Chapter 5 What Rhett sees

By the third day the men had stopped pretending. The ones who thought they were fit found out they actually weren't, and the ones who thought they were tough found out there were levels to "tough" that nobody warned them about.

Dane had spent the first day quietly picking out the ones he thought would struggle. By day three, most of his predictions were wrong. The man he'd been most wrong about was an unremarkable recruit from somewhere in the valley — average in every way you could measure, the kind of man Dane had written off without thinking twice.

But that man had outlasted almost everyone on every run. No pain on his face, no fatigue, no expression at all. Just one foot in front of the other, long after it stopped being comfortable.

Dane watched him carefully but later filed it away. He found himself watching other men differently after that.

There was a big man from the coast, all noise and muscle on the first day, who quit on the fourth run and cried about it afterward where he thought nobody could see. Looking strong and being strong, Dane was starting to learn, were not the same thing at all — and neither were looking unremarkable and being unremarkable.

The border had taught Dane to judge people quickly, because sometimes there wasn't time for second chances. This place was teaching him that quick judgement wasn't always accurate. Some men carried courage quietly. Others carried fear so well it looked almost the same.

Aldric ran the sessions. Rhett watched them, quietly, from wherever he happened to be standing.

Aldric was everywhere — shouting corrections, timing runs, appearing beside men who were cutting corners before they'd finished cutting them. Nobody tried to fool Aldric twice.

Rhett showed up at the edges. He didn't say a word, just watched for a while and then was gone again. Half the time nobody noticed until someone mentioned it, and then everyone would look around trying to figure out how long he'd been there.

"He's doing it on purpose," Bram muttered one afternoon.

"No," Corin said.

"Then how does he keep appearing behind people?"

"Because you're looking everywhere except where he is."

Bram found this deeply unsettling. He spent the rest of the run trying to watch the perimeter and the drill at the same time, and did neither particularly well.

Corin, watching, said nothing about any of it. But he noticed. He always noticed. It was just rarely worth the breath it took to say so out loud.

On the fourth morning Aldric walked the lineup slowly. He stopped in front of Dane, looked at him a moment, then moved on without a word.

"Did you see that?" Bram said quietly, several men down.

"Yes," Corin said.

"Aldric doesn't stop in front of people for no reason."

They both looked down the line at Dane, staring straight ahead like nothing had happened.

That afternoon Rhett pulled three men aside — appearing beside each of them at different points, saying the same thing quietly. "Find me when this is done." Dane was one of the three.

Something settled in his chest he couldn't quite name — half nerves, half something closer to anticipation, refusing to settle into either one.

"He did it again," Bram told Corin at the water break. "That quiet one from the border. Rhett pulled him aside too."

"I saw."

"And you're not curious?"

"I'm always curious. I just don't say everything I'm thinking like you."

Bram grinned. "Must be nice. We should find out his name."

Corin said nothing.

"Tomorrow," Bram said. "First thing."

They found Rhett at the far end of the yard as the sun went down. He waited until all three had arrived before turning around.

"You three keep moving to the outside edges of the group," he said. "Every session. Why?"

The other two said nothing.

"You can see more from the outside," Dane said.

"See what?"

"Everything that's going wrong. Before it goes wrong."

Rhett held his gaze a moment.

"Stay in the middle," he said. "Seeing the problem isn't enough. You have to be close enough to fix it."

He looked at all three of them.

"That's all."

They walked back. The other two talked between themselves. Dane didn't join in. He was thinking about the fact that out of three hundred men, Rhett had noticed exactly where three of them stood — and hadn't chosen the fastest or the strongest. He'd chosen three who preferred watching before acting.

Dane wasn't sure whether that should have reassured him or unsettled him.

It managed to do both.

Outside, somewhere across the compound, a recruit was still running. Nobody said anything, but they all heard it. An instructor's correction carried across the darkness before fading again. The compound never seemed completely asleep anymore — even after dismissal there was always someone cleaning equipment, tending blisters, carrying water, trying to claw back one more lap before tomorrow arrived.

War, Dane was beginning to understand, wasn't something waiting beyond the walls. It had already started changing them, quietly, the same way it had already changed the man who broke on the fourth run and the one nobody had expected anything from at all. Nobody could tell yet which one Dane would turn out to be.