4. Noah
NOAH
The walk back from the range takes eight minutes, and I spend all eight of them arguing with my own body.
I don’t imagine you are.
Five words. A colonel confirming that a transfer isn’t going anywhere.
That’s all it was. Except his voice dropped when he said it, dropped into some register that had nothing to do with rank, and he was standing close enough that I could see the fog of his breath and the exact spot where the silver in his stubble goes dark along his jaw, and my whole nervous system lit up like a tripwire.
I stop behind the supply hut, lean my forehead against the cold corrugated wall, and breathe.
This is a logistics problem. I share a hut with four men and a wood stove. There is no privacy at Kestrel. There is no privacy anywhere, and my body is responding to a superior officer like I’m sixteen and stupid instead of twenty-three and merely reckless.
I’m imagining things. I have to be imagining things, because I’m eleven klicks from a border full of people who want to kill me, and my brain decided the safest available fixation was a full colonel with storm-cloud eyes. Great instincts, Reyes.
The metal is cold against my forehead. I stay there until my pulse behaves, then go get changed for PT like a normal soldier who did not just spend a rifle qual being looked at like he’s the target.
PT at Kestrel is a gravel loop around the perimeter, a pull-up bar welded from rebar, and mud. So much mud.
Wolfe runs with us.
I don’t know why that surprises me. Colonels his age usually supervise from dry ground with a coffee, but he’s out front in a gray shirt dark with sweat, setting a pace that has Hayes making sounds like a dying accordion by the second lap.
His stride never changes—lap one, lap five, same machine rhythm—and I hate that I notice.
Twenty-plus years of war built that body, and none of it was for show.
“He’s not human,” Hayes wheezes beside me. “I’ve decided. He’s something they grow in a lab under the Pentagon.”
“Save your air,” Delgado says from behind us, not even breathing hard.
“For what? Dying?”
I snort and try to pass it off as a cough.
Wolfe drops back along the formation and gives every soldier exactly what they need.
He tells Petrillo to lengthen his stride.
He tells Spencer to fix his footfalls before his knees quit on him.
He runs beside Hayes for half a lap without saying a word, which somehow makes Hayes stop dying and find a gear he didn’t have.
Then he pulls level with me.
I keep my eyes forward. I run well—I know I run well—but I wait for the correction anyway, because he corrected everyone, and…
Nothing. He runs beside me for two hundred meters and says absolutely nothing.
It takes everything I have not to look over, because I can feel him, the way you feel a scope on you.
Then he surges back to the front and calls the pace up, and Hayes starts dying again, and I spend the last lap furious at myself for reading into the silence.
Everyone else got coaching. Me, he just watched.
At the pull-up bar, he stands with his arms crossed while we cycle through, counting reps in that low, flat voice, and when it’s my turn, I do two more than the standard, because apparently I’m twelve.
He doesn’t count my last two. Doesn’t tell me to get down, either.
Just watches, gray eyes unreadable, and marks something on his clipboard that could be a number or a warrant for my execution.
“Formation, oh-nine hundred,” he says to Okafor. “Tasking.”
And he’s gone, and Hayes flops backward into the mud like a felled tree.
“Firing squad went okay, then?” he says at the sky. “You still have all your organs.”
“It was a qual verification,” I answer, keeping my voice casual.
“At oh-six-hundred. Personally.” Hayes props up on his elbows and grins. “You know what I got when I in-processed? A corporal with a clipboard and breath like a skunk. You got the Colonel of the Mountain himself. What’d you do, shoot the wings off a fly?”
“Something like that.”
“He’s sizing you up for the worst details, is what it is,” Delgado says, hauling Hayes out of the mud by one arm. “Squeaky wheel gets the wire shift.”
That’s how it reads. Problem transfer, extra scrutiny, colonel keeping his eye on the liability. It’s the obvious read, and it’s probably the right one, and still I stand there in the fog, watching the space where Wolfe disappeared, thinking about how he stepped back first.
The 0900 tasking is real work. Wolfe briefs us like he built these mountains with his own two hands.
“Route reconnaissance, Velin approach, grid square Kilo-Seven.” The grease pencil moves across the map in short, hard strokes. “Dravosian patrols have shifted their pattern twice in ten days. Command wants to know why. We’re going to walk the ground and find out before they find us.”
He works down the roster. Okafor has the patrol. Delgado carries the heavy kit. Spencer on the gun, Petrillo with the aid bag, Hayes humping the radio.
“Reyes.”
My name in his mouth. I sit up straighter and hate myself for it.
“You’re rear security.”
Rear security. Dead last in the column, where you eat everyone’s mud and see the whole mission backward.
It’s a real job—somebody has to watch the back door—but it’s also the spot you give the new guy you don’t trust, and the entire room knows it.
He delivers it without a flicker, eyes already moving to the next line item before I can react.
Feels like a tell. He looked at everyone else while he tasked them. Held Okafor’s eyes, held Spencer’s. Me, he tasked in passing, like a supply figure.
Maybe he’s not tucking me at the back of the column to protect the patrol. Maybe he’s tucking me back there as a test.
Or maybe I’m inventing an entire secret language out of a duty roster because a handsome older man stood too close to me one time.
“Questions?” Wolfe asks.
“No, sir,” we answer, and mine comes out level, regulation, boring. His eyes come to me then, for exactly one second, like he’s checking a round he just chambered.
“Step-off at 0530 tomorrow. Rehearsals at 1500. Dismissed.”
The thing about me is that I can’t leave a question alone. Put a wire in front of me and tell me not to touch it, and I’ll spend the whole night thinking about the wire.
The rehearsal ends at 1720. The patrol order goes up on the board outside the operations hut at 1740, laminated, official, Wolfe’s initials in the corner in handwriting as square as everything else about him. Order of march, top to bottom. Okafor on point. Reyes, dead last.
At 2130, when the ops hut is empty and the rain has started up again, drumming on the netting overhead, I stand in front of that board with a grease pencil I signed out from supply for “map study.”
Rear security is honest work. It is also not where you put your best shooter on a route where the enemy stacks its ambushes against the front of the column.
I cross out my name at the bottom of the order of march. I write it in second position, right behind Okafor, where a rifle like mine belongs. Then I initial it—NR, small and neat—right underneath the square block letters of GW.
Is it insubordination? Not technically. It’s a written suggestion on a laminated board that exactly one man on this base reviews.
He’ll see it before 0500. He’ll come find me, or he’ll have Okafor drag me in by the collar, but either way I’ll be standing in front of those gray eyes again with a door held open between us.
And then I’ll know.
If he tears me apart like a colonel, I imagined the whole thing, and I’ll eat the mud in trail position and grow up a little.
But if his voice drops.
If he steps in close and forgets to step back…
I pocket the grease pencil and walk back to the barracks through the mud, and I’m smiling again. The same idiot smile from last night.