Toni peered into the fog and thanked the family gods for the concealment it afforded. He winced as he heard a cry in the distance and reminded himself again of how much of an idiot he was.

He could have left without warning, of course. In fact, every rational bone in his body had urged him to do just that. He had decided instead to leave a goodbye note upon his bed before leaving. The desperate voice in the distance belonged to his mother, his sweet mother who, possessed by her uncanny maternal sonar, must have gone into his bedroom to check on him. He had been hearing her voice for the better part of the last half-hour, calling for him.

Toni refused to run, however. Running was something a child would do, and he firmly believed himself to no longer be one. Even so, he hastened his pace.

The fog had Toni wondering whether he would soon be in need of shelter. Peering up was pointless, the unrelenting mist shielding the sky beyond, hiding any clues as to his immediate future. The fact that it was presently the seventh day of the month offered the only clue as to the weather he could expect.

At that time of the month, the sky could be counted upon to be overcast, with a persisting presence of fog, drizzle, or even light showers from the second to the eighth before the crimson sun finally made its appearance. It was only day three since the Great Rains had come to an end.

As he journeyed over the winding dirt road, he finally set his eyes on something that gave him a firm idea as to his location. Under his feet the road began to rise until, several paces ahead and at its highest point, a familiar ochre-red wall appeared to his left. He ran his hand along the rough wall, feeling the rock-like bark grating against his skin, feeling the looser fibers in the intermittent gaps giving way as his fingers scraped along. The road curved around the wall for quite a few more steps before finally breaking off at a downward slope. Toni followed the road, sparing only the briefest glance at the tree behind him, its massive trunk disappearing up into the fog. Today was no day to peer at the silent sentinel.

Toni's heart sank as he spied a more humble redwood at the roadside.

Leaning nonchalantly against it with arms crossed and a furrowed brow, Kaya Miura awaited her brother's silent approach. As he halted hesitantly before her, she uncrossed her arms and shoved her slim fingers into her coat pockets. She was wearing the brown leather jacket. He had worn it once, and knew that its pockets' interiors were lined with genet fur. It was an extravagant coat, quite appropriate for the tall woman who stood before him, appraising him with that critical expression he hated so much. He couldn't help but see his father there.

"So ..." she finally said, "did you hear your mother? Did you hear her calling for you?"

Silently he nodded.

"And?" she asked, the furrow on her brow deepening. "Don't you have anything to say?"

"There's nothing to say," he replied, despairing at the softness of his voice.

"Nothing to say? Nothing? You ungrateful little prick," she remarked quietly.

He grimaced at her tone, recognizing it for what it was: the light breeze before the storm. If he allowed her to get up to full steam, Kaya would soon be yelling loudly enough to trip mother's sonar and draw her in like stellar gravity. He hurried to cut her off.

"It's not a matter of being grateful, I can't be what you want me –"

"You hid your final marks from us," she continued. "More skillfully than I would have expected, I must admit. But using my password was a bit much, don't you think? Was there some hidden message there? Were you sticking your tongue out at me?"

Three days ago, Toni's final examination results had finally arrived at the Miura residence by conventional mail, removing from the household all doubts as to who had been tampering with the domestic server's electronic mail.

"Well?" she insisted.

"No," he lied. "I needed to make time until I had an answer from the Forces. I thought that if I deleted the messages, I –"

"You coward ..."

The word was kick to the gut, and it silenced him instantly.

"I know," he conceded. "You wanted to know why, so I'm telling you why."

"And I guess you realized we'd just think it was the money pit's fault, right?"

The Miura household's domestic server, affectionately known as the Money Pit, was more than thirty years old, having survived multiple ownership over the course of its existence. The forestation company his father had bought it from had neglected to entirely clear the computer's memory banks and so, once reconnected to the grid at its new place of residence, it had showed some entrepreneurial spirit, acquiring countless seedlings of several tree species to the detriment of their bank account. His opportunistic mother had made the best of the mistake and quietly set to work, planting the seedlings around their farm's perimeter and tasking Toni to care for them until they found their footing in the soil.

The computer was subsequently lobotomized, although its reliability suffered a nosedive as a result. It was, in fact, the family's lack of confidence in their connection to the General Civilian Network that had allowed him to get away with his deception for so long.

"Yeah, I guess so. I also knew that without mom's or dad's authentication codes, Southwood would just find another way to send the letters. I just didn't expect it to be so soon."

"Dad threatened the school, Leiben varsity and the GCN employees with prosecution, he kept calling them incompetent. He had to call them back and apologize!" she said with rising anger.

"I know, I was there when he made the call ..."

"You're a worm, you know that? You've brought dishonor to our –"

"This is the problem, right here ..." he muttered under his breath as dull anger began to fester.

"What? What did you say, shrimp? You sure you want a piece of me?" she challenged.

"I won't ever be anything like this."

"What?"

"I said I won't ever be anything like this! You step on me. Father steps on me –"

"You screw up, that's –"

"Let me speak!" he spat.

There was enough anger pressed into those words to give her pause. She watched him coolly, her expression momentarily subdued.

"I don't care if I screw up!" he continued, speaking as loudly as he dared. "From now on I'll screw up on my terms. Where I'm going I won't have this insane family to tear me up from the inside out!"

"No. You'll just have some drill instructor to do that for us! You think we were hard on you? Wait until you get a load of them! They'll break your fragile heart and send you home crying," she finished with a laugh.

"No, they won't," he countered with certainty. "I can take them on because they're not family, which means I'll be free to hate them without having to feel ashamed about it. And even if I don't make it somehow, you shouldn't stand around waiting for me to return. If I fail, I'll just walk into the wild until I find a research hub out there. I don't care to return even if it means within a week I'll be eating the bark off of trees. What I feel for all of you now is the worst kind of hate. I've been trying to repress this, but the feeling just won't go away ..."

His words seemed to have made an impression on his older sister. Kaya leaned against the redwood again and listened to the forest sounds, or maybe for some clue as to his mother's whereabouts. Her anger appeared to have abated, and there was a hint of doubt on her features, although perhaps that was just a trick of shadows.

"What we have here is a failure to communicate," she finally said. "I don't really care whether you hate me or not. My conscience is clear on that point. But you might want to reconsider those feelings in relation to Sarah. She's attached to you, and your leaving's going to leave a mark there that might –"

"Go to hell. I knew you were gonna pull the Sarah Card out sooner or later. She'll do fine. She's got two older sisters to take care of her, besides mother. As for me, I'm eighteen years old, my studies are done and I've been accepted into MEWAC."

"Mewhat?"

"MEWAC. Mechanized Warfare Corps. I'm on my way there now."

"On foot?"

"It's not that far away ..."

A slow smile slowly began to spread across her face.

"So you want to break out into the world and be independent. You want to be autonomous, a great warrior, whatever. And you'll be within walking distance of the farm? Don't overexert yourself there, soldier."

As he always tended to do in such moments, Toni wondered whether his sister loved him.

"So tell me about this MEWAC," she demanded.

"It's ... It's a sort of fusion of old infantry and cavalry units from the Henderson and Kumato research hubs. Its home-base is the Adamastor warehouse."

"That a very big aquarium for such a small fish," she remarked more to herself than to him.

For the briefest of moments, he suddenly wasn't too keen on getting there. Then he remembered what had drawn him to MEWAC in the first place; it was the outfit to join if one wanted to drive a Hammerhead Suit.

"What about the Military Academy? It might be a bit much for you, but at least dad might respect you a little more."

Toni grimaced.

"I applied for both the MA and the Army Sergeant School. The Academy didn't even bother to reply, the Sergeant School just sent me the application form for MEWAC. I filled it in and got an answer yesterday."

"You mean I got an answer yesterday. You've been using my user account, I checked the activity log."

"I knew mom was checking up on mine, so ... yes."

"Wonderful. And their reply?"

Toni grudgingly handed his sister the printed sheet. Her eyebrows slowly rose as she studied the document.

"Two spelling mistakes ..." she observed distastefully. "Anyway, it says incorporation dependent upon approval. Which means you haven't even been approved yet. To an outfit whose soldiers apparently don't know how to spell ..."

She handed the sheet back to Toni with disdain and he refolded it, trying not to let his feelings show. He had already been painfully aware of what she had said. He wondered whether soon he really would be eating the bark off trees.

"I have to go," he finally said.

"Sure. I wouldn't want to keep you from abandoning your family. However, mother told me that if I chanced to come across you, it was my solemn responsibility to warn you to inform base medical services about your folic acid deficiency."

"My – what?"

"Yes, your folic acid deficiency. She never bothered to tell us about it, but she's been supplementing our meals with the stuff, it apparently runs in her side of the family. You can be sure the canteens won't be supplementing your meals, so you'll have to inform the medical department about that."

Toni was dubious.

"Does that even exist? I'm sure as hell not going to hang myself by the tongue at medical, Kaya. Goodbye," he muttered as he skirted around his sister, giving her a wide berth.

"That's just fine, then, I'm sure you'll be getting all the supplementation you need when you're eating the bark off trees. I heard they've got a lot of folic acid," she taunted, rubbing the redwood beside her.

It took him only a dozen steps to lose her in the fog.

*****

The sounds of the forest were beginning to make themselves heard. Toni checked his digital watch; it read a quarter past four in the morning. But of course the critters didn't know that, and so they kept to whatever timetable they had figured out for themselves. By the looks of it, at least some squirrels had decided it was daytime, and he could see a pair of them foraging among the roots of a Tanoak to his left. He wondered for the millionth time what true night might be like.

Close your eyes and you'll know, his father had joked the first time Toni asked that question.

He had learned to never expect a straight answer from his father, and had long suspected that that was a treatment the old man reserved only for his son. He felt relieved all over again to be walking away from Mushima farm. His encounter with Kaya had only strengthened his resolve.

He increased the length of his stride, dreading to be late for his first encounter with military life. His backpack felt heavier, and he had begun to switch it from one shoulder to the other more often. His surroundings were becoming noisier. Birds chirped musically as some began to take flight, and at last it became clear to him that the forest had decided it was daytime. Nature's dawn had finally arrived.

Despite everything he had been taught about Nature's adaptation to his home planet, Toni still found its biological clock fascinating. In the complete absence of day-night cycles, the forests had adopted their own circadian rhythm of about twenty two hours, although the cycle-length happened to vary depending on the time of month. On more than one class excursion out to the groves, Toni and his primary-school mates had been instructed to sit silently and listen to the forest as it woke. It was a rare day when Nature's Dawn coincided with the chronological one.

But Nature's Dawn was not a simultaneous continent-wide event. It progressed in waves, the gradual increase in wildlife activity propagating across the countryside like a planet-wide Mexican wave. That wave moved along at over a hundred kilometers per hour and was eleven hundred kilometers deep, sometimes taking more than two weeks to make a full circuit around the Thaumantian supercontinent's arid center. There were never less than twelve such dawn waves in motion at any time, although very rarely dawns fused, or spontaneously emerged from between sister waves that were unusually far apart, or even swirled and eddied over vast mountain ranges and other geographical features. Once faced with a time-lapse simulation of the event on a continent-wide scale, it had appeared to Toni as if a giant hypnotic eye was hard at work, trying to bewitch him.

The tree-roots under his feet had become so densely intermingled that he was having difficulty keeping his footing. The road had since been demoted to a long disused path, but it was already too late to think about turning back. Besides, there was supposed to be nothing else out there except for the base. He maintained his heading, swallowing his anxiety as the minutes passed by.

Half an hour later, the road promisingly began to look well-traveled again, and every once in a while he would find a dirt path leading off it, wide enough for a single column of men to travel through. Visibility had also begun to improve and Toni could see farther out around him. He groaned inwardly, knowing that it was now only a matter of time before it began to rain. He kept following the dirt road until finally he spied something that made his heart leap. He took a quick look at his watch: it was a quarter to six.

Two hundred meters down an arrow-straight paved road, there was an ornate wrought-iron military gate with a solitary black sentry box standing beside it. To the left was a white-washed wall of about a man's height, and it led off into the forest without any end in sight. A wall on the other side led off diagonally into the forest.

After an exhilarating sprint, Toni came to a skidding halt in front of the gate. A quick look at the sentry box provided him with yet another setback; it was quite empty.

The gate must open at six o'clock sharp, he finally realized.

The avian chirping slowly grew to become a nuisance, and Toni saw a number and variety of birds beyond count in flight, or pecking along the ground in ever closer proximity to him as he rested on a rock with his pack beside him.

As Toni tried unsuccessfully to attract the attention of several marauding crows, the long expected drizzle finally began to fall, reducing visibility again as well as chilling Toni to the bone. He removed an oversized jersey from his pack and used it to cover his shoulders like a cloak before perching a wide-brimmed farmer's hat on his head, an accessory as useful to keep his head dry as to prevent the birds overhead from painting a target on his crown.

The minutes ticked slowly away and, to Toni's growing bewilderment, not a single recruit showed up at the gate.

He checked his watch again. It was a quarter past the hour, and that undoubtedly meant he was late. Anxiety lurched forwards and took center-stage in his heart, reminding him in exquisite detail of the shame that awaited him were he to fail.

He walked over to the gate and gave it a long, hard stare. He then shifted his weight back and launched himself forward, sending a boot against the gate in frustration. The sudden impact of work-boot against iron produced a resounding metallic clang.

To Toni's utter surprise, the sentinel box to his left shuddered violently, and a tall figure enshrouded in a black cloth suddenly jumped out, only to collapse to the ground with a thud.

"Uff! HALT! WHO GOES THERE?" the figure bellowed loudly, trying to stand as it did so. It finally managed to free itself from its covering and a compact-looking rifle fell clattering to the ground at his feet.

A crack trooper he certainly wasn't. Toni suppressed the urge to face-palm as the soldier quickly gathered the rifle up with spider-like arms. He wore a vomit-green uniform a little short at his arms and legs, which made some sense, seeing as his extremities were a little long for the body he had been graced with. The expression on the sentinel's face as he spotted the newcomer summed his intellect up nicely.

"Oh, for the love of –" The soldier coughed twice and then spat. Composing himself, he turned to Toni.

"Hell, you had me thinking the Lieutie had caught me at it again!" he gasped with relief.

"Hey ..." Toni said, "I thought there was no one in there ..."

"Oh, just doing the curtain routine. Get some sleep without the critters bothering me. If I knew Parkinson had let someone out, I would've been expecting you. So, ya want in?" He asked, hooking his thumb towards the gate.

"I'm here to be incorporated," Toni stated bluntly.

The sentinel stood there for what seemed like a long time, studying Toni anew.

"You're a ... a rook?"

"Uh ... yes, I guess so. Listen, the sheet says oh-six-hundred and I'm already fifteen minutes late ..."

The sentinel quickly checked his watch, and then marched over to him and put his hand out. Toni shook it, taking note that the soldier possessed retard strength.

"I'm Derek Rooney, but everyone calls me Stick. Get your gear, I'm gonna open the gate!"

"Toni. Thanks."

Before long Toni found himself inside a military base for the first time in his life, his pack shaking and leaping as he coursed down a paved road at a good sprint.

Stick had turned out to be a mate. The lanky sentinel had given a brief explanation on how to get to the Suit parade ground, the usual mustering spot for recruits. Before Toni had been about to break into a run, however, the soldier had stopped him.