By Paths Coincident

Chapter 8

11 Years Ago

Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa , Algeciras, Spain

Her parents looked devastated. Which was odd, because they were smiling and so happy that she was awake.

Eve wanted to apologize for making them sad, for making them worry—again.

She was sorry for the new strands of grey in her mom's hair, for the puffiness around her eyes that meant she had been crying a lot and often.

She was sorry for the tremor in her dad's hands, for the way his eyes were seeing terrible memories as he looked at her. He had never discouraged her from being a soldier, but he had always known too well how precarious was the life into which she had followed him.

"I'm sorry," she would write if she could. The paper and pen were on the table, beyond her reach.

I love you, she tried to say with her eyes.

* * * * *

Her father was the one who told her what she had already suspected from the fragments of her returning memory and the nightmares—that her team, all her friends, were dead.

She appreciated that he made it a formal occasion, wearing his uniform, and delivering to her the handful of broken identification tags, one at a time, each as unique as the person who had worn it—issued by the country in whose armed forces he or she had originally served before transferring to NATO.

With fingers trembling from more than weakness, Eve traced the DEU on the half oval that had belonged to Lieutenant Brader, her stern and utterly reliable second in command. The other half had remained with his body. The two of them had dragged each other in and out of hot spots and warzones across half the planet, but she hadn't been able to pull him out of this one. She wondered where he had been taken, where they all were. She had not even been able to say good-bye.

Cradling the small bits of metal in her mostly immobilized right hand, she reached with her left for each dog tag her father handed her: Poptart's I disc, the rounded rectangle broken from its twin, inscribed with CDN FORCES CDN—it would have to be returned to Canada's National Defence Headquarters; Fortinsky's nieśmiertelnik wz.—he'd told her that meant "immortalizer mark"; the identical, circular, non-reflecting stainless steel tags, engraved "Big 6" that had belonged to the Terrible Twosome. Each tag dropped into her hand with the weight of a millstone on her heart. Derya, Joscin, Teresinha, and Torbjørn—these scraps of metal were the last touches she would have of them all. Her fingers folded over the so very tiny handful, clenching until the broken edges scored her palm.

Eve could not weep for them. All her tears caught in her ruined throat and knotted in pain but refused to be shed. She wanted so desperately to talk about them, to tell her father who they had been, how brilliant, how close. She wanted someone to share her feelings of loss.

Instead, her father sat with her in the silence imposed by her injury, letting her grip his hand.

She wondered about their families, the ones they loved. Derya's huge clan of brothers and sisters and cousins. Fortinsky's boyfriend. Oh God, Poptart's wife and little boy. Who had told them?

It should have been her, and she felt guilty that she was relieved that she had not been able to.

That night, they had to sedate her as she fought her nightmares.

* * * * *

Eve endured the interminable days with increasing impatience interspersed with extreme lassitude. She could communicate only the most basic of needs with her shaky, left-handed writing and her persistent fatigue. Anything beyond, and her head would ache even more than it already did, and her vision would blur.