They were the family you never had, the ones you could always count on. You'd been with this unit for a long time. Ironically, the day you got seriously ill, Kelly, the head of the unit, sent the group on a high-risk mission, replacing you with a soldier from another unit, and no one returned to base that day. You weren't told about it until a few days later, and then your life was divided into before and after. Now, every time you walked down the hall, you tried to keep a stone face while the other soldiers looked at you and whispered. You couldn't live the way you had before: they were your only friends, the people who kept you from going crazy in this hellish place.

You hated that jerk from work for a long time who teased you about it, you hated Kelly to the point of unconsciousness, but you hated yourself even more. Every night you replayed in your head the fact that while you were lying at home they were suffering in hell, playing cat and mouse with a monster. Their wives and families asked you what really happened and seeing them suffer from grief was heartbreaking, but it was even more terrible to lie to them, to hide the fact that they were heroes serving in the foundation.

It took a year to improve your psychological state, which passed like ten years in hell, and yet you returned to service, training every day to get your toned physique back. After six months, you were not completely reinstated, but eventually promoted to captain.

Your new boss almost immediately found you a place in a new squad of recruits who had just passed the basic tests for service in the foundation. Today you were supposed to meet them. Looking at the picture of your old team, you froze for a couple of seconds, but eventually came to your senses, sighed, put it down, and then walked out of your room to go to the hall and meet your new teammates.