American Prince

We all knew it, our allies knew it, our enemies knew it. Even the hills seemed to know it, rain and fog turning the area around our base into a shrouded quagmire. The week after Colchester and I returned, my platoon and I were patrolling a series of paths on the other side of the low mountain closest to base. There’d been reports of separatists using the nearby valleys to hide from the Ukrainian and Romanian land forces, and it was our job to flush them out. So far, we’d turned up nothing, but the longer we stayed out there, the more time I had away from Colchester, and so I pushed Dag and Wu and the others to go deeper with me into the mountains. The trails were so steep and jagged they could only be navigated by foot, and it was while we were finding our way past a snarl of rocks and fallen trees that it happened.

It sounded like a snap, like a small branch had cracked.

Except it wasn’t a branch.

“Get down!” I yelled. “Down! Down!”

The woods lit up with bullets after that, just like our drills, but these weren’t paint bullets this time, this was real. I thought of Colchester’s words the first time we met, they don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and I thought of our drill in the forest when he’d shot me in the arm.

I thought about his fingers on my arm, cruel and gentle in turns.

But the drill… “They’re in the stream bed,” I shouted into my radio, thinking of Colchester and his men coming up over the lip of the creek. “Concentrate fire there.”

We did, with Dag and I leading the way. Pop, pop, pop went the gunshots as they echoed through the trees. I heard men shouting, talking, running and reloading, and I anxiously took stock of them every minute or so, shooting into the creek bed and then dodging behind a tree and counting all the crouching, uninjured bodies that were under my protection.

It was the first time I ever exchanged live fire. The first time I ever shot my gun knowing I could kill someone. The adrenaline rush was violently potent, the kind of intoxication that there aren’t words for. And once we’d driven the separatists off, found a safe place to shelter down until we could catch our breath and double-check that everyone really was unscathed, I closed my eyes and let the adrenaline take me. The fear and the exhilaration. There was no self-loathing here, no Colchester. Just me and a cocktail of hormones honed by evolution to make me see life for the pulsing, vibrant thing it was. The birds seemed louder, the wildflowers more fragrant. The fog seemed alive, sparkling and benevolent. Even the mud seemed magical.

I wasn’t the only one affected, either. Dag and Wu—normally both quiet men—were joking and laughing almost giddily. Other men sat and stared into the fog-laced trees or down at their boots, looking dazed and a little lost, as if they’d just woken up.

I wondered which kind of man Colchester would be after a fight. Amped and antsy? Quiet and stunned? Neither?

But there wasn’t time to think about it after that. I went from seeing Colchester every day to seeing him not at all as our captain struggled to adjust to the new level of hostility. Getting shot at became a regular pastime of ours, our walks through the villages became shadowboxes of jumpy distrust and tension, and the whole company was scattered in those early days, doing patrols, establishing outposts, spooking the rebels in the woods. We still thought we could scare them off back then. A few bullets, the might of the U.S. military standing behind the allied forces in the region, cue a few fighter jets flying overhead, and we thought they’d just drop their ancient Russian guns and run.

They didn’t.

Three months of this blossoming hell had worn deep paths in the hills and scarred the tranquil groves with grenades and artillery shells, and still nothing had essentially changed. The separatists hadn’t gained any ground, but they hadn’t lost any either. There had been countless firefights and a handful of hospital-worthy injuries, but no deaths. The civilians in the area kept doggedly living their lives as usual—farming sugar beets and oats, logging trees and mining coal. We doggedly shot and were shot at and nothing made any difference.

We all lived in a Mobius strip of a life—press forward, fall back, fight in the valley, fight on the mountain, fight in the valley again. I slept on the ground more than I slept in my bed. I got good at smelling danger; I got smarter about protecting my men. And if there were moments when I closed my eyes and thought only of Colchester reaching across a train table to touch a bruise, then no one needed to know.

The Mobius strip tore one day when the captain called me into his office and I saw Morgan sitting there, looking as polished and expensive as ever. I nearly laughed to see her there in her nude heels and cigarette pants, looking all ready to shoot a Chanel ad (or Dior or whatever the fuck it was she said.) But she was also the prettiest, cleanest thing I’d seen in three months, the first non-war thing I’d seen in three months, and even without all that, she was kin, whatever coldly loyal thing that meant in our family. I stopped my laughter.

Instead, I dropped into a chair next to her and crossed my legs. “Only you would show up in the middle of a war dressed like this.”

Morgan arched a perfect brow, crossing her legs to match mine. “I’m here on business actually. Well, and I wanted to see you.”

But the way her foot traced anxious circles in the air betrayed her. She wouldn’t be anxious if this were about business—hell, she wouldn’t be anxious if I dragged her out on a patrol right this minute, armed only with her Burberry trench coat and a slingshot.

No. She was here for Colchester. I was certain of it.