A shrill alarm blared through the room, metal sounds bouncing off metal walls. A uniformed man in a chair rolled a coin between his fingers reading omnes ut unum—he had no clue what it meant, and didn’t care. With a ‘thwong,’ the ceiling hatch flipped open and another man with a younger face climbed down the metal rungs of a ladder, jumping the last two onto the outpost’s grated steel floor.

“I take that to mean you couldn’t turn it off?” droned the sitting man, his words oozing with tired sarcasm. His younger colleague ignored him as he swung open a loose cabinet door, scanning for something that he knew he wouldn’t find. Then, he began to pace the room. His movements picked up a frantic air, the kind that comes with an uncomfortable and unavoidable realization. 

“We’re gonna burn in here.” 

“Jesus, T3. Don’t be so morbid,” the older man replied, feeling another bead of sweat stream down between his eyes. The stale air made his chest feel heavy, and it was already becoming difficult to breathe. 

“You’re not listening to me!” the young man cried out. “I worked in control, Seven, I know how long this takes! We’re only an hour out from base. If they got our message at all, they’d already be here!”

It had been exactly four hours since the outpost’s cooling unit failed, and three hours and thirty-seven minutes since the two decided to radio for help. Two and a half hours ago, the old dusty desk fan T3 fished out of storage began to rattle violently, four minutes before it shattered into pieces. Two hours and he started to consider the logistics of a journey on foot, though only as a distant possibility. He wished that command had left them a truck, a bike—hell, any vehicle at all. But the war was dragging on now, and a request for supplies deemed ‘unnecessary’ stood no chance. Besides, what would they need them for? The way their station was run, they never had to leave for anything at all.

Now they both sat still. The cadet’s face was tightly drawn, mind lost in thought. He pulled his legs up on the chair and wound his arms around them. Seven looked over his colleague with pity. 

“I remember my assignment in the Amazon,” he offered, waiting for a glance. 

T3 cocked his head to the side. 

“Nothing like this. Everything got wet—socks, hair, you name it. And it was hotter than the desert. We got stuck and stranded out there more times than I can count. Not that I can count well, mind you.” 

“What’s your point?”

“They’ll come. They always come.” 

Something creaked in the ceiling, filling the silence between them. That moment was uncomfortably long.

The younger man quietly replied, “But what if they don’t?” 

Seven thought he might say something, but only managed a sigh. The anxious sound of fingers tapping on desks filled the room, droning and repetitive. His eyes felt heavy. In a moment, he was back in the jungle, legs broken, waiting for a rescue that he thought would never come, water dripping between his eyes like a metronome. 

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

Another bead of sweat ran down the bridge of his nose, and he slipped into a dream. 

T3 first came to this ramshackle Saharan outpost from a cushy desk job in the N-Africa control sector. It was a tough transition. The rations were far worse, and there was nothing to do out in the desert but talk to your station-mates, or in his case, mate. At the start of every quarter a few mass-market paperbacks would be dropped in as part of their supply package—but the two descended on them each time like a pack of starving dogs, so that never occupied them for more than a week before they had to go back to talking. Seven had a hard time believing that anyone would want to make a transfer like that, no matter the bonus. Who would give up such an easy life for a stint watching dunes form in the middle of nowhere? 

As they spent some time together, though, he realized that it likely wasn’t a choice. T3 hated every minute of his new station. Evidently, though Seven never asked what exactly happened, his partner just wasn’t organized enough to cut it in administration. He found that more believable, but still surprising; after all, T3 was by far the most organized soldier he had ever met.

The young man slipped a ration-pack behind his flares and pushed them both deeper into his bag. Seven snapped awake, drenched in sweat. He watched T3 fish a sheet of paper out from their desk drawer, fold it neatly, and stick it into his coat.

“What the hell are you doing?” 

T3 jumped. 

“Oh, good. I didn’t want to wake you. It seemed like you needed some sleep.” 

In a swift movement he pulled out the sheet of paper he’d stored away and unfurled it over the desk, pointing to a large red marker. Seven’s eyes followed his finger along a set of strangely curved lines to a point labeled Perma-2.897, realizing as he shook himself awake that he was looking at a topographic map. T3 had furiously underlined the location of the permanent outpost nearest to their own.

“There is a transient base somewhat closer, but it’s in the opposite direction. I figure we’d have a better chance going someplace we know is still around. 897 is about 180 miles due east. We can make that in a bit over a week if we keep a good pace and travel by night. Here, look,” T3 gestured, walking away from the table to a large white mass of cloth in the corner of the room. 

“I found these thermo-tarps in storage. We can dig a well and string them up in case there’s nothing else to sleep under when the sun’s out.” 

Seven pictured himself collapsing behind a dune, his scarred fingers clutching handfuls of white-hot sand. The image made him shake. He knew what would become of them if they dared the journey—T3, for all his planning, had no idea what the desert does to a man. A bit over a week? 

By that time, he thought, the two of us would be nothing but bones. T3 seemed to sense his hesitation.

“Look, I know it’s a long way, but we really don’t have a choice. This building is a death trap. You know it, I know it—there’s no use kidding ourselves. What do we have to lose?”

Seven replied in a familiarly dismissive tone. “It’s a bad idea, kid. You’re just gonna get us both killed.” 

T3 seemed to lose his scientific patience, replaced with a condescending anger. “You aren’t listening to me,” he asserted. “This place is killing us! If we’re going to die anyways, don’t you want to go out fighting?”

“Fighting what?” Seven yelled back, “Sand? There’s nothing out there to fight. Why do you think they put us here—two soft-skins who couldn’t cut it where the real fighting happens?” 

He paused for a moment to collect himself, quieting. 

“Listen—a man doesn’t play the game all his years without figuring out that he has to lose someday. That’s the life I chose. If not here, it’d be somewhere else. I’m done fighting. I’m tired.”

T3 suddenly grabbed his head with both hands and yelled out. “Tired?! You’re dying! Of course you feel tired!” 

The intensity left both of them speechless for a moment. Seven felt a spark of that same spirit which led him to undergo the conditioning process and join the war so many years before. Back then everything felt like life or death, every thought or belief a sacred thing that had to be fought for—now here he was, facing life or death, and yet the old man still couldn’t find it in himself to care. 

“I’ve been tired for a long time, son.”

A sudden lethargy washed over the young cadet as he looked over his comrade with pity. Wordlessly, he gathered up his supplies and walked towards the front of their command post. Seven heard the mechanical whirring of the door. He heard the sound of T3 heaving his backpack over the threshold, yet still looked down at his feet. It wasn’t until Seven heard the sound of desert wind and sand crunching under boots that he found the strength to turn around and watch the only friend he’d known in years leave him to die.

The young soldier’s footsteps were buried as he vanished into the shifting sand. He appeared to Seven behind the clouds of dust like a desert mirage, a thing of the mind. In a moment, nothing remained.