The Line

Kandahar Province — Three years before the events at Station 13

The valley swallowed light at dusk. Shadows pooled in the crevices of the mountain passes like water finding its level, filling every fold and depression until the ridgelines stood sharp against a sky bleeding from copper to violet. Beautiful country, if you forgot what lived in it.

I ran my thumb along the stock of my rifle and watched the last of the sun dissolve. Eighteen minutes to full dark. The briefing said we'd have moonlight by 2200, but the briefing said a lot of things. The briefing said the compound would be lightly defended. The briefing said the neurological agent had been moved to a secondary location weeks ago. The briefing said a lot of things that wouldn't matter in eighteen minutes.

"Lieutenant." Martinez materialized at my shoulder, quiet as always for a man his size. Sergeant Hank Martinez, twelve years in, built like a wall somebody taught to whisper. "Team's set. Thompson's got eyes on the northern approach. Sorenson and Davies are staged at the wash. O'Mally's running final checks on the breathers."

"Good."

"She's nervous," he added, not quite a question.

"She's thorough." I adjusted the strap on my pack. Sandra O'Mally was the youngest on the team besides Davies, but she compensated with a precision that bordered on compulsive. Every piece of gear checked twice. Every protocol followed to the letter. She reminded me of myself at that age, which was either a comfort or a warning. "Let her be thorough."

Martinez settled into his crouch beside me, scanning the valley with eyes that had learned patience the hard way. Three tours. Two Purple Hearts. A wife who sent care packages full of homemade jerky that he rationed like currency. He'd been my right hand for two years, and in that time I'd learned to read his silences the way other people read reports.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing." Which meant something. He worked his jaw, choosing words. "Davies was slow on the breather drill this morning. Fumbled the seal twice."

"He corrected it."

"Third time." Martinez shrugged, but the shrug carried weight. "Kid's solid. Just noting it."

I filed it. You file everything in country. The temperature of a room, the angle of a shadow, the half-second delay between a question and its answer. Most of it means nothing. But the one time you stop filing is the time the nothing turns out to be everything.

"Fourteen minutes," I said.

Martinez checked his watch, then reached into his vest and produced a strip of jerky. He tore it, handed me half without asking. We chewed in silence while the sky finished dying.

Below us, the compound sat squat against the valley floor. Three structures. Mud-brick walls thick enough to stop small arms. Intel said twelve to fifteen hostiles, lightly armed, guarding what remained of a chemical weapons research program that officially didn't exist. Our job was equally nonexistent: secure the site, neutralize remaining biological agents, leave no trace. A ghost operation for a ghost unit in a war that had supposedly ended years ago.

Six of us for a job that should have had twenty. But twenty people leave traces, and traces leave questions, and questions leave congressional hearings. So they sent six and called it sufficient.

The team gathered at the staging point as the last light bled out. Thompson arrived first, Corporal Fred Thompson, ten years in, a man who communicated primarily through the scope of his rifle and occasional grunts of professional satisfaction. He gave me a thumbs up from the ridgeline. Northern approach clear.

Sorenson came next, sliding down the wash with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent half his life moving through terrain that wanted him dead. Private Richard Sorenson, though everyone called him Dick, and he'd learned to laugh about it before anyone else could. "Ready when you are, LT," he whispered, adjusting his pack straps. His hands were steady. Good.

Then Davies, Private William Davies. Bill to his friends, which was all of us. Twenty-two years old, broad-shouldered, earnest in the way that hadn't been beaten out of him yet. He was checking his breather apparatus for the fourth time, fingers working the seals with quiet intensity. I watched his hands in the dim light. Steady enough. Martinez caught my eye. I gave a slight nod. Noted.

O'Mally last. She materialized from the dark like she'd been part of it, gear silent, movements economical. Private Sandra O'Mally. Twenty-four, red-haired beneath her helmet, precise as a scalpel. She'd triple-checked every seal, every strap, every round. When she took her position beside Sorenson, she gave me a look that said everything's perfect, which meant she'd made it perfect through sheer will.

"Breathers on," I ordered. "Martinez, you have point. Thompson, rear security. Standard formation. No comms unless critical."

Six faces nodded in the dark. Six breather masks sealed against what intel promised was a negligible risk of residual contamination. Negligible. Another word from the briefing that wouldn't matter soon.

I gave the signal. We moved.

The compound was quiet. Wrong quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight to it, that presses against your eardrums like a hand over your mouth.

Martinez held at the breach point, fist raised. I stacked behind him, feeling the heat radiating off the mud-brick wall. Even at dusk the stone held the day's warmth like a fever. Behind me: O'Mally, Davies, Sorenson in sequence. Thompson held his position on the ridge, watching our backs through glass that could read a license plate at eight hundred meters.

Martinez looked at me. I nodded.

He went through the door like a freight train learning to dance. Fast, controlled, violence compressed into economy. I followed, sweeping right while he cleared left. The room was empty. Overturned furniture. Papers scattered. The sour chemical smell that the breather couldn't quite filter, sharp enough to taste at the back of my throat.

"Clear left."

"Clear right."

We moved through the first structure in ninety seconds. Nothing. The second took less. Abandoned equipment. Shattered glass crunching under our boots. Stains on the floor that could have been anything.

The third building was different. The door was reinforced. Fresh scrapes on the frame where something heavy had been moved recently. Martinez and I exchanged a look.

"Breathers sealed?" I whispered.

Five confirmations. Five hands checking masks by instinct.

I tried not to count how many times Davies touched his seal.

Martinez kicked the door. It swung inward on a room that smelled like burning metal and something older, something biological and wrong. Shelving units lined the walls, half-empty, labeled in a language none of us read. At the center: a workstation with equipment still powered, lights blinking amber in the dark. And on the floor, shattered, three canisters leaking a thin vapor that caught our flashlight beams and turned them solid.

"Contact," Martinez said. "Biological."

"Confirmed." I swept the room. No hostiles. Just the vapor, crawling along the floor like a living thing, pooling in the low spots, reaching for our boots. "Masks tight. Nobody touches anything."

O'Mally was already documenting, camera clicking in precise intervals. Sorenson secured the door behind us. Davies stood at the workstation, studying the blinking equipment with that earnest concentration I'd come to rely on.

"LT," he said. "These readouts. I think the canisters were rigged. Pressure release on a timer. This wasn't an accident. Someone wanted this room opened."

The implication hit like a gut punch. Not abandoned. Staged. We weren't securing a site. We were walking into a delivery system.

"Everyone out. Now!"

We moved. Fast, professional, the way you move when the ground beneath you has become the enemy. Through the door, into the courtyard, the night air hitting like cold water after the chemical heat of that room.

That's when I noticed Davies.

He was last through the door. His hand went to his mask, not checking it. Adjusting it. The seal on the left side hung loose, a gap the width of a finger where the rubber had folded instead of seated. He pressed it closed, but the motion was too late, too slow. He'd been breathing contaminated air.

Martinez saw it too. His eyes met mine in the dark. The same thought, communicated in a glance: how long?

We didn't know yet what the agent did. We only knew what the briefing had said, which was that it didn't exist.

Seven minutes. That's how long it took.

We'd pulled back to the staging area, Thompson still on overwatch, the rest of us catching our breath and waiting for extraction. Davies sat against a rock, helmet off, running his hands through his hair. Normal gesture. Normal kid processing a close call.

Martinez materialized at my shoulder. His voice was low, meant only for me. "Commander, something's wrong with Davies. He's not himself."

I looked where he was looking.

Davies' fingers were trembling. Not fear trembling, not adrenaline. A rhythmic, mechanical oscillation, like a motor running beneath the skin. He stared at his own hands with an expression I'd never seen on him before. Confusion becoming something else. Something emptier.

"Davies," I said. Calm, steady. The voice you use when you don't want to spook the horse. "How's your breathing?"

He looked up. His eyes were wrong. Not the pupils, not the color. The intelligence behind them. Like someone had taken Bill Davies out and put something else in the chair. "Fine, Lieutenant," he said, and his voice was almost right. Almost. The cadence was off by a fraction, syllables landing a half-beat late. "I'm fine."

"Your seal was loose in there."

"I fixed it." A smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm fine."

Martinez's hand moved to his sidearm. Casual. Professional. The motion of a man who'd been in enough rooms to know when one was about to go bad.

O'Mally was closest to Davies. Three feet, maybe four. She was repacking her documentation kit, camera stowed, notes secured. Focused on her hands, on the ritual of putting things in order. She didn't see what Martinez and I saw.

"Martinez," I said, keeping my voice level. "Get O'Mally over here."

Too late.

Davies moved with a speed that didn't belong to him. Not fast in the way trained soldiers are fast. Fast in the way that things are fast when the body stops consulting the brain. He was on his feet and across the gap before O'Mally's head came up, before her hands could drop the kit, before the word forming on my lips could become sound.

His hands found her throat.

Sandra O'Mally was precise. She was thorough. She was twenty-four years old and she'd triple-checked every seal on her gear. None of that mattered when two hundred pounds of chemically hijacked muscle decided she was the enemy. She fought. God, she fought. Elbows, knees, the heel of her hand driving up toward his chin the way we'd all been taught. But Davies wasn't Davies anymore. Whatever was running his body didn't feel pain the way he would have. Didn't flinch. Didn't stop.

Martinez fired. The round took Davies in the shoulder, spinning him half around, and for one horrible second his hands loosened and O'Mally gasped air. Then he was back. Tighter. His face blank as a wall while his hands did the work.

I was running. Four seconds, five. Too long. Everything too long.

Sorenson grabbed Davies from behind, trying to pull him off, and took an elbow to the face that dropped him flat. Davies didn't look. Didn't acknowledge. His eyes stayed fixed on nothing while his hands squeezed the life out of a woman who'd checked her gear twice because once wasn't safe enough.

O'Mally stopped fighting.

Her hands, which had been clawing at his wrists, fell open. Fingers splayed against the dirt. Precise to the end. Thorough to the end.

I reached them. My sidearm was already drawn, already aimed. Martinez had wounded him but Davies was still standing, still gripping, still wearing that vacant expression like a mask painted on from the inside.

"Davies." One last try. "Bill. Let her go."

He turned his head toward me. Slowly. The movement mechanical, inhuman, a camera panning on a broken gimbal. His mouth opened and what came out was not language. A wet, aspirated sound. Air pushed through vocal cords by something that had forgotten what speech was for.

Martinez fired again. The round caught Davies in the hip and he staggered, finally releasing O'Mally. She crumpled to the ground. Not breathing. Not moving.

Davies turned toward Martinez. That same blank face. That same terrible speed building in his legs.

I shot him in the chest.

He took one more step. Then another. Then his knees buckled and he sat down in the dust like a man taking a rest, and his eyes, Bill Davies' brown, earnest eyes, cleared for just a moment. He looked at me. He looked at his hands. He looked at O'Mally on the ground.

"I can't," he whispered. The real Davies, surfacing for one breath through whatever chemical tide had swallowed him. "I can't stop it."

I fired again. He fell backward and was still.

Seven minutes from exposure to this. Seven minutes to turn a good kid into a weapon that killed one of our own and injured two more. Sorenson was spitting blood from a shattered jaw. Martinez was clutching his ribs where Davies' thrashing had connected. O'Mally lay in the dust with her gear perfectly packed and her throat crushed.

I knelt beside her. Checked the pulse I already knew wasn't there. Closed her eyes with fingers that weren't shaking yet. That would come later.

Martinez had warned me. He'd looked at Davies and seen it before I did, said the words that would follow me for years. And I'd looked. I'd seen the tremor. I'd seen the eyes. I'd filed it, the way you file everything, and filing had cost Sandra O'Mally her life.

The explosion came from the northern ridge. Thompson's position.

The flash turned night to noon. I hit the ground by instinct, covering O'Mally's body with my own before my brain caught up with the absurdity. Protecting the dead while the living burned. The concussion wave rolled over us, hot and sharp, carrying the smell of cordite and superheated stone. Then the gunfire. Not the disciplined crack of trained soldiers. The sustained roar of an ambush sprung with patience and overwhelming numbers.

Thompson's rifle answered from the ridge. Steady, methodical, each shot placed with the calm precision of a man doing his job while the world ended. Then a second explosion. Then silence from the ridge.

"Thompson!" Martinez was on the radio. Nothing. Static chewing the frequency. "Thompson, respond!"

The static sounded like something I'd hear again, years later, on a station far from any desert. 23.7 Hz of pure noise, radios spitting gibberish while the valley filled with muzzle flashes.

"LT, we're flanked." Martinez, bleeding from his ribs, was already returning fire. Controlled bursts. Counting rounds. Doing the math that soldiers do when the math has stopped making sense. "East and south. Dozens. Maybe more."

Dozens. Intel said twelve to fifteen. Intel said a lot of things.

Sorenson was trying to fight with a jaw that hung wrong, his rifle braced against a rock, blood streaming down his chin and onto the stock. He fired with one eye swollen shut and the other burning with the focused fury of a man who knew the odds but refused to acknowledge them. "Give me a target," he slurred through the wreckage of his mouth. "Just give me a target."

I gave him targets. There were plenty.

The valley lit up in strobing flashes. Tracers stitched the dark like terrible needles, red and green, crisscrossing above our heads. The heat was immense. Not desert heat but combustion heat, the air itself catching fire from the volume of ordnance being poured into our position. Rounds sparked off the rocks around us, each impact a bright exclamation point in the dark.

Martinez moved to my left, firing, reloading, firing. Professional to the end. His shots were measured, deliberate. Each one an answer to a question the enemy kept asking. But the questions kept coming, more and faster, and our answers were running thin.

"Magazine," he called. His last.

"Same," I answered.

He looked at me across the gap. Four feet of open ground that might as well have been a mile. His face was a mask of dust and blood, and behind it was the steadiest pair of eyes I'd ever served with. No panic. No recrimination. Just the quiet acknowledgment of a man who'd done the math and accepted the answer.

"Been an honor, LT."

"Don't start with that."

He grinned. Blood in his teeth. Then he turned back to the fight and put his last rounds where they'd do the most good.

Sorenson went down next. A burst caught him across the chest as he tried to shift position, and he folded over his rifle with a sound that was more surprise than pain. His hand found the stock, tried to lift it. Found it too heavy. Found everything too heavy.

Martinez was moving toward him when the third explosion hit. Closer. The shock wave threw me against the wall of the compound, the back of my helmet cracking against mud-brick, stars blooming across my vision. When they cleared, Martinez was on the ground. Not moving the way Sorenson wasn't moving. Not moving the way O'Mally wasn't moving. The way Thompson, somewhere on that silent ridge, wasn't moving.

I was alone.

The gunfire didn't stop. It redistributed, searching, probing. Rounds chewing the stone around me in systematic sweeps. They knew we were here. They knew how many. They were being thorough.

Like O'Mally would have been. Like I'd taught her.

My magazine was empty. My sidearm had two rounds. Two rounds against dozens.

Davies lay three meters away, still warm, the man I'd killed to save a woman who was already dead. His body was big enough to hide behind. Big enough to hide under. Big enough to become a dead soldier if I pressed myself against him and stopped breathing in any way that mattered.

I crawled to him. Pressed my face against his back. Pulled his cooling weight over me like a blanket made of everything I'd failed to prevent.

And I stopped.

Stopped moving. Stopped breathing in any way that carried sound. Stopped being alive in every way the enemy could measure.

Bill Davies' blood soaked through my uniform. His body settled against mine as gravity reorganized him into something less than human. The warmth faded first from his hands, then his face, then the broad chest that had housed a good heart until seven minutes of bad chemistry had turned it into something else.

I lay still and let the dead protect me.

They came through the first time an hour after the shooting stopped.

Boots on stone. Voices in a language I recognized but couldn't translate through the roaring in my ears. Flashlight beams sweeping the ground, catching on boots and hands and the dark mirrors of open eyes. They moved through our dead with the businesslike efficiency of men checking inventory.

A boot connected with Sorenson's leg. Rolled him. A voice said something. Laughter. They moved on.

O'Mally next. A flashlight beam lingered on her face. More words. The beam moved.

Then Davies. Then me.

The boot caught Davies in the ribs, and the impact transferred through his body into mine. A dull, intimate percussion that I felt in my teeth. I didn't flinch. Didn't breathe. My face was pressed against the space between his shoulder blades, my mouth full of the copper-salt taste of his blood, and I was dead. I was dead because the alternative was worse. Not death. Capture. What they would do to a female American soldier in a valley that didn't exist, on an operation that never happened, where no one would come looking because no one knew we were here.

The boot came again. Harder. Davies' body shifted, his arm swinging across my face with the boneless weight of meat on a hook. I absorbed it. Let it land. Let the dead man hit me because dead women don't flinch.

A hand grabbed Davies' collar and pulled. Testing. Seeing if anything underneath was worth the effort. I felt my body slide an inch, two inches, the ground scraping beneath me. Then the hand released. The voice said something dismissive. The boots moved on.

I lay in Davies' blood and counted heartbeats. Mine. The only ones left to count.

The second time was worse.

Dawn was coming. The sky had shifted from black to the deep blue that means the sun is thinking about it. With the light came clarity I didn't want. The smell that had been abstract in the dark became specific. Blood, bowel, cordite, the chemical sweetness of whatever had been in those canisters, all of it cooking slowly in the first warmth of morning.

And Davies. Pressed against me, around me, over me. His body had stiffened in the night, locking into the shape of our last embrace. Rigor turning him into architecture. My shelter, my cage, my evidence. His skin had gone cold and waxy, and where my face pressed against his back, I could feel the texture changing, flesh becoming something else, something that used to be a person and was now just a fact.

The second patrol was more careful. More systematic. They came through with the measured patience of men who had time and wanted prisoners. They turned each body. Checked each face. Prodded with rifle barrels and boot tips, looking for the flinch, the breath, the small betrayal of life hiding among the dead.

I heard them reach Martinez. His body was closest to mine. The sound of him being rolled, his gear scraping stone. A voice calling out something. A response. They moved on.

Davies. A boot against his hip. Hands gripping his arm, trying to roll us both. His body was rigid now, locked to mine by cold chemistry. The hands pulled harder. I felt my shoulder exposed, morning air hitting the blood-soaked fabric of my sleeve.

Don't breathe. Don't blink. You're dead. You're already dead. You died in a valley that doesn't exist and nobody will find you because nobody knows you're here and that's fine because you're dead and dead things don't mind being forgotten.

A rifle barrel pressed against my exposed shoulder. Cold steel on wet fabric. Testing for the response that every living body gives: the involuntary tension, the micro-flinch, the skin pulling away from the thing that threatens it.

I gave it nothing.

Dead weight. Dead skin. Dead eyes behind lids I pressed shut so hard the darkness bloomed purple.

The barrel withdrew. A voice. Dismissive. The same word as before. The boots moved on, and their sound faded into the morning, and I was alone with five people I'd failed and the growing certainty that I would never move again.

I don't know what time the friendlies came. Time had stopped being linear somewhere around the fourth hour. It existed only in cycles: the flies that appeared with the sun, the heat that built like a fever in the dead man above me, the slow contraction of my muscles as my body forgot what movement was for.

I heard the firefight. Distant at first, then closer. Controlled. Professional. The sound of trained soldiers clearing a valley with resources my team had never been given. The shooting lasted twenty minutes. Then the radios, crisp and clear, callsigns and sector reports, the organized language of people who had enough ammunition and enough bodies and enough time.

I should have called out. Should have moved. Should have done something to announce that one of six was still breathing.

I couldn't.

My body had learned its lesson too well. Stillness was survival. Movement was death. The equation had written itself into my muscles, my lungs, my eyelids, and no amount of conscious will could override it. I lay beneath Davies and listened to rescue walk past me. Heard them stop at Martinez. At Sorenson. At O'Mally. Heard the silence that meant Thompson had been found on his ridge.

The secondary wave came hours later. Medical. The ones who deal with what the fighters leave behind.

I felt hands on Davies. Professional hands, checking vitals they knew weren't there, documenting what didn't need documenting. They tried to move him and felt the resistance, the way his body had locked to mine, rigor and gravity conspiring to make us one.

"Got another one under here." A voice. Young. Startled.

"Dead?"

"Can't tell. Help me with this."

They pulled Davies off me in pieces. Not literally, but that's how it felt. Each inch of separation was an amputation, the cold air rushing into spaces that had been warm and dark and safe for nearly a full day. Light hit my face like an accusation. The sky was orange. Dusk again. A full cycle of the earth while I lay still and let the dead do the work.

"She's alive. Jesus, she's alive. Medic!"

Hands on my face. My neck. Checking pulse, checking pupils, checking for the obvious damage that would explain why a living woman was curled beneath a dead man in a valley full of corpses.

"Can you hear me? What's your name? What unit are you with?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The muscles had forgotten how to shape words. Everything in me was still performing death, still committed to the stillness that had kept my heart beating while every other heart around me stopped.

"She's in shock. Severe. Get the stretcher."

More hands. Gentle, insistent. Lifting me from the ground that had been my bed, my coffin, my salvation. I felt the dirt release me with reluctance, red-brown dust clinging to the blood on my uniform, on my face, in my hair. Davies' blood. O'Mally's dust. Martinez's last words still ringing in a frequency I'd carry forever.

The medic leaned close. Young face, clean uniform, eyes that hadn't seen what mine had seen. He asked again, slowly, like talking to a child.

"Can you tell me your name?"

Something unlocked. Not much. A crack in the wall I'd built in the dark. Words came up through it, scraped raw, barely human.

"Lieutenant..." The rank first. Always the rank first. "Dimitrovic."

"Good. Good. You're safe now, Lieutenant. We've got you."

Safe. The word meant nothing. But another word was climbing up through the crack, pushing past the blood and dust and the taste of Davies' back against my teeth. A question. The only question that mattered.

I grabbed the medic's sleeve. My hand was brown with dried blood and my grip was weak but I held on with everything I had left.

"Did we hold?" My voice broke on the last word, and I tried again, louder, desperate. "Did we hold the line?"

The medic looked at me. Then at the bodies. Then at the valley, still smoking, still settling, the mountains standing witness to what had happened in their shadow.

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

They loaded me onto the stretcher. I watched the sky scroll past as they carried me out of the valley. Orange to purple to dark. The same sky. The same transition I'd watched from the staging area eighteen hours earlier, when I had a team and a mission and the belief that caution and precision could keep the people I loved alive.

I kept my hand clenched around the medic's sleeve the whole way out.

I didn't let go until they sedated me.

After

Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany. Fluorescent light. White sheets. A doctor explaining injuries I couldn't feel. Dehydration. Contusions. A dislocated shoulder I didn't remember getting. Blood work that came back clean, which was the first miracle, and a psychological evaluation that came back anything but.

I told them about Davies. About the agent. About the way his eyes emptied and his hands kept working after the rest of him was gone. They wrote things down. They used words like acute stress reaction and trauma-induced dissociation and temporary psychotic features.

I told them about O'Mally. About being too slow. About filing the warning signs instead of acting on them. They nodded. They wrote more things down.

I told them I needed to get back to my unit.

They explained, gently, that I didn't have a unit to get back to.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Psychiatric Ward. The walls were a color someone had chosen specifically because research said it reduced agitation. It didn't. Everything reduced to routine. Wake. Eat. Therapy. Eat. Group. Eat. Sleep. The same cycle, day after day, week after week, month after month, until the routine became the architecture and the architecture became the cage.

Two years.

Twenty-four months of learning the language of recovery. Of sitting across from doctors who asked the same questions in different arrangements and learning which answers opened doors and which ones added locks. Of watching other patients cycle through, in and out, while I remained. A permanent installation. Part of the furniture. The woman in Room 7 who woke up screaming about things that didn't exist.

Except they had existed. Davies existed. The agent existed. O'Mally's crushed throat existed. Martinez's last grin with blood in his teeth existed.

But the doctors had a framework, and the framework said that what I experienced was a trauma response, not a threat assessment. That my hypervigilance was a symptom, not a skill. That the part of me that watched every face for the moment it changed, that catalogued every tremor and hesitation, that measured the distance between a person and a weapon at all times, was broken. Not trained. Broken.

I learned to agree.

I learned to say "I understand that my perception was altered by extreme stress." I learned to nod when they explained that Davies' behavior was caused by a chemical agent and that such agents were rare, controlled, unlikely to be encountered again. I learned to describe my feelings using the approved vocabulary. I learned to sleep through the night, or at least to lie still enough that the monitors believed I was sleeping.

I learned what recovery looked like, and I performed it with the same precision Sandra O'Mally had brought to checking her gear.

Final Evaluation. Month Twenty-Three. The doctor across from me was new. Younger than the others. She studied her notes with an expression I recognized but couldn't name. When she looked up, she asked the question they all asked, the one I'd answered a hundred times.

"Do you still believe your team was compromised by an external agent?"

"My team was killed in a classified military operation," I answered. "Private Davies was exposed to a neurological warfare agent that caused involuntary violent behavior. This is documented in the mission report."

"And your response to that exposure? Your current state?"

"I've processed the trauma. I understand my reactions were extreme but appropriate to the situation. I'm ready to resume duty."

She studied me. Longer than usual. The pen in her hand didn't move.

"Lieutenant, if you found yourself in a situation where a colleague began behaving erratically, what would you do?"

"Follow protocol. Report it. Seek medical assessment."

"Not intervene directly?"

"Not unless lives were in immediate danger."

She wrote something. Then set the pen down with a careful deliberation that meant she was about to say something she'd been thinking for a while.

"I have reservations."

"Noted."

"I don't think you're ready."

"Respectfully, I disagree."

She held my gaze. I held hers. Two women measuring each other across a desk, one with a file full of observations and one with twenty-three months of practice at looking like the person those observations described.

"I'll note my reservations in the file," she said. "The final determination rests with the board."

"Understood."

The board cleared me. Fit for duty. The reservations went into the file, and the file went into a cabinet, and the cabinet went into a building that processed a thousand files a week. One more recovered soldier. One more success story. One more box checked.

Twelve days later, the promotion came through. Lieutenant to Commander. Not earned through time in grade or distinguished service. Earned through survival and the military's quiet machinery of liability management. A new rank to go with a new posting. Something cushy. Something calm. Somewhere far from anything that could trigger the woman in Room 7.

The assignment memo arrived on a Tuesday. Plain envelope. Standard letterhead. The kind of document that changes a life without the courtesy of looking important.

Station 13. I read the number twice. Some people would have called it unlucky. I'd stopped believing in luck the night I crawled under a dead man and let him save me.

Four crew. My responsibility. My family, for six months in deep space where nothing explodes unless you tell it to.

I folded the memo along its creases, precise and even, and placed it in the breast pocket of a uniform that still felt borrowed. New rank. New posting. New chance to protect the people who depended on me. To hold the line the way I'd failed to hold it in Kandahar.

This time would be different. This time, I was prepared.

This time, I wouldn't be too slow.