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With summer easing toward its peak, the evenings stretched long, the hours after dinner filled with just enough daylight that there was time to grow properly bored.

Boredom was a rare delight for the ranks.

There hadn’t been much of it to go around in the last year of the campaign, once the fight to liberate Fallon had started in earnest. They’d had downtime, of course, but not the sort where the mind could be idle, not when the forces of evil loomed on the horizon and every breath felt perilously close to being your last.

It left Kat uncertain how best to enjoy it.

She lay flat on her back in her bedroll, staring at the decade tent’s slope and wondering how her body could be so tired with her mind so far from sleep.

Most of the decade was out and about—Emory and Giselle training, Carrick and Sawyer up to their usual mischief, Gage and Brandt unaccounted for, but no doubt occupied.

Ziva and Elise lounged idly on opposite ends of the tent.

Across from Kat, Javi, the unit’s leading expert when it came to staving off boredom, was paging through a book he’d acquired in Palomar, some heretical pamphlet that he’d been arguing about with Gage at dinner for the past week straight.

Kat was right on the verge of asking him whether he really believed all of it—that the hosts came from the stars, not the heavenly plane, and that their true purpose in Telrus had been to mine some mysterious ore from the very place where the Mouth of Hell had broken through—when Ziva sat up abruptly from her bedroll, reached into her marching pack, pulled out a leather ball the size of a melon, and dropped it in Kat’s lap.

She pointed at the open tent flap and said, “Goal.”

“This again?” Javi sighed.

Kat stared down at the ball. The cracks and stitches across its surface were exactly as she remembered them, but she’d last seen this ball disappearing over the horizon more than a year ago. “You—I thought Mira—”

“Punted it a mile when she got sick of us turning into absolute children every time we played this game?” Ziva finished, flashing a bright grin. “Turns out Haileen over in the fourth found it on a scouting patrol.”

“And gave it to you?” Elise asked from the tent’s far corner, rolling over.

“Guess she must have liked me better,” Ziva replied, her smile gaining a diabolical edge.

Kat knew from experience that she had roughly five seconds to head off the spat before it became a full-blown incident. She snatched up the ball, tossed it out the front of the tent, then pointed at the matching flap in the rear. “Goal,” she said.

Ziva and Elise scrambled forit.

The rules of Goal were, in theory, simple.

It had started as an easy way to pass the time and burn off the nervous edge that tended to chase any hard day on the campaign.

Any opening large enough to pass the ball through could be declared a goal.

Whoever got the ball through it first got a point, declared a new goal, and sat out the next round while the rest of the players tried to score on it.

The game could go to a point threshold, but more often than not, it ended just shy of the moment the officers got wind of how out of hand things had gotten.

It had been over a year since the last time they’d played it, and not just because Mira had attempted to kick their ball into the sun.

They’d been on the approach to Fallon at the time, and they couldn’t have known that from then on, the campaign would only ramp up in intensity—that there wouldn’t be much time for frivolous games, and even if there was, no one would feel like playing.

Ziva and Elise crashed back into the tent, the ball squashed between the two of them as they each tried to pry it away, nearly trampling Javi as he dove to protect his books.

On the battlefield, the two of them were well-matched, Elise as stalwart and immovable as Ziva was agile.

Off it, turned against each other, they ground to a standstill—at least, until Javi tugged hard on his bedroll, pulling Elise’s footing out from underneath her.

Ziva twisted, wrenching the ball free, and pitched it out the rear flap before Elise could get in a word of protest.

“I thought outside interference was against the rules,” Elise panted.

“I’m playing,” Javi replied mildly. “I’m just very bad at it.”

Elise cut her gaze to Kat.

“Don’t look at me,” Kat protested. “I’m the reason Brandt won’t play until we start requiring helmets.”

“Which would take all the fun out of it,” Ziva said.

“Exactly.”

“Fine,” Elise conceded. “Call it.”

Ziva turned back to the fore of the tent, pointing at the legs of the rack that held their training gear just outside the open flaps. “Goal.”

Kat sprang from her bedroll, thanking the hosts that she hadn’t bothered to kick off her boots when she’d flopped down in it an hour ago.

Elise lunged for her but couldn’t make the intercept before Kat had thrown herself through the tent’s rear flap.

The ball had settled against the side of the adjacent decade tent, and Kat checked her momentum just in time to stop herself from taking out its stakes as she skidded on top of her prize and tucked it safely into the cradle of her elbow, pinning it against her hip a second before Elise caughtup.

She could have sworn she was tired—if not in mind, certainly in body.

But some reservoir within her had been unleashed, an extra bit of spark she hadn’t felt in…

well, it had been at least a year, hadn’t it?

Part of her despaired, thinking of all the times on the battlefield she’d needed just a little bit of push and hadn’t been able to call it up, but it was easily overwritten by the relief that flooded her, the knowledge that her appetite for play hadn’t been destroyed completely.

And she needed that push now, because Elise wasn’t holding back.

The shieldbearer fell on top of her, one arm threading beneath her armpit in an attempt to pry the ball out.

Kat rolled, trapping that arm in place as she bore her weight back and used the momentum to wrench herself back on her feet.

She staggered sideways, trying to round out behind the wall their decade tent presented and get a line of sight on the training gear rack, but before she could find her target, Elise tackled her sideways, and this time the ball popped free.

Elise tried to scramble away, but Kat latched onto her ankle before she could get clear and held on tight.

“Oh no, ” she heard from over her shoulder and glanced back to find Ziva sidling out of the tent, grinning wickedly. “Two beautiful women wrestling for my entertainment. Whatever will I do?”

“Depends on whom you’d rather fight for the next point,” Kat ground out with a smirk of her own, then pulled hard, hamstringing Elise’s attempt to get back on her feet.

With deliberate ease, she pinned the shieldbearer, getting herself up and clear of Elise’s shorter reach in the same move.

From there, it was a quick scramble to where the ball had rolled, and this time she had her line of sight.

The shot was long—twenty paces, at least—but Kat’s aim hadn’t failed her yet.

She loosed, and the ball sailed clean through the gap in the rack.

“Hah!” Kat crowed, though she reached down to help Elise back on her feet before the shieldbearer could start another argument over the rules. Now that they were out in the open, the options for her next target had expanded significantly. She had to make a good choice.

Another decade tent was too risky. She wasn’t about to piss off the rest of the Third.

Outside the infantry encampment was similarly perilous—she’d never live it down if she lost their ball to Mira again.

But parked at the end of the infantry row was the equipment wagon that carried their tents on the march.

Kat pointed to the gap between its wheels, and announced, “Goal.”

The word had barely left her lips when Ziva threw herself in front of the cart, blocking the ball as it whizzed past Kat’s ear.

Elise bolted after the rebound as Kat turned, just in time for a tiny blond blur to dart past her and kick the leather ball even farther away from Elise’s outstretched fingertips.

Though the action spilled down the road, Kat kept turning, and found Emory straightening from where he’d bent to pick up Giselle’s discarded training spear, his practice shield slung over his back.

“I don’t think you’re working her hard enough,” Kat called over a series of shrieks and the sound of boots scrabbling against the dirt. “Clearly she’s still got some fight left in her.”

“She’d run me off my feet before she lost the last of her energy,” Emory replied. His smile was warm, but there was a wary cast in his eyes as he tracked the game’s action.

“Don’t,” Kat warned.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be the hinge shield,” she replied, jerking her chin at the equipment rack. “C’mon, only Ziva and I have points so far.”

He set down the training gear. “I’m not being the hinge shield, I’m being appropriately cautious. It’s harder to get away with Goal under Mira’s nose in a small camp.”

“There’s a lot worse Mira could string you up for,” Kat said with a waggle of her eyebrows. Emory was already flushed from drilling, but even in the late evening sun, she could tell he’d just gone pinker. She backed away from him, spreading her arms invitingly.

“Not too close!” Ziva yelled, and Kat startled before she could register Ziva meant to the wagon. It was another hotly contested Goal rule, born of far too many bouts where someone picked an easy target and then camped in front of it until the ball came their way again.

“She’s fine! It’s ten paces,” Emory hollered back.

“Oh, so you’ll referee, but—”

“Actually it’s looking like nine,” he corrected.

Kat mimed a scandalized gasp. “My own battle partner, ruling against me?”