Salisu

They released me at dawn, just as the sky cracked open with pale light. The cell door groaned, and the guard who came for me didn’t say a word. He just gestured with his chin, like I was a stain he couldn’t wait to scrub out.

I stepped into the morning air with a body stiff from solitude and a heart still heavy with grief. My demotion was waiting for me—quiet and cold, like a gun left on a table.

"Private Salisu Abubakar,” the officer read from a paper as if he didn’t already know my name. “Effective immediately, you are demoted of the rank of Private. You are hereby warned to remain silent on the subject of Commanding Officer General Okon and Staff Sergeant Bello. Any further insubordination will result in court martial.”

He didn’t wait for me to salute.

I didn’t.

---

The barracks had changed while I was gone. Or maybe I had.

The sun still baked the rusting roofs. The scent of gun oil and stale sweat still clung to the air. But the voices were quieter around me now—measured, hesitant. Soldiers I had once drilled beside now avoided my eyes. Some looked through me like I was invisible. Others whispered as I passed, like I carried a curse.

I didn’t care.

Let them talk. Let them believe the worst. Let them think I cracked.

Because something was cracked, just not me.

---

Later that afternoon, I saw them.

General Okon and Sergeant Bello.

They sat beneath the large mango tree near the officers’ quarters, surrounded by plates of peppered meat and sweating bottles of beer. Their laughter cut through the still air like gunfire, loud and careless.

The General leaned back in his chair, his stomach rounding out beneath his starched white tunic, his polished boots planted wide like a man who thought the earth owed him balance. His cane rested against the arm of the chair, not for weakness, but as a symbol. Power. Command. Untouchable legacy.

“Imagine,” Okon was saying, “they expect soldiers to think. You give a boy a uniform, and suddenly he thinks he knows tactics. Strategy. Morality!” He roared at his own joke, slapping his knee so hard the cap tilted sideways. “Let the generals do the thinking. Let the pawns march.”

Bello laughed along, loud and shallow. “ They want to be heroes.”

“Heroes die young,” the General said, grinning into his glass. “And fools die quicker.”

That laugh—full of arrogance and rot curled something sharp in my stomach. I stood just beyond the tree’s shadow, frozen. Watching.

They looked so comfortable. So clean.

Their uniforms didn’t carry the blood. Their mouths didn’t hold the screams.

I glanced at the junior soldier beside me. He shifted, visibly uncomfortable, as if standing too close to me might summon trouble. He looked like he wanted to warn me to walk away. Maybe I should have.

But I didn’t.

“They always reward the liars,” I muttered.

The soldier stiffened, his eyes darting toward the tree, but I wasn’t talking to him.

I watched them like a man etching their faces into bone.

Because I knew what I’d seen. What they’d done. What they were hiding.

This wasn’t about a failed mission or a few bad calls.

They had buried something.

Something deeper.

Something the army couldn’t or wouldn’t see through its official reports and signed denials.

And I was going to find it.

Even if they stripped me of every badge, every thread of honour. Even if they threw me in another cell and pretended I never existed.

I would dig.

I would burn through every lie.

And when I uncovered what they had hidden, I wouldn’t just expose it—

I’d bring the whole thing down.