My brother knocked me into the gravel while the other recruits laughed.
“Go home. Nobody here wants you,” he said, standing over me as if we were children again.
I kept my mouth shut until a seam on my sleeve split, and our colonel stopped looking at my brother.
Getting thrown off that course would’ve meant losing the only route back into service they’d offered me.
Cole knew that much.
He ground his heel beside my hand while I pushed myself upright.
“You heard me.”
I brushed grit off my palm and joined the line.
He’d already let Karan tip lentils down my front at lunch without moving his tray.
Paige had crushed my compass card beneath her boot during the equipment check.
I’d asked her to move.
She’d pressed harder.
We were at Fort Bellweather for reassessment, mixed in with recruits convinced that having been away meant I’d forgotten everything.
My brother had told them I couldn’t finish things.
He hadn’t asked where I’d been.
When I reached for my pack, the damaged sleeve opened across my shoulder.
Colonel Hatfield stopped beside the equipment rack.
Her lips parted.
I pulled the fabric together, but she’d already stepped around Cole.
“Leave your sleeve.”
My fingers stayed where they were.
“Dara. Let me see.”
The mark was small enough to cover with my palm: a split ring crossed by a bar.
I’d stopped thinking about it whenever I dressed.
Now everyone stared.
Karan bent sideways for a better look.
“That’s what this is about? Some bargain tattoo?”
The colonel turned toward him.
“Stand BACK.”
His boots scraped together.
She came close enough that I could see a thread caught beneath her collar button.
“Who put that on you?”
“The same people who put it on the others.”
She swallowed before she answered.
“Breakwater.”
Paige’s boot slid off my compass card.
Someone behind her said the name again, much quieter.
They’d heard enough barracks stories to know the program had existed, or to argue that it hadn’t.
Selected soldiers, training nobody talked about, a shutdown that never reached the papers.
Cole kept looking between the colonel and me.
“No. She would’ve told us.”
I let the sleeve fall.
“We were told there were no survivors,” Hatfield said.
My brother’s mouth stayed open.
He’d spent years being angry that I hadn’t called.
I couldn’t look at him then.
“Permission to finish the course, ma’am.”
The colonel held my gaze before stepping aside.
“Cover that.”
Afterward, the empty places around me spread.
Karan carried his dinner past our usual bench, even though his tray was already touching it.
Cole followed him.
At lights-out, questions traveled through the room whenever someone thought I’d fallen asleep.
Could I hear them?
Had I killed people?
Why would they put someone like me beside THEM?
I kept getting up with the others.
On the course, I repeated the obstacles until an instructor told me to stop.
At inspections, I stood beside the same boots that had ground my equipment into gravel.
Nobody touched my things again.
That didn’t make sleeping easier.
During carbine maintenance, Karan finally dragged his chair closer.
He’d fitted a spring incorrectly and kept pressing the housing closed.
“Why come back through this?”
I pointed to the spring.
He removed it.
“You could’ve asked for somewhere else.”
“I asked for a start.”
He waited while I checked my weapon.
“That’s all?”
“That’s what they gave me.”
He went back to his spring.
The evaluation came without warning.
Before dusk, Hatfield ordered us into sensor vests and handed out laser training carbines.
A rescue mannequin waited somewhere beyond the training boundary, with patrols between us and it.
We had until after midnight.
She read our assignment together: Cole, Karan, Paige, me.
Paige pulled her vest straps tight.
“We’re the test equipment, aren’t we?”
Cole checked his carbine.
“Let’s find out what my sister remembers.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Out beyond the boundary, Paige’s vest sounded before we’d reached the first crossing.
An instructor marked her leg restricted, and she had to continue without putting weight on it.
Cole insisted on taking point.
We kept returning to a culvert with a bent grate.
Karan swung his weapon toward every branch that moved.
“Stop turning,” I said.
Cole opened his mouth, then looked at the grate again.
I took the lead.
The patrol’s boot marks left the path where the ground softened, so I moved us uphill.
When their beams cut between the trees, I put Paige behind a stump.
“Stay LOW.”
I circled their position while they tracked the others.
Their vests sounded in quick succession.
By the time I returned, Cole had raised his weapon toward the sound of my steps.
“Clear,” I said.
He lowered it slowly.
We reached the equipment hut with Paige leaning against Karan.
A rival team had beaten us there.
Their sensors flashed through the doorway, and Cole dropped behind a stack of timber.
Karan kept pressing his trigger without clearing the safety.
Paige lost her grip on her carbine.
“We can’t cross that,” Cole said.
I caught his sleeve before he stood.
“Then don’t.”
I moved along the hut’s blind side and reached the rear entrance before they changed positions.
Inside, the vest alarms overlapped.
Someone swore and struck the wall with his palm.
I carried the mannequin out past him.
My brother stared at its dangling boots, then moved aside so I could pass.
After midnight, Hatfield met us at the return point.
“Status?”
I lowered the weight onto the ground.
“Recovered. Full team returned.”
She checked Paige’s vest before looking at me.
The next evening, she called me into her office.
“Your records were supposed to stay buried.”
I stood across from her desk.
“You approved my reassessment.”
“I approved a NAME.”
Her fingers pressed against the edge of the blotter.
“Why here?”
“Because whatever shut that program down didn’t finish the job.”
She started to answer.
The alarm cut through her first word.
A blast rattled the window, and light jumped across the wall behind her.
Outside, boots hammered the walkway in different directions.
Cole appeared at the doorway with his weapon held wrong for the narrow space.
“What the hell’s happening?”
“They came after me,” I said.
He stopped moving.
“Who?”
The outer door struck the wall before I could answer.
Men in dark equipment pushed through with weapons raised.
I drove the nearest weapon away from Cole and used its sling to pull its owner off balance.
“GET BEHIND THE DESKS.”
Karan dragged Paige down as I forced the next attacker into the doorway.
There wasn’t room to do anything neatly.
A chair caught beneath my boot.
I kicked it away and kept the entrance blocked until our security detail reached us.
Afterward, the alarm kept sounding.
Hatfield stood among overturned furniture while medics worked around her.
“You led them HERE.”
I couldn’t get enough air to answer immediately.
Cole started toward me, then stopped at her raised hand.
“They were coming,” I said. “Now you know how they enter.”
She looked at the doorway.
Then at the recruits behind the desks.
“Your previous rank is restored.”
Cole stared at me.
“You’ll take this section.”
For nine days, Karan asked me to check his work before inspections.
Cole followed instructions without making me repeat them.
Paige brought back the compass card and said she’d tried to straighten it.
“I’m sorry.”
I took it from her.
During training, they still looked toward the gate whenever a vehicle slowed outside.
I kept putting them through the drills.
One afternoon, Hatfield stopped beside us as I adjusted my sleeve over the mark.
Her finger touched the course schedule.
“Run it again. Assume the next group knows everything you taught them today.”
The pencil line
I drew a line through that afternoon’s finish time.
“We’re repeating the recovery exercise,” I said.
“Same equipment. Everyone stays until we’ve finished.”
That was what Hatfield meant on the surface.
Change the exercise before somebody else learned to beat it.
She left the schedule in my hands.
Cole stepped into the place at the front where I’d been standing.
For nine days he’d followed my instructions.
He’d also begun answering questions directed at me, usually with “What she means is.”
Apparently my return to service required a brother-shaped interpreter.
I pointed beside Paige.
“Over there.”
He moved.
Hatfield stayed by the rack while I checked the vests.
The equipment was for training. The weight we’d carry was the same mannequin.
Nobody needed another evening of mistaking alarms for the real thing.
“Who’s leading?” Cole said.
“I’ll assign that.”
“I know the course.”
“So does everyone else.”
His eyes went to the schedule.
I’d written his name beside the first practice run.
During those nine days I’d let each of them try giving instructions.
Cole always asked to go first. Karan asked whether he could try again.
Paige asked what she’d missed.
Those were three different questions.
I’d been giving them the same answer: another chance.
Hatfield held out her hand for the schedule.
“Your recommendations are due when this training block ends.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cole straightened. He’d been waiting for those recommendations since before my sleeve tore.
He wanted to be the recruit trusted to lead the next group through its practice.
I wanted to get through an afternoon without my brother measuring my rank against his memory of me at sixteen.
Hatfield tapped the space beneath his name.
“Practice isn’t a recommendation.”
“I know.”
“Then keep them separate.”
Cole held out his hand for the schedule before she had finished returning it to me.
I folded it.
“Vest on.”
He pulled the straps tight enough that I had to tell him to loosen them.
Then he leaned close.
“You aren’t going to put something bad beside my name, are you?”
Cole’s name
That afternoon, I opened the schedule against the equipment rack while Cole stood beside me.
His name was in my handwriting.
So were the notes beneath it. He checked straps without being reminded.
He could keep people moving when they were tired.
He gave an instruction loudly enough to reach the person at the back.
I hadn’t invented his good points. That would’ve been a tiresome hobby.
But I’d left spaces where other things belonged.
Cole put a finger on the paper.
“You said I could do this.”
“I said you could practice.”
“You’ve been letting me lead.”
“With me there.”
He took his finger away.
Nine days earlier, at that same rack, he’d held out a vest with its straps untangled.
“I can get them ready for you,” he’d said.
I’d let him.
He’d stood beside me instead of across from me, and I’d wanted that badly enough to stop looking at his hands.
Now he reached for the folded compass card sticking out of my pocket.
I covered it.
“I was going to see if it lay flat,” he said.
“It doesn’t.”
“Paige tried.”
“Yes.”
“People are trying, Dara.”
Across the rack, Paige stopped fastening her vest. Karan kept his head down.
Cole lowered his voice.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
I wanted to ask which part had been easy for him. The lentils?
My hand in the gravel? There were plenty of choices.
Instead, I took the card out and set it between us.
One crease ran through a bearing I’d written before the equipment check.
Paige had rubbed at it until the paper thinned.
It could still be read if I held the two halves level.
Cole studied it.
“I didn’t do that.”
“You stood there.”
“I wasn’t responsible for everybody.”
“You want to be.”
His mouth opened. He closed it when Karan reached past him for a vest.
Hatfield took the schedule from the rack.
“At the end of this block, Dara tells me who she can trust with a practice group,” she said.
“That includes whether anyone is ready.”
Cole gave her the expression he used when an older relative explained something obvious.
Pleasant. Patient. Eager for them to stop.
“I understand, ma’am.”
She handed the paper back to me.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
She left us with the equipment.
Cole waited until she was beyond the walkway.
“You can say whatever you like in there,” he said.
“She’ll believe you now.”
My thumb pressed into the crease on the card.
I’d wanted him to believe me before anybody recognized a tattoo.
Karan lifted the mannequin by its shoulders. Paige took its feet.
Cole didn’t help them.
He was still looking at the blank beside his name.
“You wouldn’t do that to your own brother.”
The hut door
We reached the hut later that afternoon, with Cole leading the practice and me following behind.
Before we started, I’d explained the change. There’d be no rival team inside.
The work was getting everyone and the weight back together, with one person assigned a movement restriction.
Paige drew that role again.
She stared at the marker on her vest.
“Wonderful. My leg’s got a reputation.”
Karan laughed, then stopped when Cole turned around.
“Can we take this seriously?”
“We can carry things and laugh,” Paige said.
I nearly liked her right then. It was inconvenient.
Cole put Karan at the mannequin’s shoulders and took the feet himself.
Paige waited by the wall.
“Where do you want me?” she said.
“Behind us.”
“I can’t keep up.”
“We’ll stop.”
They lifted the weight.
I stayed beside the door. Cole took four steps before he looked back.
Paige had moved one pace.
“Come on,” he said.
“With which leg?”
He lowered his end.
“Dara, help her.”
“Use the people in your group.”
“You’re standing right there.”
“I’m observing.”
He stared at me as though I’d announced a new disability.
Karan set his end down carefully.
“We could move her first. Then the weight.”
“That takes twice as long,” Cole said.
“Less time than this.”
Cole looked toward me for a ruling.
I kept my hands behind my back.
There was no prize for speed that afternoon.
I’d said that before we left the rack.
I’d said it again at the hut because Cole asked about the time.
He wanted the fast result he’d seen me produce.
He kept leaving out the part where I’d brought everyone home.
“Take Paige,” he told Karan. “I’ll manage this.”
He dragged the mannequin a short distance before its boot caught beneath the door.
The frame scraped.
Karan stopped beside Paige.
“Leave it. We’ll come back together.”
“I’ve got it.”
The boot stayed caught.
Cole pulled harder.
I stepped forward and stopped myself before I touched the weight.
My hand was already open. It had taken less than a second.
He’d been counting on that hand all week.
“Put it down,” I said.
He dropped his end.
“So now you can help.”
“I can stop you damaging equipment.”
Paige eased herself onto the bench outside the hut.
Her assigned restriction lasted until I ended the run, and she was obeying it despite being furious.
Cole wiped his palms on his trousers.
“Fine. Tell us the right answer.”
“Karan offered you one.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me to use it?”
Karan looked away.
That hurt worse than Cole’s question.
A man who’d spent nine days asking me to check his work had offered a sound answer, and my brother wanted my permission to hear it.
“Try again,” I said.
Cole put his hands on his hips.
“We’ve done enough. Everybody knows I can carry a dummy.”
Paige looked down at the mannequin.
“Not that one.”
I bit the inside of my cheek.
It was the wrong time to laugh, though my brother had supplied an excellent time to start.
He bent and freed the boot.
Then he turned toward Paige.
“You could’ve said something before it got stuck.”
She stood on her permitted leg and faced him.
“I’ve been talking since we got here.”
The bent grate
An hour later, the four of us stood beside the culvert we’d kept finding during the night evaluation.
Cole had brought us back to it again.
This time he knew where we were.
He’d chosen the shorter path and discovered that the weight and Paige couldn’t get through it together.
Karan lowered the mannequin.
“Wide path,” he said. “Back the way we came.”
Cole turned to me.
“We can make this work.”
“Show me.”
He looked at the grate. Then at Paige.
“End her restriction. She’s proved she can follow it.”
“The exercise includes bringing her back.”
“She’s right here.”
“And still needs help.”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth.
There was dirt on his sleeve. I’d have brushed it off once.
I had a whole childhood of fixing his collar while he complained that I was touching him.
Now I kept both hands on my own equipment.
“You’re enjoying this,” he said.
Karan bent for the mannequin.
“Let’s just go back.”
“Leave it.”
Cole pointed at me.
“She’s waiting for me to fail.”
Paige put a hand against the culvert wall.
“She’s waiting for you to pick a way we can use.”
“You don’t know her.”
There it was. The sentence he’d brought from home and unpacked for everyone.
I took the schedule out.
“Your practice ends here. Karan, bring us back.”
Cole stepped between us.
“No. You don’t get to put this down as me failing.”
“Move.”
He did, but only far enough to stand beside me.
“You want them to think you’re better than me.”
Karan and Paige stopped moving.
I’d been willing to discuss the exercise.
Cole had brought us somewhere else while leaving my boots in the same mud.
“I want everyone back,” I said.
“That’s your answer to everything now. Everybody back. Everybody safe. You weren’t so bothered about that when you disappeared.”
My throat hurt before I said anything.
“You know I couldn’t contact you.”
“I know what you said.”
Paige took her hand off the wall.
“Cole.”
“No, she needs to hear it. You all heard about the tattoo. You didn’t hear about the years before she arrived here.”
I could’ve stopped him with an order. I should’ve stopped the exercise sooner.
Instead I stood there waiting for him to say the thing that might let me understand.
That was another mistake.
He pointed at my folded schedule.
“She’s got a colonel believing she’s some kind of hero, and now she gets to decide whether I belong.”
“I haven’t said you don’t belong.”
“You don’t have to. You can write it.”
Karan put the mannequin down again.
Cole faced him.
“You remember what she was like before all this.”
Karan’s eyes went to my shoulder.
Cole pressed on.
“We were trying to get her to leave. That’s all. She shouldn’t have been there. And after what happened in that office, tell me we were wrong.”
My hand closed around the paper.
He was using the attack to tidy up the gravel.
Karan opened his mouth, but Cole spoke over him.
“I was looking out for her. She wouldn’t listen. She’s never listened to me.”
I waited until he looked back.
“When you pushed me?”
His eyes slid toward Paige.
“I didn’t know how else to get through to you.”
“You said nobody wanted me.”
“I was angry.”
“You let them laugh.”
“Oh, come on, Dara. You weren’t hurt.”
Paige sat down on the culvert edge.
She pulled the restriction marker off her vest and held it out to me.
“I need the exercise stopped.”
I took it.
She stood with both feet on the ground.
“I wasn’t looking out for her,” she said to Cole.
“I was being cruel. Don’t put a ribbon on mine.”
Cole turned to Karan.
Karan shook his head.
“The lunch was mine,” he said. “You laughed.”
My brother looked back at me.
He could’ve stopped. There were several places he could’ve stopped.
Instead he said, “If you’d told me what you were, none of us would’ve done it.”
I unfolded the schedule against my thigh.
The space beneath his name was no longer blank.
The rack at six
At six that evening, I returned the training equipment to the rack while Cole waited on the walkway.
Karan and Paige stood beside the mannequin. Nobody wanted to leave first.
Hatfield came out to meet us.
“Finished?”
“Stopped,” I said.
Cole stepped forward.
“We had a disagreement about the assessment.”
“You were practicing,” she said.
“Dara made it an assessment.”
Hatfield held out her hand.
I gave her the schedule.
She read what I’d written. Cole tried to read it upside down.
Then she looked at the first nine days.
“These notes say he was improving.”
“He was following instructions.”
“These say you were considering him for practice lead.”
“I was.”
“What changed?”
Cole answered before I could.
“She wants to bring the family into it.”
I could still have made it a small disagreement. A route choice. Fatigue. Another try tomorrow.
He’d take that version. He was practically holding the door open for it.
“My brother blamed the people he was leading when his choices didn’t work,” I said.
“Then he defended what he did to me before the evaluation.”
Cole’s face flushed.
“You dragged that out.”
“I asked two questions.”
Hatfield turned a page.
“Where’s your account of the first incident?”
“There’s what you saw.”
“And the rest?”
I looked at Karan.
His hands stayed at his sides.
I looked at Paige. She gave a small nod.
“I didn’t put it here.”
“Why?”
The answer was ugly enough without dressing it for inspection.
“I wanted him to stay.”
Cole stepped closer.
“Dara.”
Hatfield kept her eyes on me.
“You thought I needed your permission to keep a recruit?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You thought ignoring it would help him?”
“Yes.”
There went the part of me that could pretend I’d handled this perfectly.
I wanted my rank back. I wanted my brother back.
I’d been trying to carry both while telling three recruits to share a load.
Hatfield handed me the schedule.
“I can’t accept a recommendation you don’t trust.”
“I won’t submit one.”
Cole made a sound through his nose.
“Great. So none of us gets anything because she’s upset.”
Karan turned toward him.
“Stop saying us.”
Hatfield looked at my empty recommendation line.
“You were appointed to this section. That requires more than getting them through when you’re beside them.”
“I know.”
“Do you intend to do the job?”
Cole stood close enough that our sleeves touched.
“Tell her you need another placement,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be stuck teaching us anyway.”
That was the clean exit. Restored rank. Somewhere else.
My brother could stay with his version of me, and I could go where nobody remembered the lentils.
I pulled my sleeve away.
But I couldn’t yet tell Hatfield that the section would work without me fixing every mistake.
She put the schedule back in my hand.
“Then show me.”
The fourth vest
That evening, before anybody left the rack, I took down the fourth sensor vest.
Cole reached for it.
I put it on myself.
“We’ll do one recovery inside the training area,” I said.
“No patrols. No clock. I’ll be the person who needs help.”
Paige looked at the mannequin.
“With that too?”
“With that too.”
Cole adjusted his straps.
“All right. I can do that.”
I fastened the restriction marker to my own vest.
“Karan will lead.”
Cole’s hand stopped at his buckle.
“Why?”
“He offered a workable plan. You wouldn’t hear it.”
“So you give him my place?”
“You were practicing. This is his practice.”
Hatfield stepped back from the rack.
She didn’t speak for me. I was grateful enough to resent it.
Cole looked toward the hut, then at the colonel.
“What if he gets it wrong?”
“He can change his mind,” I said.
Karan rubbed his palms down his trousers.
“I’ll need Paige beside you.”
“Ask her.”
He did.
Paige came to stand near me.
Cole stayed where he was.
For nine days he’d obeyed my instructions, and I’d treated that as an apology he couldn’t say.
At the culvert he’d supplied the words himself.
We would’ve left you alone if we’d known you mattered.
I unclipped my training carbine and handed it to Hatfield.
For this practice, I wouldn’t carry equipment or offer instructions.
Cole pointed at my empty hands.
“You’re going to let him make you look helpless?”
Paige’s face changed.
“She’s allowed to need a hand.”
I sat on the bench.
That took more effort than lifting the mannequin had.
My legs wanted to get me upright. My mouth had three suggestions prepared.
Karan crouched enough to meet my eyes.
“Which side’s easier?”
“Left.”
“Anything I shouldn’t pull?”
“The vest.”
He nodded and spoke to Paige.
Cole shifted his feet.
“You’re wasting time.”
“There’s no clock,” Karan said. “Take the weight when I tell you.”
My brother looked at Hatfield.
She stood beside the rack with my carbine across her arms.
Then he looked at me.
I rested my hands on my knees.
“Karan’s speaking.”
Four places on the bench
We finished the short recovery before the light went.
It took longer than Cole wanted.
Karan stopped twice to change what they were doing.
Once Paige said she couldn’t keep her grip, and he put everything down without asking her to prove it.
Cole complained.
He also carried his share.
Nobody went back for somebody they’d forgotten.
When I stood without the restriction marker, my knees shook.
The work hadn’t tired me.
Sitting there while other people decided whether to help had done that.
Paige held my elbow until I pulled it free.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“My face hasn’t passed this course yet.”
She gave a short laugh.
Hatfield told us to sit on the bench by the rack.
Cole remained standing.
“I don’t see what that proved,” he said.
“We carried her fifty yards because she told us to.”
Karan sat down beside Paige.
“You argued for thirty of them.”
“Because I knew how to do it faster.”
“But we finished,” Paige said. “All of us.”
Hatfield set the schedule on the bench between us.
“Dara. Your recommendation?”
Cole looked directly at me.
I could hear my own pulse. I wanted water.
I wanted him to say he was sorry before I had to speak, which was another way of asking him to make my job easier.
“Karan can lead supervised practice,” I said.
“Paige can assist. Cole isn’t ready to lead.”
His mouth pulled sideways.
“There it is.”
Hatfield waited.
“I’ll keep training the section,” I said.
Cole took a step toward the bench.
“You don’t get to keep me here just to make an example.”
“You’re assigned here,” Hatfield said. “So is she.”
“You can’t expect me to take orders from my sister after this.”
“You’ve been taking them for nine days.”
“Because I was trying.”
“Then continue.”
He looked at Karan.
“You know me.”
Karan bent forward, forearms on his knees.
“I know you left Paige standing at the hut.”
“I was coming back.”
“After Dara helped her.”
Cole turned to Paige.
“And you’re happy with this? You crushed the thing. I didn’t.”
Paige took the compass card from where I’d set it beside the schedule.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
She held it with both hands.
There was no way to flatten the crease by being careful now.
“I pressed harder after she asked me to move. I wanted everybody to laugh.”
Her eyes filled.
She passed it to me.
“I’m sorry, Dara. I should’ve said all of that before.”
Karan sat upright.
“I tipped the food. It wasn’t an accident.”
Cole threw up a hand.
“Nobody said it was.”
“I did,” Karan said. “At lunch. I said she got in my way.”
He looked at me.
“You didn’t.”
I put the compass card in my pocket.
Hatfield turned to Cole.
He stared at the ground between his boots.
“So I pushed her,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have. But she keeps making it sound like I was some stranger.”
I said nothing.
“She’s my sister. You don’t know what that was like, having her vanish and then turn up here without telling me anything.”
His voice rose.
“I was supposed to stand there and act like I didn’t care? She’d walk past me. She’d answer an instructor before she’d answer me.”
“You told me to go home,” I said.
“I wanted you out of here.”
“Yes.”
He put both hands behind his head, then dropped them.
“Because you wouldn’t talk to me.”
Hatfield stood.
Cole took a step back.
“You knocked a soldier down because she wouldn’t give you the conversation you wanted,” she said.
“Then you encouraged other recruits to join you.”
“I didn’t tell them to do those things.”
“You laughed.”
His eyes went to Karan.
Karan held his gaze.
Cole looked away first.
Hatfield picked up the schedule.
“You won’t lead practice during this block. Karan gets that opportunity, under Dara’s supervision.”
Cole opened his mouth.
She kept speaking.
“The work you’ve completed stays completed. The team exercises you couldn’t finish properly will be repeated. You won’t have Dara finishing your part for you.”
He stared at the paper.
The course hadn’t disappeared beneath him.
The place he wanted at its front had.
“And this account goes beside my own,” Hatfield said.
“The push doesn’t disappear because she can handle herself.”
Cole’s face crumpled before he turned away.
I hated that it still hurt me.
He pressed a hand over his eyes.
“Dara, come on.”
I stayed seated.
Paige moved closer to Karan, and my brother turned back to find no one beside him.
“I said I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“You did.”
“What else am I supposed to say?”
I took the schedule from Hatfield.
“Nothing that changes the recommendation.”
The head of the line
The next morning, Cole arrived at the rack before me.
He’d put the vests out.
Mine lay at the end with the straps open, as it had nine days earlier.
I checked it myself.
Karan came down the walkway with Paige.
Neither of them stopped beside Cole to wait for him.
They came to me.
“What do you want first?” Karan said.
“Tell them your plan.”
He faced the other two.
Cole looked past him at me.
I lifted a hand toward Karan.
My brother turned back.
That morning, Karan held the place at the front.
Cole took the weight when he was told.
When Paige needed the load lowered, it went down.
Cole started to explain a better way once.
Karan listened.
Then he said, “We’ll try it on the next run.”
And they did.
I hadn’t taken away every good thing my brother knew.
He’d have preferred that.
It would’ve given him a grievance he could hold without looking too closely.
At the end of the run, Hatfield met us by the rack.
She had the schedule.
Karan’s name was beside supervised lead. Paige’s was beside assistant.
Cole’s remained with the work he still had to complete.
Mine was above the section.
Hatfield handed it to me in front of all three.
“Your section. Your recommendations stand.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cole looked at the paper, then at the recruits behind him.
The same people who’d laughed while I got out of the gravel stood waiting for me to dismiss them.
I let myself take that in.
No sleeve had torn. Nobody was looking at my shoulder.
“Equipment away,” I said.
They moved.
Paige set the mannequin down with Karan and came back to me.
She had a replacement compass card.
“Same kind,” she said. “I checked.”
The corners were square. The surface lay flat across my palm.
“I can’t replace your notes.”
“I can write them again.”
She nodded, but she didn’t leave.
“Will you check mine sometime?”
“After you’ve done them.”
“Right.”
She started toward the rack, then came back and held out her hand.
I shook it.
Her grip was firm. Mine was, too.
A week earlier I’d have used that hand to hide the mark on my shoulder.
Karan passed us with the last vest.
He gave me a nod and put it away without asking me to check the straps first.
I tucked the new card behind the old one.
There were things worth keeping even when they no longer worked.
Cole waited until Hatfield had gone back inside.
Then he came over.
His eyes were red. He hadn’t tried to cover that.
For once, he wasn’t carrying an expression he hoped somebody would approve.
“I was angry before you got here,” he said.
“I know.”
“I kept thinking you’d have found a way to call if you’d wanted to.”
I pressed the schedule against my side.
He looked at it.
“I shouldn’t have said that stuff at the culvert.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“No.”
He rubbed his palms together.
“Are you ever going to talk to me like I’m your brother again?”
“We can talk after duty.”
He looked up.
I meant it. He was my brother.
He could also learn where to stand while somebody else gave instructions.
Then his eyes dropped to the schedule again.
“Could you put me down for one lead practice before this block ends? Just one. You know I can do it.”
I held the paper out of his reach.
“Earn it.”
I walked past him carrying my section’s schedule.
If you’ve ever had to stop making excuses for someone you love, this one is for you.
Family conflicts can leave scars long after the moment has passed – read about a mother and sister separated by 75 miles or a husband who demanded another $1,080 after his wife left. For another unforgettable family confrontation, see the bride who hosed down the grandma who raised her groom.
