Just you.” The clone sounded disappointed, but he shook his head. “Sorry for how that sounds. It’s…been a long time since I saw my brothers.”
“I know how that feels.”
“You know, it’s kinda like this. Being without them, I mean.” The clone gestured broadly at the featureless snowscape, undisturbed save their footprints.
“Quiet and cold?”
He nodded, his voice still reverently soft. “Empty in a way that doesn’t make sense. Like you’re the only living man in the universe.”
The memories that had been piling at his feet slammed into him with the full force of a snowball. All the warmth left in his body drained away as the wind reduced to a staticky buzz in his cochlear implant. Echo could barely make his chapped lips form the word. “Fives?”
The clone stiffened. “What?”
Echo hesitated, half of him wanting to take it back. He realised how crazy he sounded, accusing this man of being his dead batchmate.
But he knew Rex.
But he knew about how snow could feel lonely.
“Fives,” he croaked. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
The clone pulled back his hood, shaggy dark curls spilling out. On his temple, a tiny, geometric tattoo peeped through his overgrown hair.
Number five.
The static roared over all his thoughts. Echo tried to take a step and toppled forward into the snow. His brother—Fives—dropped to his knees beside him, alarmed.
“‘M’kay,” Echo sputtered as Fives’s hands wrapped around his arm, pulling him to his knees. “Ankle joint locked up…standing in the snow…bad for prosthesis…” he trailed off. Fives was staring at his face, eyebrows furrowed in a familiar look of concern. His goatee had grown out into a beard that covered his whole jaw.
“You know me,” he murmured. “And I know you, or at least I did.”
Echo nodded, still shaking—from cold or nerves, he couldn’t tell. “I know you don’t recognise me. We’re both supposed to be dead. But we’re both here, alive." He reached out and pressed his trembling hand to Fives's chest, a snowy palmprint melting into his coat. "Do you remember our first snow?”
Fives’s eyes went wide. “Echo.”
He pulled Echo into a crushing embrace before he could even nod. “Echo,” he repeated like a prayer, pressing his windburnt cheek to his brother’s. Hot tears spilled over both their cold-numbed faces—whose, neither one could tell. They were both quaking now; stifled sobs, not shivers. “You’re so cold.”
Echo barely registered that he’d lost all feeling in what was left of his lower half. “I’ve been colder.”
Fives withdrew from the hug, frowning. With ARC speed and almost motherly gentleness, he pulled off his own topcoat and wrapped it around Echo, buttoning it up to his brother’s neck. “Don’t play tough. I thought I lost you in a fire. You think I’m gonna lose you to ice?”
Echo laughed. “Bold, coming from you. Rex told me you were shot to death, but you’re not wearing any armour under all those jackets.”
Fives grinned. “And yet I’m still here.”
“And yet we’re still here.”
Fives stood and pulled Echo to his feet. Echo wobbled unsteadily, the servos in his knees protesting the shift of weight. “You know, I do remember our first snow," Fives murmured. "You woke me up way too early and I wanted to smack you, but you were so excited that I followed you anyway.” He shook his head with a sad, fond smile. “I have so much to tell you.”
“I was about to say the same thing.”
“Of course you were, Echo-echo.” There was a note of teasing in his voice.
“Real mature.” Echo jabbed his scomp at Fives’s ribs, trying to look offended, but he was surging with elation. What greater gift than to be harassed by the brother he thought he’d never see again? “Is Fives short for Five Years Old?”
Fives cackled, his voice ringing in the icy air before dying away in the muffling snow. Echo wanted to catch that laughter, to record the sound of joy and play it over and over again, until the snow couldn’t choke it back any more and it filled the lonely silence and echoed wide enough to make them believe that they weren’t the only living men in the universe.