When the spotter drone appeared, the cold detachment I had wrapped around the shell’s impact collapsed instantly. My dissociative thinking broke like a dropped lens.
I felt exposed. Stupid, even. Caught with my mouth half open, eyes blank, still staring across the meadow at the steaming crater I had summoned into existence.
Now my focus snapped back. Be invisible.
I was standing out in the open, but shielded by a lone birch tree. The drone, a repurposed agricultural quadcopter with 4K optics and night vision bolted on, hovered near the treeline. It eased into view like a cautious crow approaching a hand-held scrap of bread. Curious, but wary. Never trustful.
It edged forward, camera angled toward the crater.
I did not move. Not even a breath too deep.
Any motion could draw the eye. And I know firsthand, from long hours behind a control screen, how drone operators develop something like peripheral intuition. They feel things just outside the frame, things that do not belong. You do not see them at first. But you sense them. And then, when you look, there they are. Betrayed by motion. By pattern.
The drone hovered, then shifted left, circling the blast site clockwise. The meadow opened before it, framed by scorched grass and powdered frost. And there I was. A smear of shadow and shape, blurred against the tree’s broken outline, my uniform blending with bark and snow.
I lowered my head. Brought my hands behind my back.
The face is always the giveaway. Even camouflaged, even still, the human face burns through pattern like a flare.
The drone drifted along the treeline, slow and deliberate, its camera eye sweeping toward me.
Still not too close. Still careful. Like it was not sure what it had found.
I waited.
Had I been seen?
suspenseful stuff their mate.