You look up, and about twenty feet above the mat, there’s a viewing deck. Metal railing, a row of clipboards lined up, evaluation sheets waiting for ink. But it’s empty. It’s 10:30 in the morning, and the deck is deserted. Through a window in the admin building, though, you can see a scheduling board. Big red letters mark an entry for 1400 hours—that’s 2:00 PM—VIP INSPECTION. Four colonels are coming, brass from on high, to look over the facility. Lang knows this. In fact, he’s planned his whole morning around it. Whatever he’s got in mind, it has to be done, cleaned up, and forgotten long before anyone with enough stripes on their sleeve to stop him shows up to watch.

And at the dead center of that big, gray mat, standing all alone, is the reason for all this theater. Captain Emma Hayes. She’s thirty-eight years old, five-foot-seven of lean, coiled muscle wrapped in a standard-issue training uniform. The insignia on her collar says she’s an officer, but her uniform is bare. No unit patches, no qualification badges, none of the little pieces of flair that tell the story of where a warrior has been and what they’ve earned. Her dark hair is pulled back in a bun so tight and perfect it looks like it was machined from steel. Not a single loose strand. No distractions. No excuses.

She doesn’t look at Lang when he speaks. Her eyes are fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance, that thousand-yard stare you see on people who’ve been to places training scenarios can’t even begin to imagine.

Lang takes three slow, deliberate steps onto the mat. The sound of his combat boots is sharp and loud against the rubberized surface, a surface designed to absorb the impact of a falling human body.