“You’re all being reassigned,” Axel MacNamara said tersely.

Ten workers from various departments were crammed into MacNamara’s office, which was surprisingly drab and small for the head of an organization. Jina Modell hadn’t been lucky enough to be one of the first two to arrive, so they had gotten the two visitors’ chairs and she and the other seven stood in various uncomfortable poses around the cramped room.

Her first reaction to MacNamara’s announcement was one of relief; none of them had known the reason for the mass summons and she’d expected they were, at best, being laid off, though she’d been braced for the worst—being fired—because budget cuts happened, even to dark projects funded by money that was deeply buried and almost invisible.

She evidently wasn’t the only one of her fellow workers to think that, because a low sigh, almost a hum, of relief went around the room.

Then she frowned. Yes, having a job was nice, and this one was very nice. She worked in Communications, and she really liked it. She liked the money, she liked the coolness factor—and it was way cool, even for D.C.—plus she liked the vicarious satisfaction of kicking terrorist butt through the actions of the GO-Teams, all without ever leaving the climate-controlled comfort of the Communications room. She liked climate-controlled comfort. Being reassigned might not be such a good thing.

“To where?” she asked, after a moment of silence with no one else voicing the question.

MacNamara didn’t even glance at her. “The Teams,” he replied, picking up a sheet of paper and scowling down at it as if he didn’t like what was written there, though as head of the agency he was almost certainly the one who had done the writing. “Donnelly, you go to Kodak’s team. Ervin, you’re on Snowman. Modell, Ace.” He continued reading down the list, giving them their assigned team, though none of them knew yet what the hell they were supposed to do.

“Ace” was the call sign for Levi Butcher. She knew the name but had never personally met any of the team operatives. Ace had the reputation for pulling some of the toughest jobs and now, oh hell, just what was she being reassigned to do?

Jina had trained herself to think before she spoke, because the cool job required it. No one could know what she really did, or where she really worked. She made herself pause and think now—for a whole second, because questions needed to be asked and no one else, evidently intimidated by MacNamara’s nasty reputation, was making a move to ask those questions.

She raised her hand. MacNamara must have caught the motion, because he paused in his reading to lift his head and bark “What?” at her.

“What are we supposed to do on the Teams?” she asked. She saw him register an instant of surprise at her voice, the realization that she was the one who had spoken before, instead of one of the guys. Her voice was what it was; she was used to the reaction. Of infinite more interest was the current situation. She didn’t know about the others, but she was in Communications, and she had zero training for what the GO-Teams did, which was commit mayhem on a massive scale.

“I’ll get to that part faster if you stop interrupting me,” MacNamara snapped.

“I’ve only interrupted once.” Was it her imagination, or did the coworkers standing around her all edge away, as if offering MacNamara a clear shot at her? Yeah, no, not her imagination.

“Twice, now.”

He had a point. She sucked in her cheeks to keep her mouth shut, and after a second he resumed reading. When everyone had been given their assignment—or rather, their team, because they still didn’t know what they’d be doing—MacNamara leaned back in his chair. “The ten of you tested highest on our spatial awareness and action tests—”

Jina bit her tongue, then sucked in her cheeks again. What spatial awareness and action tests? She hadn’t taken any tests. As far as she knew none of the others had, either.

“What spatial awareness and action tests?”

Shit. Her neck just kept sticking itself out.

MacNamara turned his rabid-wolverine gaze on her, and once again silence filled the little room. He began tapping the end of his pen against the top of his desk in a rapid tattoo. His expression said he was thinking of places where he could dump her body. She imagined he knew plenty and might have used a few.

But then he said curtly, “The video games in the break room.”

Ah. A low murmur circulated. Several months ago the video war games had been installed, and a bunch of them had immediately become immersed in playing all through their breaks, competing to see who could score the highest. Jina was an old hand at computer games and had really gotten into the friendly competition, consistently racking up the highest scores and pissing off the guys who had done a lot of big talking about girls not being any good at gaming. She’d shown them. The games were complicated and very lifelike, far more advanced than anything commercially available; the coolness factor had been off the charts. Evidently so had the sneaky factor.

She held up her hand again. Jeez, was she the only one with a mouth? Why didn’t some of the others ask the questions and make the observations?

MacNamara pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something under his breath.

“I’m not qualified to go out with one of the teams.” She was a little embarrassed to be stating the obvious, but it was only God’s truth. No matter how high she had scored in the computer games, the members of the GO-Teams were like supermen. They swam and ran for miles. They spent endless hours in training. They could shoot an acorn out of an oak tree at a gazillion yards. She knew sometimes they worked with women who had field skills, but she wasn’t one of those women. She knew how to swim, she jogged around some, but Fanny Fitness she wasn’t.

“None of you are,” he snapped. “All of you will receive training. You won’t be doing the physical part of the operations, anyway.”

“Then what will we—” Jina began, to be cut off by a wearily upheld hand.

“Let me remind all of you that you’re sworn to secrecy about any and everything connected with this job. The answer is, the team members are very good at situational awareness, but at a cost. Being aware of a goatherd coming toward them and how soon he’ll get there distracts from mission focus. Not a lot, because we’re talking about people good enough to be on a GO-Team, but still—seconds count. We’ve run thousands of analyses, and in every instance having an on-site operator dedicated to movement and timing and situational awareness has made a difference. The operator would be surveilling the surroundings via drone, controlled by a computer. With that extra eye, the chance of mission success increases by three percent; the chance of team member casualties decreases by two percent. The changes are small but critical.”

Especially to the team members suffering the casualties, Jina thought wryly. Okay, she could see why this was important. What she couldn’t see was herself in any field situation. She wasn’t . . . well, she wasn’t anything special. She wasn’t particularly athletic, she wasn’t intrepid, she wasn’t psychic so how the heck would she know which direction the goatherd was going to take, and she’d never had any ambition to be good at those things. She was good at a particular war game, that was all.

This wasn’t going to work.

“This won’t work,” she said.

MacNamara propped his head in his hands and gripped his hair with both hands, as if intending to pull it all out, though she had to admit he could be thinking about crushing her skull.

“Of course it won’t,” he snarled at his desktop. “It isn’t as if we know anything about what we’re doing, as if we haven’t considered all the possibilities and potential roadblocks, as if we haven’t analyzed all ten of you to the point we know more about you than you know about yourselves. We thought we’d just throw the ten of you out there for shits and giggles, to see how bad you can fuck things up.”

She didn’t like being analyzed without knowing she was being analyzed. It was kind of like some perv spying through a peephole in the women’s bathroom. On the other hand, she knew the analysts were top-notch at their job, so that was reassuring even if it wasn’t convincing.

“What if some of us aren’t interested?” she asked, because no one else was uttering a word—still, the ball-less wonders. And she was the only one in the room who didn’t have any, other than the ones in her mind. Mind testicles. Okay, gross.

“Then clean out your stuff and find another job.” MacNamara gave her the evil eye. “I don’t want quitters. People have already been hired to fill your previous positions.”

Finally—finally!—someone else spoke up. “So if we can’t handle the training, or get hurt on a mission, we’re out of a job.”

MacNamara’s mouth thinned to a straight line, and his mad-dog eyes glinted, but thank God they were glinting at someone else. “I take care of my people,” he growled. “If you get hurt, you’ll be treated the same as any other team member. You’ll get medical care, reassignment, a pension—whatever it takes. This is a hard job, people. Out of everyone who has played those games, just the ten of you scored high enough to be considered. I wouldn’t be making this move if we didn’t think the benefits were worth the risk. You won’t be in direct action unless something goes wrong, but you have to be in good-enough shape, and have sharp-enough field skills, that you won’t be a hindrance to the mission operators. Any more questions? Didn’t think so. Clean out your old desks and report back at oh-seven-hundred tomorrow, to the basement. Wear shorts and tees, and athletic shoes. You’ll be taken to another location and your PT will begin.”

PT. Oh, joy, Jina thought. Kill me now.

The decrepit, rusty, unremarkable fifteen-seat Ford Transit van came to a halt with a whine of brakes and groan of transmission. Its condition had passed “used” a long time ago and was now in the “could die at any time” category. The seats were worn and torn, and there was a hole in the floor through which Jina had watched the asphalt blurring beneath them. The motor coughed like a fifty-year smoker, the shocks were shot, and the steering groaned a protest at every move. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d had to push it to their destination.

But the vehicle had made it, not without a lot of prayer and crossed fingers. The guy sitting next to the side door opened it, and the ten of them crawled out. The last one out closed the door, and the latch had barely caught before the driver stepped on the gas and the van wheezed and growled its way back to wherever it stayed when it wasn’t needed.

They all looked around. “Where the hell are we?” one guy wondered aloud.

BFE, Jina thought, but kept her mouth shut. She’d kind of paid attention to direction and knew they were somewhere in Virginia. The van had deposited them at one end of a big open space scattered with piles of hay bales, wooden walls, giant knotted ropes, low tangles of barbwire, and other fixtures whose use wasn’t immediately apparent but were probably meant for torture—hers. A dirt track encircled the entire thing, disappearing into the forest at the far end, and even the track wasn’t a normal one. There were berms and hills and stretches of either sand or mud. What wasn’t visible was any sign of civilization, such as a coffee shop.

No longer than they’d been standing there she could already feel the red dust beginning to coat her throat, her nasal passages. She’d seen plenty of red dust in Georgia; she wasn’t afraid of it, but neither did she like it. She didn’t like dirt, she didn’t like sweating, she didn’t like anything about this.

Suck it up, buttercup. Sweating was better than unemployment—for now, anyway. She wasn’t making any promises about tomorrow.

People moved around them in a confusing tangle. She could see at least thirty men scattered around the training area, doing various things that looked impossible for normal humans. The sudden, rapid crack of full-auto weapons made her jump and look wildly around for where the shots came from, but there were no bull’s-eye targets pinned up anywhere that she could see. The acrid smell of burnt gunpowder filled the dusty air, so the shots had to have been close by. Her small group stood knotted together, silently watching the men doing the life-endangering things they themselves were supposed to learn how to do. What was there to say? Their options were this, or go job hunting. She did the buttercup thought again, trying to buttress herself.

The sun beat down. Despite herself, she was sweating anyway. That infernal dust turned her throat into Death Valley. Finally someone noticed them—or, rather, decided they’d been made to wait long enough, because she doubted anything escaped notice by this bunch—and a burly guy with a shaved head, deep bronze tan, and short gray beard ambled toward them. He wore a sweat-soaked olive-green tee shirt, khaki shorts, and desert sand boots. A fine layer of dust coated every inch of him, except where sweat had turned it into streaks of mud. He looked like a moving wall of muscle. When he got closer, he said, “You the FNGs, right?”

Fucking New Guys. They couldn’t work where they worked and not have picked up a lot of military slang, so none of them committed the embarrassment of asking what the initials meant. Instead there were some awkward head bobs.

“I’m Baxter.” He didn’t say if that was his first name or his last, not that it mattered. “Okay, we’ll start out the same way as if you were entering the military. First you’re going to run. We need to see who’s in general good shape and who isn’t. Follow me.”

He took off at an easy lope, his bulk moving with surprising ease. The group of ten cast questioning looks around, then gamely set off after him. Jina settled herself firmly in the middle of the pack, trying to keep Baxter’s shaven head in sight. She didn’t want to come in last, but she had no desire to be first; either one would get her noticed, and she didn’t want to be noticed. Pacing herself was the key; keep something in reserve, because she didn’t know what would be thrown at them next.

That was a good theory, but in practice it meant the jostling bodies in front of her—and all of them taller than she was—sometimes blocked her view of the terrain. She stumbled when a berm rose sharply under her feet, barely caught herself when she topped it and the ground fell away, then stumbled again when abruptly they were running in sand so soft her feet sank into it and fine grains sifted over the tops of her sneakers. That explained why all the men she’d seen had been wearing lace-up boots instead of sneakers. Only she and the other nine FNGs were wearing sneakers, though MacNamara had specifically said athletic shoes.

Lesson learned. Ask the people who actually did this kind of stuff what type of footwear she’d need.

That was assuming she wasn’t the first one to wash out of PT.

Damn if I am, she thought grimly. Not that she wanted to be assigned to an actual GO-Team, but neither did she want to fail. She’d grown up in the country, in southeast Georgia, running barefoot most of the year, so surely she could hang with at least some of the guys who likely had only done some jogging on a track or city street.

After about five minutes, her muscles were beginning to burn a little, her heart was pounding, and her breath was coming fast. Five minutes! She was in sorrier shape than she’d realized. About that time, the guys behind her evidently realized they were running behind a girl, and they all started pushing harder.

Jina dug deeper, ran harder, determined to stay in the middle of the pack. That was all she had to do. This wasn’t a race she had to win, she just had to do what was necessary and not draw attention to herself.

Abruptly someone roughly brushed by her, jamming a shoulder into her and knocking her to the side. She lost her stride, and when she got back into gear, she was dragging at the end of the line. Panting, sucking air, she glared at the shoulder jammer. It was Donnelly; he’d been in something to do with encryption, and she thought he’d been assigned to Kodak’s team. Easygoing Kodak was the plum assignment, the one she’d have chosen for herself if she’d been given a choice.

Bastard. Donnelly, not Kodak. Jina sucked in deep breaths and pushed herself harder, driving her legs, passing a few guys and positioning herself just behind and to the side of Donnelly. The uneven terrain made it risky to take her attention away from her footing, but there were some things she just couldn’t let go. Donnelly must have felt her presence behind him; he cast a quick glance over his shoulder, and she took advantage of his momentary lapse of attention to throw a quick kick into the middle of his stride. She didn’t actually hook her foot into his because that would make her fall, too, but the kick was enough to make him stumble and windmill his arms in an effort to regain his balance. He failed and tumbled to the side, skidding face-first in the dirt.

Baxter must have had eyes in the back of his shaven head, because without turning around he barked, “Get up and run!”

Donnelly scrambled to his feet and lurched after them, now about five yards behind without much hope of catching up unless he had an untapped reservoir of strength, which she didn’t think he did. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder; he was red in the face, his mouth open.

What the hell! Why had he jammed her? She’d never done anything to him, never had a cross word with him. Yeah, she’d beat him in the video games, but she’d beaten everyone, not just him. Guess he’d taken it personally.

Tough, she thought fiercely. It was a freaking game. She’d have never played the damn thing if she’d known it would lead to this. She’d much rather be sitting in an air-conditioned building instead of running in the heat, with sand scrubbing the skin off her feet and dust getting in her mouth and coating her lungs until she wanted to just spit—except her mouth was too dry and too full of dust. Her legs hurt. She thought she might throw up.

Some guy she didn’t know peeled off and bent over with his hands braced on his knees while he lost breakfast. She sucked in air and willed herself not to do the same. She would not, she would not, she would not—

Just as she reached the point of being sure she was going to throw up, Baxter held up a fist. “Water break,” he called,

Oh, God. She lurched to a stop and forced herself to stay upright as she desperately sucked in oxygen. Everyone around her was making the same harsh, gasping sounds. She wanted to bend over, but she was afraid she would collapse if she let her spine bend at all. Not only that, if she bent over, her stomach might take that as a sign to go ahead with its impending spasm. Instead she looked at the sky and concentrated on her wobbly knees, ordering them to not dump her on her butt in the dirt.

“Don’t just stand there, you morons,” Baxter barked. “Grab some bottles! Hydrate!”

Water. There was water. There was a big cooler sitting on a rough bench, lid open, revealing beautiful glistening ice and bottles of water nestled within. She stumbled over to the cooler, shoving her arm past the bigger bodies of her run buddies, and snagged a bottle. Every muscle in her body was trembling; she fumbled as she tried to twist the cap off, dropped the bottle, and watched it roll under their feet. Shit! Rather than chasing it down she went for another bottle, because she still wasn’t certain she could bend over without barfing. Her clumsy fingers grabbed some ice along with the bottle and that struck her as a good thing; quickly she slapped the shards of ice on the back of her neck and sighed at the immediate relief. Maybe she wouldn’t puke. Maybe she wouldn’t pass out.

“Pitiful,” Baxter said in disgust. Jina wondered if she should take offense, then realized he was talking to all of them. That was okay. She didn’t mind being pitiful in a group of pitiful. “A herd of fucking turtles would be faster. Half of you are on the edge of passing out, and we’ve done a measly two miles. The other half of you aren’t much better. Damn, son, are you puking?”

Huh. That couldn’t be right. If the turtles were fucking, they wouldn’t be covering any ground at all. She thought about pointing that out, but elected to keep her smart mouth shut in favor of guzzling water. Discretion was the better part of valor.

Wait. They’d run two miles? Only two miles? That was wrong on two counts. First, yay, because she’d run two miles! There was no “only” to it. But they’d been running for hours, it seemed, so shouldn’t that have been something like twenty miles? Her lungs and heart thought it was twenty miles. Baxter’s odometer was clearly wrong.

She wiped the sweat off her face and guzzled more water. When she lowered the bottle, her attention was caught by something . . . kind of threatening.

She squinted. Seven men were strolling toward the group, abreast like they were walking toward the showdown at the OK Corral. One and all, they were scary. And big. Big and scary. They were as dusty and streaked with sweat as everyone else, bare arms roped with muscles, not a smile anywhere in sight. The way they moved was fluid with power. Various weapons hung off their bodies, which was scary in itself, because this was a training ground, right? Those looked like real knives and guns and stuff.

Not guns, she reminded herself—weapons. They never said guns. She knew that much.

They were focused on the group of FNGs like lions on a herd of gnu, or whatever lions hunted. FNGs, evidently.

Jina could almost feel her skin twitching in alarm. She stared at the wall of man-flesh advancing toward them, uneasily wondering what was going on, if there was going to be some kind of God-awful hazing of the newcomers. “Hey, y’all,” she said in warning, looking around at the others to give them a heads-up—only to find there were no others, that somehow Baxter had led them away without her having noticed, mainly because she’d been riveted by the man-wall.

Damn it! She took a hasty step after the group and that was as far as she got in all the time she had, because it was there, the man-wall, and it surrounded her. Seven men stared down at her, and there wasn’t a smile in sight.

She felt as if the sun had been blotted out. She was a normal-sized woman, not a tiny one, but she suddenly felt insignificant and she didn’t like it one bit.

Her heartbeat stuttered in alarm. Her head told her they wouldn’t hurt her; too many repercussions. Her primitive instincts said she was at the mercy of a group of predators, and anything could happen. “Anything” had been happening to women since forever, since before caves and loincloths. Smart women never let down their guards.

She wanted a weapon, any weapon. Lacking that, she straightened her shoulders, narrowed her eyes, and glared belligerently around, waiting for them to speak. So far all they’d done was smother her with their closeness, choke her with the thick miasma of sweat and testosterone.

There were seven of them, one of her. She was already exhausted by Baxter’s wretched running. Even if she could break free, any one of them could chase her down . . . if she ran.

She wasn’t running. No way would they make her run.

The biggest one spoke, in a dark, rough voice that sounded as if he gargled with rocks.

“We hear you’re our girl.”