Page 14 of The Words Beneath the Noise

He didn't argue. We walked through the dispersing crowd, past the huts and the manor and the guards resuming their normal posts, and the silence between us felt different than it had before. Less wary. Less weighted with mutual suspicion.

At his door, he paused, key in hand.

“Sergeant Hale.”

“Yeah?”

“The work I do here. The codes I break.” He wasn't looking at me, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. “People die because of it. Our people, their people. Every intercept I crack becomes an order that sends men to kill or be killed.”

I said nothing. Just waited.

“I used to think that made me a coward. Sitting here in the warm while others freeze in foxholes. Pushing paper while others push through mud and blood.” His voice was barely above a whisper now. “But lately I've started to wonder if it just makes me a different kind of weapon. One that kills from a distance, like...”

He stopped. Looked at me properly for the first time since we'd left the assembly point.

“Like you,” he finished.

The words hit harder than they should have. I'd thought the same thing, more times than I could count. The distance between pulling a trigger and decoding a message that led to an airstrike. The removal from consequence. The way you could pretend, if you tried hard enough, that your hands were clean.

“We're both killers,” I said. “Just with different weapons. The war doesn't care how the bodies pile up, only that they do.”

“That's a bleak way of looking at it.”

“It's an honest one.”

He studied me, and I felt the weight of that intelligence turned in my direction, analysing, cataloguing, trying to find the pattern beneath my surface.

“Goodnight, Sergeant,” he said finally.

“Goodnight, Pembroke.”

He went inside, and I stood there for a long moment, staring at his closed door.

Then I turned and walked back toward my own billet, and if my thoughts kept returning to grey-green eyes and the soft admission that we might be the same kind of monster, I didn't let myself dwell on it.

Tomorrow there would be interrogations. Security reviews. The fallout from Williams's attempted betrayal rippling through the estate like a stone dropped in still water.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, I cleaned my pistol by candlelight and tried not to think about the way Pembroke had looked at me when he'd called us both weapons. The recognition in his voice. The understanding.

Like seeing his own reflection in a mirror he hadn't known was there.

I finished with the Webley, checked the cylinder, set it within reach on the bedside table. The cold pressed against the walls of my billet, and somewhere outside, a guard's footsteps crunched past in the snow.

I lay down on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling, and eventually, long after the sounds of the estate had faded to silence, I slept.

FOUR

PATTERNS AND PEOPLE

ART

Numbers became a language more fluent than English somewhere around hour six of my shift.

Letters arranged themselves into patterns that sang in frequencies only my brain could hear, a symphony of meaning hidden beneath apparent chaos. My pencil moved across the paper in quick, precise strokes, annotating, cross-referencing, feeling the shape of the code like running fingers over Braille. This intercept was Wehrmacht, probably Lorenz, the encryption complex enough that it required every scrap of focus I possessed.

Which was fine. Perfect, actually. Because when I was this deep in the work, the rest of the world fell away. The guilt. The exhaustion. The persistent ache of loneliness that had made a home between my ribs. All of it dissolved into the clean logic of cryptanalysis, where problems had solutions and patterns revealed themselves if you were patient enough to look.