“You do know that shit won’t heal your cuts any faster,” he said, voice low so it didn’t travel.
I grunted. “If it can’t, nothing will.”
He eyed me sideways, the whites of his eyes barely visible in the gloom. “You’re running hot.”
“Says the guy who flagged me for missing a turn in a war game last month.” I refilled both glasses, the whiskey sloshing around my fingers. My hands were not cooperating, and the shake was getting worse.
He ignored the dig. “Vin’s got the perimeter covered. You’re off for tonight. He wants you rested for whatever weirdness is coming.”
I snorted, too tired to hide the contempt. “That why he’s got me on psych watch?”
Shivs let the silence hang until it was clear he wasn’t going to play. “You still gonna go, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer, just stared at the ring left by the bottle on the bar’s sticky surface. The world shrank to that ring: amber liquid, its edge fuzzed by condensation, the dark halo bleeding outwards. I wanted to be sick. Instead, I drank.
“I don’t know what I saw,” I said eventually. “She looked like she’d walked out of a fever. I chased her. Thought I could catch her, but—” The memory flickered, painful and raw. “She was gone before I could think.”
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “Sometimes I wish I could vanish, too.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw for the first time that he was fraying at the edges, hairline cracks radiating out fromhis mouth, the beginnings of a tremor in his fingers when he reached for his drink.
“You don’t,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he replied. “But it wouldn’t suck to have the option.”
For a while, we just drank. The air filled up with the hum of the ice machine and the occasional squeal of brakes out on the main road. It was almost peaceful.
Then he spoke again. “Have I ever told you about my first tour?”
“You told everyone. Fifty times. Afghanistan. All of it.”
He shook his head. “No, not the part with the rats.” He waited, eyes locked on mine. “The base was built on an old landfill. Every night, rats the size of possums would get into the bunks. Chewed through everything. Blankets, food, boots, skin. You’d wake up and find them in your mouth, biting your tongue. We tried poison, traps, but nothing worked. The only way was to kill them with your bare hands. So we’d sit up together, backs to the wall, knives out. One man sleeps, one man keeps watch.”
I pictured it, the dark, the terror, the certainty that nothing would ever change or get better, that all you could do was sit and wait for the teeth. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. We killed a lot of rats. Lost a lot of sleep. Came home.” He reached for the bottle, then stopped, his hand hovering over the glass. “But sometimes, I still feel them. Under the skin. Waiting.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I get it.”
He waited, then said, “So, what’s under your skin, Moab?”
I opened my mouth, but what came out was not what I meant to say. “It’s like I’m being pulled apart. Like there’s too much in here, and the only thing holding it together is the muscle memory of not letting go.” I looked at my hands, at the paleknuckles, the old scars, the dirt trapped in the creases. “The episodes are getting more frequent.”
He didn’t flinch. “How bad?”
“Bad,” I said. “I feel it starting sometimes before it happens, like a fever or a nosebleed. I get this pressure behind my eyes. And then it’s like I’m two people, and one of them wants to tear the other apart.”
Shivs absorbed that, then said, “You sure it’s not just old wounds? Trauma can do that, especially when you try to run from it.”
I wanted to laugh, but my throat wouldn’t let me. “I’ve run every mile of trauma. It never caught up until now.”
He risked a hand on my shoulder. “Vin’s worried you’ll go rogue. Off the leash. But you’re stronger than that.”
I wanted to believe it, but the old wolf inside me, the one that watched from the back of my eyes, shook its head.
“They don’t get it, Shivs,” I said. “None of them do. This is bigger than the job, bigger than the fucking club. I think I’m changing.”
He grinned, the smile ruined by too much truth. “We all change, Sarge. But you’re still Moab Williams. Sergeant at Arms. Royal Bastard. End of story.”
