Page 21 of My Forbidden Commander

“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.