NOAH
The shower hut at Kestrel has six heads, four of which work, and water pressure that comes in two settings: mist and punishment. I stand under the punishment setting and watch a full day of mouse hut roll off me in gray ribbons.
“I want to talk about what I saw in there,” Hayes announces from the next head over, scrubbing his arms like he’s prepping for surgery. “I need to talk about it. For my health.”
“Don’t,” Delgado says.
“There was a nest, Rafael. A nest. Built out of insulation and what I’m ninety percent sure was a sock from the previous administration. And when I moved the bunk frame, something ran across my boot, and I want everyone to know that the sound I made was tactical.”
“It was a scream,” Delgado counters.
“It was a tactical alert.”
“You alerted the whole base.”
“You’re welcome, the whole base.”
Petrillo turns his face up into the spray. “The stove pipes were worse. One of them had a bird skeleton in it. Whole thing. Wings out, like it died mid-takeoff.”
“See, and Petrillo says that calmly.” Hayes flings soap off his hands in Petrillo’s direction. “That’s the disturbing part. What did they do to you in medic school?”
Petrillo shakes his head. “Anatomy lab.”
“Wiring was fine,” Spencer says, and that’s Spencer’s entire after-action report.
I let it wash over me with the water. I’ve got my forearms braced against the plywood wall and my head down, and I am, technically, listening. Twenty percent of me is listening. The other eighty is back in the command hut, standing in that doorway with my hand on the frame.
So you don’t need to run off to get some alone time.
He said it. Out loud.
That was his opening.
If I’d read it wrong—if he were just a colonel who caught a specialist beating off behind the generator shed on a perimeter run—I know exactly what happens next.
I’ve seen what happens next. There’s a counseling statement.
There’s a speech about conduct and discipline delivered in that voice that could strip paint, maybe an Article 15 if he wanted to bury me, at minimum a week of the worst details on the base and a permanent entry in the long ledger of Reyes, Noah A.
, problem soldier. That’s what officers do with deviants.
They document you. They make an example.
He did none of it. Not that day. Not the six days after. He didn’t even pretend to chew me out for falling off the run, which would’ve been free—I handed him the infraction gift-wrapped, and he didn’t open it.
Instead, he stood on that track staring at the gap between the buildings, hard enough to show through his shorts, and then he spent six days not looking at me, and then today he assigned me a hut alone and told me why with a straight face.
Did he want me to jerk off? Did he want to think about me possibly jerking off in there?
The water sluices down my back, and I think about the way his eyes went almost silver when I paused in the doorway, and the way his fist closed at his side when I smiled, and the tone of his voice when…
And that’s about when I notice the situation developing south of my navel.
No. Absolutely not. Abort.
I am standing in a communal shower with four men who have known me for under two weeks, one of whom narrates everything he observes at full volume, and my body is drafting a press release about my commanding officer.
I crank the tap toward cold, put my face directly into the spray, and start naming weapon components in my head.
Bolt carrier group. Firing pin. Cam pin.
Buffer spring. The cold bites my skin, and the situation de-escalates. Slowly.
“—Reyes agrees with me. Reyes. You agree with me.”
“What?” I say into the water.
“The mouse. Hazard pay. Are you even listening?”
“He’s been in the water ten minutes,” Delgado observes. “Standing there like a load-bearing beam.”
“It’s called hygiene, Rafael. The man cleaned a hut alone, he’s earned a long shower.
” Hayes shuts his tap off and grabs his towel.
“Which, by the way, we’re circling back to.
The solo hut. Everybody else works in teams, and the Colonel gives our boy his own private hut, that’s day five of the pattern, I’m keeping a chart—”
“It was the smallest hut,” I say, and I’m proud of how bored it comes out.
“It was the nicest hut. It had the least mice. I checked.”
“You inventoried the mice,” Delgado says deadpan.
“I did a threat assessment.”
Petrillo kills his water. “The new people get here at 1400 tomorrow. Anybody else find it strange that eight bodies is command’s answer to a range card?”
That kills the mouse talk. Spencer wraps his towel around his waist and says, “Means command thinks the card’s the start of something.”
Nobody has a joke for that. Even Hayes just works his towel over his blond hair and lets it sit for a whole three seconds, which for Hayes is a moment of silence with full honors.
“Well,” he says finally, “eight new people, fresh audience, and a sniper who’s supposedly some kind of wizard. I say we let Wilder deal with whatever’s on the ridge and I focus on my strengths.”
“Which are?” Delgado asks warily.
“Morale, Rafael. Morale and the mouse saga.”
I shut my water off and towel down before getting dressed. My body is tired, but my mind is still racing.
Everyone files out with the shuffle of tired men.
“Coming?” Delgado asks at the door.
“In a minute,” I reply. “Gonna get some air first.”
“Air,” Hayes repeats, like it’s a foreign concept. “It’s forty degrees and smells like diesel.”
“Better than mouse.”
He can’t argue with that, so they go. I pull my jacket on and step out the other way, toward the perimeter road.
The fog has thinned to a haze that turns every floodlight into a soft white globe.
I walk the gravel with my hands in my pockets and let the cold work on me, because my head is too loud for a bunk right now.
Six days of nothing, and then one sentence in a doorway, and now the question isn’t if anymore.
The question is what happens next, and who moves first, and whether the answer is nothing, ever, because he’s a colonel with twenty-two years on the line and I’m a specialist with a file thick enough to be a fire hazard.
And tomorrow, eight new people are coming. Eight new sets of eyes.
The window for whatever this is might be closing before it ever opened.
“Specialist.”
I stop. Okafor comes out of the dark between the fuel point and the wire like he’s been standing there since the war started. Rain jacket, no light, dark eyes doing their full-spectrum sweep of me before I’ve said a word.
“Sergeant,” I greet back.
“Where you headed?”
“Nowhere. Clearing the mouse piss out of my nostrils.” I point my thumb back toward the huts. “Bunk in a minute.”
Okafor doesn’t move, studying me instead for a long moment. I get the distinct sensation of being read like that range card.
“I pulled your file before you got off the truck,” he finally says.
“I know what’s in it. And I know what a soldier looks like when he starts winding himself up for something stupid, because I’ve scraped a few of them off this border.
Whatever you were doing at your last posts, the volunteering for everything hazardous, the walking around at night like you’re shopping for a bad ending, that stops here.
This unit doesn’t carry self-destruction. Not on my watch, not on his.”
I stop breathing. He’s got the right symptoms and the wrong disease, and I can’t correct him without making everything a hundred times worse. So I say the words he needs.
“I hear you, Sergeant.”
“Do you?” he asks, though it hardly sounds like a question.
“Scout’s honor.” I put a hand over my heart. “Best behavior. I’ll be so boring you’ll request my transfer out of sheer—”
“Reyes,” he interrupts.
I stop joking. “Yes, Sergeant. I hear you. For real.”
He holds my eyes another second, deciding whether to believe the second version. That’s when the door of the command hut opens thirty meters up the road, spilling yellow light across the mud, and Wolfe steps out into it.
Of course he does. This base is four hundred meters across, and the two of us seem to have a magnetic field like orbiting suns.
He clocks us immediately—two figures on the perimeter road at 2200—and comes toward us with that unhurried stride that still eats ground faster than it should. He’s in his field jacket, collar up, and the floodlight haze puts a silver edge on his stubble.
“Problem, gentlemen?” he asks mildly.
“No, sir,” Okafor says.
“Nothing, sir,” I add. “Just getting some air before I turn in.” I shift my weight, already angling toward the huts. “Which I’m doing now. Good night, sir. Sergeant.”
I turn and walk, and I keep my pace even and my shoulders loose and my hands in my pockets, and I feel both of them watching me the whole way down the road.
Only their eyes don’t carry the same kind of weight.
Two men on a dark road, watching me walk away, one deciding if I’m a liability and one deciding if I’m a mistake. His mistake.
I round the corner of the barracks hut, out of both sightlines, and breathe out slowly.
Sergeant Okafor, I might actually keep my promise about the self-destruction.
The other thing, though? The other thing I’m walking straight into.