White Hot (Hidden Legacy #2)(104)

Of course, she did.

Daniela handed me a mirror. Bruises covered the right side of my face. A lump swelled on my right shoulder. I looked like a boxer at the end of a final round of a hard title match.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I told her.

“Oh, it will,” she said. “Once the painkillers wear off.”

“Where is Rogan?”

“He decided to give you some space.”

That wasn’t an answer. I reached for my blanket.

“I understand that your first instinct is to dramatically jump out of bed and rush over there,” Daniela said. “It’s a good plan, except you’re so medicated you’ll have trouble making it to the bathroom, let alone driving. Why don’t we sit here and chat a bit?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Her eyes were hard. “Not really.”

“Okay.”

Daniela cleared her throat. “I have a nephew. Sweet kid. Martin’s twenty-four now. He did his four years in the army, earned his college tuition, and enrolled in UNC. He wants to be a geologist. He says he likes rocks because they don’t shoot back at you.”

It sounded like a joke, but again she didn’t smile.

“He got himself expelled a month ago. You know that horror movie where the guy in a pig mask chases kids across college campus. Screamer-something.”

“Screamer-Dreamer.” Living in a household with three teenagers made me a horror movie expert. It was a stupid cheap flick, but for some reason it had caught on and there were memes of Piggy, the killer, all over the Internet with witty sayings plastered over them.

“A campus radio station was pranking people live on the air. They had a guy dressed in a pig mask and some sort of black shroud. He’d hide behind something, burst out with a big plastic knife, and chase people around. They were filming it for YouTube.”

Yep. Sounded just like something college kids would do. I knew exactly where this story was going.

“The pig guy charged Martin, and Martin took the knife away from him and hit him. He didn’t just hit him once. He went for the knife hand first, dislocated the guy’s shoulder, and then punched him four times in the head in less than two seconds. It took three people to pull him off. I asked him about it. He said something just snapped inside him. He saw a threat and reacted. He isn’t a violent kid. Never been in a civilian fight before. He felt terrible about it. He apologized. The college expelled him and there were serious charges, until Rogan’s lawyers moved in and had it dropped down to a misdemeanor. Still, it will be on his record forever. He’s going to a private university in January.”

“Piggy should’ve played dead,” I said. “If he stopped moving, Martin would’ve stopped hitting.”

“Probably,” she said. “The kid who had the bright idea to scare people with his knife didn’t expect to be hospitalized, because civilians typically don’t try to kill you when you scare them.”

“It was irresponsible either way.”

Daniela sighed. “We have rules in our society. Don’t steal. Don’t hurt others. Don’t kill. That’s the big one. We take these kids, some of them barely eighteen years old, tell them that rules no longer apply and then we drop them into the war zone. Fight or flight is a constellation response, a perfect storm within your body. It makes you faster, stronger, hyperaware, but all of it comes at a cost. Soldiers in combat are running a biochemical sprint, except for them it’s a marathon that doesn’t end. It wears the body down and it carves new neurological pathways through your brain. It changes you. Permanently. Then you finally come home and people expect you to set all that aside and immediately remember what it’s like to be a normal person.”

Daniela leaned back.

“My nephew, Martin, is a relatively well-adjusted veteran. He simply needs time and a little help to re-attune himself to the civilian world. The switch that moderates the severity of his response needs to be recalibrated. Some people don’t understand that.”

I understood it. I knew all the statistics and I’d seen the hysteria firsthand. When Mom snapped, the assistant DA assigned to her case called her a ticking bomb and waved around the PTSD flag, which Mom didn’t have. He made it sound like she would go on a shooting rampage any minute. In reality, most veterans were a danger to themselves rather than others. The suicide rate among vets was 50 percent higher than in the rest of the population.

“Like I said,” Daniela continued. “Martin was a sweet kid. You know who else was a sweet kid before the army got a hold of him? Connor Rogan. I knew him at the very start of his service. He was so young. Full of himself, a little cocky, and idealistic. The brass realized early on what they had, so they guarded him like the Hope Diamond and controlled everything he saw. We used to call him BL—Bubble Lieutenant. They built this bubble of patriotism around him. Everyone he interacted with told him he was a hero, that he was serving his country, saving lives, and doing the right thing. They would bring him out, tell him how many thousands of lives would be saved if he did what they ordered, then he’d crush a city, and they’d whisk him away before we combed through the ruins. He knew there were casualties, but he never saw the dead bodies. He was an officer in name only. When they promoted him to captain, we had a good laugh.”

Daniela’s voice broke. She held her hand up for a moment, then continued.