Chapter 1: Dandelions Are Weeds
The first one is a dandelion, which you assume is an insult.
It is sitting in the exact centre of your keyboard at 06:40 on a Tuesday, stem bent, head a little crushed, as if someone carried it in a fist that was not built for carrying small things. You have been at the KorTac training compound in the Tyrolean Alps for nine days. In those nine days you have been called "the dictionary" by four different operators, "Frau Translator" by one, and "hey, you, language lady" by a man named Horangi who seems to believe charm is a renewable resource.
A dandelion feels on brand. A weed, for the civilian.
You drop it in the bin and translate a forty-page logistics annex from Polish into German before your coffee goes cold.
The second one is a sprig of yellow gentian, Wednesday. The third, Thursday, is a cluster of alpine forget-me-nots so blue they look fake, tied with a twist of green paracord. That one you don't throw away. You put it in a paper cup of water next to your monitor, and you spend the morning glancing at it as if it might confess.
"Secret admirer," says Horangi, leaning into your doorway with a protein bar in his teeth. He says it the way other men say checkmate.
"Is it you?"
"God, no. I'd buy roses. I'd buy you a whole hothouse. I have taste." He considers the cup. "Those are ditch flowers."
"They're Myosotis alpestris," you say. "They grow above fifteen hundred metres. Someone climbed for these."
"Someone climbed for these," he repeats, delighted, and leaves before you can throw the protein bar wrapper at him.
The job is simple on paper, which is how every job you've ever regretted has started. KorTac has been contracted to run a six-week joint exercise with a Polish special operations detachment and a Slovak mountain unit, and somebody in procurement finally noticed that "everyone speaks some English" is not a translation strategy. So they hired you: Kraków-born, Vienna-trained, eight years as a court interpreter before you got tired of voicing other people's worst days in the first person. German, Polish, English, enough Slovak to get by and enough Russian to get in trouble.
Mostly you sit at the front of the briefing room and become other people's mouths.
Thursday's briefing is a range-safety walkthrough for the long-distance shoot on the north ridge, and the KorTac side is represented by the usual wall of men in black kit who sit with their knees apart and their arms folded, as if posture were a qualification. You translate the Polish captain's questions about wind corridors. You translate the KorTac range officer's answers. You translate a joke from the Slovak lieutenant that does not survive the trip into German and get a polite, pitying laugh anyway.
And at the very back of the room, taking up the space of roughly two people and a vending machine, sits König.
You know his name because everyone knows his name. You know he's Austrian, ex-Jagdkommando, their best marksman, and that he stands somewhere near two metres ten in his boots. You know he wears a hood instead of a helmet in the field and at all other times, a dark sniper's veil pulled over his head with eyeholes cut into it and a scrim that drops over his face, and that the Polish guys have bets running on what's under it. Disfigurement, says one camp. Movie star, says the other. You've heard both camps argue it in two languages, loudly, near your desk.
You do not know what his voice sounds like. In nine days, he hasn't said a word in a room you were in.
Until now.
"Die Windfahnen," comes a voice from the back, low and careful. "Am zweiten Posten. Sie stehen falsch."
The room turns. König looks immediately like a man who would like the floor to open and take him somewhere quiet, possibly the Earth's core.
The Polish captain looks at you. You clear your throat and render it for him: the wind flags at the second position are set wrong.
"Wrong how?" the captain asks.
You turn it around into German. You look at the back of the room. Two pale eyes look back at you through the holes in the hood, and then, very fast, look at the table.
"Sie..." He stops. Starts again, slower, as if he's laying each word down on a firing line. "Sie sind auf der Leeseite vom Felsen. Sie zeigen den Wind nicht, den die Kugel spürt. Nur den Wind, den der Felsen erlaubt."
They're on the sheltered side of the rock face, he says. They don't show the wind the bullet will feel. Only the wind the rock allows.
You translate it into Polish and you keep the shape of the last sentence, because it's a good sentence, and because eight years of court work taught you that when someone says something with care you owe them the care back. The captain nods slowly, writes something, and moves on.
When you glance up again, König's hood is angled toward you. He doesn't look away this time. He tips his head, a fraction of an inch. Thank you, maybe. Or: I noticed you didn't flatten it.
On Friday there is nothing on your desk. You are a grown woman with a master's degree and a professional reputation, and you are disappointed about a missing ditch flower.
You get in at 05:50 on Saturday out of something you refuse to call strategy. The admin block is cold and smells of instant coffee and gun oil. You flick on your desk lamp and there it is: a single stem of edelweiss, white and woolly, laid on top of the Slovak glossary you'd left open.
Edelweiss is protected in Tyrol. Picking it is technically a fine. Somebody broke a minor Austrian conservation law for you before dawn.
Under it there is a strip of paper torn from a range card. The handwriting is blocky and pressed so hard into the paper you can feel it from the other side, the way a big man writes when he's trying not to snap the pencil.
Danke, dass Sie meine Worte nicht kleiner gemacht haben.
Thank you for not making my words smaller.
You sit down. You read it four times. You think about a man who sits at the back of every room, who says one thing in nine days, and who noticed that you didn't sand the edges off it.
You think about the paracord on the forget-me-nots, which you have been told twice is the same olive drab the snipers wrap their rifle stocks in.
You have a theory. You need a confirmation.
You get the confirmation on Monday, at 05:31, and it is not graceful.
You've come in through the side door instead of the front, the one by the drying room, and you're halfway down the dark corridor when you hear something in your office. Not footsteps. Breathing, and the soft crinkle of paper. You stop in the doorway.
König is crouched beside your desk.
Crouched is generous. He's folded down like a collapsed tent, all long legs and broad shoulders, the hood pushed up and back over his head so it sits like a cowl, the face scrim tucked away. He has a fistful of purple gentians in one gloved hand and your stapler in the other, as if he's been trying to figure out how to weight a note down without crushing the flowers.
He looks up.
The lamp is off and the light from the corridor only catches half his face. You get a jaw, a long straight nose, a mouth that's pressed thin with concentration and goes slack with horror. A pale scar notches his upper lip at the corner. His eyes are blue-grey, bloodshot from cold air, and the skin around them is wind-chapped pink.
Not a movie star. Not a monster. A tired man who got up before the sun to walk up a mountain.
"Oh," you say. "Good morning."
The stapler goes off in his hand. Twice. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, staples spitting across the floor.
"Entschuldigung," König says, to the stapler, to you, to God. He stands up too fast. His head clips the angled shelf above your desk and a box of highlighters rains down onto his shoulders. He doesn't seem to notice. He drags the scrim down over his face so fast the hood twists and one eyehole sits over his eyebrow.
"It's fine," you say, in German, because you've decided this is a German conversation. "Really. Are those for me?"
He looks at the gentians in his fist like he's never seen them before. They're bent from his grip, blue-purple trumpets, a few petals crushed. He holds them out at arm's length, the full terrifying length of his arm, so that he can stay by the window and you can stay by the door and neither of you has to occupy the middle of the room.
You walk into the middle of the room anyway. You take them. Your fingers brush the leather of his glove, and you hear him stop breathing.
"Thank you," you say. "I liked the edelweiss. That's illegal, by the way."
A sound comes out from behind the hood that might, in better conditions, grow up to be a laugh.
"Nur ein bisschen illegal," he says. Only a little illegal. And then: "Ich... I am sorry. To surprise you. I didn't..." His English is good, accented and careful; it breaks apart when he's nervous, and he is very nervous. "I do not want you to think I am, ah. Strange."
"You've been leaving flowers on my desk in the dark for a week."
"Ja." His shoulders hunch. On anyone else it would look small. On him it looks like a cliff face shifting. "That is strange. I know."
"It's a little strange," you agree. "Nur ein bisschen."
Through the eyeholes, you watch something in his face relax by a millimetre.
Then boots in the corridor, and Horangi's voice singing tunelessly about coffee, and König moves faster than anything that size should move. He's past you and out the side door before you can turn around, and the only proof he was ever there is a handful of staples on the floor and a highlighter rolling slowly under your chair.
Horangi sticks his head in. He sees the gentians. He sees your face.
"Oh no," he says, with enormous joy. "Who is it?"
"Nobody," you say. "Go away."
He goes. You sit down with the flowers in your lap and look at the shelf, where there is now a shallow dent in the plywood the exact shape of a very large and very embarrassed skull.
You don't hear from him again for two days. No flowers. No notes. He skips the Tuesday briefing, which the range officer explains as "König's on the ridge," in the tone people use for "König's in a mood."
On Wednesday morning there is a single folded range card on your keyboard. No flower.
Inside, in that heavy, careful hand: Morgen. Fünf Uhr. Nordgrat. Bitte bringen Sie warme Socken.
Tomorrow. Five o'clock. North ridge. Please bring warm socks.