Chapter 9 #2
Parts went down in order, left to right. I worked by feel and by count.
Then I put it back together.
Part by part, the weapon rebuilt itself under my hands. Rollers seated, firing pin and spring home, bolt head locked into the carrier. Carrier guided back into the receiver, cocking handle forward. Trigger housing mated to the receiver, rear pin pressed home.
I pulled the cocking handle back and let it fly forward. It cycled clean.
I reached up and pulled off the blindfold.
The rangers were standing close enough that I could have touched the nearest one. Their faces ran from disbelief to amazement.
Andrew checked the rifle. Bolt, carrier, rollers, firing pin, every component in its rightful place and correct orientation. He handed it back.
“Afternoon off,” he said. “Earned.”
I didn’t have to tell them that we planned on giving them the afternoon off anyway.
The cheer that went up from the group had nothing performative in it. They’d worked hard enough that the reward meant something, and they scattered fast, heading for the bunkhouse, the dining tent, or off on their own, before anyone could change the terms.
Jomo hadn’t moved. He hadn’t cheered. He’d watched the whole thing—intent, absorbing, his eyes tracking my hands, memorizing the sequence. The mechanical mind that rigged the cargo net and solved the island crossing had just found something new to take apart.
I gave him a nod. He gave one back, with a newfound smile, though. Then he followed the others toward the bunkhouse, the limp rolling through every stride.
I started packing up the station. Andrew and Cole headed toward the dining tent, already talking about their own afternoon schedule. The yard emptied out around me.
“I can help with that.”
I turned. Zayn was still there. He hadn’t left with the others. He stood at the edge of the tarp with his hands at his sides, the afternoon off he’d just earned apparently not what he wanted.
“You heard the man,” I said. “Afternoon’s yours.”
“I heard him.” He crouched and started collecting the cleaning rods and brushes I’d laid out, sorting them into the kit bag with the same steady focus he brought to everything. “I want more reps.”
“On the field strip?”
“On everything.” He set down the bag and looked at me. “The others are good. They’re getting better every day. But I need to be ahead of them. If I’m supposed to lead them, I need to know it better than they do.”
I studied him. Twenty years old. No family left. He’d been a ranger for two years, holding this program together with instinct and stubbornness and whatever Ethan Cross had seen in him that made him pick up the phone. I’d met men twice his age with half that purpose.
“All right,” I said. “Grab a rifle.”
He did. We worked side by side on the tarp, stripping and reassembling in the undulating heat of the afternoon.
I walked him through the roller lock the way I’d explained it to Baraka, and then further—how fouling patterns told you about your ammunition, how a stiff extractor spring masked a worn extractor claw, how to diagnose a weapon by the sound it made when you ran the cocking handle.
He listened hard, absorbing every sentence like he intended to use it later and meant to have it ready.
“The wager,” he said, working the bolt free. “The first one. At the outpost. And today. You keep making bets.”
“Bets give people a reason to buy in. If I just order it, they do it because they have to. If there’s a stake, they do it because they want to.”
“Andrew’s idea?”
“It’s always a team effort.”
He turned the bolt over in his hands and checked the rollers the way I’d shown him. “Jomo was watching you today. When you were blindfolded. He was working out the steps.”
“I saw.”
“He does that. When something has pieces that fit together, he sees it faster than anyone.” Zayn set down the bolt. “The others don’t know what to do with him.”
“Do you?”
He thought about that. “I’m working on it.”
Some things you let a man figure out at his own pace, and the fact that Zayn was thinking about it at all told me more than any answer he could have given.
We ran the strip twice more. His hands were faster the second time, and by the third, he was finding the parts before his eyes confirmed them, working by touch the way I’d done it blindfolded.
“Go get some rest,” I said. “You earned the afternoon too.”
He packed his kit and headed across the clearing toward the bunkhouse. I watched him go. The sun was already past its peak, and the camp had gone still, the generator humming behind the vet facility, the dining tent empty, the last of the rangers’ voices fading behind closed doors.
I sat on the edge of the tarp and let the silence settle.
The kid wanted it. That was the thing I kept circling back to, sitting there with the disassembled cleaning rods and the warm tarp under me and the camp emptied down to nothing.
He wanted it more than the afternoon off, more than rest, more than whatever the others were doing right now behind the bunkhouse door.
He wanted to be ready, and he was asking me to make him ready, and I could feel the weight of that settling into the center of my chest like a chambered round.
I hadn’t come here for this. I’d come to do a job and leave.
Train the unit, fix what was broken, move on to the next contract.
But Zayn had looked at me across that tarp, and I’d seen something I recognized—the same hunger that had driven me at twenty, before I’d learned what it cost to want something that badly.
And now, he was asking me to be the one who shaped it.