The officer leaned against the table.
“At the ceremony?”
“You paused before the fifth name.”
The officer looked away.
“I knew there were irregularities in the unit history. I did not know the full operation.”
“But you recognized me.”
“I recognized your face from an old personnel image that no longer links to an active record.”
Ethan closed his eyes.
That hurt more than he expected.
Proof that fragments of him survived everywhere, disconnected enough that no one was allowed to assemble them into a person.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I was standing in front of families at a memorial and had no authority to improvise classified history.”
Ethan opened his eyes.
“Fair.”
It was the first fair answer he had received that day.
The suited man returned forty minutes later with authorization for a limited read-in.
The families were kept outside. The room emptied except for Ethan, the commanding officer, the legal officer, and the man from the compartmented program.
The folder opened again.
The first pages were familiar enough to make Ethan’s stomach turn.
Maps.
Timelines.
Movement windows.
Then casualty notes.
Then an extraction summary he had never seen.
He read the first paragraph.
Stopped.
Read it again.
“No.”
The suited man said nothing.
Ethan’s finger followed a line across the page.
