Six days ago . . .
Finn didn’t remember walking away.
He didn’t remember much of anything.
All he knew was that when his mind started becoming aware of things, there were no bodies on the ground. No cave. No voices. He was miles and miles from where he’d deployed with his team.
His team.
Cheech Wizard. Bear. Jazzman.
This morning, they had been so full of life. Big, covered in the scars they’d earned fighting genuine threats to the world. Men who had saved the world. The actual world.
Now . . .
He closed his eyes—his real eyes and his inner eye—in hopes of shutting out the image of those things that had been scattered across the valley floor. Those impossible things with their impossible eyes.
Things that could not have been his men.
His friends.
They call it being “brothers in arms,” but it went so much deeper than that. He and those men were brothers, more so than if they’d been born of the same mother.
Brothers.
Finn loved them more than anyone he’d ever known. More than his wife. More than his two kids back home. More than his actual brother, who was a fat accountant in Des Moines and would never have believed what Finn did for a living. Did for his country, for the world.
Bear, Jazzman, and Cheech Wizard understood.
Bitter tears filled his eyes.
The kind of love a soldier has for his battlefield brothers can’t really be defined. Maybe “love” is the wrong word. Maybe there’s too much romance and bullshit hanging off that word, and there’s none of that here. It’s not about that kind of shit. This was a fundamental thing; it went down to the DNA. Down to the soul.
Finn knew that if he could have dialed the clock back, he would have done anything in his power to keep from failing his men. He’d have done anything—any damn thing in the world—to save them.
To spare them.
To take their place.
He blinked his eyes clear and stared at the landscape. There were people on the road. A man and two boys leading a string of goats. Beyond them was an old truck, wheezing along the road away from him, and with dull astonishment, Finn realized that it must have passed him while he was walking.
Finn stopped and stared at it. Far beyond the truck was a cluster of huts, and beyond that . . .
A town.
A hot wind blew past him and he held a hand up to shield his eyes. Buried deep inside the wind was a voice.
Her voice.
What will you give me for what you want?