Chapter 1
The Arizona sun did not shine over Camp Obsidian that afternoon. It pressed down on it.
By two in the afternoon, the heat rising off the motor pool asphalt was thick with diesel and old rubber and the specific weight of air that has absorbed too many secrets over too many years. It was the kind of heat that made every breath feel borrowed. The kind that made silence heavier than orders.
My name is Maya Cross. Specialist, United States Army, twenty-seven years old, and on my knees in the middle of that blacktop with tactical zip-ties biting into my wrists because I had found what Captain Raymond Garrick had spent four years making sure nobody would find.
My uniform was torn at the shoulder. Blood had darkened the fabric near my ribs and at the corner of my mouth where Staff Sergeant Briggs had introduced his boot to my face forty minutes earlier. My jaw had swollen in the way jaws swell when a very large man has decided that information is worth more than your bones. My ribs ached with every inhale. My vision had gone white at the edges twice in the last ten minutes and come back both times, which I took as a sign that I was still in the game.
Forty-two soldiers stood in a hollow square around us.
Men and women who had trained beside me. Who had shared bad coffee with me before the sun came up and watched me carry more than my share without complaint. Who had sat with me on the two anniversaries of Caleb's death when I could not sleep and needed someone to not say anything. Now every one of them was looking at the fence line, at the shimmer of heat over the desert, at anything that was not my face, because looking at me too long might mean becoming me.
That was what Garrick had built here. Not a unit. A structure of fear with discipline painted over it.
May you like
Garrick stood in front of me in spotless desert camouflage with his aviator sunglasses hiding whatever was behind his eyes. He had the posture of a man who had never been told no by anyone he was afraid of. He checked his watch, which told me there was a timeline, which told me something was coming that he did not want an audience for.
"Let's try this again, Specialist," he said. "Where is the drive?"
