Chapter 2

The morning did not return to normal. It couldn't. Normal had been a range sergeant's voice cracking across the mist and a hundred recruits jumping to it. Now there was a different silence, heavy as wet canvas, and nobody knew what to do with their hands.

Braddock stood at the crates for a long time after the FDC traffic went quiet. The hold order stayed on. The guns remained loaded but cold, the gunners standing at their posts with their eyes straight ahead, the way soldiers do when something has gone wrong and nobody has told them what the correct face is yet.

Reyes watched Braddock watch the crate. She had been in the Army twelve years, made staff sergeant on merit, stood on this same lane through wind and heat and the kind of cold that froze the breath in your nose. She had never once seen Braddock's face do what it was doing now — the jaw working, the eyes not quite focusing, the body still as a fence post.

"Sergeant," she said, quiet, not a question.

Braddock didn't answer right away. He reached out and touched the stenciled lot number on the crate with two fingers, tracing the letters like a man checking a watermark.

"I signed for these crates," he said finally, and his voice was flat, stripped of the volume that had carried his authority all morning. "I walked the offload myself. Checked every stencil against the manifest. Counted the boxes twice."

Reyes nodded. She didn't mention that he had been distracted that morning, that his radio had been squawking with a disciplinary matter from barracks duty, that the truck had arrived twenty minutes early and the driver had been in a hurry. She didn't mention it because she wasn't sure it mattered, and because Braddock was not a man who needed to hear what he already knew.