The fall

Nick's homemade bath barrel had sprung another leak, but this time his workmanship wasn't to blame. After all, when he had first hooped it together, he hadn't planned on fitting two people inside.

Fortunately, with their previous experience, they soon had the room cleaned up.

Wrapped in a thick blanket, Dahlia lay on Nick's camp bed, giggling as she watched him bustle about.

Nick plopped down beside her and flicked her forehead in exasperation. They laughed and tussled, then held each other again.

Late that night, thoroughly exhausted, they sat on the terrace gazing at the stars. Dahlia pointed at three stars of similar brightness, evenly spaced in a straight line across the night sky, and said,

"That's Orion's Belt. Can you see it?"

Orion's Belt, also known as the Three Stars of Shenxiu, consisted of the three most conspicuous stars in the winter night sky.

"I see it." Nick gently stroked her hair as he listened to her tell him about herself and her father.

Dahlia worked for the GRU. Every time she shot and killed a target, she gave the spent casing to her father. In the old man's words, by leaving the guilt born of killing in his keeping, his daughter could set out again unburdened.

But Dahlia's father had little time left. Cancer was ravaging his body, and several organs had already been invaded.

Their last meeting had been in front of her mother's gravestone. Her father had told her he was ready to end his life on February 14, if he lived that long.

"Papa said he was ready to end it all. He'd be buried beside my mother, and wherever I was then, I was to light a candle for him and look up at Orion in the night sky."

Dahlia didn't cry, but the tightness of her grip on Nick's arm said everything.

"So what do you do when grief swallows you?" she asked.

Nick frowned in thought for a moment, recalling an inspirational anecdote that had circulated online in his previous life. "Grief is like a ball inside a jar.

"Many people think the ball gets smaller over time, leaving more room in the jar. But in fact, the ball never changes size. It's the jar itself that grows."

"Damn, you sound like a philosopher." Dahlia frowned, sitting up to look at Nick earnestly.

"Oh no, I hate philosophers." Nick's expression filled with distaste, but a moment later, she pounced on him and pushed him down.

"But I like philosophers. Sexy, aren't they?"

"All right, then. I admit it, I'm a philosopher. The kind who's even crazier than Nietzsche."

"A sexy lunatic..." She left a hickey on Nick's neck.

In the morning, Dahlia got the breakfast in bed she had hoped for: a fragrant, crisp pancake with some unidentified wild greens in it, a few fried bird eggs, and a cup of instant coffee.

"Oh, God, you're going to spoil me. Just thinking about waking up tomorrow without anything this delicious is already making me sad."

Watching her put on a performance, covering her face and pretending to cry, Nick, who had gotten up early to make breakfast, was nearly sweet-talked back into an embryo himself.

He had to admit, when it came to making him feel good, this young Russian woman delivered in spades.

"Next time, I'll come over to your place. We can run another rope across and use a pulley to send things back and forth. I could design a basket, too..."

Nick began describing his ideas, while Dahlia kept her bright gaze fixed on him. Finally, she hooked an arm around his neck and stopped his next words with her red lips.

Eventually, the time came to part. Neither of them had carried out their daily patrol yesterday, and the gorge had remained as quiet as ever.

But they couldn't really neglect everything just to cling to each other. There was plenty of time ahead, anyway, and Nick was already considering what gift to take across next time.

Those little white flowers he had seen in the woods last time would be a good choice. He could gather some more later.

Dahlia attached her pulley to the line and clipped another static rope to her waist. Once she reached the other side, Nick could get started on his grand logistics plan.

Everything about her was wonderful, except that she was a little too thin. Clearly, she hadn't been eating well. He needed to feed her more.

After carefully checking her parachute pack, Nick secured a backpack to her chest and gave it a light pat as he reminded her, "The rest of that Potato Vodka is for you too, but don't drink too much.

"Alcohol affects the nervous system. As a sniper, you wouldn't want to find yourself unable to pull the trigger one day because your hands were shaking, would you?"

His words were rather fatherly, but Dahlia liked that sort of thing, and she gave him a kiss with a smile.

At first, everything went smoothly. Nick watched Dahlia slide toward the middle of the gorge, then start using her powered rope ascender to continue forward once she slowed.

But the next moment, disaster struck. A deafening blast came from the opposite side as a suspended proximity mine suddenly exploded. Several Hollow Men that had sneaked up the cliff fell into the gorge with strange cries.

Before either of them could react, another proximity mine went off. Amid the flying fragments, the static rope suddenly snapped, and Nick watched Dahlia plunge into the gorge.

His eyes stretched wide in anguish. Instinctively, he reached for the second static rope tied to her waist, but then he realized and shouted across to her, "Unclip the rope!"

This wasn't a movie. At this point, the rope at Dahlia's waist would only throw her off balance when she opened her parachute and slam her to death against the cliff.

Fortunately, she reacted quickly. She unclipped the rope the instant she fell and deployed her parachute in time. Before her figure vanished into the mist in the gorge, a canopy flashed briefly into view.

Bang!

Nick kicked open the bunker armory's iron door, grabbed a parachute pack off the wall, and strapped it to his back. Then he slung an equipment bag the size of a hiking pack against his chest and stuffed it with a powered rope ascender, magazines, grenades, C4, timed detonators, a rifle grenade launcher, and other gear.

Finally, with a Bolo knife and two M4A1s slung on his back, he charged out of the bunker without looking back and leaped into the gorge.

Nick didn't know exactly how deep the gorge was, but he remembered JD's demonstration on his first day, when JD had thrown a grenade with a ten-second fuse down into it.

Subtracting the second or so the grenade had spent in JD's hand, eight to nine seconds of free fall meant a drop of three to four hundred meters, which probably didn't exceed the gorge's width.

So now wasn't the time to consider how to get back. He could look for the broken rope near the western cliff later. The disgusting, terrifying Hollow Men in the gorge were the greatest threat. Dahlia had brought only a pistol when she crossed.

By now, Nick had completely forgotten about any mission in the movie world. There was only one thought in his mind: nothing could happen to Dahlia.