First time it happened, I thought it was a joke. A boot full of shaving cream. Harmless.

Stupid. But the smirks from Alvarez and Denton weren’t just hazing—they were mean. And when my bunk mysteriously collapsed during inspection, I realized they wanted me gone.

I wasn’t the loudest. I didn’t drink with them. I kept my head down, followed orders, stayed sharp.

Maybe that’s what pissed them off. Or maybe it was because I’d reported a training error that almost got one of us hurt. I never named names, but they knew.

After that, it escalated. My rucksack would “accidentally” go missing before drills. I found my protein powder dumped in the latrine.

One morning, I woke up to find “TATTLE RAT” carved into the side of my footlocker. I told Sergeant Kiang once. She raised an eyebrow, told me to “toughen the hell up.”

Then came the op in the pass.

Freezing wind, thin air, and one wrong turn from Alvarez. He refused to check his compass—“I’ve done this route a dozen times.” I tried to speak up, but Denton shut me down, hard. We ended up stranded two klicks off route, visibility shot.

Base was radio silent. And when things started going sideways, I could feel every petty jab and insult crawling back to life inside me. The storm rolled in fast.

We were supposed to reach checkpoint Echo by 1400, but by 1330 we were knee-deep in slush, lost in a valley that didn’t match any contour line I remembered. My gut said we were too far west, but when I brought it up again, Alvarez told me to “shut up and focus on not tripping over your own feet.”

Still, I marked the spot on my map. Quietly.

By 1600, we’d burned through our first thermal pack. Denton had frost gathering on his lashes. The air tasted like metal, and the clouds hung so low it felt like we could reach up and pull them down.

There was no shelter—just jagged rock and a wind that cut like razors. When Alvarez finally admitted we were off course, he tried to blame the GPS unit. Said it must’ve glitched.

But I’d been taking readings in my notebook the whole time. It didn’t glitch. He just never checked it.

“Let’s backtrack,” I said, offering him my marked map. “We’ll lose light, but we’ll hit Echo if we move fast.”

He snatched the map, gave it a glance, and tossed it back like it was garbage. “You think you’re the only one who knows how to read a map?

We’ll head northeast.”

Northeast was wrong. I knew it. But I also knew if I argued again, they’d shut me down even harder.

So I fell back, said nothing. I just prayed they’d realize their mistake before nightfall. They didn’t.

We pitched camp in a narrow cut between two ridges, wind screaming through like a banshee. Our comms still weren’t reaching base. Denton was coughing, and I could hear the rattle in his lungs.

His boots were soaked straight through. That night, I stayed up long after they slept. Teeth chattering, fingers numb, brain wired.

I kept thinking—what if we don’t make it back? What if the story becomes “we got lost and the liability made it worse”? And then I heard them.