Chapter 1
The first sound that morning was metal on concrete.
Master Sergeant Cole slapped the Barrett M82 onto the equipment table at Fort Carson hard enough to make two recruits flinch, and I understood from that single gesture everything I needed to know about how the day was going to begin.
My contractor badge said Dakota Sawyer. Civilian equipment maintenance. That was all it said. That was all I needed it to say.
I am forty-one years old. I have a daughter named Maya who is seven and who finished her last round of chemotherapy six months ago and who made me promise, sitting up in a hospital bed with an IV taped to the back of her small hand, that I would stop disappearing. I had spent eleven years disappearing on her behalf without her knowledge — three tours under a designation that does not appear in any public personnel record, a callsign I had not used out loud since the year before her diagnosis. When the offer came to leave that life behind entirely and take quiet civilian contract work maintaining precision equipment for training ranges, I had taken it without hesitation. I wanted ordinary. I wanted to come home tired and alive instead of vanishing for months at a time into places that did not officially exist.
May you like
Cole did not know any of that. Cole saw a woman in her forties with a maintenance badge and decided, the way some men decide things before they have any information to decide them with, exactly what category I belonged in.
"Who authorized a civilian to touch our weapons?" he demanded.
