Retreat was not forbidden. It was punishable.
Kael learned this on the nineteenth day when a soldier from a neighboring regiment — a man named Ferris, dock worker, Low Quarter, someone he had nodded to at the eastern camp — broke from his position during the fourth northern engagement and ran.
He did not run far. He was not a coward in any useful sense of the word. He ran because the position he had been holding was untenable and the order to hold it was coming from an officer three hundred feet behind the engagement who did not have access to the information that made the order untenable. He ran because the body, when presented with sufficient evidence that staying still means dying, produces a very compelling argument for movement.
They brought him back within the hour.
The proceedings were brief. An officer read from a conduct document. The language was formal and moved quickly. The conclusion had clearly been reached before the reading began.
Ferris was publicly reduced in rank, docked of two weeks' rations, and assigned to the forward clearing unit — which was the regiment's most exposed position, the one given to soldiers the command had assessed as needing correction or as expendable, the distinction between those two categories being largely administrative.
The message moved through the eastern regiments in hours.
Retreat was not an option. Not because it was tactically unsound. Because it was structurally impermissible. The function of the front line required it to remain a front line, which required the people on it to remain on it, which required the removal of any alternative. The soldiers were not soldiers making tactical decisions. They were a position on a map, and positions on maps do not retreat.
Kael absorbed this and filed it under things he had suspected and now knew.
He told the others.
Orren was unsurprised. "It's consistent with the resource timeline. The clearing phase requires sustained pressure in specific zones. A retreating front line disrupts the pressure."
"So they'll keep us there until the zone is cleared," Ysse said.
"Or until we're not there anymore," Bren said flatly.
"Yes," Orren said.
"Then we don't retreat," Kael said. "And we don't wait to be cleared." He looked at each of them. "We need a different kind of exit."
He did not yet know what that exit looked like. He knew the forward clearing unit Ferris had been assigned to moved through territory that the main regiment did not. He knew that territory, per Orren's analysis, connected to a supply route that ran east, away from the northern push, back toward the border regions.
He kept this thought in a separate place from the others. Small. Specific. A door he was not ready to open yet but needed to know the location of.
He went back to his position.
He stayed on the front line.
He did not retreat.
But he had begun, very quietly, to plan.