No one argued. No one looked for a badge on his arm. They just followed.
“Satchel,” he said. His voice was steady. “Then we go home.”
He looked down at his own buckle. Tarnished. Scratched. He’d found it on a corpse two winters ago. Tied to it with a frayed bootlace was a single, dented whistle. The whistle of a Brigade Captain. Eli had never blown it. To blow it was to claim command, and command meant making choices that got other boys killed. boy brigade rank
Their ranks were stitched, painted, or scratched onto their gear: Private, Private, Private, Private. And one Lance-Corporal. The difference between Eli and them was a single word on a stained piece of cloth. It felt like a crown of thorns.
The mine jumped.
He put the whistle to his lips and blew.
Not in a glorious charge. No. They were being sent into the splintered throat of the Tangled Wood, a half-mile of collapsed tunnels and poisoned fog, to retrieve a dead courier’s satchel. The adult officers called it a “rank-defining mission.” Eli knew the translation: expendable. No one argued
It wasn’t a military call. It wasn’t any code from the manual. It was just a raw, piercing shriek—the sound of a child who had seen too much and refused to see one more thing.