Chapter 12 - The Colonel's Missing Year
The night after the hearing, Evelyn woke in Mara's apartment with the taste of dust in her mouth. She had dreamed of Kestrel, though the dream contained a door she could not open and a child calling her by another name.
At five, she found Naomi in the kitchen making tea.
“You should be asleep,” Naomi said.
“You should be in jail.”
“For which decision?”
“Choose one.”
Naomi poured hot water into two cups. “There is a year missing from your service record.”
“I know.”
“Do you know why?”
“I was told it was an administrative correction.”
“It was not.”
Evelyn sat. Her knee throbbed in the damp morning. “What happened after Daniel died?”
“You were removed from Kestrel.”
“I remember that.”
“Then you disappeared.”
“I was assigned to a logistics review.”
“There is no record of it.”
“Naomi.”
“You spent eleven months in a psychiatric treatment facility under a name that was not yours.”
Evelyn's cup rattled against its saucer.
“That is impossible.”
“I visited you twice.”
“I would remember.”
“You did not know me.”
The kitchen shifted around her: pale cabinets, yellow light, rain on the window. “Who put me there?”
“Sloan and a medical officer named Victor Sayeed.”
“Nadiya's father?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They said you were suffering from combat trauma and had become a risk to yourself and others.”
Evelyn's memory opened in fragments. A room with no windows. A woman's hand adjusting a blanket. A voice asking her to repeat the names of the missing. A plastic cup filled with pills she had refused to swallow.
“I was not ill,” she said.
“You were injured. That is not the same thing.”
“Why did you let them do it?”
Naomi closed her eyes. “Because I believed I could get you out.”
“You failed.”
“Yes.”
Mara stood in the doorway. “I heard.”
Evelyn rose too quickly and had to grip the table.
“You were eight,” she said. “When I returned, you had been sent to your father.”
“My father told me you had chosen the Army over us.”
“Your father was angry.”
“You never corrected him.”
“I was under surveillance.”
“For eleven months?”
“For years.”
Mara's voice broke. “You could have written.”
“I wrote.”
“I never received anything.”
Naomi reached into a cabinet and removed a blue folder. “Because every letter was intercepted.”
Inside were envelopes addressed to Mara at three different homes. Each carried Evelyn's handwriting and a red stamp: RETURNED—UNAUTHORIZED CONTACT.
Mara touched one envelope but did not open it.
“Why did you not show me these before?”
“Because showing them would have meant admitting how powerless we were.”
“You were a colonel.”
“Rank is not power when the people above you control the paper.”
Evelyn remembered the treatment facility now. The locked courtyard. The smell of boiled vegetables. A doctor who called her “Subject Hart.” She remembered an evening when Victor Sayeed sat beside her bed and said, “Your daughter's safety depends on your cooperation.”
“Victor threatened Mara,” she said.
Naomi nodded. “Sloan threatened Nadiya. Victor believed the only way to save his daughter was to cooperate.”
“Did he know where she was?”
“He knew she was alive.”
“Then why did he let her family disappear?”
“Because Asterion held the records. He thought cooperation would buy her time.”
Theo entered carrying four paper cups. “No one is going to like this, but Pike found something.”
He handed Mara a tablet. On the screen was a scanned military order dated 2002. It transferred Evelyn to a rehabilitation program in Virginia. The signature at the bottom was hers.
“That is not my signature,” Evelyn said.
“It is close,” Theo replied.
“Close is not mine.”
The document included a handwritten note: SUBJECT WILL REMAIN SILENT REGARDING CHILD RETENTION EVENT.
Mara stared at the words. “They used the phrase as if you kidnapped me.”
“They used it because I took Nadiya from the airfield.”
“You did not tell me that.”
“I carried her away from men who wanted her. I had no authorization.”
“So you did break the rules.”
“Yes.”
Mara looked at her mother for a long time. “And you would do it again?”
Evelyn thought of Nadiya's bruised forehead, Daniel's notebook, and the blue glass hidden in a child's hand.
“Before I knew what it would cost,” she said, “yes.”
“And now?”
“Now I would choose a way that did not leave you alone with the cost.”
Mara wiped her face. “That is the first answer you have given me that sounds like an apology.”
Outside, an engine idled at the curb.
Naomi looked through the blinds. “Sloan.”
May you like
Evelyn folded the forged order and put it in her pocket.
“Then he has finally decided to speak.”
