She was treated in a military hospital in Germany. Jina lay quietly in bed, mostly staring at the ceiling and not interested enough to even look out the window. A massive exhaustion weighed down on her, killing her desire to do anything other than breathe.

Maybe she should call her mom. Vaguely she felt as if she needed to, just to connect with someone or something again, but not only would she have to figure out how to make an international call, she’d have to talk. She didn’t want to talk, not to anyone. There was an invisible wall around her and she felt safe inside it, safe and empty and alone. Too many words would dissolve the wall, leaving her vulnerable again.

Maybe she’d call later, when she could stand words again and isolation didn’t feel so necessary.

A brief hard tap on the door caught her attention, followed immediately by Levi pushing the door open and entering, as if it wouldn’t occur to him to wait until she said, “Come in.” Maybe he knew she wouldn’t say it. More likely, he simply didn’t care.

He looked better than he had on the flight; he’d showered, shaved, had on clean clothes, and had gotten some sleep. The expression in his eyes was still not civilized. Something angry and violent lurked just below the surface, bubbling against his iron control.

She wanted to be left alone. Why was he here? She didn’t want him here.

There was a chair for visitors, but, being Levi, he didn’t take it. He hitched his ass on the side of her bed, half sitting, and bridged her body with one muscular arm braced on the other side of her hip. Now Jina moved her gaze to the window. Funny—somehow she’d expected to see the stark, desolate landscape of sunbaked Syria, and instead she saw a gray sky and a drizzle of rain on the glass. Germany; she was in Germany. Her body was here, but her mind hadn’t caught up.

“They’re both out of surgery,” he said after a long moment of waiting for her to look at him. She could feel him willing her to obey his will, as if he could use some Jedi mind trick on her eyeballs.

Crutch. Voodoo. For them, she slowly turned her head, looked at him. “Will they make it?” Her voice was thin and scratchy, her throat still dry feeling despite all the fluids that had been pumped into her.

“Touch and go.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “They’re both in ICU. Voodoo has a better shot than Crutch, but he took a lot of damage to his leg.”

She nodded, and once more looked out the window. Who knew devastation felt so empty? She’d always thought it was great pain, but instead it was . . . nothing, all emotion gone. She felt as empty as the desert, bleak and scorched.

“We’re flying out in a couple of hours,” he said. “We have to get back ASAP. You’ll be released tomorrow, and I’ve arranged a flight home for you. Everything is taken care of.”

She nodded again. So they were leaving her behind again. Different circumstances, and illogical on her part to think that, but there it was. They were leaving, and she wasn’t. She could have traveled with them, with some help.

All in all, she thought, she was in fairly good shape after going through the ordeal she’d faced. Her feet would heal. She didn’t have any broken bones, and a wonderful nurse had washed her hair for her. She hadn’t had a shower yet, because of her feet, but she’d washed off several times and had finally felt clean.

She’d been treated for severe dehydration and she felt much better. Her feet were bandaged and walking wasn’t fun, but she could manage to hobble around, get to the toilet by herself. At least the catheter was out, now that they no longer needed to measure her urine output to make certain her kidneys hadn’t shut down.

She could have handled the flight, gone with them, even if they were hitching a ride on another cargo plane. Instead he’d opted to leave her to fly by herself, twenty-four hours later.

Been there, done that, forget the damn T-shirt because she didn’t want it.

He took her hand, the one that didn’t have the IV needle in it, rubbed his thumb across the backs of her fingers. “I’d take you with us if I could,” he said.

Sure.

“That’s okay.” She pulled her hand free and looked down at the sheet. Why was he touching her? He shouldn’t be touching her, there was no point. He needed to leave, go do whatever he was supposed to be doing. She was positive holding her hand wasn’t on that list. “Can I see Crutch and Voodoo?”

He paused. “I’ll see if they’ll let someone wheel you in.”

“That’s okay,” she said again. “I’ll ask a nurse.” Don’t do me any favors, Levi.

He checked the time, then stood. “I’ll see you when you get back.” He stood beside the bed looking down at her; she could feel that Jedi thing again, compelling her to look at him, but she set her jaw and kept her gaze on the sheet. She’d already seen enough of him, so damn big and tough and battle-weary, that intense dark gaze on her, his presence almost like a punch in the stomach.

She wanted him to go. He was the one she most didn’t want to see. None of the other guys had come back for her, either, but Levi was the one who had kissed her and held her, and he was the one who had made the decision to leave her behind. When she thought of the others, she was okay; when faced with Levi, everything in her wanted to shut down.

Because he was Levi and his will was a force of nature, he cupped her chin in one big, rough hand and turned her face toward him. She stubbornly kept her gaze down, though it felt stupid, but neither did she feel cooperative. His thumb rubbed over her mouth and he made an impatient sound, then bent down and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her mouth, staying just long enough to give her a touch of his tongue. “We’ll talk,” he said—was that a promise, or a threat?—and strolled out, his broad shoulders barely fitting through the door.

Maybe, maybe not. Three days ago—a lifetime ago—that touch, that kiss, would have had her heart pounding and her thoughts racing around like a crazed squirrel.

He’d left her behind. He’d kissed her and put his tongue in her mouth, then he’d left her anyway.

And she was so tired. She didn’t want to think about anything, deal with anything, not even that something about Levi had changed and she didn’t have the energy to figure out what it was. Maybe when she got home she’d feel more like herself.

The next time a nurse came in, Jina asked about going to critical care to check on her pals. “I don’t see why not,” she said, then looked at Jina’s bandaged feet. “I don’t think you want to walk that far on those puppies, though, so I’ll see what I can do about a wheelchair just before the next visitation period.”

But then she forgot, and Jina had to ask someone else. Finally she got that wheelchair, though, and an orderly took her to the ICU. Voodoo’s cubicle was first. He opened his eyes when she wheeled inside, and she almost collapsed with relief. He was pale, he had tubes running into his chest, an oxygen cannula in his nose, an IV stand strung with multiple plastic bags, and his left leg was immobilized.

Still, he said, “Hey.” He sounded heavily drugged, which he was, barely out of sedation.

“Hey, yourself.” So far this was a very profound conversation.

His bleary gaze went to the wheelchair. “What’s up . . . with that?”

“Oh. I hurt my feet. Not bad. I’m going home tomorrow.”

“Damn boots.”

“Yeah, the damn boots. They won’t cause any more trouble, though; they’re gone.” That was positively chatty of her, the most she’d said at one time in . . . had it really only been a day? A little more than a day? She felt as if weeks had passed.

He lifted a hand, reached for her. She rolled closer and took it. “I was . . . mostly out,” he said with difficulty, “but I know . . . you were . . .” The words drifted off, then he rallied and finished, “Glad you’re all right.”

“I made it. Now you have to make it, too.” She laid his hand back on the bed.

“Planning on it.” A barely there smile touched his mouth. He lifted his hand again, made a fist. She smiled, too, as she fist-bumped him.

“See you back home, buddy.”

She rolled herself down the corridor to where Crutch was. He was asleep, or unconscious. Jina watched him for a minute. He was breathing regularly, but his temp was a hundred and three and his blood pressure was up. Crutch had gone long hours before he was treated with anything but the most basic care. He was strong, but it was still touch-and-go.

Looking at him, looking at Voodoo, she didn’t know if either of them would ever be able to rejoin the team.

Life changed on a dime. Even people who lived ordinary lives were at the whim of chance: an auto accident, a fall, a walk in the wrong place at the wrong time, and nothing was ever the same again. For them, the members of the GO-Teams, fate was tempted every time they answered the phone.

Donnelly was dead. Voodoo and Crutch had come close. She herself had come through the disastrous mission without any lasting harm, but the balance could so easily have tipped the other way and she could have died in the Syrian desert. She’d been terrified during parachute training, at the time more than half convinced she wouldn’t survive, but that had been a walk in the park compared to the desert. Another mile—even another half mile—and she wouldn’t have made it. Five more minutes, and she wouldn’t have made it. The helicopter would have lifted off and she wouldn’t have been on it.

The orderly stopped chatting with the ICU nurses and took her back to her room. Once more lying in bed, her feet aching, she looked out the window and thought about the mission. A spark of interest lit, and she seized on it with relief, glad to feel something other than sad emptiness. When she got home and talked to the others, she’d find out what they thought had happened, but she’d gone over it herself and it was obvious Yasser and Mamoon had been hostile. When Mamoon had seen the computer screen and realized she would be able to alert the team to the ambush, he’d gone outside and consulted with others who had been well hidden, perhaps in the very wadi she’d used for escape, but somewhere Tweety hadn’t been able to see even in infrared. Perhaps they’d been able to contact the ambush team. Or they hadn’t been able to contact them, and their solution had been to set off the explosion that burned the truck and hopefully killed her, as a way to warn them something had gone wrong. Maybe they’d thought the team would immediately turn back, leaving them vulnerable to attack from the rear.

She didn’t know why the attack had been planned as it was, if there had truly been an informant or if he had already been dead. There was a possibility they’d never know exactly what had happened, or why, but the GO-Teams had analysts who would go through every bit of information and advance the most likely theory.

In the end, she didn’t have to know why. She had information from her part of the mission, what had happened and how, but she didn’t know why, and in a way she was done with it. It was as if there was a line of demarcation in her mind, and what had happened in the before didn’t matter in the after.

The next day, she was put on a hospital flight home. Her feet were completely wrapped in what she considered a surplus of gauze, the bandages extending halfway up her shins. She wore the shapeless paper booties surgeons wore and was taken on board the plane by wheelchair. Her feet were better, still very sore and achy and no way would she have wanted to put on a pair of shoes, but she thought the wheelchair was a little bit of overkill, kind of like the bandages. She could have walked on board, though slowly.

It was a long flight. Pretty much they all were, because the GO-Teams didn’t operate domestically. She slept some, read some, and still felt like crap when the plane landed at Andrews. She was rolled off the plane, then kind of abandoned while the more seriously sick or injured were unloaded.

She’d been officially released, so really she’d hitched a ride on the med flight and wasn’t one of the patients. She was pondering the logistics of getting home—she had no cash for a taxi, her car was elsewhere, and she wasn’t exactly in good-enough shape to drive anyway while she was still on pain meds for another couple of days. She’d have to borrow a phone and call . . . someone, though she didn’t know who—

“Babe!”

She turned toward the call and saw Terisa coming toward her, a visitor’s tag clipped to her blouse. A few seconds later she was enveloped in a warm hug, and for the first time since being rescued she felt tears sting her eyes. Fiercely she returned the hug. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said into Terisa’s shoulder and blinked back tears.

“It’s my off day, so I volunteered to meet your plane,” Terisa said. “The guys are all tied up at headquarters. The shit hit the fan over what happened, though Marcus has been his usual lock-jawed self and I don’t know any of the operational details, just that Voodoo and Crutch were hit bad, and your feet are hurt and you can’t walk. Your car has been collected and taken home, I’ve gone shopping and stocked your fridge with food—girl, seriously, you had nothing to eat but crackers. Anyway, if you want to stay at home and rest for a few days, you can, or if you want to get out of the house, all you have to do is call. If I didn’t have to work tomorrow, I’d take you home with me, though I figure you’d rather have peace and quiet and a chance to get yourself back.”

“You don’t know how much I appreciate this.” Had Terisa somehow guessed how she felt? As a nurse she routinely saw people who had been through traumatic experiences, so maybe she knew getting back to normal took time. Had Boom told her that she’d saved herself by running for hours, on bleeding feet, through the desert?

She didn’t want to think about that. And she didn’t want to get back to normal, she preferred the disconnect.

Instead she focused on the mundane, because that was safer. She hadn’t gotten as far as thinking about the food situation at home—usually lousy, these days—or how she would function until she was cleared to drive, which would be when she no longer needed pain medication. She could always order in pizza, she supposed, but the driving would have to wait. “Have you heard how Voodoo and Crutch are doing? I saw them yesterday, talked to Voodoo some, but Crutch wasn’t awake.”

“Voodoo has been upgraded from critical to serious, and if he keeps improving, he’ll be moved to a regular room tomorrow. Crutch is still critical, his fever is still up, but his vitals are stabilizing.” Terisa’s tone was the businesslike one of an experienced nurse. She shook her head, her gaze worried. “He has a long way to go before he’s out of the woods. Whether or not either of them will be able to work again . . .” She gave a brief tilt of her head, indicating that was unlikely.

Unspoken was the reality that the team was on stand-down for the foreseeable future, at least for the missions that required full strength, because a third of the team was injured and unable. Jina thought of the team without those two, and it didn’t feel right. A team was a whole, and family of sorts; losing them would leave a huge gap.

Losing her . . . wouldn’t leave as large a gap. She had been an add-on. She’d thought she’d become completely accepted as a teammate, but she’d been wrong.

Terisa took Jina home, fixed a sandwich for her, and made her eat. When she was satisfied that the basic needs had been met, she left and Jina tumbled into bed. She didn’t care about resetting her internal clock, because she didn’t have to hit the training field tomorrow. She could sleep if she wanted to, and she did.

She slept for hours, woke up hungry, and hobbled her way to the kitchen to eat a cinnamon roll. Thank God Terisa had included some junk food, because even nuking some instant oatmeal was beyond her. She went back to bed then woke up in the early hours, made some coffee, took a basin bath, and put on regular clothes. It was good to wear something other than the hospital scrubs she’d been given in Germany.

At seven o’clock, her phone rang. She reached for it, recognized Levi’s number, and jerked her hand back. But he was still her team leader, and now that she was home there was likely debriefing to be done, debriefing that wouldn’t wait for a little thing like not being able to drive. Reluctantly she answered.

“Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?” He didn’t even say hello, but she gave a mental shrug; it wasn’t as if she didn’t know who was calling.

“Yes.” She didn’t tell him she was already dressed.

“Mac is sending a car. There’ll be a wheelchair.”

She disconnected, and wondered if seven a.m. was too early to start drinking. She didn’t feel like doing this and hated like poison to be rolled through headquarters as if she was an invalid—though technically she was an invalid. Okay, literally she was; that didn’t mean she liked it.

She also didn’t like wearing the paper booties, which were getting ragged anyway, so she tried to put on her only pair of bedroom slippers. Forget that; besides, Caleigh had bought them for her a couple of Christmases ago, and they had moose heads bobbing on the toes. Better she wear paper booties than moose heads.

Ten minutes after Levi’s call, she gingerly made her way downstairs. She couldn’t flex her toes because of the bandaging, so she had to go down sideways, like a toddler, clinging to the banister for balance. The car Mac had sent pulled to the curb just as she went outside, and the driver, a burly guy in dress pants and a polo shirt, gave her a perturbed look. “I was coming up to get you,” he said.

“How? Wheelchairs don’t work on stairs,” she pointed out.

“My orders were to carry you.”

Carry her? She must have looked as appalled as she felt, because he mumbled something about not knowing she could walk yet. She hobbled around the car and got in the passenger seat and hoped he wasn’t chatty.

He wasn’t, though she could feel him giving her occasional glances as if he was trying to size her up. When they reached headquarters, he jumped out and got the wheelchair from the trunk, unfolded it, held it steady while she transferred from the car to the seat. She already felt tired; despite her dislike of the chair, she was happy not to be walking the distance required.

He pushed her along the sidewalk, up the handicap ramp, into the building where the air-conditioning was already cranked up to maximum, as if trying to get a head start on the day’s heat. Headquarters interior was very humdrum, deliberately so. Anyone who entered the building by accident would see a drab lobby, a single receptionist who would kindly direct them away and who would be holding a pistol under her desk, pointing at them. The door leading back to the business part of the building was armored and accessed only by a facial recognition program and a key card.

Beyond that, the hallways seemed to have designed by a drunk troll, though she knew they were deliberately laid out for defense. Finding her way around, when she’d first been hired, had been a challenge. After a while she hadn’t noticed the mazelike layout and navigated the building without any problem. Now she saw things with different eyes and recognized the effectiveness of the design.

Every time they met someone in the hallway, whoever it was stepped to the side and stopped to stare at her. Jina began to feel uncomfortable. Was it the wheelchair? Then they met a woman she recognized from her days in Communications, though she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Whoever it was stopped and said, “Jina!” Grabbing both of Jina’s hands she said, “I admire you so much. When we heard what you did—running for hours like that . . . well, I couldn’t have done it. That was amazing.”

“Ah . . . thank you,” Jina finally managed. So that was it. Should she tell them she hadn’t done anything heroic or amazing, that she’d been operating on blind desperation and the will to survive? In the end she let it go, because doing otherwise would take too much effort and she didn’t care enough.

He wheeled her to one of the secure conference rooms. Mac was there, looking as impatient and ill-tempered as always. Levi was also there, and three others, two men and a woman, who she took to be intelligence analysts.

“I have her,” Levi said, taking control of the wheelchair from the driver he’d sent.

“Sure thing.”

Levi pushed the chair up to the conference table, then poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of her. She murmured a thanks and was sincere about it—the coffee, anyway.

No one introduced the three strangers, which didn’t matter to her. She’d likely never see them again, anyway. Mac paced around, scowling. “Okay, we know this mission was in the crapper from the get-go. Ace has been debriefed. What happened on your end?”

“The kid, Mamoon, came in and watched me while I was operating the drone. I picked up a thermal signature, zoomed in on it. I thought he was amazed, interested, but now I know he was alarmed because he knew I would see the men who were waiting to ambush the team. He left, and a few minutes later I heard a voice outside, probably at the truck we were supposed to use to exfil. Whoever it was, Mamoon was talking to him. They were trying to be quiet, probably thought I couldn’t hear them.”

“Did you understand what they were saying?”

“No. I don’t speak Arabic. Even if I did, the words weren’t distinct. I could hear just enough to know there was someone with Mamoon.”

“What happened next?”

“I flew the drone ahead of the team’s position, looking for the thermal signature of the informant. Instead I saw a group of signatures, I’m guessing about fifteen. I didn’t have time to count them. I immediately alerted the team to the ambush, then the truck exploded and I was knocked . . . not unconscious, but dazed. I could see two people picking their way through the ruin, toward me. I destroyed the laptop, per instructions, and managed to work my way outside through a hole in the wall.”

“Why didn’t you contact the team to let them know your location, that you were alive?”

Ah. There it was, the question she’d hoped they wouldn’t ask, because that was what she most didn’t want to discuss, or even remember. “My throat mic was damaged,” she said steadily. “I could hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t respond.”

She could feel Levi’s hooded gaze on her, fierce and intense. He hadn’t known that, hadn’t known that she could hear him. She couldn’t say that he’d made the wrong decision; looking at it unemotionally, she knew he’d made the correct one, the only one he could with the information he had. Unfortunately, though her head knew he was right, her heart couldn’t join in the applause.

Mac said, “You didn’t have your comm headset with you when you reached the secondary exfil point.” It was an accusation, as if he thought she might be lying.

She hadn’t known that, hadn’t thought about it. “I fell a lot, running in the dark. It must have been torn off. Deduct it from my pay.” The last was said with a coldness she hadn’t known she could muster.

Levi must have thought Mac was capable of doing just that, because he said sharply, “It was damaged anyway. Forget about the inventory.”

Mac gave them both an intensely annoyed look, but he didn’t argue.

The debriefing continued. How odd that so much could be compressed into so few words. If anything, telling them about it made everything feel even more unreal, made her feel even more distant from events.

The analysts grilled her for over an hour, going over details, asking for her impressions, what she thought could have happened. Why did she think the truck had been exploded? Was it possible there had been more than one person outside with Mamoon? Why hadn’t they simply come in and shot her?

“My guess is the only way they could make enough noise to warn the others was to set off an explosion.”

And, “Possible, but I heard only the one other voice.”

And, “I’d taken my weapon out of my holster, had it lying beside the laptop. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t be an easy kill, and a shot inside the ruin might not have been loud enough to serve as a warning, so they opted for the warning explosion first, then came in to take care of me. I don’t know. Parts of it just seemed like poor planning.”

Mac interrupted at that point. “Part of it seems damned Machiavellian. A team was sent to the Syrian interior because of the informant’s supposed intel about Graeme Burger. That’s a hard place to get into, a hard place to get out of. It looks as if the purpose of the whole plan was to bait a team into a hostile environment and eliminate the entire team.”

“More likely the informant was captured, interrogated, and that was the best plan that could be put together on very little time,” the woman analyst said. “I agree with Ms. Modell. Parts of it are either poorly planned or poorly executed, or both.”

“Or there was no real informant to begin with.” Mac scowled. “The intel we could put together on him was thin. Everything about Graeme Burger is thin, a hint here and there. But then he pulled that disappearing act, and—” He stopped, rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, as if he’d been up all night. “From my perspective, it looks as if a deliberate attempt was made to eliminate an entire team, a team that had been focusing on Burger.” He said abruptly, “All right, that’s it. You’re through for now, Modell. You can go.”

She wasn’t cleared to hear any further intel that might be discussed, so she wasn’t surprised. She started to wheel herself away from the table, but Levi took control of the wheelchair and pushed her out of the room, down the hall.

I can do it. She thought it, but didn’t say it. If she could run the equivalent of a marathon at night, without water, and with bleeding feet, she could damn well handle a wheelchair. For the first time she felt a flicker of emotion, and it was anger.

She didn’t want the anger, didn’t want to feel anything. She pushed it away and sat silently as he wheeled her back to where her taciturn driver waited.

“Thanks, Terrell. Take care of her. I owe you.”

“No problem,” Terrell the driver said, though from the exchange Jina figured his job wasn’t driving.

Terrell drove her home, where she refused his somewhat awkward determination to carry her upstairs, and made it under her own steam. Carry her in? What the hell had Levi been smoking?

Late that afternoon, Ailani called. “Hi, you,” she said warmly. “Do you feel up to some company?”

“Sure,” Jina said, though she really didn’t. A pain pill—the last one she’d take, she had decided—had eased the pain in her feet and made her feel dull and drowsy.

“I’ve been cooking today, trying out new recipes. I’ll bring you a few meals to put in the freezer, just heat them when you get hungry instead of making do with a sandwich. See you in an hour!”

It wasn’t just Ailani who came, though; Snake was with her, though they were kidless. “We hired a babysitter for the hellions,” he explained. He was holding a cardboard box, which freed Ailani to give her a big hug. He hefted the box. “Food. I wanted some of it and Ailani said no, so I want you to think of me every time you eat.”

“I won’t,” she assured him. “You can find your own food.”

She slowly made her way to the kitchen and stowed the meals in the freezer compartment of her refrigerator. If her fridge had been mostly empty, the freezer was worse, containing only a half-eaten carton of ice cream and three Popsicles. Normally she had a frozen pizza or a microwave dinner in there, but Terisa had been right about her food situation being pitiful. “These look great,” she said, and meant it. She felt the stirring of appetite. “Have the two of you had dinner yet? We can order in a pizza or—”

“Already handled that,” Snake said. “The other guys are bringing food. If you don’t feel up to having all of us around, say so, because otherwise we’re taking over.”

What she felt was taken aback, and, no, she didn’t want a bunch of people around, but she didn’t say so. Sending them away after they brought food would require a level of rudeness she couldn’t muster. “As long as no one expects great conversation from me,” she said. “I took my last pain pill a little while ago, so I’m a tad fuzzy.”

“Your last one? I can get you some more,” Snake said, frowning at her.

“No, I have more, I meant that’s the last one I’m going to take. I can’t drive while I’m taking them.”

“You don’t have to drive. One of us can take you anywhere you need to go. If you’re in pain, take the damn pills.”

“Maybe at night, so I can sleep,” she said, though she had no intention of doing so.

One by one the guys showed up, all of them bringing something: doughnuts, a bakery pie, chips and dip. Boom and Terisa also arrived sans kids, so evidently they’d all agreed not to bring overtax her with little people running around, climbing on her, and maybe stepping on her feet. Levi was last to arrive, laden with four large pizzas. Jina hadn’t been particularly hungry, but the smell of the pizzas made her mouth water.

She could handle being around Levi more easily when there was a crowd. After all, she’d spent the last year trying to mostly ignore him, except on team matters. She hadn’t succeeded, but she’d tried. Ignoring meant not paying attention to him, and no matter what she was always acutely aware of his presence. That held true now; she could mostly keep her focus on the others, but he was like a big, bright thermal signature on Tweety’s infrared camera, front and center in her awareness.

“I checked for an update on the guys,” Levi said when they were all crammed into her small living room. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so Jelly and Snake had settled on the floor, with Snake leaning against Ailani’s legs. Somehow Levi had ended up sitting closest to Jina, though at least she was in a chair by herself instead of on the couch. Everyone’s attention turned to him. “Voodoo is better, they may get him up on his feet tomorrow. Crutch is still critical, but holding his own.” His mouth was a grim line. He knew, they all knew, that the likelihood of either of them being able to return was very slim, and that was if Crutch survived at all.

Jina was braced for a rehash of the mission, but perhaps because of Terisa’s and Ailani’s presence the men avoided the subject. Whatever the reason, she was glad for it. Other than for debriefing, she hadn’t deliberately thought about any of it. That didn’t mean she could avoid thinking about it, but she didn’t go out of her way to relive it. Once had been enough.

She was mostly quiet while everyone else talked, but gradually she realized that despite her initial reluctance, she was grateful they were there. The team had been a huge part of her life for the past year, almost completely taking her over, and abruptly being cut off from them had felt . . . wrong. She’d halfway expected them to carry on as if she’d never been assigned to them, out of sight out of mind, but instead they were making an effort to keep her included. After all, her wounds were relatively minor; they expected her to rejoin them after her feet healed.

The only problem was: she didn’t know if she could.