The Detachment

case. It was just how people talked. And he’d learned to suppress the reflex. So why had he slipped the night before? He thought Rain had spotted it, but he couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t show much.
    But what if he had? First Treven, then Hort, now Rain and Dox…the number of people who knew, knew what he was, was growing. It was getting out of control, and if he didn’t shut it down now, he would lose the ability outright.
    He understood on some level that it shouldn’t matter. Attitudes were changing, even DADT was dead…but the thought of people knowing, of looking at him differently, treating him differently…he hated it. It would be like revealing a terrible, exploitable weakness.
    And that wasn’t all, either. There were also the people who knew he was alive and relevant, rather than presumed dead and therefore forgotten. That number was growing, too. It was possible Hort would have told others besides Treven, Dox, and Rain, and if he had, then the genie was already out of the bottle. But Larison guessed Hort hadn’t. Hort liked to keep his cards close to the vest. And if he had told others, so what? Then the damage was done. Regardless, the thing to do now was to shut it all down while shutting it down was still as least theoretically possible.
    He looked out the window at the passing urban landscape, and felt more trapped than he ever had in his life. What the hell was wrong with him? His mind was telling him one thing. His gut wouldn’t go along for the ride.
    He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be outed. But he so wanted to be able to sleep again, to lie down on a bed without dreading what he would see when he closed his eyes and he was left alone and defenseless with his dreams.
    He was afraid of being weak. And he was afraid that failing to do the tactically sound thing here was the weakest move of all.
    The trick would be to not think about it. Get back to the motel, get the Glock, wait for the moment, see the opportunity, act to exploit it. Yes, like that. No thinking. Just pattern recognition, and reflex, and done.
    And not just Treven, Rain, and Dox. Kei, too. No one left who knew anything about him, or who could tie him to anything, or had any way to track him.
    Except Hort, of course. But Larison would clip that loose end in short order, too. And then he’d be done. Free of all these entanglements. Free.
    He didn’t have to like it. He just had to do it.

T reven and Dox waited at the motel with Kei. Kei was sitting on one bed; Dox, on the other; Treven, increasingly antsy because Rain and Larison had been gone so long, pacing in what little space the room afforded.
    Treven hated waiting. When he was alone, he could wait patiently for days, even for weeks. But this was different. The whole operation was shot through with problems. Larison was acting increasingly unstable. There had been several near blow-ups among them, any one of which, had it gone critical, would have been fatal. And then there was Hort, suddenly scrambling all the pieces on the board with his stunt at the White House.
    He hoped he’d done the right thing in letting the man live. He told himself it was logical, but part of him wasn’t buying that, part of him knew it was emotional. Treven looked at Larison and Rain and Dox and didn’t want to be like them. He needed some line he wouldn’t cross, some sense of command authority and unit loyalty. Something that would represent the difference between a soldier with a conscience and a killer under contract. Wherever that thin line was, he knew he was dancing right along the edge of it now. Killing his commander would push him over forever.
    But his decision gnawed at him anyway. Hort was dangerous. He might have been tracking them right at that very moment through means none of them fully appreciated. Sure, the others assumed Hort had found them in Washington via satellites and surveillance cameras and all the rest because they didn’t know Treven had simply tipped the man off, but that didn’t mean the satellites and surveillance cameras didn’t exist. And sure, Hort had made his big speech and stepped down, and so presumably had lost his official access. But he still had friends in high places, and low ones, too. It was Hort himself who had schooled Treven in Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength. Hort had certainly acted weak in the car last night, and the more Treven thought about it, the more