From the letters of Arto Vaeltanen to Martina Strannikova, ca. Aug. 2023:

…but it is not [the bloodshed] that tears at my soul and finds me whispering your name in the night like a mantra, like a ward against darkness. It is the mentality, the brutality of thought, the oppressive air of antagonism and mental violence that blankets this desert. One does not ponder in this place; one only reacts. One does not discuss; one only defends. Everywhere the message is clear: seek not to understand. Seek only to resist the attack from without, lest your weakness be found and the pale sand painted in broad strokes with your blood.

There is no place for compassion here. To see the battered faces of women and children, the corpses left in the street, with anything more than stifled indifference would destroy any man in this army. We have to bury ourselves to have any hope of survival. And that part of me resists, would rather die than be callous, but I remember that it is only your love that matters. So I fight, when every fiber of my body screams against it. I fight to live, I fight to win, I fight to come home.

Yet it is coming home that I dread most of all. For though I may leave my weapons behind, I must still bring back the soul that has seen this place. Try as I might, I will return to you having fought and killed. Though my hands may be empty, I will enter your home still armed, my mind cold and sharp, trained to resist and riposte. Even philosophy has become a weapon of the state. And what purpose is left for that when I have returned to you? Will I be able to unearth the part of me that loves, or will I still be at war, striking at the world like a sword in the rain?

But I will endure for you. I will do what I must to stay alive, and I will find a way to come back to you whole and unchanged. You are the light that draws me back from the darkness, and I will kiss you again…

Corporal Vaeltanen was declared missing in action in September 2023, when he and two other soldiers from his unit failed to return from a routine patrol on the outskirts of Separatist-controlled Tehran. Strannikova never remarried, and disappeared from her office in midtown Manhattan in January of 2027, several weeks after the Delgado incident. They are presumed dead, but eyewitness reports claim that they have been spotted in Hong Kong and Bombay as recently as 2031. These reports have been neither confirmed nor investigated.