Page 7 of My Forbidden Commander

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.”