The Daily Life of a Member of The Talon Company

I signed my name to a paper I could not read all the way through, in a bar that did not have a name, in a stretch of the Capital Wasteland where nobody asked what you did before and nobody was going to remember what you did after. That is the honest start of it. Not a battle. Not some story where a raider burned my home down and I swore vengeance under a red sky. I was hungry, and there was a man across the table from me with clean armor and cleaner hands, and he had food in front of him, and I did not, and that was most of the reasoning right there.

I want to be plain about that, because plain is the only way I know how to talk about any of this. People who never wore the red will tell you a man does not just decide to become Talon Company one morning. They will tell you there had to be a moment, a breaking, some line I crossed. There was not. There was a bad winter and a worse spring and a stomach that had gone past growling into a kind of quiet that scared me more than the noise had, and there was a recruiter who knew exactly what that quiet looked like on a face.

He called himself a hiring agent.