Why I Had to Write "The Line"

Station 13 was supposed to be finished.

The book was done. Edited, formatted, ready for the world. I was satisfied. I was moving on.

Except Anna wasn't done with me.

She kept showing up. Not on the page, not in notes or outlines, but in the quiet hours when I wasn't trying to write. I'd be driving, or making coffee, or lying in that half-sleep where your brain decides to solve problems you didn't ask it to solve, and she'd be there. Not the Anna from the station. The other one. The one from before. The soldier who hadn't crossed the line yet but was standing close enough to feel the heat coming off it.

I kept thinking about Kandahar. In Station 13, it's a shadow. A scar that shapes everything Anna does, every decision she makes, every sound she hears in the corridors of that station. You feel it on every page. But I never showed it. I let readers see the wound through the way it bled into her present, and for the novel, that was the right call.

But I realized I wasn't thinking about what the novel needed anymore. I was thinking about what Anna deserved.

She deserved to have her worst night told properly. Not summarized in a psych evaluation. Not reduced to a line in a personnel file. She deserved the full weight of it, the heat and the dust and the moment when everything she believed about herself got tested in ways no training manual covers.

That's what "The Line" is. It's the night everything changed. The classified mission, the impossible choices, and the specific horror of standing in the dark and not knowing whether the threat is outside the wire or standing next to you.

Writing it was different from writing Station 13. The novel lives inside Anna's head. "The Line" lives in her body. Sand in her teeth. The weight of a rifle that suddenly feels wrong in her hands. Sounds that don't match what her eyes are telling her. It's more visceral, more immediate, because the Anna in Kandahar hasn't built the walls yet. She doesn't have coping mechanisms, rituals, or ways to organize the chaos. She just has the chaos. Raw and real and the kind of thing your mind spends years trying to make sense of afterward.

I also needed to tell the story of how the system failed her. The evaluations that followed. The counseling that checked boxes. The moment someone signed a piece of paper that said she was fine, and what "fine" looked like from the inside, versus what it looked like on a form. Because the most terrifying thing about Anna's story isn't what happened in Kandahar or what happened on the station. It's the space between the two, where everyone agreed she was ready, and nobody asked the right questions.

If you've read Station Thirteen, "The Line" is going to change the way you experience that book. You'll hear things differently. You'll understand the weight behind moments that seemed small the first time through. I'll leave it at that, because discovering those connections is part of the experience.

If you haven't read Station 13 yet, "The Line" stands completely on its own. It's a story about a soldier, a night in the desert, and the distance between who we are and who we become when the worst happens. And if it gets under your skin the way it got under mine, there's a space station waiting for you afterward.

I didn't plan to write this story. I thought I was done. But some characters grab you by the collar and drag you back to the desk, and Anna Dimitrovic is nothing if not someone who holds the line.

This was her private story. Now it's shared with you.

The Line is available now at www.JosephRaithe.com/the-line-a-station-13-prequel