The armor arrives in 2011.

  Custom-designed. Ceramic composite, layered and interlocking, dense enough to keep me grounded. The engineers who built it called it a "mobility assistance exoskeleton," which is technically true in the same way that a cage is technically a room. It weighs one hundred and sixty kilograms. Without it, I cannot walk without cracking concrete. Without it, I cannot touch anything without calculating how much force will destroy it.

  They paint it white. Someone's idea of symbolism, probably. Israel's guardian angel. Their invincible protector. The suit photographs well - I've seen the recruitment posters, the propaganda reels. A figure in gleaming armor, standing between civilization and chaos.

  Iran. Lebanon. Syria. Places that used to have names and now just have coordinates. Targets that used to have faces and now just have designations. I go where they point me. I remove what they tell me to remove. I come back, and they point me somewhere else.

  There is a special dormitory now for me, and I am sitting in it, and I am exhausted. Not physically, but mentally. A cold cup of black coffee sits like a ritual totem on my table. I look out the window. From this distance, you can almost see Gaza.

  The men who give the orders never change. They sit in their comfortable rooms with their coffee and their newspapers and they draw circles on maps, and people inside those circles stop existing. Sometimes the people are enemies. Sometimes they're not. It doesn't seem to matter much either way.

  "You don't need to understand," a deputy minister once said to me. "You just need to perform."

  I grab the coffee. I do not need to calculate how much force is necessary to break the handle. The armor dampens me enough to touch the world. I drink it. It is cold, thick, and disgusting.

  The invitation comes in March.

  A security briefing at the Knesset. High-level, classified, the kind of meeting where decisions get made about the next decade of regional strategy. My presence is requested - not required, the letter is careful to note, but requested. They want their weapon on display. They want the comfortable men to see what their budgets have purchased.

  I could refuse. I've refused before, smaller things. They don't like it, but they can't make me do anything. That's the irony they've never quite absorbed: they built a weapon they cannot control, and the only reason it still fires where they point it is because the weapon hasn't yet decided to point itself somewhere else.

  I don't refuse. I want to see them. I want to look at the men who draw circles on maps and watch people stop existing. I want to know what it is they think of me.

  The Knesset is smaller than I expected.

  I've seen it on television, of course - the semicircle of seats, the elevated podium, the flags and the solemnity. In person, it looks like what it is: a room where people sit and talk and pretend their words matter.

  The security briefing is in a smaller chamber, off the main floor. Twelve men around a table, plus aides and assistants hovering at the edges. I recognize some of them from television, from newspapers. The Defense Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister. Generals and advisors and people whose titles I don't know and don't care to learn.

  They look up when I enter. Some of them flinch. Even here, even among men who command armies, the lizard brain recognizes what I am.

  Good.

  "Mr. Espinosa." The Defense Minister rises, extending his hand. "Thank you for joining us."

  I don't take his hand. I could shake it, with the armor on. I choose not to.

  "You requested my presence," I say. "I'm present."

  An uncomfortable silence. The minister gestures to an empty chair, reinforced, specially constructed. They've thought ahead. They always think ahead about the logistics - never about the implications.

  I don't sit. I stand at the edge of the room, my back to the wall, and I watch them.

  The briefing begins.

  Then, they talk for two hours.

  Regional threats. Iranian nuclear capabilities. Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Hamas tunnel networks in Gaza. Syrian instability and its implications for border security. The same topics they've been discussing for decades, the same threats they've been managing without ever resolving.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I listen to the words, barely, but what I am really interested in is this - I watch the faces. The way they lean back in their chairs, comfortable, certain. The way they gesture with their coffee cups, punctuating points about casualty projections and infrastructure damage. The way they laugh, occasionally, at jokes, during a meeting about who gets to live and who gets to die. Drinking warm coffee. Making jokes.

  I take a small sip of my own cup. Plastic, from Starbucks, I believe. I got it two hours ago. It is, too, sludge.

  One of the politicians catches my eye. A general, I think - gray hair, soft hands, the kind of tan you get from vacations rather than fieldwork. He's been watching me instead of the presentation, curiosity and something like fear in his expression.

  "You're wondering what I think," I say.

  The room goes quiet. The general clears his throat. "I'm sorry?"

  "About the briefing. The strategy. You're wondering if I have opinions."

  "Mr. Espinosa--" the Defense Minister begins.

  "I have opinions," I continue, as if he hasn't spoken. "I think you're all very comfortable. I think you make decisions about violence from rooms that will never see violence. I think you've been managing this conflict for so long that you've forgotten you're supposed to be ending it."

  "That's quite enough," someone says. An aide, maybe. It doesn't matter.

  "I think you like it this way. The perpetual threat. The perpetual response. The perpetual justification for budgets and powers and men like me." I take a step forward, and the room contracts. At once, everyone shrinks away from me. I think of footage of a pufferfish, rolling in reverse. "I think if you actually achieved security, you wouldn't know what to do with yourselves."

  "Espinosa." The Defense Minister's voice is sharp now, commanding. The voice of a man who is used to being obeyed. "You're out of line."

  I look at him. I look at all of them. Twelve men in comfortable chairs, surrounded by aides and security and the accumulated weight of institutional authority. I could kill everyone in this room in the time it takes them to draw breath. The guards at the door might slow me down for a second, maybe two. The reinforced walls might contain the sound.

  They know this. I can see it in their eyes - the calculation, the fear they're trying to hide behind protocol and procedure. They know what I am. They just thought they controlled it.

  "You shelled a building with me inside," I say. "Do you remember?"

  Silence.

  "Rafah. Eight years ago. I was in the building when you gave the order. You knew I was in the building, and you shelled it anyway. Right?"

  "That was a tactical decision," someone says. "The target was confirmed, and the extraction window had closed--"

  "I wasn't asking for an explanation." I take another step forward. "I was asking if you remember."

  The Defense Minister stands slowly, his hands spread in what he probably thinks is a calming gesture. "Chezki. I understand you've been under tremendous pressure. The work we ask of you - it takes a toll. Perhaps we should discuss--"

  "You don't understand anything." My voice is calm. I'm surprised by how calm it is. My heart should be hammering. Perhaps my ribs are too dense now, too. Maybe I would sink like a stone. "You sit in rooms like this and you draw circles on maps, and you never have to see what happens inside those circles. You never have to carry the weight of it."

  My footsteps resound like thunder. I reach out and take hold of the general who was watching me. The one with the soft hands and the vacation tan. My fingers close around his skull, one hand on the crown, the other finding purchase at the base of the neck. Nobody looks at me. They're all looking at him. Totally paralyzed by fear.

  A dozen weapons drawn from a dozen more holsters.

  I lift the general from his chair. He weighs nothing. A hundred kilograms of blood and bone and a lifetime of decisions made from comfortable rooms. He's saying something - pleading, maybe, or praying, or just making noise because that's what humans do when they're afraid.

  I look into his eyes. I want to see it - the moment when he understands. The moment when all the abstractions collapse into the concrete reality of a hand around his skull and the knowledge that nothing he's ever done has prepared him for this.

  All I would need to do is press down on his shoulder with one hand, and pull up with the other. That's all it would take.

  What - ha ha - like they could arrest me? I feel myself smiling despite it all.

  "Your violence sickens me. Unnecessary violence from unnecessary people. If you thought these wars were worth ending, you would have ended them. The only logical conclusion to draw--" I tighten my grip on his hair. He grunts, whimpers, and soils himself. The air is suddenly foul with the acrid smell of urine. "--is that the cruelty is the purpose."

  I let him go. He drops to the floor, bowing at my feet, and immediately starts praying in the fastest Hebrew I have ever heard. I rear my foot back.

  "I resign," I announce to the room. My foot comes forward.

  The safe house in Cyprus is quiet.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, still in the armor, and look at my hands. There's brown under my fingernails. I try to use my pocketknife to clean it out, but the tip punctures when I push just a little too hard, and then the rest of the metal behind it buckles, leaving a shallow, painful pinprick that begins oozing, weeping blood. I didn't realize I was still capable of bleeding. I had almost forgotten what it felt like.

  My phone buzzes. A message from a number I don't recognize, routed through servers in three countries: Heard about your retirement. Coffee?

  Cross.

  I type a response: Where?

  Zurich. Bring your résumé.

  They'll cover it up, of course. They can't admit what happened - their greatest asset, their invincible weapon, going berserk, humiliating the old men in Knesset. Somehow, the blame will become Hamas's again. The ambiguity suits them.

  Nothing will change. Nothing ever changes. The men who draw circles will keep drawing circles, and people inside those circles will keep dying, and somewhere a new twenty-two-year-old will be told he's protecting his country while his country calculates whether he's worth extracting.

  Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes. And we kill for sport.

  Another Mikey took a knife

  While arguing in traffic

  Flipper died a natural death

  He caught a nasty virus

  Then there was the ever-present

  Football player rapist

  They were all in love with dyin'

  They were doing it in Texas

  Pauly caught a bullet

  But it only hit his leg

  Well it should have been a better shot

  And got him in the head

  They were all in love with dyin'

  They were drinking from a fountain

  That was pouring like an avalanche

  Coming down the mountain

  I don't mind the sun sometimes

  The images it shows

  I can taste you on my lips

  And smell you in my clothes

  Cinnamon and sugary

  And softly spoken lies

  You never know just how you look

  Through other people's eyes