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Eli put his palm on Lullaby’s cold armor and felt the steel vibrate faintly with the engine’s sleeping heat. He didn’t know what truth Patton feared—whether it was the truth about the enemy, or about his own Army.
But he knew one thing for sure.
If the Midnight Eight ever rolled forward, they wouldn’t be rolling for anyone’s comfort.
They’d be rolling to prove that a man’s worth didn’t change with the shade of his skin—only with what he did when the world tried to crush him.
That evening, Eli wrote a letter to his wife, Sarah, in a cramped hand that tried to be steady.
He didn’t tell her about Whitaker’s “optics.” Some things you didn’t mail across an ocean. You folded them inside yourself and carried them like shrapnel you couldn’t pull out.
Instead, he wrote about small things.
The way the French children watched the tanks like they were circus animals.
The smell of coffee when the mess sergeant managed to get some.
The way Leon could imitate the sound of a cranky lieutenant so perfectly it made grown men choke on laughter.
He wrote about home. About Sarah’s hands, about the porch light, about the way she’d laughed the last time he’d tried to fix the sink and flooded the kitchen.
He ended the letter with the only promise he felt safe making:
I’m still me. Don’t let the world tell you I’m anything else.
He didn’t say it, but he thought it hard enough to carve into the paper:
And if they finally let us fight, I’m coming home with my name intact.
Two days later, the front found them.
War had a way of doing that—ignoring plans, stepping over hesitation like it wasn’t there.
It began with a runner in the predawn dark, a young white private sprinting through the mud like the devil had grabbed his ankles.