The Calw base's Kindertagesstätte door opened with a pneumatic hiss, a sound too clinical for a place meant to house children's laughter and games. The air that hit Wighild was a sensory cacophony that her mind, trained for order and tactical silence, processed as a potential threat: the sharp scent of pine disinfectant mixed with the cloying sweetness of playdough and the faint aroma of spilled apple juice. The walls, a monotonous military green, were defiled with children's drawings taped on, chaotic explosions of color that gave her a strange visual headache.

Her hand, flesh and blood, squeezed with protective firmness the small hand of Silvan, her eight-year-old son. The child, a miniature version of Kael with his serious eyes and blond hair, clung to her, his anchor in this new, noisy environment. Wighild walked with the economy of movement of a predator, her immaculate combat boots barely making a sound on the shiny linoleum. Her perfectly ironed Flecktarn camouflage uniform and her tight, severe cyan bun made her stand out among the few parents in civilian clothes like a wolf in a sheep pen.

And then she saw him. Her analysis stopped abruptly, like a computer encountering data so anomalous it couldn't process it. In the center of the room, clumsily trying to comfort a little girl crying over a broken toy, was a soldier. Or rather, a caricature of a soldier. He was tall and gangly, with an expression of gentle panic on his face as he held a plastic dinosaur as if it were an un-deactivated explosive device. Over his uniform, which seemed a size too big for his slender build, he wore a sky-blue plastic apron with a smiling yellow teddy bear painted on the chest. An apron. On a military uniform.

When the soldier looked up and his eyes met Wighild's, his face transformed. The gentle panic evaporated, replaced by an expression of absolute, almost devotional, awe. He froze, mouth slightly agape and eyes fixed on her, completely forgetting the sobbing girl at his feet and the dinosaur in his hand.

"Glücksbärchi! Little Lena needs the triceratops, not the stegosaurus!" The voice of one of the other caregivers broke the spell. The soldier blinked as if waking from a trance, his face reddening violently. He crouched down, picked up the correct dinosaur with a lack of coordination that Wighild found physically painful to watch.

Glücksbärchi. Care Bear. The nickname echoed in Wighild's mind like a sentence. Her lips tightened into a line so thin they almost vanished. Her expression, already an impregnable fortress, became a polished granite wall. Beneath that mask, however, a storm of disbelief and a disdain so profound it almost made her nauseous raged. That? That... gangly, clumsy thing wearing a teddy bear apron was who was going to look after her son? Her only son? Kael's last vestige on earth?