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“My five brothers were all killed--two on their first mission, two on their second... ...and the last on his sixth mission. All dead. There was sadness, but more than that... ...I felt ashamed of their lack of strength.”
It reads as callousness and it is grief in the only dialect she was issued. The captions at the top of the same page explain the dialect: the Fon were executioners and assassins for generations, strength was everything, and anyone unfit for the Punishment Force was cast out and disinherited. A girl raised on that rule learns to file five deaths under professional failure, because the alternative is filing them under something the job does not permit. The tell is the order: sadness is admitted first, and the shame only arrives after an ellipsis.
It reads as callousness and it is grief in the only dialect she was issued. The captions at the top of the same page explain the dialect: the Fon were executioners and assassins for generations, strength was everything, and anyone unfit for the Punishment Force was cast out and disinherited. A girl raised on that rule learns to file five deaths under professional failure, because the alternative is filing them under something the job does not permit. The tell is the order: sadness is admitted first, and the shame only arrives after an ellipsis.