The static charge inside Locker #04 snapped with the sound of a dry twig.
The clear plastic sheet swung backward into the dark, pulled into the depths of the sixteen-inch locker by an unseen draft. Danny Briggs’s flattened face vanished into the gloom, leaving only the rusted metal louvers and the yellow wax letters Julian had scrawled across the green paint.
Marcus “Mac” Cole didn’t say a word. He turned away from the lockers with his shoulders hunched, his heavy work boots dragging across the linoleum.
Mac sat down heavily on a dented olive-drab ammunition crate beside the bulkhead. His broad frame seemed to cave in on itself. He rested his elbows on his knees, staring down at his left wrist where the dull alloy socket met his 1.5-inch naval brass spanner.
Lin Mei watched him from the corner of the mud-logging console.
Her fingers tightened around her mechanical pencil until the plastic barrel creaked.
In formal logic, a proposition was either true or false. A statement didn’t have feelings, and an equation didn’t care who died inside a sheet-metal locker.
Yet watching Mac sit there in hollowed-out silence--a man who could wrench a rusted valve off a bulkhead with one arm--made something knot up tight behind Lin Mei’s ribs.
