She took a breath, closed her eyes.
Mongol . . . Faber . . . Staedtler . . . Ticonderoga . . . Swan. Nola flipped through the mental list the psychiatrists gave her for when her rage was too much. Mongol . . . Faber . . . Staedtler . . .
She tried picturing Lieutenant Colonel Mint, then the so-called funeral employee with the flat nose who she put down in the hallway. But all she kept seeing was Zig.
Such a pain in the ass. She didn’t like Zig, didn’t like the way he always looked at her with pity in his eyes, like she was someone he was there to rescue. It made her feel like she was twelve again . . . and if Nola wanted one thing in life, it was to never feel twelve again.
The question remained, though: What the hell was he doing here? She sketched his face, the deep worry lines and wide eyes. He looked confused, almost as surprised as she was.
Even when Nola was little, when she was drawing, she saw things—things she didn’t even realize were there. When her pencil hit the page, the full image appeared. Her art teacher, Ms. Sable, called it a gift. Army psychologists saw it as a different sort of asset, selecting her to be the Army’s Artist-in-Residence.
Since World War I, the Army had kept an artist—an actual painter—on staff, to document everything from the beaches of Normandy to Vietnam to 9/11. With Nola’s ability to spot things as she painted—like an elderly Iraqi man who was strolling through a village—she could find what everyone else overlooked, like the phone the old Iraqi was carrying. On that day, Nola looked up mid-brushstroke. The village had no cell service. Moving in close and putting a knife to the man’s throat, she confirmed that what he was really holding was a detonator.
According to her supervisors, Nola saved at least a dozen lives that afternoon. From there, the Army quickly realized that her observational skills were something they could use to track and kill those who did harm in this world, which was fine by Nola, since, my God, did she excel at that.
Now sketching the edges of Zig’s shoulders, Nola added two straps: a backpack for his mortician tools. Was that why he came? To work on Mint’s body? That made some sense—still, for it to be Zig of all people. No way was that coincidence.
In her pocket were the ID and wallet that she’d swiped from the flat-nosed “funeral employee” she hit with the electroglove. Sergeant First Class Malcolm Green, at least according to his CAC, the ID card carried by all active military. Twenty-nine years old, from South Carolina. Like a careful soldier, he didn’t keep any mention of his unit or who he worked for in his wallet, though as Nola flipped through his photos, she found a family pic from a recent holiday ball.
Around his blond wife’s neck was the same type of gold charm so many spouses get from Rhudy’s Jewelry in North Carolina. The charm had a hand grabbing two lightning bolts. In gold sparkly letters were the words Semper Vigiles, Latin for Vigilant Always.
“Fuck,” Nola whispered, suddenly feeling like there were ants under her skin, crawling from the back of her neck and fanning out down her arms. That unit . . . she knew that unit. Of course it was them, her past back to haunt her. Vigilant Always.
She started to sweat, scribbling harder now, searching to see who else they might’ve hidden in the crowd. Shifting the sketch pad, she took another look at her drawings of the pastor, then Mint’s wife and kids . . . the crying boy with the thin neck and the daughter with the scabbed knees—Huck and Violet—there was something in their faces . . .
Nola leaned closer, recognizing that cocktail of loss and anger in both their eyes. They’d never be the same. But in the daughter’s eyes, there was something else, too. Defiance? Disobedience? Nola didn’t have the word for it yet, but she’d seen it before in her own life. Loss was always the best tutor.
In the distance, dozens of car doors slammed all at once, a chorus of mourners headed to the cemetery. Nola turned at the sound; her pencil broke on the page. Mint’s kids didn’t deserve this. Pulling a new pencil from her bag, Nola added a few extra lines to the flag on Mint’s coffin, replaying that day all those years ago when she first encountered that unit back at Warehouse 3, or as the military code-named it, Grandma’s Pantry.