He always forgot how loud the civilian world was.
Not the battlefield kind of loud, not the concussive bursts, the cut-short screams, the constant rustle of bodies shifting in formation. Civilian noise was different. It spilled everywhere: the drone of traffic, the squeal of a train braking, conversations overlapping in messy layers, paper cups scraping pavement, boots scuffing tile.
It was chaos without pattern. It made Soren’s fingers twitch.
He stood beneath the concrete awning of the transit plaza, armor on as always. Heavy, angular, black plates broken by red medic symbols. Passersby gave him wide berth. Some stared. Some pretended not to. Armored soldiers weren’t rare around here, but fully kitted medics off-base were.
He didn’t move. Didn’t shift his weight. Didn’t check his watch. Patience came easy to him. Stillness even easier. It was the noise that gnawed at him from the inside.
A bus hissed to a stop behind him. A child cried somewhere. A pair of teenagers laughed too loudly. A woman argued into her phone with someone he couldn’t see.
Then, as if the noise suddenly parted, two men approached.
They weren’t soldiers. No boots, no fatigues, no chest rig. Suits. Black. Slim. Neat. Their shoes were too clean for the area, and their gait wasn’t the slow drift of commuters. They were pointed. Intentional. Moving like they expected him to stand his ground.
Soren didn’t turn his head until they hit a ten-foot radius. No weapons drawn; just badges, lifted in practiced motions.
“Staff Sergeant Gallagher?” the older one asked, his voice clipped but polite.
Soren gave a single, subtle nod.
“We need a moment of your time.”
Another nod. No words. His voice wasn’t real enough to waste yet.
“We’re conducting a routine pre-deployment inquiry,” the younger agent said. He looked barely past thirty, tie already crooked. “Just administrative. You’re not in trouble.”
Soren let that sit. His goggles hid his eyes, but the stillness of his posture made both men straighten unconsciously. Something about a man who never moved.
The older agent flipped a small notebook. “Can you confirm your unit?”
Soren’s voice rasped out through the damaged chords, distorted.
“Seven-four. Medical.”
The younger agent blinked. He hadn’t expected the gravel, the grind, the unnatural resonance. “Right. Of course.”
Another question. “Place of birth?”
Soren didn’t answer verbally this time, just held up two fingers, then tapped the dome of his helmet twice, indicating the internal ID chip. Military info was embedded. They could pull it instantly.
“Humor us,” the older agent said, gently.
“Virginia,” Soren said. No elaboration.
They scribbled. Flipped pages. Cross-referenced. Normal.
Then:
“Can we see your identification?”
Soren tilted his head a fraction. “On base.”
“You don’t have it with you?”
“Active. Tagged. You can search the records.”
The words came out mechanical, each syllable scraped raw.
“We did,” the younger one said quietly. “It brought up your role and unit, but not your civilian records.”
Soren didn’t respond. His silence was not defensive, just absolute.
“Do you have any form of personal ID on you? License? Passport?”
“No.”
“You’re off base,” the older agent noted. “Usually soldiers carry at least a card.”
A very small, slow shrug. Barely perceptible.
“I mean look at him, he never takes the armor off,” a lightly uniformed soldier passing nearby whispered to a friend, not even looking at Soren as he spoke. “Weird bastard. But he works.”
The agents didn’t comment.
The older agent continued the page-turn ritual, flipping through data he already knew wasn’t there. Soren’s file was a bureaucratic ghost. Clean where it should’ve been cluttered. Redacted where it should’ve been routine. Too quiet.
“Staff Sergeant,” the agent said finally, “we’ve reviewed your medical history. Or tried to.”
Soren’s jaw tightened imperceptibly beneath the mandible plate.
“There’s nothing past your training accident seventeen years ago,” the older man continued. “Then suddenly there’s you. Soren Gallagher. No previous names. No schooling. No fingerprints in any civilian database.”
The younger agent added, “Which is unusual. Highly unusual.”
Soren didn’t move.
“Where are you stationed, exactly?”
“Where they send me.”
“What’s your listed home address during leave?”
“Barracks,” He responded, finitely.
“You don’t go home?”
“No.”
"Why is that?"
"Classified."
Each answer was delivered with the same blunt, scraped tone. Not hostile. Not evasive. Just… final.
A few seconds of static silence passed. The wind whipped along the concrete corridor, flapping a torn poster against a metal bench. Somewhere behind them, someone shouted about a departed bus.
The two agents turned to one side and whispered silently to one another. The older one shook his head. The younger agent got frustrated. Then, they seemed to agree on something, turning back to Soren.
Then the older agent closed his notebook.
“One more question, Staff Sergeant.”
Soren didn’t tilt his head this time. He stood absolutely still, body locked inside armor he’d worn so long it felt like ribs.
The agent watched him and said:
“Where is Catherine Lawson?”
It was a soft question. Not accusatory. Not demanding. Just placed gently between them like a scalpel.
Soren’s reaction was immediate.
Not a flinch. Not a stiffening. Not a twitch. Just a voice: sharp, reflexive, unfiltered.
“Dead.”
Both agents froze.
The younger one stepped forward. “There’s no record of that. She’s MIA. Disappeared after a training accident. We have no-”
“Dead,” Soren repeated, quieter but firmer. A statement of fact, not emotion.
The older agent tried a different angle. “Do you know what happened to her?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Buried.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
Soren tapped the black armor over his sternum once. Hard.
The sound echoed like a coffin lid.
The agents looked at each other. This was no longer administrative. This was anomalous. Psychological. Their training didn’t cover soldiers declaring themselves the tomb of missing women.
“Soren,” the older agent said carefully, “we’re only trying to verify that Catherine Lawson is accounted for. We’re not here to accuse you of anything. We just need to know what happened.”
Soren turned slightly, letting the shoulder plates shift. It wasn’t aggression. It was alignment, like he was rotating into position.
“She’s gone.”
“We need more than that.”
“You don’t.”
The younger agent swallowed. “Staff Sergeant, listen. We can’t close a missing person case on a single word and if you don't answer our questions here, we'll arrest you for questioning somewhere you don't want to be.”
Soren stared straight ahead, goggles reflecting the plaza. “She isn't missing.”
“Then where is she?”
That question hung in the air like a guillotine blade.
And then slowly, Soren raised one gloved hand and unclipped the clasp of his armored collar enough to let the reinforced polymer loosen.
He tugged the scarf at his neck aside.
The agents leaned forward.
A latticework of scars crawled up the column of his throat; thick, pale ridges of keloid tissue where a bullet had ripped through flesh long ago. The surgical stitching had been deep and crude, back when trauma teams were rushed and underfunded. A jagged medical birthmark sat just to the left of the windpipe, a feature noted in Catherine Lawson’s original injury report.
The scars were not fresh.
They were not clean.
They were the kind of wounds that cleaved a life in two halves.
“This,” Soren rasped, “is where Catherine ended.”
He let the fabric fall back into place, snapped the armored collar shut, and stood straight again.
The younger agent spoke first, voice barely above a whisper.
“So… Soren Gallagher is-”
Soren didn’t let him finish.
“No. No is, no was. She is dead.”
The older agent closed his notebook very slowly.
Their questions were finished.
He didn’t wait for clearance to leave. He didn’t ask if they were satisfied. He simply walked past them with methodical, unhurried steps , the kind of steps someone takes when they’ve already buried the dead and are just tending the grave.
The crowd parted instinctively around him.
And Soren never looked back.
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