And standing over me…
His dress uniform unbuttoned at the neck, his silver eagles gleaming beneath the halogen downlights, his large hand holding an unsealed, four-hundred-page titanium-sleeved **Admiralty Sovereign Litigation Brief** bound with dark-crimson silk ribbon…
Was Colonel Aaron Carter.
My father’s former executive officer.
The man who had stood beside Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Bennett in nineteen-eighty-four when the subterranean command conduits of the Great Plains were surveyed and sealed beneath the Omaha limestone.
“Breathe, Clara,” Carter whispered into my ear, his rough, calloused fingers holding my temple still against the pneumatic headrest:
“The patch is neutralized.”
“The naloxone is clearing the receptors.”
“Your daughter, Lily… is safe inside the base nursery at Offutt.”
“And the family who tried to put you in a psychiatric asylum… has just run out of runway.”
I tried to speak.
My tongue was thick, coated with the chemical bitterness of the sufentanil, but the words tore through my split lower lip with clean, sub-zero clarity:
