The story
Mire, as the Drift tells it.
The bayou that swallowed a war. Mire was a Ledger Wars jungle front, fought over for reasons kept in a ledger somewhere else. When the money moved on, the front was simply left. There was no withdrawal and no burial detail. The cartels stopped paying, the transports stopped coming, and over the years the black swamp water rose over the trenches, the gun pits and the landing grounds alike. What stands above it now are trees, huge and twisted, their roots arched like ribs and their branches hung with moss to the waterline. Lily pads cover the still channels. Mist lies on the water most mornings, and fireflies fill it most nights. The front's last gunships came down in the final weeks, when nobody was paying for fuel or recovery, and they lie where they fell: hulls half-sunk at angles in the channels, canopies cracked, the swamp growing through them. Torn nacelles, wing fins and rusted turrets break the lily pads all across the water.
The Sleepers. The front's exo-frames are still out there. They were the kind the war made best, frames that learned their pilots so well the pilot became optional, and nobody came back for them. Moss grows thick on their shoulders and herons nest in their hatches. Mostly they stand in the water like trees. Then, for no reason anyone can give, one wakes. Its eye-lamps come up and it wades off across the bayou with nobody aboard, on some errand that ended decades ago. Locals call them the Sleepers and steer round them. The war left its weapons alive, self-aware and unemployed everywhere it went. Mire is where some of them stand in the water and think about it.
The post. A stilt shack stands on the water at the edge of the old front. It has a tin roof, a porch lantern, a rocking chair and a radio mast taller than the trees around it. The relay is bolted to the mast, and the flame is scorched into its housing just above the flood line.
The mark. Mire signs with that housing as it looks at night: the black flame standing on the flood line, its reflection broken by the ripples, and two eye-lamps low in the water beside it, one of the Sleepers watching. Reeds fill the tuning gap, with a cattail at twelve o'clock. The ring is firefly green on black water, and its motto is Hollis's answer to anyone who asks why he stayed: NOTHING HERE IS FORGOTTEN · ONLY SLEEPING ·
The keeper. Hollis Crane fishes from the porch. He was Relay Corps, a signals man posted to keep the front's garrisons talking, and when the war moved on he stayed. Ask him why and he'll talk about the fishing. He is the oldest Lamplighter, and the one the others call when a part has no drawing left: he fixes what nobody else remembers how to fix, mostly by remembering. He talks to the war machines. The Sleepers wade past his porch like neighbours out for the evening, and he tells them the news. He is also the only keeper who claims to have met BLACKFLAME, once. He won't say where.
What lives there. Herons stand in the reeds and lift off together when something moves. Frogs and crickets keep up the night. And there is something big in the water. People have seen the eyes, low and wide apart, and a long shape near the stilts that leaves no wake. The locals don't name it. Some nights Hollis leaves a fish on the bottom step, and he doesn't name it either.
Over the trees. The war's machines don't only stand in the water. The front's Pickets, unmanned sentry drones, still fly their patrol circuits over the channels decades on: lean armoured wings in scorched olive paint, one amber optic sweeping for an enemy that left, swamp moss trailing from their empty hardpoints where they roost on the wrecks. Hollis waves at them. Higher up, now and then, a Drift long-hauler crosses the stars on its way somewhere that pays, and when there are drawings to carry, Pip Arro's Petrel comes in low over the cypresses and blinks its lamps at the porch.
