They Were Watching for Danger. She Was Watching for Cause.

Mercer approached from behind and said my time was up.

Before I could answer, Rex stopped.

His body turned toward me. Not with the forward lean of a dog about to move. With the stillness of a dog who has encountered something in the environment that has temporarily overridden everything else. Kilo's head came up. Dax stepped out of the back corner into the light.

All three dogs looked at me.

Nobody in the kennel spoke.

Mercer said, "That's luck."

I did not argue. I had learned a long time ago that people who needed to be right could not be pulled toward truth. They had to collide with it. "Probably," I said. "Can I come back tomorrow?"

She said no. She said she would pass my comments to the veterinary team. It was a clean, controlled, final dismissal, and I nodded once and walked back toward the checkpoint.

Hewitt caught up with me before the first gate.

Eleven minutes later I sat in a room with plastic chairs while Mercer entered carrying a manila folder she had obtained from someone in approximately eight minutes, which told me she had wanted to verify something and had known exactly where to verify it.

She placed the folder on the table. I saw my name on the first page.

Emily Carter. Former Army combat medic. Attached to military working dog units. Two overseas deployments. K9 behavioral intervention certification. Handler trauma conditioning. Rehabilitation under active combat conditions.

"You spent six years doing this," she said.

"I spent six years doing a lot of things."