The kingdom grows taller using our bones as foundation.
He found the second record book on the seventeenth day of the northern push, in an abandoned command post the regiment swept through during the third engagement's aftermath.
It was not like the first book — not a casualty record with hidden addenda. This was older, more official, bound in the heavy leather used for administrative documents of genuine institutional weight. It bore the seal of the coalition planning commission, which was a body Kael had not known existed until Orren identified the seal from his cartography work, where it appeared on territorial surveys.
He had forty seconds in the command post before the sweep moved on.
He used thirty of them to scan the book.
He could not read everything. What he could read was enough.
Pages of territorial assessment. Mineral density projections. Population displacement estimates — the phrase used was anticipated civilian relocation, which he recognized as the same mechanism as selection and anticipated losses, the polished surface on the unpolished thing. Timelines extending twelve years beyond the current campaign. Infrastructure projections. Trade route modifications. Profit distributions allocated to a list of institutional beneficiaries whose names he did not recognize but whose designations were recognizable: crown houses, trading consortiums, the kind of bodies that exist at the intersection of political and economic power and leave very little trace in the documents ordinary people have access to.
The war was a construction project.
The battlefields were site preparation.
The soldiers were — he found the phrase, buried in an annex, in language so bureaucratic it had almost neutralized its own content — temporary human infrastructure. Present for the duration of the clearing phase. Not anticipated in post-construction projections.
Temporary. Infrastructure.
He had thirty seconds and he used the last ten standing completely still, holding the book, feeling the full weight of what it contained settle into him.
Then the sweep moved on and he moved with it, and he did not have the book because taking it would have been noticed and being noticed would have ended his ability to use what he knew, but he had read what he had read and it was in him now, permanent, added to the list which was no longer a list of questions but an answer he had been assembling piece by piece across weeks of mud and blood and dying-slower.
That night he told the others.
He told them plainly, without softening the language, because they had earned the plain version and he did not have the energy for anything else and the plain version was the only honest one.
The kingdom they served had allocated them as temporary infrastructure for a resource extraction project projected across twelve years. The war was the clearing phase. They were not soldiers in any meaningful sense. They were a cost, pre-calculated, already written off in documents that used terms like anticipated losses and civilian relocation with the calm confidence of people who had never been a loss or been relocated.
They sat with it.
Bren said: "They knew before we were conscripted."
"Yes."
"They knew how many of us would come back."
"They had projections."
"And they did it anyway."
"Yes."
The word sat in the ruined farmhouse like a stone.
Ysse, who had not spoken, said: "What do we do with this?"
It was the right question. It was the only question left after the answer had arrived. Kael looked at each of them — Ysse with her precise stillness, Orren with his careful measurement of everything, Bren who had left his fear in the valley and picked up something harder and more useful in its place.
"We survive," he said. "We get out. And then we make sure it can't be erased."