Chapter 3
She had not raised her voice. She had not mocked him. She had not performed anything for the audience. She had simply stated a fact, in the same register you state facts about weather or distance, and the flatness of it was worse than any trash talk he had ever received because trash talk gave you something to push against and this gave him nothing.
His ears went red.
He turned toward the crowd. "You all hear that?" Nobody answered. He turned back. "Name?"
She said nothing.
"Unit?"
Still nothing.
"You don't walk into my advanced combatives class and play mysterious."
"It isn't your class," she said.
The room got colder.
Master Sergeant Ryan Cole, standing near the training dummy rack, said "Sir—" and stopped when Cross looked at him with the specific look that ended conversations before they organized into sentences.
Cross studied her. He laid out the terms: apology, step off the mat, everyone forgets by lunch.
Olivia glanced at the clock on the concrete wall.
May you like
"I don't have that much time," she said.
She had been assigned to Forward Training Site Redstone the previous Monday, attached to the site's advanced combatives program under a designation that nobody on base had encountered before, from an office in the Defense Intelligence Agency's training division whose name was not on any roster that Cross had access to, with orders signed by a deputy director whose relationship to the base's operational chain of command was technically adjacent but not subordinate.
