Border Watch
A wedding that never happened, recorded anyway

I want to state plainly what this chapter actually contains, because I do not think it should be softened by anything I add to it. Francisco and Mary were planning a Circle Walk. They had signed a Cohabitation Agreement. They were, by every account I have access to, happy, and building toward something neither of them would live to complete. I recorded the artillery strike that ended this in the same flat, precise language I record everything else. I want to be honest that doing so felt, in this instance, like a kind of failure, even though the recording itself was entirely accurate.

I want to address something about the word I have used before, in lighter contexts, and want to be clear I am not using it here. There was nothing left. I did not soften this sentence when I wrote it, and I do not intend to soften it now. Some events do not deserve careful phrasing. They deserve to be stated exactly as they occurred, so that whatever comes next in the story cannot pretend the cost was smaller than it was.

I want to be honest about what happened immediately afterward, because I think it deserves to be named directly rather than absorbed quietly into the surrounding narrative. Malvorn fabricated an entire account of Utopian aggression, invented casualties that did not exist, and treated the true cost of that day as raw material for a story that served him rather than the dead. I do not have a comfortable way to describe watching this happen. I will say only that I find it among the more difficult things I have had to witness and record in the course of this book—not the violence itself, though that was terrible enough, but the speed and confidence with which someone converted it into a lie, before the bodies had even finished being counted.

I want to note something about Ryan, briefly, because I think restraint deserves acknowledgment even in a chapter this dark. He helped carry José from the wreckage, said nothing about it afterward, and went quietly home. I do not think every act of decency in this book requires a spotlight. I think some of them are more honest for not receiving one, and I wanted to record, at least once, that I noticed.

I do not have a closing thought that resolves any of this, and I do not think a chapter like this one should end resolved. Two people who were planning a future together are gone. Their deaths were recorded honestly by me and dishonestly by someone else, within the same hour, and I do not think either of us should be allowed to move past that quickly. I will simply say their names once more, plainly, because I do not think plain is the same as small. Francisco. Mary.