Chapter 1

The cotton ripped with a sound like a branch breaking.

Nadia Okafor felt the pull at her left shoulder a half-second before she heard it — Grady Pruitt's hand closing on the sleeve of her grey PT shirt, yanking sideways as he tried to drag her off balance. The fabric gave way along the seam, a long dry tear that stopped the room like a gunshot.

A strip of grey cloth hung from his fist. He stood there, frozen, his sunburnt face registering the wrongness of it — the way you tear a thing you meant only to grab. Behind him, Terrence Boone's laugh died halfway out of his throat.

The mat room went quiet.

Not the quiet of surprise. The quiet of a shape, like a held breath waiting to find out what it's holding.

Nadia did not step back. She did not look down at her shoulder. Her jaw set once, a muscle moving along the line of her cheek, and her eyes narrowed — a single flicker of something that was not anger and not fear, something older than both.

The drill sergeant, who had been walking along the edge of the mat, stopped mid-stride. His boot hung in the air for a beat before he set it down.

Colonel Warren Halloway, standing by the wire-mesh windows at the back of the room, had been writing something on a clipboard. The pen stopped moving.

Four days earlier, none of this was true.

Four days earlier, it had been just another morning on the training field — the red Georgia sun coming up flat and orange over the treeline, the dew burning off the grass, and the whole platoon lined up in twos, breathing in the cold air and the smell of cut hay.

Nadia Okafor had arrived with her boots laced tight and her duffel slung over one shoulder, walking up the line like she'd walked up every line before it: steady, unhurried, eyes forward. She was tall and lean, with the shoulders of a swimmer and close-cropped black hair that ended in a clean fade at the temples. She wore the same grey PT shirt as everyone else, the same olive drab trousers, the same scuffed tan boots. No jewellery except a thin black cord under her collar that disappeared beneath the cloth.

She looked like a recruit. That was the point.

The platoon had taken one look at her stillness — the way she didn't fidget, didn't chatter, didn't look around like everyone else who'd just left home for the first time — and read it as something soft. Something breakable.

"You see that?" a voice said behind her, loud enough for half the platoon to hear. "She's got the quiet thing going on. Like a library."

Nadia didn't turn.

"Books don't do push-ups, princess."

Grady Pruitt. Thick-necked, sunburnt, shaved sandy hair with a sweat-stained cap pushed back on his head. He was built like a door, broad across the chest and shoulders, and he'd hacked the sleeves off his PT shirt the first morning, showing off arms that looked like they'd been drawn by someone with no sense of proportion. He grinned at the line, waiting for the laugh he knew was coming.

It came. Half the platoon chuckled. Terrence Boone, short and stocky in a grey watch cap, laughed a half-second late, looking at Grady first to make sure it was funny.

Nadia kept walking.