A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE

Chapter 4

Inside, the clinic smelled of disinfectant and burned coffee.

“Sit,” Pike said.

I sat on the edge of the examination table. He shut the door.

Then his face changed. The humor drained out of it like water out of a tilted glass.

“Lift your shirt enough for me to see the impact area.”

I did. A bruise was already blooming under my left ribs, dark and wide, like a spilled shadow.

Pike examined it with two fingers, careful and slow. “Any trouble breathing?”

“No.”

“Dizziness?”

“No.”

“Nausea?”

“No.”

He pressed lightly along my side. Pain went through me like a white flare, and I flinched before I could stop it.

He pulled back. “Possible fracture.”

“Contusion.”

“Possible fracture.”

“I appreciate your optimism.”

“I save the good news for people who listen.”

He reached for his stethoscope. While he worked, I watched him — the way he laid out instruments in a strict row, the way his eyes kept travelling to the hallway, the way he checked the wall clock twice in under a minute.

“You were in the mess hall before I got there,” I said.

Pike paused.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You saw Thorne.”

“Yes.”

“With whom?”

He looked at me. I could practically see the decision happening behind his eyes, the way you can watch a man choose between his oath and his instinct.

“You’re investigating him,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

“I’m asking who he was with.”

He stepped back. “Commander, I’m medical staff.”

“And therefore trained to remember details other people don’t.”

He exhaled. “Three instructors. Two recruits came up to him separately. One left almost immediately.”

“Which recruit?”

His hesitation lasted half a second.

Which was enough.

“Pike.”

“Recruit Caleb Sutton.”

The name hit me harder than Thorne’s fist had.

I kept my face absolutely still. “You’re certain.”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Eleven fifty, maybe.”

“And Thorne?”

“Didn’t seem happy to see him.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t hear.”

“But you watched.”

Pike’s mouth tightened. “Sutton handed him something.”

My breathing slowed. “What?”

“I don’t know. Folded paper. Small envelope, maybe.”

“What did Thorne do with it?”

“Put it in his pocket.”

I looked toward the door.

Caleb Sutton.

That was why I had been sent.

Not Thorne. Not officially.

Three weeks earlier, Sutton had written a letter to his sister. Recruits aren’t supposed to describe classified training, and he didn’t — he wrote about small things. A vending machine that ate dollar bills. A roommate who snored loud enough to wake the fire watch. Dawn runs along the seawall. A gray cat that had started appearing behind the laundry building, thin and unimpressed by everyone.

None of it looked important.

Except one line.

I think somebody here is changing the scores.

His sister worked as a civilian analyst at Naval Personnel Command. She noticed the sentence, the way a good analyst notices a hairline crack in a foundation. Then a second letter arrived. Sutton mentioned that recruits who failed certain evaluations sometimes showed up as passing in the official record. He assumed it was a clerical error.

His sister didn’t.

She quietly pulled the files. The discrepancies were real. Names altered. Performance scores edited. Medical restrictions deleted. In at least two cases, recruits had been moved into specialized training tracks after instructors recommended against it in writing.

The credentials authorizing several of those edits belonged to a lieutenant who had transferred off the compound eight months earlier.

Someone was rewriting the future of this base from the inside.

Admiral Reeve wanted answers before he opened a formal investigation, because the moment a formal investigation opened, whoever was doing it would know.

So he sent me.

Commander Elena Vance. Naval Intelligence. No entourage. No uniform advertising my purpose. No introduction to the staff. I arrived a day early under temporary administrative credentials, walked in through a side gate at dawn, and intended to observe, identify the weaknesses, meet Reeve privately the next morning, and begin interviews before anyone understood what was happening.

Marcus Thorne had destroyed that plan in sixty seconds.

Or maybe — I was starting to suspect — he had accelerated it.

I looked at Pike. “Where is Sutton now?”

His face changed.

Something cold settled in my chest. “What?”

He put the stethoscope down on the tray.

“Sutton was pulled from afternoon training,” he said.

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“By whom?”

“I thought command knew.”

“Pike.”

He lowered his voice, even though the door was shut.

“Nobody’s seen him since last night.”