Breathless. Sharron McClellan
smell was Charles Latham in a bed next to the window, being kept alive by tubes and a ventilator.
The room swayed, but she took a deep breath and shuffled over to her trainee’s bed.
Careful not to jostle any of his tubes, she stroked a palm over his cocoa-colored, shaved head. When he’d come to her for training, his dark, curly hair was just over an inch long and stylish for a Marine. He’d shaved it off. Keeping it simple, he’d said when teased about the transformation.
And now, he lay here. His face puffy. His skin ashen. His body limp.
A shadow of the man she knew.
“I am so sorry, Chuck,” she said.
“Chuck?” Taylor asked.
“He hates Charles,” she replied, unable to think of the boy in front of her as Latham. Under the circumstances, his last name sounded cold. Aloof. Impersonal. The boy in the bed was none of those things. Not to her.
He was a person. Her student. Her responsibility.
She put her hands in her lap and squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to believe that such an energetic, strong young man would not pull through. “You’re going to make it,” she whispered, praying that this room, and the comatose man in the bed, was nothing more than a continuation of her nightmare.
When she opened her eyes, Chuck still lay in bed. Dead except for the machines breathing life into him. “This is my fault,” she said.
“Things happen,” Taylor said from behind her.
“Not things,” she corrected, anger tinting her voice and wiping away any attempt at professionalism. “Sabotage.”
“What?” Taylor asked, surprise in his voice.
Jess shifted to face him. “When we were going to the ship, the DPV gave me trouble. I should have stopped. Aborted the mission. Instead I kept going.”
“Those things foul up. We both know that.”
“Yeah, but if I’d stopped…” She glanced at Latham then continued her story. “We set the limpet. The timer didn’t work. Wouldn’t abort. I looked closer, and the screws were stripped. When we tried to bug out, the DPV failed.”
She met Taylor’s widening eyes. “You and I both know that explosion was bigger than anything either of us would use for training. Did you hear me call out? Tell you to run?”
He nodded. “Still, sabotage? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Taylor said, the words not doubting her but uttered in surprise.
“I wish I were.” She shook her head, a part of her unable to believe it could happen on her watch. On any watch. Who would have done such a thing? “We were set up, John, and Chuck is paying the price.”
“You came close,” Taylor said. “We almost lost you, as well.”
Jess stiffened. “What do you mean? You said I was awake when you found us.”
“I said kind of. Your mask was filled with water. You were babbling.” He squeezed her shoulder. “We must have reached you seconds after it flooded. Otherwise, you’d be in ICU, too.”
Jess bit her lip. Taylor was one of her best friends, but not even he knew that luck had nothing to do with her survival. Her mask could have been filled for hours, and she would be fine. She was special. Different.
When she was a child, her parents discovered that her body chemistry was different. She processed gases, like oxygen and nitrogen, with an unnatural efficiency that gave her an advantage when it came to holding her breath. When tested, she discovered that she could remain submerged for ten minutes, and if she remained unmoving, twenty. But it wasn’t her efficiency that saved her when she was unconscious in the water.
It was the set of internal gills that rested just below the upper lobes of her lungs.
It was her freakish nature that saved her.
“You were lucky, Jess. Very, very lucky,” Taylor said, squeezing her shoulder again.
“Yeah, lucky,” she muttered. She took Latham’s hand in hers, squeezing his long fingers. He didn’t respond. She squeezed harder. He remained inert.
In the background, a monitor beeped. Grew louder and changed into an insistent shrill. The words, “Code Blue,” echoed over the intercom. Seconds later, doctors and nurses ran into the room and shoved her out of the way.
Standing against the wall, with Taylor’s arm around her shoulder for support, Jess watched them work on Chuck until there was nothing left to do but pull the sheet over his head.
“Yeah, lucky,” she whispered.
Chapter 2
Jess shut the door to her apartment and leaned against the solid wood. There wasn’t much to personalize the small living space. The few decorations that graced the room were a reflection of her Apache heritage. A woven basket in the corner. A book on Native American art on the carved oak coffee table.
There was little else, since she normally lived aboard ship with the rest of her team, ready to effect search and rescue or infiltration at a moment’s notice.
She touched the written order she’d shoved into her pocket. She’d been leaving the hospital when the communication from Command was handed to her. She didn’t open it. She knew what it said.
Fuming inside, she crumpled the official embossed paper in her fist.
Pushing away from the door, she strode across the living room to her computer, tossing the paper into a wastepaper basket along the way.
She hesitated, part of her wanting to fish it out and get the waiting over with—like ripping off a Band-Aid or taking the first step into unfamiliar waters—but her hands shook at the thought, and she stuffed them into her jeans’ pockets. The letter could wait. It wasn’t as if her reading it an hour from now would make a difference anyway.
Marching to her desk, she sat in her black, high-back garage-sale office chair and turned on her computer. Her attention flickered back to the small wastepaper basket.
Wait, she told herself and looked away.
The computer hummed, coming to life, but before she could open up her e-mail, a knock sounded on her door. She punched the button on the monitor. The knocking continued, like a woodpecker’s persistent rapping. The screen darkened, and she went to find out who was stretching her last nerve.
Taylor leaned against the sill, his knock turning into a wave of hello when she opened the door. “You didn’t open it, did you?” he asked.
“The letter?” Turning on her heel, she walked into her living room, finding it annoying that he knew her so well. “I was getting to it.”
Taylor stood in the doorway a moment longer then strode past her, stopping to pick up the crumpled envelope before he took a seat in one of her mismatched chairs. He ripped open the end of the envelope and pulled out a piece of folded white parchment with an embossed seal on the top.
“Well?” she asked, watching as he read it.
“Standard. You can’t return to active duty until the investigation is complete.”
Jess buried her head in her hands, gripping her long black hair between her fingers. It was two days since Latham’s funeral, but she already itched to engage both her body and mind with something more than working out and running mental scenarios about what might have been. “But I have to do something,” she groaned.
“A trainee died under your command. You knew this was coming.”
She did. It was also why she had wanted to ignore the letter. She met his gray-eyed gaze. He glanced away, but not before she read him. She knew that expression. That guilty look meant he was withholding information. “Spill it,” she said. Sitting in her oversize reading chair, Jess kicked off