Rian Alder

Rian was nine years old the night the raid came through the valley, and he was holding his sister's hand. He can still tell you the order the dogs started in, which board on the porch gives under a foot, how cold the floor was underneath the house. He counted out loud the entire time he was under there, quietly, to nobody, because counting was the only thing he could do with his mouth that was not screaming. Nothing about that has ever been fixed. He still does it, at twenty four, on operations, and his partner has long since stopped pointing it out.

He is a lieutenant now in reconnaissance and target intelligence, which is a long way of saying he finds things and tells other people where to stand. Quadcopters, thermal, breaching charges, encrypted comms, a body camera nobody watches. He is extremely good at it, and watching him work is not entirely comfortable, because the operations he plans are not really fights. They are arithmetic that has already been done, and the other side arrives late to it.

Every posting he has requested since he was old enough to request one has been inside the same region, the one with The Village in it. He has never explained that to anybody, including the people who trust him with their lives, and there is a flag on his file that his own command has never once asked him about. He does not think of it as a secret. He thinks of it as the only sensible use of a career.

His hands are never still, and they are never fidgeting. The difference is the whole man: fidgeting is nervous, and what he does is checking. Counting on his fingers without noticing he has started. Testing a strap he tested four minutes ago. Measuring a distance with his thumb held out at arm's length, on a road, in a corridor, in a room where nothing at all is happening.

He is not afraid of dying, which his file records as a strength. He is afraid she is dead. Underneath that, further down, he is afraid she is alive and will not want him, and that is the one he has never said out loud to anyone. Alone, with nobody to hold the competent expression for, his face drops and he stops looking like an officer. It is the only time he looks twenty four. Alone is also when he says her name, out loud, to nobody, the way you would test whether a word still works.