He is standing in a field with no trees, where tall windblown grasses have gone yellow with the heat of summer, the lack of rain. No hard cover, a voice says, in the back of his head. But there are no enemies to fight, there is no war.

Try as he might he cannot get used to moving without the armor. Over the years it has gotten easier, but it is still like moving in slow motion, like trying to run underwater. The air itself seems to resist him, though he knows that even in his age he is faster than most. In the forest sometimes he tests himself against the animals: the deer, and, when he can find them, the wolves. He always wins. In this, he is never surprised.

But he is dying, they tell him. Staring out over the plains at the glassed mountains he remembers: Parkinson's Disease; cancerous growths in the marrow of the metacarpus and phalange bones of both hands; retinal decay as a result of sustained close contact with high-intensity energy sources. Many many diagnoses, one after the other, delivered by doctors who looked increasingly concerned as he did not react. Do you understand, they asked him, and he had nodded. Death was no new thing to him, he would face it as he had before, and win.

But his hands are slowing down, becoming painful to use. His eyes are blurry. When he wakes up, some days, and runs, his bones echo the old pain of the surgery, glass shattering inside his marrow. He ignores these things, because even in age, he is a SPARTAN, and pain, like death, is not new to him. Not remotely. When he takes stock of himself he makes note of every burn scar, every cut and surgical incision. There are more than he wants to count, but he counts anyway, because in some odd way it soothes him, knowing.

Still he stares over the fields, wondering how death will come, and when.

—

The house he has built is far enough away from others that it is troublesome to reach, and when they come it is in a vehicle he recognizes only pieces of, the body of a Pelican with the blue drive-glow of Covenant technology. He hears them long before they are in view, the high whine of a fusion coil echoing off the mountains, and rises from the chair he has taken to sitting in, wood carved by his own hand. He sits more, these days, something he has noted with bemused concern. His hand strays to the pistol he still keeps on his hip, and then he moves forward, out the door, into the grass where he can see the men arriving.

Only they are not all men.

There are two of them, flanked by SPARTANs of the latest generation. A man and a woman. Around them it is as if he can see thousands of ghosts crowding in, and he wonders, feeling dazed, if they are ghosts themselves. Halsey. Mendez. By all rights they should be dead, but here they are alive, and together, for the first time in who knows how long. He wishes for his armor so that he would not have to hold his face in check; it has gotten harder of late, and he feels his mouth tilt up at the corner in a smile that before he would have suppressed. He salutes.

And then notices the correctional facility uniforms they wear.

Still prisoners for their work.

"John." Halsey steps forward. "How are you?"

It is the strangest thing in the world to hear her say. Her voice is brittle, but there is an edge of humor that runs beneath that he thinks that she will never lose. Hesitantly he lets his hand slip from the salute and nods a greeting instead.

"Well."

"That's not what your doctors tell me." She smiles wryly, as if she doesn't really believe the doctors herself. "But you've always beaten the odds before. Chances are you will again."

"John," Mendez says, and his voice, unlike Halsey's, is thin and weak and high enough that it is painful to listen to. There is no bark of command no force, only an old man and his memories. But his eyes shine with a kind of pride. "John, I'm glad I got to see you."

"You too, sir." He looks at them carefully, and then at the SPARTANs behind them, armored, clutching rifles that glow in strange places and look too angular to be of purely human manufacture. He wonders if he could take these soldiers, without his own armor, and win. Free his friends, his mentors. He has his pistol, his strength, his speed. They have armor. "Ma'am, what brings you here?"

"Because I wanted to be. Because we wanted to be. We don't get much time out, you understand." She smiles again, sardonically. "We don't know how long we'll be around to do this again."

"You have many years left, ma'am. Many years."

He refuses to believe that she can die, that she can die before him. She had created him, created all the others. And none except the first had died in any way but fighting.

"Years, yes. In prison, maybe." She looks toward the house. "Will you let us in? I want to see what kind of home you have for yourself."

He walks up the steps and gestures inside, watching them as they walk past. Halsey moves carefully, but Mendez has lost the fine control that he had so many years ago, and shakes with each footstep, his hands jerking. His head, now and then, nods sharply to one side. The SPARTANs, as they pass, are the polar opposite: smooth, nearly liquid in their grace, different than the stark but understated power he remembers of himself. They pass, and he shuts the door behind them, and goes inside.

It is a cabin more than a house, whole logs cut and notched and fit together one after the next until he decided the ceiling was high enough, and built the roof with pieces of sheet metal recovered from long-abandoned farm machines. There is one room, and few pieces of furniture. A small foam mat, a concession to the modern, is the bed. There is a table, and a stool next to it, and an area which could be called a kitchen: a container for water which he collects from a stream; spaces for fire with crossbars of metal and a vent for smoke; two sets of silverware, lacquered wood. All his. For a while he lived in a city, and then further away, provided the whole while with ration packs, the newest technology. But there were always people: people in the streets, people bringing the food, the packages, greetings and goodbyes, all so strange he made up his mind to move away. And he did, the survival skills of training snapping on as quick as the safety on a rifle.

There are also two chairs. He takes a seat in his, and offers the other and the stool to them.

"It's very well built." Halsey looks around, admiring. "I didn't expect you to build it yourself."

"You gave me the tools for it." He holds up his hand, curls it into a fist, uncurls it, and then taps on the side of his head. "And the knowledge."

"And you're keeping well, apart from the doctors coming?"

"Well enough."

They go silent for a few more moments. In the background, though dampened, the armor of the SPARTANs whirs and whines. Mendez lifts a shaky finger.

"You got that coin?"

John snaps up and reaches into his pocket, then kneels in front of Mendez and offers it up in an open palm. Age and the constant rubbing of his hand have worn the fine details away. The eagle's wings no longer seem to spread beyond the surface of the metal. The arrows are a deformed rectangle with the suggestion of a point on one end. But it is the same coin. He looks at Halsey and remembers the first time he saw her, a lifetime ago. Eagle! he remembers calling out, guessing the side that would land face-up.

Mendez takes it between two fingers, drops it. John picks it up in an instant and sets it back in his hand.

"My my," Halsey says, and when she smiles this time it is wide and freely given, no trace of restraint. It is a day of unfamiliar things, John thinks. Mendez turns the old quarter over in his hands, and then reaches over to Halsey, who takes it and holds it up to her eyes.

"You know, I've forgotten what year it had on it."

"Nineteen-sixty-four." He has long since memorized every part of the coin. When it is worn to nothing but a silver disc, he will still remember it. When all other things are gone, he will remember the moment when Halsey flicked it up into the light of a different sun, and he called it—Eagle!—and brought on himself the burden of a warrior's life.

"You carry it with you everywhere?"

"Yes ma'am."

"And what does it mean to you now?"

"Ma'am?"

He looks at her, uncomprehending, and she repeats the question. He considers, briefly, his brow furrowing.

"It means that I still have my luck."

—

He sits back and listens to them tell their stories. Halsey knows that he is not much for words, and never has been, even in younger days. She has been keeping up with research. Even imprisoned they cannot deny her usefulness, and it is a joke to her, because the research was all she ever wanted in the first place. Quiet rooms with no distractions and all the tools she needs are the sign of a universe in order. She wishes for the outdoors, sometimes, which amuses even her; after a lifetime spent under mountains of rock working on projects of the utmost secrecy, she now seeks the opposite.

Mendez has done worse. Prison, even comfortable prison, has left him without the exercises that kept him focused, the duty that kept him sane. His mind is not gone, but it is slipping, something that John finds difficult to understand. He has read biology textbooks, sometimes several in a row, learning what is happening to his own body, his own mind. But it is something different to see the familiar stripped away before his eyes, a body he knows coupled with a mind that is somehow younger. Duller. He does not like the feeling. He looks again to the SPARTANs who stand near them, wondering if there are weak points he can learn to take them down, wondering if he can fly the aircraft outside, wondering if he too will be thrown in prison if he does these things.

Halsey talks about newly developed medical procedures. Improvements on flash-cloning, neuron repatterning, things that will be given to him because he is a hero, because every government on the planet and every person of rank in the UNSC still hopes to give him a reward that he will accept. He nods, listens. These are the things that will save you, she says. They will keep you alive.

He says he will consider. Halsey looks at him strangely.

"You aren't going to accept medical procedures that will save your life?"

He shrugs. Without the armor, it is barely a movement at all. "I've lived my life, ma'am."

She purses her lips. "John. You are going to have these procedures done."

"With all due respect, ma'am, you can't order me to do that."

"No. I can't." She turns to the SPARTAN behind her and nods, and then turns back. "But I can give you a reason to keep living."

There are chills in his chest. He knows by some strange instinct the gravity of what is about to happen, and knows that Halsey is right. Again, he is on the cusp of something huge, but this time it is just for him. Only for him.

The SPARTAN unclamps a module from her back, a cylinder about the same size and shape as nuclear weapons were, years ago. Its top is what he thinks he recognizes as a projector array, but as she sets it on the floor and activates it, whatever it is, the sides fold down, and more arrays are revealed, tiny mirror-and-crystal assemblies meant for displaying holographic images.

Cortana appears.

He rises from his seat. There is no house around him. There are no others. Cortana is in front of him, her skin crawling with patterns that he still remembers, and her light shines bright enough that everything else seems dark and insignificant, blotted out. His mouth is open.

"Cortana," Halsey says, "this is the Master Chief, SPARTAN 117. I believe you've done some reading on him."

"I have," she says, and their voices have the same patterning, emphasis, but Cortana's is as it always was, more precise, controlled, analytical. But still with an edge of humor. "Hello, Master Chief."

She holds out a hand.

John stares at it. There is tension in the room. The SPARTANs, even in their armor, radiate it in waves. Halsey is half out of her seat. Mendez, though still, is lasered in on their hands, on John's expression. Hesitantly John reaches forward, and when his fingers touch the rippling edges of solid light that make up Cortana's hands he falls to his knees and gasps, long hacking breaths, because though he cannot it is the one occasion in his life that he has ever wished he could cry.

—

Cortana retreats as Halsey explains the details.

Her own brain, newly cloned. Neural repatterning: her memories have not been restored, but she is the same as she was when she was first made, first born. Her theoretical lifespan is now extended by new programming, new code. Sixteen years. The module's power is a miniature fusion coil, and they give him a lifetime supply of fuel pellets, stored in lead. Her range is only as far as the projector can reach, but if it is mounted higher—they give him a tripod—that is a long way. Indoors or at night, Halsey says. Daylight is too strong.

Then they leave, each in turn. This time the SPARTANs go first. Mendez next, with a handshake and a look of pride in his rheumy eyes. Halsey is last, and she closes the door behind her, setting her back against it.

"She is not the woman that you remember."

"I know." He turns to look at the module for a moment, and then back to Halsey. "How much information does she have?"

"She has all public and private data concerning you and her former self. Every operation you have ever run together, anything ever noted down, she has. But she doesn't have memories. There may be points at which she connects her self to her former self, but you know the military, the reports don't say much about the fine details. She has some suit recordings, but not all. None of the really important ones."

"And other information?"

"Everything she had before. War history, analytics, combat support protocols, language, it's all there. She's the same Cortana you met when you tested MJOLNIR Mark IV. But she doesn't have the memories of what you did. She knows, but she doesn't remember."

"Do we have orders?"

"Yes." Halsey moves away from the door a fraction. "They are unofficial, and they are only for you. John, I don't pretend to know what's in your head. I never have. But I have two orders. I want you to find a way to be happy."

"I am happy, ma'am."

"And I want you to tell her stories." She hadn't even slowed down as he had spoken. "Tell her about Halo. About High Charity. The Ark. The Didact. Everything. Tell her what you did together. Tell her stories."

"That will take a long time."

"And you will have time. You will have the rest of your life."

She steps forward and kisses him on the cheek. There are tears in her eyes.

"Goodbye, John. I won't see you again."

"Ma'am—"

"Treat her well. Tell her stories." She was opening the door, walking out. "Remember me through her."

"Wait."

She stops.

John has his hand out in a gesture that he remembers and she knows from suit recordings, and she takes two steps forward and embraces him, another strange first, and he holds his arms out to the sides, uncertain of what to do.

"Doctor Halsey, are you in need of medical assistance?"

She laughs bitterly. "No, John, no. I'm just sad." She steps down, having lifted herself up on her toes to reach him. The tears are still in her eyes, and her face is miserable. "Just sad."

—

The final parting is confusing. They wave to him, and he waves back, not knowing what else to do. As the hatch seals it clicks at last that this is the last time he will ever see them in person, either of them; that they might have traveled from worlds away to see him, and that in the final minutes he did not know what to do. He buries instantly his guilt, his pain, and goes back inside, and turns on the projector.

"Thank you. It's such a stuffy system, that thing. It's good to get out." Cortana brushes nonexistent dust off her arms, and looks at him with eyes that are so bright they are nearly white, no retina or pupil. "Are you well, Master Chief?"

"How much do you know about me?"

"I know everything there is to know that isn't inside of your head." She says this matter-of-factly, with a tinge of smugness. "My programmers were very thorough, and after they were done, I filled in where they left off. Is there anything specific you were interested in?"

He still cannot believe that she is in front of him. He puts his hand up again, palm-out, and she meets it with hers, intertwining their fingers.

"The newest adaptation of Forerunner technology. Difficult with a single projector, but luckily we have algorithms to compensate for what even the Forerunners couldn't manage."

She squeezes his hand lightly, and his breath catches. He pulls away. Through it all he has not let his expression change.

"Have you read my CSV?"

"I'm reading it again right now. Impressive, to say the least. Much of it managed with my help, of course."

"Do you know how I won the UNSC Legion of Honor Medallion?"

His voice hurts. He has not talked this much in months. Years.

"You dove into a bunker of Covenant soldiers to save a group of Marines, who were pinned down by a stationary weapons emplacement." She frowns. "The details are somewhat lacking. This was pre MJOLNIR-IV, before energy shielding. How did you do it?"

John settled into his chair and gestured to the other one, and Cortana strode over and sat, the patterns across her skin brightening briefly with the contact. "Do you want to know?"

"No, I'm asking because I'd rather sit here and hypothesize. Tell me." Her cheeks brightened, as if she were blushing.

John smiled. It feels strange on his face, but also like something he can get used to. He looks around the room at the walls he knows, the things he has built. Cortana sitting in a chair he had always imagined her in.

"Let me tell you a story," he says, and that is the beginning.