Chapter 1 - The Paper at His Boots
"You want somebody to carry your lunch too, Whitcomb?"
Sergeant Derek Voss said it loud enough for the entire dining hall to hear. A dozen conversations died. Forks stopped halfway to mouths. I stood on two aluminum crutches with my tray balanced against my hip, trying not to let him see how badly my right leg hurt.
"Move," I said.
Voss smiled. He was six feet two and perfectly healthy. Apparently that made him brave when facing a woman on crutches.
"Can't move past me?" He glanced at my crutches. "Maybe they should've retired you when they had the chance."
Someone behind him laughed.
"I said move."
"And I said you don't get special treatment just because you know how to put on a show."
My name is Staff Sergeant Nora Whitcomb. Two years earlier, a roadside blast had shattered my knee during an Army medical convoy outside the fictional border town of Darrah. That same morning, my younger brother Liam had died. The Army's final report said he was killed instantly when the vehicle caught fire. It said I had misunderstood the radio traffic because of my own injuries. It said a lot of things I had never believed.
Voss had signed that report.
He stepped forward, and I had to plant a crutch to keep from falling. My tray tipped. A spoon clattered across the floor. Nobody moved to help.
"You should learn when to quit," he muttered, suddenly quiet enough for only me to hear.
"Funny," I answered. "Liam used to say that about bullies."
His smile twitched. Then something slipped from the breast pocket of his uniform, fluttered between us, and landed beside his boot. A folded white scrap. He looked down, and the blood seemed to drain from his face.
I moved first. The metal tip of my crutch scraped the tile as I lowered myself, caught the paper, and unfolded it with shaking fingers.
Three times were written in blue ink: 04:17. 04:31. 04:46.
Beneath them, in block letters, were six words.
LIAM WHITCOMB. PULSE PRESENT AT 04:17.
I stared at the date in the corner. It was the morning my brother supposedly died instantly, almost half an hour before that first entry.
"Where did you get this?" I whispered.
Voss reached for the paper, and every soldier in the room heard me shout, "My brother was alive when you said he was dead."
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Then I turned the paper over. On the back, in Liam's unmistakable crooked handwriting, were the words: "Nora, if they tell you I died in the blast, ask who ordered the trucks to wait."
And under that, a single name: PRICE.
