Four years of heat and sand and noise and waiting and not sleeping and learning, in precise and brutal detail, exactly how fragile the human body was, how quickly it could come apart, and how little it took.
I’d seen men get that look after firefights, IEDs, after watching something happen to someone next to them that their brains refused to process. Their eyes would go dead. They’d sit down somewhere and simply… stop. Like the mind had hit a wall it couldn’t climb over.
It wasn’t weakness, more like overload, as if the system protected itself the only way it knew how.
I walked over slowly, not crowding her.
“Sloane,” I said.
Gently, quieter than I usually spoke to her. Quieter than I’d ever honestly spoken to her.
Her eyes shifted to me, sluggish, as if the signal had to travel a long way to reach her, and by the time it arrived, it had lost most of its strength.
She looked at me, but it was as if she were looking through me.
“They’re everywhere,” she whispered.
Her voice was empty.
I didn’t answer because there was nothing I had the ability to say that would make it better, nothing that would make it less true, and I would not stand here and lie to her. Not about this.
“They just…” She swallowed hard. Her throat worked visibly, and her eyes dropped to her hands in her lap. “They just tore her apart.”
Her voice broke on the last word—no dramatic sobbing, just simple disintegration.
I stood there, didn’t touch her, didn’t fix it.
Some things can’t be fixed. You just have to stand next to them and wait it out.
Her hands trembled again. I watched as she looked down at them as if they belonged to someone else, as if she was a bystander to her own body rebelling against her.
I crossed the room, pulling the director’s chair with me, swiveling it around as I sat down across from her. I leaned forward on my knees so I was closer to her level, closer to where she was.
“You’re in shock,” I said.
She gave a small, bitter laugh—short and sharp and completely without humor.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Fair enough.
Finally, she looked at me, fully. Not the glazed, distant stare from before.
“What do we do?” she asked.
Not challenging me the way she had a hundred times before across conference tables and in hallways, and over email chains that went on for days.
Just asking, as if she trusted me to have an answer.
That scared me more than anything I’d seen on that roof.
I exhaled slowly, rubbed my hands together, thought about it the way I’d been trained to think about it—not the big picture, not the why, not the how. Just the next step, and the one after that.
“We’ll stay here,” I said. “For now.”
She frowned faintly.
“Here?”