Page 6 of My Forbidden Commander

He breathes out through his nose, and it almost sounds like a chuckle. “Okafor made it sound like a firing squad. Figured there’d at least be a blindfold.”

“The blindfold is for men who miss.” I pick up the spotting scope and fold the tripod. “You don’t miss, Reyes. Which means when something goes wrong around you, and something always goes wrong around you, it won’t be your shooting. It’ll be your judgment. And that’s the qual I can’t verify on a range.”

He absorbs that. I watch him decide whether to let it land or bat it away, and the brown eyes come up bright and dangerous, and here it comes.

“With respect, sir,” he bites out. “My judgment kept me alive in a cellar for six hours.”

“Your judgment put you eleven klicks from a hostile border. By request.” I step closer than I need to. Command distance. That’s all this is. “I read your file. I know what’s in it, and I know what isn’t. Men like you burn hot and useful right up until they burn out everyone standing next to them, and I have buried enough of my own that I don’t intend to bury any of you. So you’ll shoot when I say, move when I say, and hold when I say, and if that arrangement offends you, the convoy runs back to the airfield on Thursdays.”

He hasn’t backed up an inch. Just twenty-three years old, and he takes it standing flat-footed with his chin level. A muscle in his cheek twitches once before he answers.

“I’m not going anywhere, sir.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t imagine you are.”

It comes out wrong. Lower than I intend. And on top of that, we’re standing closer than a colonel and a specialist have any regulation reason to be. His eyes flick down, then up, cataloging me.

I step back first. That’s going to rub me the wrong way all day.

“PT with the unit at 0700. Dismissed.”

“Yes, sir.” Softer this time. I’m not sure which version is worse.

Reyes slings the rifle and walks off down the path, and I stand at the firing line, watching the fog take him, and my head will not shut up.

He’s the best natural shooter I’ve had under my command in a decade. And he’s a fucking liability.

4

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.