The Pin Was No Bigger Than a Dime

"Reaper," he said. "Can you still shoot?"

I looked at him for a long moment.

I thought about Maya's scan, three days away. I thought about the promise I had made her in a hospital room with fluorescent lighting that made everything look slightly wrong. I thought about eleven years of disappearing and the particular kind of stillness I had been building for the six months since her remission, brick by careful brick, the way you build something you intend to actually live inside.

"Yes, sir," I said. "But I'm not enlisting back into it."

Webb's expression shifted — not disappointment, something closer to respect arriving alongside a request he had not expected to need to make so carefully.

"I'm not here to recruit you," he said. "I'm here because Ghost 7's old case file just got reopened. Three names from your unit. One of them is sitting in a federal courtroom in November claiming the unit never existed, which means the operation that got two of your team killed never officially happened either, which means their families have spent six years collecting survivor benefits for men the Army says did not die in service. I need someone who was there to testify to what actually occurred. Off the books testimony, under your old designation, sealed proceedings. You'd be done in four days."

The range was silent enough that I could hear the dust moving against the concrete.

"My daughter has an oncology follow-up in three days," I said. "I'm not missing it. Not for this. Not for anything."

"I'll move the hearing," Webb said. "I have that authority."

I looked at him for a long moment, weighing eleven years of disappearing against four days that might finally close something that had been open since two men in my unit did not come home and their families had been told, officially, that there was nothing to grieve because there was nothing on paper to have lost.