# Chapter 12: "Blood No Dey Wash Blood"
The compound fell silent except for the crackling of flames. Elisha stood in the courtyard, his service pistol still warm in his hand, watching smoke rise from the main building. The acrid smell of cordite mixed with something worse—the distinctive stench of death that would never leave his nostrils again.
"Sir." Corporal Nwosu's voice came from behind him, careful and subdued. "We've secured the perimeter. No survivors, as ordered."
_As ordered._ The words echoed in Elisha's mind with a hollow finality. Through the shattered windows, he could see bodies sprawled across the floor of what had been Lieutenant Jubek's operations center. Jubek himself lay face-down near an overturned table, three bullets in his back. The buyers—two Labanis merchants and a Congolese broker—were crumpled near the door where they'd tried to flee.
"The children?" Elisha asked, his voice steady despite the tremor in his chest.
"Safe, sir. Hassan and Adamu are with them in the truck. Twelve girls, youngest maybe eight." Nwosu paused. "They're asking what happened to the bad men."
Elisha holstered his weapon. "Tell them the bad men went away."
Sergeant Collins emerged from the building, his face granite. He'd followed orders—he was too much of a soldier not to—but his eyes held something Elisha had never seen there before. Not judgement exactly, but a kind of careful distance, as if he were looking at a stranger.
"Building's clear, Lieutenant," Collins reported formally. "We found their records. Names, dates, transactions going back two years. Hundreds of children."
"Burn it," Elisha said.
"Sir?"
"All of it. The records, the building, everything. Burn it all."
Collins hesitated. "Those records could help identify—"
"Burn it, Sergeant." Elisha's voice carried an edge that belonged to someone else, someone he didn't recognize. "That's an order."
As Collins turned to comply, Elisha walked to the edge of the compound where Private Suleiman stood guard. The young soldier was trying to maintain his composure, but Elisha could see his hands shaking slightly on his rifle.
"First time?" Elisha asked quietly.
"Yes, sir."
"It gets easier." The lie came automatically. It was what commanders were supposed to say. What Major Adelaja might have said back at the Academy, back when words like "duty" and "honor" still meant something clean and simple to him.
Suleiman nodded, though his eyes suggested he knew better.
The drive back to Camp Falcon took three hours through the pre-dawn darkness. The rescued children huddled together in the truck bed, covered with army blankets, their silence more unsettling than tears would have been. Elisha rode in the lead vehicle, staring out at the Yongoan landscape—scorched earth and abandoned villages, the detritus of a war that had no real beginning and would have no real end.
His secure phone buzzed. A message from Major Adebayo: "Report to my office immediately upon return."
They knew. Of course they knew. Elisha had taken an entire squad out for six hours. Vehicles, weapons, ammunition—all of it would be logged, tracked, questioned. He thought of his mother back in Lagos, still proud of her son the officer. He thought of Kemi, who had warned him years ago that the military would change him. He thought of the man with the megaphone in Mushin, speaking about change coming from inside the system.
At 0500 hours, they reached Camp Falcon. The children were quickly transferred to the medical tent, where aid workers—summoned by radio during the return journey—waited to receive them. Elisha watched them shuffle past, these small witnesses to cruelty beyond comprehension. One girl, perhaps ten years old, looked back at him. There was no gratitude in her eyes, no relief. Just a flat, endless exhaustion that belonged on no child's face.
"Lieutenant Oriade." Major Adebayo stood in the doorway of the command post, his uniform immaculate despite the early hour. "My office. Now."
The walk across the compound felt both endless and too brief. Other soldiers were beginning their day, preparing for morning drills and patrols. They glanced at Elisha with curiosity—word traveled fast in a camp this small. He kept his eyes forward, his gait steady, wearing his transformation like armor.
Major Adebayo's office was sparse, functional. A desk, two chairs, a map of the operational area, a photograph of the Major with his family back in Abuja. The Major sat behind his desk, fingers steepled, studying Elisha with an expression that was impossible to read.
"Fifty-seven children rescued last night," the Major began. "Another twelve this morning. Sixty-nine lives saved, Lieutenant."
Elisha remained at attention, silent.
"Also, four combatants killed in what appears to have been an execution-style raid on a compound fifteen kilometers outside our operational mandate." The Major opened a folder on his desk. "Combatants who, according to our intelligence, were meeting with civilian traders. Traders who are also now dead."
"They were human traffickers, sir."
"I'm aware of what they were, Lieutenant. I'm also aware that we operate under a United Nations mandate with very specific rules of engagement. Rules that don't include summary execution of suspects, regardless of their crimes."
Elisha felt something cold and hard crystallizing in his chest. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"
"DENIED!!." Adebayo stood, walked to the window overlooking the compound. "Do you know what happens now, Lieutenant? There will be an investigation. The UN will demand answers. The Yongoan government will file protests. And back in Abuja, politicians who've never set foot in this hellhole will decide that someone needs to be held accountable."
He turned back to Elisha. "That someone will be you."
"I understand, sir."
"Do you? Do you??" Adebayo's composure cracked slightly. "You had such promise, Oriade. Top of your class at the Academy. Commendations from every instructor. They said you were different, that you understood what real leadership meant." He shook his head. "But you're just like all the others who think they can fix the world with a gun."
The words should have stung. A week ago, they would have devastated him. But now Elisha felt only a distant acknowledgment, like hearing thunder from a storm that had already passed.
"Will that be all, sir?"
Adebayo looked at him without speaking for a long moment. "You're confined to quarters pending the investigation. Sergeant Collins will assume command of your platoon. You're to have no contact with the men involved in last night's operation."
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
Elisha saluted, turned on his heel, and left. Outside, the morning sun was already brutal, casting sharp shadows across the dusty ground. He walked to his quarters—a small prefab unit he shared with two other junior officers, both currently on patrol.
He sat on his bunk and finally allowed himself to think about what he'd done. Not the killing itself—that had been surprisingly easy, mechanical almost. Squeeze the trigger, watch them fall. Bodies were just bodies, meat and bone that stopped moving when properly motivated. What haunted him was the moment before, standing outside the compound, listening to the traders negotiate prices for children as if they were livestock.
_Ts' ones pretty strong, gon' make a good slave ._ _How much for the two sisters? I give you discount if you take both._ _The small one, she's fresh. untouched. Special price._
In that moment, something inside him had simply... awoken. All the philosophy, all the ethics, all the careful moral reasoning he'd cultivated over years—it had evaporated like morning mist. What emerged was something primitive and absolute: these men needed to die, and he had the power to make it happen, not justice, just absolute.
His phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: "You did the right thing. - A friend."
Elisha looked at it for a while trying to figure out the sender, with no luck he deleted it immediately. There were no friends here, only witnesses and accomplices.
A knock at the door. He opened it to find Private Hassan, looking nervous.
"Sir, I'm not supposed to be here, but... the children, sir. The ones we saved. They're asking for you."
"I'm confined to quarters, Private."
"I know, sir, but..." Hassan struggled for words. "They keep asking for 'the soldier who made the bad men go away.' The aid workers don't know what to tell them."
Elisha looked past Hassan toward the medical tent. He could see small figures sitting outside, wrapped in blankets despite the heat. Children who would carry this forever, just as he would.
"Tell them the soldier had to go away too," Elisha said, and closed the door.
He lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, thinking about trajectory—that physics concept he'd contemplated years ago on his mother's balcony in Lagos. Objects in motion, following predictable paths unless acted upon by outside forces. But what happened when the object itself became the force? When the trajectory curved back on itself, creating not a path but a spiral?
Tomorrow, investigators and psychologists would arrive. There would be questions, recordings, statements. They would try to understand how Second Lieutenant Elisha T.J. Oriade, pride of the Nysarian Defence Academy, had become someone who could order "no survivors" and mean it.
He could explain the logic: the system was broken, the proper channels were useless, and direct action had saved lives. He could cite the numbers: sixty-nine children rescued against seven adults killed. He could argue the morality: some evils demanded an absolute response.
But none of that would capture the truth of that moment outside Jubek's compound, when he'd felt his old self die and something else take its place. Something harder, cleaner, more honest perhaps. Something that understood what Uncle Femi had tried to tell him years ago: the military doesn't make heroes, it makes survivors.
Except Elisha wasn't sure he'd survived at all. The idealistic boy who'd stood on a rusty balcony in Mushin dreaming of serving his country with honor—that boy was as dead as Lieutenant Jubek. What remained was this: a man who could do necessary things, terrible things, and sleep soundly after.
Outside, he heard the daily routine of Camp Falcon continuing. Patrols heading out, supplies arriving, the endless clockwork of a peacekeeping mission that kept no peace. Soon, his part in it would end. Court martial, probably. Disgrace, certainly. His mother's tears, Kemi's disappointed silence, the waste of all that promise.
But in a medical tent across the compound, sixty-nine children were alive.
Elisha closed his eyes and waited for whatever came next. He had chosen his trajectory, and physics would handle the rest. In the distance, he could hear the children singing—some Yongoan folk song about morning coming after the darkest night.
He wondered if they really believed it, or if, like him, they'd learned that some nights never truly end. You just learned to see in the dark.