Every unit has one, the old sergeant told me during my first posting. Nobody appoints him. Nobody lists the duty on paper. Eventually somebody becomes the person who notices when another soldier’s answers come half a second too late, when a joke lands strangely, or when a man starts giving away possessions without explaining why.
Ours was a quiet older soldier who slept less than anyone I knew. The others called him the traitor baiter when he was out of earshot, although betrayal was only one of the things he seemed able to detect. He knew who was planning to desert, who was stealing, who had decided to hurt someone, and who was considering something even they had not yet admitted to themselves.
He never accused anyone directly.
Instead he appeared at inconvenient moments carrying coffee or cigarettes. He sat beside you and asked questions that sounded harmless until several minutes later, when you realized the conversation had somehow arrived at the one decision you were trying hardest to conceal. People who spoke with him usually changed course. Those who did not sometimes disappeared from the roster, transferred suddenly or were escorted away without explanation.
I avoided being alone with him for nearly two years.
He finally found me packing during the week I had decided to leave. I could no longer stomach the assignment waiting for us, and disappearing seemed preferable to carrying it out. He sat on the end of my bunk and told me he had no intention of stopping me. He only wanted to know whether I had imagined the entire road beyond the gate or merely the relief of taking the first step.
We talked for almost an hour. I stayed.
He retired several months later. During his farewell, he pressed a packet of cigarettes into my hand despite knowing I did not smoke. I thought it was a joke until I noticed that the package felt unusually heavy. Inside were twenty cigarettes and a tiny brass disk with no markings.
Years have passed, and I still carry it.
Sometimes the disk warms in my pocket around certain people. I have learned that resisting the sensation only makes it hotter. Eventually I find myself sitting beside whoever triggered it, offering one of those cigarettes and asking a question whose wording arrives before I decide what to say.
The packet never empties.
What unsettles me most is how rarely the person I approach is actually contemplating treason. Some are planning to run. Some intend violence. Others are preparing to betray promises nobody in the service would consider important. The thing passed down to me appears to recognize betrayal in a much broader sense than any military regulation does.
Recently the disk has started warming when I am alone.
I have spent several nights examining my choices, searching for the intention it has detected. So far I have found nothing certain, though I now understand why the old soldier rarely slept. Whatever this duty identifies, it seems capable of noticing a betrayal before the person committing it has decided which loyalty will be broken.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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