"I am on your side. I promise that we want the same thing."

  Dena recognizes the vast hall. It is where the Keamla regime would meet ambassadors, and other foreign dignitaries before all diplomatic ties with the outside world were severed. As a child, Dena had seen pictures of people with pale skin colors in strange suits, bowing before a young Koer I Keamla, in full military dress.

  The second have installed themselves where necessary, which consists mostly of machine guns and sniper turrets at the windows, as well as equipment, provisions and other bags and crates that Dena can't identify, neatly arranged here and there. They have left most of the old decorations. The paintings on the walls, the ornate drapes that serve no purpose, and most of all, the thin line of deep azure carpet that runs down the center of the great hall. Like dignitaries decades ago, Dena had now walked that carpet frantically rehearsing his plea. At the end of it, on a podium, on high-backed wooden chairs, sits Horamk with lieutenants to either side. The rest of the second are scattered about the hall, some flanking the carpet, ready to jeer at Dena, others going about their business here and there, uninterested in proceedings.

  Horamk looks down on him with disdain. Dena feels like he is facing a bored silverback gorilla. Horamk is smarter than the others. They immediately take their chance to shout him down. Call him command. Call him a spy. That gives him a way to prove his loyalty, to show he doesn't give a damn about command. Horamk just sits there, and makes him talk.

  "It's ours to lose now. You have changed the war. But not in the way you think."

  Just more silence. He's not taking the bait.

  "Maybe you do know this. Maybe I don't need to be here. The palace is worthless. It's just one building. It has no strategic value. The whole capital is all but worthless. So why did you go for it? Why was this your last shot? Why not the ports of Bashar Idah? Why not the refineries? Or the powerplant at War Haddath?"

  The subordinates are biting their tongue. They all want to put him in his place. But it's clear that nobody speaks until Horamk speaks.

  "I think you knew. There's symbolic power in the capital. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough weapons. Our only shot is the rest of the population out there. If they see that we did something like this. If we can tip enough of them over. They don't even have to join the army. All we need them to do is to stop being afraid. To say what they already believe."

  Horamk is a man with a carefully honed reputation. If everything Dena has heard is true, there is a good chance he will draw his sidearm and shoot Dena in the head without ever saying a word.

  "That's why I'm here. Because you're sitting on the biggest ammo dump in the country and I don't think you fully realize it."

  Time for the final paragraph. This is how he'd mapped the argument out in those few minutes in that cold dark toilet. Like a college paper.

  "Those filing cabinets you've got propping up the front door. I can guarantee you that's what Keamla is worrying about right now. Not your position. Not your ability to fuck up their comms. Not your flag on the balcony. The fact that you're sitting right on top of his archives. Everything they did. For generations. Every disappearance. Every killing. Every torture. Every rape. It's all there. That's what they do: they document everything. That's how he controls people. Every single thing they've had to deny. Everything they've been denying for decades. We can show who they really are. Who they've been all along."

  Horamk licks his lips. Then, in a booming voice.

  "We know all this. We'll take care of it."

  "I don't think you do."

  Horamk stares. Dena resists the urge to call him sir. Technically, Dena outranks him, although that doesn't count for much right now.

  "Look, I know. You took the Palace, you took Madargeisa. Without the second we'd all be dead or worse ten times over. I have no right to lecture you on how to win a fight. But you're barricading the doors with the exact thing that's going to end this war."

  Horamk gets up.

  "I have better things to do. Put him back in the toilet. See if we remember to feed him."

  In desperation, Dena turns to the commanders dotted around the room.

  "You must see what I'm saying. You're in this war for a reason. Every single one of us is in this war for the same reason. Because you saw something they did. You saw it with your own eyes. Maybe you helped them do it. And then you saw it disappear. And you realized that everything else they deny, it's all true, and much worse."

  The two men who brought him in grab him again.

  "That's what we're sitting on here. Imagine giving that insight to every single man and woman in the country! Imagine showing them all what we're fighting for. We can do that, but it's all gone if we don't start now. Please!"

  They hit him in the back of the legs with a baton, and he hits the marble floor directly with his knees. By the time the pain subsides, he's out of the room and back to his dark toilet.

  He sits against the cold tiles. Shivering now, still without his shirt. He plays his speech back in his head. Did he ever have a chance? Perhaps he did well to make it out alive. He considers at length the nagging thought that he has entirely too high an opinion of himself. These are real soldiers. Maybe they've thought about all of this already.

  Maybe none of this was necessary, and everything would be fine without him.

  He smiles. He's in the heart of a war zone, and his greatest worry is still making a fool of himself. He puts his head back against the cold tiles and tries in vain to sleep. It's all out of his hands now.

  ***

  The door is yanked open. Light and warm air rush in as Dena is jolted out of his half-sleep. He tries to open his eyes toward the figure above him. They throw something at him. It's his shirt.

  "You don't touch the barricades yourself. You ask Kirem and he'll get you what you need. You have 8 hours. Show us what you can find."

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  He stumbles out, his calves and back aching. By the time his eyes have adjusted, Horamk is already marching out of the room. A young man stands to attention.

  "This way, sir" the young man says. Dena looks for the disdain in his eyes, but it doesn't seem to be there. The boy has been given an order. He either believes in the task, or he has decided, like a good soldier, that his own opinions have no bearing on the matter.

  Dena buttons his shirt.

  "Aren't we going to the barricades? The dossiers?"

  "I think you should see the basement first, sir."

  Kirem was right, they can leave the barricades where they are. The basement archive spans a vast area, at least the full size of the palace. Endless rows of filing cabinets, Millions of pink folders, hanging from railings in their drawers.

  He starts from rumors. Famous people high up, who had disappeared without a word. From there, he finds the names of high-profile interrogators, and all cases they had been assigned to.

  Kirem is a good runner, bounding up and down the basement between the filing cabinets, so Dena can stay at his desk. The boy seems to be genuinely on his side. Invested in his project. Eager to show Horamk what they can come up with.

  The rich and famous are a good starting point. Salacious, but also easily dismissed. But the real power lays in the regime's treatment of normal people. Shopkeepers. Mothers. Something people will identify with.

  He had expected to find perhaps some indirect evidence of torture, or of the extent to which they spy on their own. If they could show the extent of the surveillance, perhaps they could start to build a case.

  As it turns out, there is no need for such poor foundations. There is a word that keeps coming up, Shire, pronounced shee-reh. It means grain harvest.

  Thirty minutes in, he has seen it five times, in places where it makes no sense. By itself, at the end of a page, or scribbled by hand in the margin. It is clearly a codeword. Something people were smart enough not to refer to explicitly. Something that, for all its frequency, was never indexed or cross-referenced. But it doesn't take long to find the words and categories that are indexed wherever Shire occurs. Chemical industry. Hazardous materials. Specialist decontamination.

  ***

  "It refers to a village. Hibba, in the south of War Odoth. It's no longer there."

  "What happened?"

  "Officially, nothing."

  "What happened?"

  Dena is back in the great hall. Horamk on his throne, the crowd lined up along the carpet. This time, it's all of them. And they're quiet. Dena stand where he stood a little under eight hours ago, but now with Kirem at his shoulder, carrying a heavy stack of folders.

  "There was this chemical plant, they were working on experimental herbicides. They leached some kind of dioxin from the reactor walls. It ended up in the soil and the water. This was around the time the 10th five-year plan was set to close, and everybody was under pressure to make the goals. As far as I can tell, nobody realized for four months and then people started dying."

  "The whole village died?"

  "No, I think maybe thirty or forty people. But enough to make the rest angry. They were already hungry, like everybody else. The details aren't recorded, but the army was sent in. I assume there was some kind of riot."

  "Is that it? The army is used. Everybody knows already."

  "This is not that. The army was used and it took a long time. Days. Maybe weeks. But then there's a command. This went back and forth a couple of times. And everybody who handled it made damn sure it was recorded that they were following orders. They were all terrified. Nobody wanted responsibility for this."

  For the first time, there is a hint of interest in Horamk's expression. He leans forward very slightly, almost imperceptibly.

  "What was the command?"

  "It gets translated as it moves up and down the chain. What the soldiers on the ground hear first is to use every means at their disposal, and every weapon in their arsenal to bring the conflict to an end. To not take prisoners, and to not leave any signs of resistance. This clearly left too much room for interpretation. It went back up the chain. All other orders to the field commanders were left off the record, but at the top level, between the generals, everybody seems to find some way to leave a trace without recording things officially."

  Dena breathes and clears his throat. This is more than he could have wished for. All he has wanted for six months of fighting. A clear, indisputable sign of what the regime is capable of. And yet, he can barely bring himself to say the words.

  This dark secret could remain hidden away. He's having to work to drag it up. To expose it to the light. In some strange way it makes him feel responsible for the thing to be the one pulling it up and out of the dirt.

  "This is repeated multiple times, from multiple sources. On strict orders from the supreme commander himself, despite counsel to the contrary, the inhabitants of the village... the name is always redacted, but there is always enough identifiable information redacted, seemingly on purpose. Every single inhabitant is to be terminated, with absolutely no exception. There are to be no prisoners. The village and the chemical plant are to be razed and bulldozed. No traces left. There are dozens of independent records like this. The redactions are... flimsy. Like they wanted the details preserved. They all implicate Keamla as giving the order. He must have given it to every general involved over and over again. Until they finally had no choice but to obey. But they made damn sure it was recorded who gave the order. They redacted, eventually, but poorly. It's all very easy to reconstruct from the keywords and the context. It's clear they were ordered to redact, but they wanted to preserve the record."

  Horamk sits back. He stares at Dena like he's ready to tear his arms out of their sockets.

  "How? A whole village. They must have had family elsewhere. Business partners. How can they keep this a secret? They can't just make a village disappear."

  "They can't. And they didn't. For the past four years it feels like this is all the secret service has been doing. Every third file contains this keyword: Shire. That's why I found it so quickly. It's everywhere. Half the service is out there, even now, intimidating family members, redacting atlasses, textbooks. Things get easier for them when the war starts, but if it hadn't, I don't know if they could've kept it up. The number of operations required to keep this quiet didn't seem to be going down. Maybe without the war, this thing would've ended them anyway. Maybe..."

  He is going too far. These are soldiers. They have lost people. It's a mistake to suggest that the war may have been unnecessary after all. He shuts up abruptly. Not knowing what else to say, he holds up the documents he has brought for Horamk to inspect. The distance between them is several meters. Horamk doesn't get up. He breathes in sharply.

  "How many?"

  "The... civilians?"

  "Yes."

  "It's never recorded, at least nowhere I've seen yet. But at least 450 were employed by the chem plant. Respectable jobs mostly, so family men. Plus all the support population that suggests. From another perspective, the riots. They sent three battalions, so about six hundred trained military, and that wasn't enough to decisively subdue the population. I mean, you're better placed to estimate how many civilians it would take to counter 600 trained soldiers."

  Dena tries a smile. Everything comes out so feeble. So inappropriate to what he's describing. Does Horamk think he doesn't understand, deeply, the horror suggested by these documents? Or is this not horror to the commander of the second? Can he himself easily imagine slaughtering a village, children and all? Horamk looks down, he seems almost to slumber.

  "Thousands." It's almost a whisper. "Perhaps ten thousand."

  Another long pause.

  "God damn cowards." He spits on the floor.

  Suddenly, he stands up.

  "My brothers! This is what we knew. This is why we fight. These are not soldiers. These are not people with honor! You and I know what it is to follow orders. You obey or you do not, either way, death lies waiting. That is why there is honor in following orders. You face death one way or another. This is not honor. They were scared! They tried to find a way out. And when they couldn't, they made sure that people knew it wasn't their idea. They followed for fear of the repercussions. That is not following orders. That is saving your ass. And because they were cowards, ten thousand people died. They were afraid to die, and because of it, a thousand children died in their place."

  "Is that honor?"

  The reply is loud and unintelligible.

  He barrels down on Dena, who involuntarily backs away. He grabs his hand and squeezes hard, crumpling the papers in it.

  "Some weapon indeed, you have delivered us. We'll find you a room. Eat and sleep well tonight. You will continue your work in the basement tomorrow."