Chapter 3
I want to describe this precisely, because precision is what the moment requires. The soldier — a staff sergeant named Briggs who had the expression of a man following an order he had not been given time to evaluate — stepped behind me and wrapped his fist around the collar of my jacket. The fabric stretched tight across my shoulders for half a second, and then he yanked it backward and sideways with the kind of force that doesn't allow for partial measures, and the jacket came off both shoulders in one sharp motion, sleeves snapping free with enough force that I felt the pull in my arms before the air touched them.
The jacket hit the ground behind me.
I did not move. I did not flinch. I did not cover myself, because covering yourself is what you do when you have something to hide, and I did not have anything to hide. I had something to reveal, which was a different thing entirely, and the distinction was about to become very relevant.
I was wearing an olive tank top beneath the jacket. The morning air hit my arms and shoulders. And on my rear left shoulder, wrapping partially onto my upper arm, was a tattoo that had been placed there seven years ago in a facility in Ankara that also did not officially exist: a wolf's head, rendered in dark ink, precise in its construction, surrounded by geometric markings that meant something specific to the twelve people who had received them and nothing to anyone who hadn't earned the right to know.
Hayes looked at me standing there with my jacket on the ground and his jaw moved with the specific satisfaction of a man who has gotten what he came for. He turned to the assembled soldiers and to the general standing at the edge of the platform, a two-star I had been told would be observing training this week, and he opened his mouth to say what he had prepared.
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"Now everyone can see the truth."
The truth he had intended to present was whatever theory he had built from five weeks of frustration — the general's daughter, the experiment candidate, the planted evaluator. He had assembled three hundred witnesses for the public resolution of his uncertainty, and he had gotten the audience he wanted, and he had miscalculated the direction the audience was about to look.
