Chapter 3

On the inside of her right wrist was a small black tattoo. Precise. Faded slightly by time in the way that old ink fades. A cat — but not quite a cat. A lynx, if you looked carefully enough to see the tufted ears and the proportions that were specific to something rather than decorative. It was not the kind of mark someone put on their body for aesthetics. It was the kind of mark that meant something exact to whoever carried it and had been placed there deliberately.

Morrow, who had a better instinct than most for reading silence when it was telling him something, put his hands in his pockets and looked away.

Tate did not have that instinct.

"A kitty cat," he said, looking around for the agreement he believed was his. "That's what headquarters sent us? A kitty cat and a rifle older than my grandfather."

The laughter came. Sharper this time. It carried across the motor pool.

I watched Ava Cross while it happened.

She did not respond. Her breathing did not change. Her face did not harden and did not perform the careful blankness of someone who is using indifference as a shield. She stood in front of men who had been hardened by three months of sustained contact, who were exhausted and frightened in the way that men who will never admit to being frightened carry their fear, and her stillness was absolute.

That kind of stillness is not weakness. I had learned that the hard way, in a different position, in a different desert, from a person I did not understand until a situation forced me to.

Morrow stepped forward and grabbed her arm without asking. His hand closed around her wrist and lifted it, displaying the tattoo to the men around him like he was showing them a funny sign he had found on the road.

"Look at this," he said, louder than he needed to. "Headquarters sent us a woman with a cat tattoo."

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She did not pull away from him. She did not try to twist free. She simply looked at the place where his hand was on her wrist with the expression of a quality control inspector noting a defect.

He dropped her arm.