BLACKOUT PROTOCOL: FORGOTTEN SOLDIER

What the Night Hides

Chapter 3

Corporal James did not remember the drive home. Twelve hours of waiting in a truck on the street across from the Rakina house, watching lights blink on and off behind curtains he had no reason at all to be watching, and somewhere between the base gate and his own driveway it all blurred together into one long ache behind his eyes.

The porch light was on. Always was, Hopelyn.

He sat in the truck a moment before going in, hands still on the wheel as the engine ticked itself off. Through the front window he could see the shape of her moving in the kitchen, and past her, smaller, quicker, the blur of their daughter that would not stay still enough on her bed to go to sleep.

Rose met him at the door before he'd even taken his boots off.

"Daddy!" She hit him round the knees with the particular violence only a seven year old can manage and he laughed despite the weight sitting on his chest, scooping her up onto his hip the way he'd done since she was small enough to fit in one arm.

"Hey, baby girl. You still up?"

"I waited for you." She said it like an accusation and a gift at once, her small hand patting his cheek, checking he was real. "Mommy said I could if I was good."

"Were you good?"

"Mostly."

Hopelyn appeared in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder, giving him the look she always did after a long shift - not quite a question, not quite worry, only her eyes moving over his face as if she could see some damage she couldn't from across the room.

"There's a plate for you," she said. "Go put her down first. She's been asking about the stars again."

He carried Rose up the stairs the long way, past the hallway pictures - Rose's first steps, Rose's first tooth gone, a blurry one of James in uniform that Hopelyn had insisted on framing even though he hated the way he looked in it. Rose room smelled like the lavender spray Hopelyn swore by, and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling had gone dim from the hallway light spilling in.

"Tell me the constellation one," Rose said, already burrowing under her blanket.

"Which constellation one?"

"The one where you find your way home."

He sat on the edge of her bed, the mattress dipping under him, tracing a shape on the ceiling with his finger even though the stars didn't actually line up to anything real. "Sailors used to look up at the sky when they got lost at sea. No roads out there, no signs. Just stars. And if you knew which ones to look for, you could always find your way back to the people waiting on you."

"Even in the dark?"

"Especially in the dark." He pressed a kiss to her forehead, felt the warmth of her, the everyday miracle of a kid who trusted the world enough to fall asleep in it. "That's when you need them most."

Her eyes were already going heavy. "Will you find your way home tomorrow too?"

"Every night, baby. I promise."

He sat there another minute after her breathing evened out, watching her chest rise and fall, thinking about a little girl three miles away who'd probably asked her mother the same question tonight and got a worse answer.

Hopelyn had the plate waiting when he came back down - rice, stewed chicken, the kind of meal that tasted like effort even on a Tuesday. He ate like a man who'd forgotten food existed for twelve hours, which wasn't far from true, and for a while neither of them said much. The refrigerator hummed. A car passed somewhere out on the road. Hopelyn watched him from across the table with her chin propped on her hand, patient in the way she'd always been patient, waiting for him to get to whatever was sitting behind his eyes.

"You've barely said ten words since you walked in," she said finally.

"Long day."

"You've had long days before. This is different." She reached over and stilled his fork hand with two fingers, not stopping him from eating, simply anchoring him. "Talk to me, James."

He set the fork down.

"You know Captain Rakina."

"The one you always talk about. The good one."

"The best one." He rubbed a hand down his face, felt the stubble he hadn't shaved in two days. "Hop, I've served under a lot of officers. Most of them you follow because you have to. Rakina, you follow because you want to. Man remembers everybody's name. Remembers your kid's birthday before you do. He got promoted twice and never once acted like the rank changed what he owed the men under him."

"So what happened?"

"That's the thing. Nobody knows. General pulls him off the beach mid-vacation, calls it an emergency deployment, and by that night I'm parking outside his house telling his wife I can't tell her where her own husband went." He shook his head slowly. "Twelve years in and I've delivered a lot of bad news to a lot of families. I know what a real deployment notice sounds like. This wasn't it."

Hopelyn was quiet for a moment, turning her water glass in a slow circle on the table.

"What do you think happened to him?"

"I don't know. And that's what's eating me. Because the story doesn't hold together, and everybody around it is acting like it does." He looked up at her. "You should've seen his wife's face. She knows too. She's not stupid - she just doesn't have anywhere to put what she knows yet."

"And that's your job now. Sitting outside her house."

"Ostensibly to protect her." His jaw tightened. "Feels more like I'm here to keep an eye on what she does. Make sure she doesn't call the wrong number, doesn't ask the wrong question too loud. I signed up to guard my brother's family, Hop. Some nights it feels like I signed up to guard the lid on something."

Hopelyn reached across the table and took his hand, her thumb moving slow over his knuckles, the same gesture she'd used on him since they were twenty-two and broke and figuring out how to be married.

"Then be both," she said simply. "Watch the house because it's an honor - because that family needs somebody decent standing between them and whatever's coming. And watch everything else too. Nobody said you have to close your eyes to do your job right."

"That's not really how the Army works."

"I didn't marry the Army." Her eyes held his, steady, the way they always were even when the rest of the world wasn't. "I married you. And you've never once in your life been able to just look the other way. Don't start now."

He turned his hand over under hers and held on.

"I'm not planning to," he said. "I just don't know what I'm walking into yet."

Three miles across town, Juliet sat in the dark with a mug of tea gone cold in her hands and didn't drink it.

The television had been off for an hour. She'd turned it off somewhere around midnight because the noise had started to feel worse than the silence, one more thing pretending everything was fine when nothing was. Now the only light in the living room came from the streetlamp outside, bleeding thin and orange through the blinds and laying stripes across the carpet, across the empty recliner where Rakina usually sat with his feet up and Maria half-asleep against his chest.

She looked at that chair too long. Made herself stop.

He said soon, Maria had told her, still holding onto that word like it meant something official, like her father had never in his life broken a promise to her and wasn't about to start. Juliet wished she had that kind of faith left in her. She'd had it once. Somewhere between the knock at the door and the two men who wouldn't say where he'd gone, most of it had drained out of her.

She set the tea down, untouched, and went up to check on Maria.

Her daughter was tangled in the blankets, one leg free, brow furrowed even in sleep as though struggling through something too big for a seven year old's dreams. Juliet smoothed the hair off her forehead, and Maria stirred without waking, murmured something that might have been Daddy, and settled again.

Juliet stood there a long moment, hand still resting on her daughter's hair, and that was when she heard it.

Gravel, shifting under weight, out past the kitchen window. Slow. Deliberate. Not the wind.

She went still, every muscle locking at once, and listened. A second sound followed the first - metal against metal, faint, careful, the unmistakable scrape of something testing the back door.

Through the blinds in the hallway, a shadow passed. Then another.

Her heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs.

She didn't turn on a single light. She crossed to Maria's bed on silent feet, scooped her half-asleep daughter into her arms, and carried her straight into the closet, sliding the door shut behind them with a click that sounded impossibly loud.

"Mommy?" Maria's voice was thick with sleep, confused.

"Shh, baby. Quiet game. We're playing the quiet game." Juliet's whisper shook despite everything she was doing to hold it steady. She pulled her phone from her pocket, thumb trembling as she found James's name and pressed call, pressing the phone hard against her ear as if she could will him to pick up faster.

The phone buzzed against the nightstand hard enough to rattle James's watch beside it.

He was awake before the second buzz, old instinct doing what twelve years of service had trained into his bones, hand already closing around the phone before his eyes had adjusted to the dark. Juliet's name lit the screen.

He answered before it finished a third ring.

"Juliet?"

Her whisper came through broken, breathless, barely holding together. "James... someone is trying to break in."

He was out of bed before she finished the sentence, hand already snatching his sidearm off the dresser, other hand grabbing his keys off the hook by the door.

"Lock the house," he said to Hopelyn, already moving. "Both of you, upstairs, now."

He didn't wait for her answer. The front door slammed behind him, the night air hit him full in the chest, and his truck roared to life under his hands as he tore out of the driveway into the dark.