Trace heard a clattering of footsteps trot past her door and woke in a terror, fearing she missed her alarm and was late for the day’s training exercises. She was near the bottom of the class rankings and her father would disown her if she didn’t graduate this time. He’d pulled every last string he had in order to get her another shot at Intelligence. Personally, Trace didn’t get it. She was more than happy as a Marine grunt. Why her father insisted on her following in his footsteps into military intelligence, she could only guess, because there was no way in hell she would actually talk to him about it.

After checking the time, she breathed a sigh of relief. It was only the middle of the night. She had several hours left before she restarted the daily grind of continuously disappointing her father.

She pulled the covers back up over her head and adjusted her body positioning, ready to fall back asleep. That was when she heard the murmuring outside her door.

She couldn’t make out anything distinct, but she couldn’t ignore it either. It was like when two people whispered in a crowded room. The whispering drew all the attention just based on its difference of tone.

She turned and adjusted her position, trying to get comfortable again.

“I swear to god if this is some kind of prank, I’ll kill every last one of you,” she growled to herself.

Mercifully, the noises died down and she redoubled her efforts to go back to sleep. But now she had a different problem–she had to use the bathroom.

Throwing off the covers, Trace scrambled out of bed and pulled on a pair of pants and a shirt. She slipped her feet into a pair of boots and shuffled out of her room, heading for the toilets.

On her way back, her mind still half-asleep, she saw several recruits piling out of one of the rooms several doors down from her. They were dressed in all black with wraps over their heads to conceal their identities.

Despite their concealment, they were laughing and joking, hardly making any attempt at stealth.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“What’s this then? Late-night party?” Trace asked, her mind not quite making sense of the situation yet. “Where’s my invitation?”

The group froze in their tracks, all eyes darting to Trace. All at once, they turned and fled in several different directions.

“Something I said?” she yelled after them.

Trace shrugged and turned, about to head back to bed when her brain finally woke all the way up with a shot of adrenaline. What had the masked morons been up to? From the way that they’d scattered, she realized it was nothing good.

For reasons not entirely clear to her, Trace tip-toed down to the door she’d seen the raiding party exit and found it still ajar. She knocked, and waited only a second for a response, before pushing the door open further. Inside was dark, and she couldn’t make out anything more distinct than several dark splotches of shadow that could have been a pile of clothes or a pillow or hundred other things that might be found in a bedroom.

She pawed at the wall for the light, finding it exactly where she would expect to find her own room light. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the bed where she found a woman in a bloody tangled mess. She was tangled up in her bedding and she had a nasty cut over her eye that sat atop the largest hematoma Trace had ever seen.

Her medic training from the Marines kicked in and Trace began working her way through a mental checklist. First, the vitals. Trace felt for a pulse on the woman’s wrist and found a faint one. Her breathing was shallow but regular. Next, she checked for any other major injuries. The cut on her forehead had mostly stopped bleeding and seemed to account for the majority of the blood that was present on the bedding. A quick check of the woman’s neck and arms revealed multiple bruises.

Trace was no expert, but they looked like self-defense wounds to her. Question was, were they from everyday normal training or from the mob that had just left?

Trace couldn’t see any more obvious critical wounds. She gently shook the woman, attempting to wake her, but she was unresponsive. Trace knew she wasn’t supposed to move a wounded person, but something told her she didn’t have time to wait for help to arrive.

She reached down and dug her arms underneath the woman, cradling her in her arms. And then she walked the five minute journey to the med center.

A heavy sweat covered her brow as she entered the sickbay, startling the on-call physician as she stumbled in and dumped the woman on the nearest gurney she could find.

“I need some help here!” Trace managed before sinking to the floor, exhausted.