Chapter 1

He stood in the doorway of their mud-and-thatch home, the morning sun already hot on his neck. Behind him, the path to the main road stretched through the cassava fields, and beyond that, the army truck would take him to a place he had only heard about on the radio. The border. The enemy. The names of battles that sounded like distant thunder.

His younger sister, Ama, clung to his leg. She was seven, with the same wide eyes that had watched their father leave three years ago. He had not returned.

“Ama, let go,” Kofi said gently. “I have to go.”

“No,” she whispered into the fabric of his trousers.

He knelt, prying her arms loose. “Listen to me. I am going so you can sleep at night without fear. So you can go to the market and not hear gunfire. Do you understand?”

She did not understand. She was seven. But she nodded because she trusted him.

His mother pressed the bundle into his hands. “Cassava and dried fish. It will last three days if you ration it.” Her voice was steady, but her hands trembled. “Your father took the same road.”

“I know.”

“He said he would come back.”

Kofi said nothing. There was nothing to say. The army had told them his father died in the Second Valley Offensive. They had buried an empty coffin because there was no body.

He tucked the bundle into his canvas bag, the rough fabric already worn thin from another soldier’s journey. The bag had been his father’s. Inside, there was still a faint smell of tobacco and sweat.

“I will come back,” Kofi said, and he meant it with every bone in his body.

His mother touched his face, her palm dry and calloused. “Then come back. Do not make me bury another empty box.”

He walked the two miles to the assembly point at the old schoolhouse. Other young men were already there, some he knew from childhood, others strangers from neighboring villages. They stood in loose groups, speaking in low voices, their bags at their feet. A few laughed, but the laughter was brittle, like dry sticks breaking.

A sergeant with a scar across his jaw called out names from a list. When he said “Kofi Mensah,” Kofi stepped forward.

“You are the one from the valley?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Your father was Corporal Mensah.” It was not a question.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

The sergeant’s eyes held something that might have been pity or might have been recognition. “Get on the truck.”

Kofi climbed into the back of the open truck, pressing himself among the other recruits. The wooden benches were splintered. The metal sides were hot. As the engine coughed to life, he looked back at the schoolhouse, at the road that led home, at the smoke rising from cooking fires in the village.

He thought of Ama, who would not understand why her brother did not return for dinner. He thought of his mother, who would light a candle every night and pray to a God who had already taken her husband.

He thought of the enemy, faceless and nameless, who were also someone’s father, someone’s brother, someone’s son.

The truck lurched forward, and the village shrank behind them. Dust rose in a brown cloud, coating their clothes, their skin, their eyes. No one spoke. The only sounds were the grinding of gears and the distant cry of a bird.

Kofi closed his eyes. He would write every week, as he had promised. He would survive. He would return.

But even as he made that vow, he felt the weight of his father’s bag on his shoulder, the weight of a promise that had already been broken once before.

The truck rounded a bend, and the village disappeared from sight.

Ahead, the road led to the border, to the war, to the place where boys became soldiers and soldiers became either heroes or ghosts.

Kofi opened his eyes and stared at the horizon. The sun was high now, burning away the morning. There was no shade on this road. There never was.

He reached into his pocket and touched the small piece of cloth Ama had pressed into his hand before he left. It was a scrap from her favorite dress, red with white flowers. She had said it would bring him luck.

He held it tight.

And the truck carried him forward, into the unknown, toward a duty that demanded everything and promised nothing.