Chapter 3
The descent was a half mile of packed dirt with a slight grade that rewarded forward lean, and I ran it the way I had been taught to run descent in field conditions, controlled and efficient, and I crossed the finish line with the pack still on my shoulders and the timer showing a time that the qualification officer looked at, looked at again, and then recorded without comment.
I set the pack down on the ground and stood in the desert heat and waited.
Barrett came in first of the team, two minutes and fourteen seconds after me. He crossed the line and put his hands on his knees and stayed there for a moment. Then he straightened and looked at me, and the look did not contain what his voice had contained at the start line. It contained something that took the shape it takes in people who are large enough to update their assessment when the information requires it.
Pierce came in next. Then two junior operators. Then Steel.
He crossed the line and his face was doing multiple things at once, exhaustion, disbelief, the specific internal negotiation of a person who has encountered a result that conflicts with a story he has been telling himself, and then he straightened, and the expression that settled was not any of those things but something rawer underneath them.
He walked toward me.
The range was quiet the way it goes quiet when everyone present understands that something is happening that is not on the schedule.
"Who the hell are you?" he said.
It was not rhetorical. He genuinely wanted to know, and the wanting to know was itself the thing that had been absent for fourteen months, the simple curiosity that might have asked the question on day one if the gray coveralls and the mop had not been sufficient to close the file.
May you like
I reached down and picked up the combat pack and held it for a moment. Then I set it at his feet, and the dust rose where it hit the ground, and I looked at him with the same expression I had been wearing since the morning I arrived at Meridian, which was the expression of someone who has been exactly where she was supposed to be all along.
"Someone you should've respected," I said.
