Young glanced down at her, then up at the Three Soldiers. The cup was warm in his hands. “No, Lieutenant, I don’t.”

“Can’t make out emotion.” She was definitely scowling. “Look at them. Are they surprised? Tired? Indifferent? Could be anything. They could be waiting for the punch line of a joke and be a second from cracking up, for all we know.”

“I think that’s the point of memorials, Butler,” Young said dryly. “To make you look. Make you think about it.”

They’d both been doing a lot of thinking these past few days, separately and together. He’d been the one to debrief everybody involved who’d been in the know. Maybe he’d spent a little more time talking with Butler and Cabrera than most others. They were creative thinkers. It made sense to give them the opportunity to brainstorm a bit in a secure environment. See what kind of theories cropped up. Add his own observations to give them more data. Come up with possible answers for all those pesky holes in the story.

“Huh,” Butler grumbled, clearly not impressed by his theory, as usual.

“What did he say?”

“No surprises.” Young studied the statues’ faces. They looked weary to him, resigned. Familiar. The faces of soldiers who knew the war was never going to be over. The location might change, the weapons and the terminology, but war was war, and a thousand memorials wouldn’t be enough to make it stop. “You’re cleared to work on the bodies whenever and wherever you want. I still want you on my team, though.”

“So Seeker is a go.” Butler rubbed a slender hand over her face as if trying to wipe away her smile. “Of course I’m in, sir.”

Young nodded once, satisfied. “Good.”

Butler took a sip of coffee and pulled a face. “Cabrera finished analyzing the footage. She says to tell you the combat cameras are crap and

to bring more light the next time, because the quality of the underground clips was atrocious. She also says you were right. It was one of the Russians who opened fire in the canyon, not the armor host. And it was the armor host who caught Sergeant Vasquez in the cavern.”

“What about—”

“He shielded him, yes.” For a second, her face mirrored the expressions of the Three Soldiers almost perfectly. “It didn’t jump bodies.

Not once. It stuck with its host, stuck with its host’s friends, killed only in self-defense, and chose to let you shoot it over slaughtering everybody in that cave. I’m thinking we might’ve fucked this up. Badly.”

They’d been over this. “We don’t know that.”

That bought him the impatient little “don’t be an idiot” look he’d had such a hard time getting used to but had learned not to take personally. “All evidence points to it. We fired the first shot. We went in hot when we should’ve tried to negotiate at the diner. And then we shot it, its host, and its host’s… whatever they were to each other.”