Chapter 1
My name is Ava Mitchell, and the first thing Sergeant Cole Vance ever said to me was a laugh.
Not words. Just a laugh, the full-bodied, ugly kind that men use when they want a room to agree with them before they've finished the sentence. I had stepped off the helicopter with sand in my teeth and the rifle case still on my shoulder, and he reached out and pulled it off me like he was confiscating something from a child who'd wandered into the wrong classroom. The blades were still spinning. Heat came off the tarmac in visible waves. He dropped the case onto a folding crate, flipped the latches, looked down at my father's rifle, and laughed loud enough to turn every head on the landing zone toward him.
"Did somebody's grandpa leave this in the supply room?"
I had rehearsed that moment in my head a hundred times on the transport. Not because I was afraid of it. Because I knew it was coming, and I'd learned early that the best response to a man who wants your reaction is to give him the silence he can't figure out what to do with.
I stepped forward. I took the rifle back with both hands, placed it in the case, closed the latches, lifted the strap onto my shoulder, and walked toward the staging canopy without saying a single word. Behind me I heard a few of the laughs die out one by one, like lights being switched off in a building. I didn't look back to watch it happen.
Lieutenant Jake Morrison had been standing at the edge of the landing zone with his arms crossed. I knew the type before I knew his name. Forty-something, lean the way men get lean after years of carrying weight, gray at the temples, lines around the eyes from too many bright horizons and too many things he'd learned not to talk about. He had read my file. I knew that too. I knew what the file said: nineteen years old, zero combat deployments, range scores that had made people in offices pick up phones. I also knew what those people thought when they read a file like that. They thought paper was paper, and field reality had a habit of setting paper on fire.
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He was not wrong about field reality. He wasn't wrong about much.
What he didn't know yet was that I had grown up inside field reality, in the form of a father who had carried a rifle since before I was born and had decided, somewhere around my fifth birthday, that the best thing he could teach a daughter was not how to be careful. The best thing he could teach her was how to see everything between where she was standing and where she needed to hit.
